I WRITE fresh from the packed Easter Day service at my parish church, where we enthusiastically sang a magnificent choice of triumphal Easter anthems including my favourite, Thine be The Glory, Risen Conquering Son.

I can safely say that there was no trace of a perception that we are a persecuted and marginalised minority, as apparently two-thirds of Christians feel themselves to be.

This is if you believe a poll referred to by Lord Carey, a former Archbishop of Canterbury, in an article in the Daily Mail on Easter Saturday. My suspicion is that the poll was based on a very small sample and commissioned by people with a large axe to grind. Lord Carey said the Prime Minister had fostered an aggressive secular agenda against Christianity.

This could not be further from the truth. Last year I received a large correspondence from constituents in support of the National Secular Society’s campaign against the government’s determination to increase the number of church schools.

Then there was a ruling by the courts that councils could no longer hold prayers as a formal part of their agenda. Within hours the government acted, issuing Orders in Council to overturn the judgement and grant local authorities the very powers which the courts had sought to take from them: prayers were preserved.

However, Lord Carey complains that despite the PM’s support for the right of Christians to display crosses and crucifixes, his were weasel words because government lawyers argued the very opposite in the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg. This is just nonsense.

Statute law says that any corporate uniform policy must have regard to religious practice.

When an employee was disciplined for wearing a cross, the High Court ruled that she was not protected by this statute because wearing a cross was not a requirement of her religion.

The case was appealed to the European Court of Human Rights.

The Prime Minister at PM’s questions in the House of Commons made it absolutely clear he supported the appeal and, if the appeal failed, he would legislate to guarantee the right to wear a cross.

In the event the appeal was upheld, so no new legislation was needed.

So why did government lawyers argue against the appeal? The answer is that the Government must defend English law in Strasbourg as defined by our own High Court, however it might disagree with it. That the position could be so misrepresented by people who really ought to know better, strikes me as being evidence of a deliberate agenda rather than ignorance.

So, we are left with Lord Carey’s principal complaint – gay marriage, which is really what his article was all about. I believe he is profoundly wrong: the battle over gay marriage isn’t between the secular agenda and Christianity, rather it is a dispute between Christians who simply disagree with one another.

Christians and the Government support marriage, even if we cannot yet agree about who can enter into it, but Christians populate both sides of this debate.

A BBC journalist asked me why the former archbishop had done it, particularly at Easter when it was bound get so much more publicity.

He must answer for himself, but I doubt he meant to do it: the screaming headlines were much less measured than the article itself. I fear he was a prisoner of the Daily Mail’s agenda, rather than his own.


Of course, at Easter we focus on the heart of the Gospel: that Christ is risen, Alleluia! And we should not be distracted by inessentials, even if it is by that age-old fascination of so many Christians: what others are getting up to in bed.