Today’s will be the shortest blog post I have made to date – it is a simple thought that popped into my head last night:
The actions of conservative Christians to exclude them has no effect whatsoever on limiting LGBT people from fulfilling God’s purpose: it simply affects where this activity may take place. The Holy Spirit is not constrained by other people’s opinions.
flockedout
flocked out 
Perhaps it is the season for ‘revelations’. A thought struck me the other day and that is how so much that is written on conservative Christian blogs and by Right Wing Christian lobbying sites is concerned with pointing the finger. In reality what many are saying is that the reason why Christians don’t have the power they once had, why Christianity isn’t honoured and marginalised is because it is ‘their’ fault. Here ‘their’ refers to liberals, government in general or anyone dim or arrogant enough to question why, when church attendance was 27% in 1900 and less than 10% in 2000 (and in the intervening 100 years society has become a much fairer, just, caring and tolerant society) that a particular brand of Right Wing Christianity should have or desire a hugely disproportionate influence in the laws and civil society of Britain.
Again and again, many Christian blogs resemble a catalogue of woes – but in the main these woes are concerning what is being done to Christianity and Christians rather than what Christians are DOING. Moreover their obsession is with ‘easy’ targets, playing on well-worn prejudices. It is curious that throughout the Western world, conservative Christianity seems fixated on two recurring topics – homosexuality and Islam. I am no expert on the former nor a lover of the latter, but with the best will in the world, it is difficult to justify the disproportionate interest some of our Christian friends have concerning these subjects – particularly when there is so much wrong with conservative Christian societies!
I have recently placed a post on my own blog, concerning the Right Wing bleatings of a Revd Mann (his same bleatings were posted on Anglicanmainstream today). A précis of his thinking is that we live in a morally degenerate society and that there should be a stronger line from the Bishops in Parliament. I, in return, commented that those societies where there is such a strong moral line, tend to have MORE of the very problems he claims would be eradicated by the inclusion of conservative Christian values into the legislation of Britain – Mann even suggests a return of the death penalty and that women should know men are their superiors! (see: http://faithisnotthesameasreligion1.blogspot.com/2011/07/man-oh-mann.html).
Thankfully, there seems little enthusiasm in government for taking a strong, conservative moral stand… Although John Major, as PM, is all but forgotten as a political force, his ‘Back to Basics’ gaff (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Back_to_Basics_(campaign)) lives on in the minds of many politicians (of diverse affiliation) and I think the general consensus is that it is politically very dangerous to lay too many sanctions on individual morality, because the chances are the very politicians who advocate such a stance are often the same ones caught with their trousers round their ankles or their hand in the cookie jar… But we have to be wary of any changes in the wind – we’re safe at present, yet great care is needed to ensure we don’t return to the type of society that is hot on laying down the law of what can and can’t be done in private… As I note the irony is that it is these very societies that have a habit of scoring badly on the ‘social indicator’ stakes of what makes a wholesome society!
As for the CofE herself, perhaps the tensions are now just too great to hold it together as one whole and it should be disestablished and can divide as necessary. Whatever, it can’t carry as it is at present, that is for sure…