Barnabas Fund calls for a national conversation about anti-Christian prejudice and bullying
from Barnabas Fund:
This week saw one of the two candidates to become simultaneously leader of the UK’s Conservative Party and Prime Minister drop out, leaving her rival to claim the crown without any further voting. The reason Andrea Leadsom withdrew was a sustained media campaign against her that by Friday last week was being described by seasoned political commentators as “feral” and based on prejudice towards her Christian faith. It was being claimed that her support for traditional marriage and family values, rather than wholeheartedly endorsing every aspect of the gay rights agenda, was morally wrong and that being a Christian in politics somehow made her suspect. On Friday last week, well before that campaign of abuse had reached its zenith, Paul Goodman editor of ConservativeHome the UK’s main independent Conservative website and himself a former MP and shadow minister observed:
“Scrutiny is one thing; prejudice is quite another. Iain Dale was right to suggest this in his column this morning that much of the media coverage of Leadsom’s campaign has been feral. Support for same-sex marriage is a litmus test of social acceptability among the class that helps to shape our political culture, and there is a sense in some of the reporting of her reservations about it that her position is not merely wrong but somehow wicked. Nick Boles’s famous text to other MPs can also be read in this way. Leadsom has also been asked while being interviewed on TV if God speaks to her..”
(For more details of this see our Operation Nehemiah article). Of course all politicians have to take the rough and tumble of politics, but this went far beyond that. Following her decision to withdraw from the leadership contest on Monday, partly due to the impact on her children, former Conservative Party leader Iain Duncan Smith observed that:
“The departure of Andrea Leadsom on Monday morning, even by the low standards of Westminster leadership elections, was painful. I was deeply concerned that the concerted and brutal attempt to destroy her character led directly to her resignation.”
While Daily Telegraph journalist Allison Pearson asked:
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