Britain will not be a “Christian country” without Christians
by Ben Sixsmith, Artillery Row:
Traditions die if there is no one to cherish them.
Every now and then, a pub or restaurant closes in my town and our community Facebook page is filled with mourning. “No!” “Don’t go!” “This town won’t be the same without you!” It always irritates a friend of mine. If they loved the place so much, he says to me, why is it closing?
I thought of that as I read the discourse yesterday. “Ramadan lights on display in central London over Easter,” blared a headline in the Telegraph. There was outrage on Twitter. “The country we grew up in is fast disappearing,” wrote Paul Embrey. “This is cultural displacement,” protested Henry Bolton. “I just don’t see how this is proportionate or justifiable,” mused a more reflective Gavin Rice.
Now, I don’t disagree with these gentlemen in broad terms. I didn’t support multiculturalism to begin with.
Yet there is an irony hanging over their armies of aggrieved retweeters. They are very exercised about Easter not being marked appropriately. Yet how many of them even go to church? How many of them will even go to church this Easter?
Say what you like about Muslims in Britain but they turn out for their faith. More people in Britain — one can guess from the available statistics — are regular attendees of mosques than Anglican churches.
True, Christianity remains, and should remain, the traditional faith of Britain. Again, I agree with Embrey and Rice on patriotic grounds alone. But traditions will not endure if they are only recognised as traditions — ornaments we keep around for old times’ sake until we die and our successors casually bin them.
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