In today’s post-Christian Britain, Poirot has lost his faith
by Julian Mann, Christian Today:
Kenneth Branagh’s recent film versions of two Agatha Christie novels remind me of former Conservative Prime Minister David Cameron’s speech in favour of gay marriage at his party conference in 2011.
Cameron, now UK Foreign Secretary, drew loud applause from delegates when he said: “I don’t support gay marriage despite being a Conservative. I support gay marriage because I’m a Conservative.” His Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act 2013 duly cruised through a House of Commons packed with sexual revolutionaries.
Cameron took an institution that belonged to Christian Britain – life-long, monogamous, heterosexual marriage – and redefined it in a way that embraced the 1960s sexual revolution.
Branagh seems to have done a similar thing with Agatha Christie (1890-1976) in his films based on two of her books, which he directed and in which he played her celebrated Belgian sleuth Hercule Poirot. He has taken a feature from Christian Britain and remoulded it in the image of the permissive society.
Christie was a writer with a committed Christian faith who made Poirot a Roman Catholic Christian. Writing in 2009 in First Things, the American religion and public life magazine, Yale University historian Nick Baldock shed light on “the Christian world of Agatha Christie”.
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