by Gavin Ashenden
“Do you think that I have come to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division.” (Luke 12:51)
The law of unintended consequences often throws up strange events.
When Tommy Robinson decided to stage an old-fashioned carol Service—shorn of overt political content—in order to put Christ back into Christmas, he could hardly have anticipated the reaction it would provoke from the mainstream Protestant churches.
The stated aim of the service was simple: to resist the stripping away of the name of Jesus Christ from public life—from supermarket crackers to Marks & Spencer’s “festival trees.” It was just a simple carol service. the instructions to all those involved by Robinson was ‘absolutely no politics.’ But it created a ‘gnashing of teeth and much weeping with rage” from the Established Church – and some others.
Such was the anger and frustration that Robinson, whio recently came out as a convinced Christian, captured by the love of Christ in solitary confinement in prison, that nothing short of a counter protest could do.
Ans thus it came to pass, that on the morning of 13 December, a group of young adult Christians organised a counter-demonstration in front of St Paul’s Cathedral. They staged a contemporary tableau of the Holy Family, seated in an orange inflatable dinghy, wearing lifejackets. Banners were raised declaring: “Jesus was a refugee” and “I was a stranger and you welcomed me.”
I never expected to find myself choosing between the theology of a former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams,
and that of a former Luton football activist, Tommy Robinson—
still less to discover that I preferred Robinson’s theology. But that is just where I have found myself.