No, Mr Fabricant. Traditional Anglicans do not behead unbelievers

If you happened to visit my church on a Sunday, here is what you would find: a group of people of all ages – we don’t do age segregation – participating in a worship service in the historic Anglican tradition. After the service you would enjoy coffee and tea, along with plenty of fellowship and laughter. If you happened to turn up on the first Sunday of the month, we would ask you to join us for lunch – an invitation that is open to all in our community. We would also invite you to come to our all-age games night on a Friday, where we muck around playing table tennis and various other amusements.

But we also have a dark side. Our two big secrets you might say. One is that we are, as a congregation, committed to the idea of what is generally known as “traditional marriage”. The other is that in the courtyard at the back, we perform executions of those whom we regard as heretics, using such methods as chopping their heads off, burning them alive and tying them to pillars and blowing them up. You may have even seen the videos uploaded to YouTube.

Okay so I made some of that up. Did you spot which bits? Yes, we really do have a service with a liturgy based on Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer together with lots of psalms. We really do play a lot of table tennis. And – along with the entire Anglican Church until just a few years back – we really do believe that marriage is an institution designed to be between one man and woman for life.

It’s the executions that we don’t do. We do baptisms, I’ll admit to that, but so far no killings. In fact, I can assure readers that we have sonever executed anyone who disagrees with us, nor do we have any plans to do so. Not even those who disagree with us on the marriage issue.

All that might come as something of a surprise to the “Conservative” MP for Litchfield, Michael Fabricant (I surround the word Conservative with speech marks only because there is currently no emoticon that encapsulates the idea of a person who claims to be something, but is in reality the exact opposite). In a recent article for the Daily Telegraph, he wrote this about the current battles over same-sex “marriage” going on in the Church of England:

“Perhaps the Church should take a tough line on its less progressive elements: get with the times or get out… Simply opting for more of the same for the sake of unity amongst a diverse Communion – some of whose views differ little from ISIL – is a choice of quantity over quality.”

Read here