Feminists in Scotland are closing ranks against the SNP’s latest hate crime law in Scotland, but how will orthodox Christians fare under the regime?
Harry Potter creator JK Rowling, probably the most high-profile feminist campaigner against the laws, has pledged on X to stand with any woman who’s prosecuted for ‘misgendering’: “If they go after any woman for simply calling a person a person, I’ll repeat that woman’s words and so they can charge us each without delay.”Â
Thus far, no distinguished Christian leader in Scotland has given an identical pledge if his or her fellow believers were prosecuted under the brand new law for standing up for unpopular biblical truth.
Scottish journalist and former Sunday Times editor, Andrew Neil, in his Daily Mail article on March 30, two days before the brand new law got here into force on April 1, prescribed a dose of realism concerning the political climate in Scotland.
He wrote: “On Monday, Scotland enters a latest Dark Age. It is entirely unnecessary and wholly self-inflicted…It is not going to be easily reversed. The Labour Party, which looks set to exchange the SNP because the dominant party in each Holyrood and Westminster, voted for the SNP’s latest hate crime laws.”
Scottish voters don’t appear to care that much concerning the threat to freedom of speech from the triumphant Left. With Labour poised to win a landslide victory on this yr’s UK General Election, conservative writers in England like Douglas Murray and Peter Hitchens, and free speech campaigners like Toby Young and Will Jones, with their historical knowledge, surely realise that apathetic self-interest would rule if the Westminster government began locking up dissidents and that the protests could be few in the event that they were imprisoned.
To take just the 20th Century for example, the shortage of popular resistance to Nazism in Germany, to Stalinism in Russia, and to Maoism in China surely teaches us that oppression goes largely unresisted in nations by which civic morality is at a low ebb.
Without making any unwarranted comparisons, it’s important to keep in mind that the Lord Jesus Christ was crucified by overwhelming popular demand. All 4 New Testament Gospels record the Roman governor, Pontius Pilate, asking the Jerusalem crowd gathered outside the Praetorium for a preferred mandate to have Jesus released. What was the solid consensus then? “Crucify him!”
The beautiful 17th century hymn by Samuel Crossman, My Song is Love Unknown, captures the timeless truth that the Gospels record: “Sometimes they strew His way, and His sweet praises sing: resounding all of the day hosannas to their King. Then ‘Crucify!’ is all their breath, and for Hath they thirst and cry.”
In a book which seems to have gotten fewer reads than a blog post by a politics student on the University of Bognor Regis, I attempted to assume myself as an 86-year-old retired vicar living in Britain in 2050 after the country had undergone a Christian revival.
I wrote in Christians within the Community of the Dome (Evangelical Press, 2017): “There is no doubt that society is changing because of the Revival. A latest Prime Minister – a Muslim convert to Christianity as a student within the 2020s – got elected in 2045. Prime Minister Ali is a very good man and has just been re-elected for a second term. Unfortunately, he’s being obstructed moderately within the House of Lords by the elderly secularists who still pack the benches in there but Lord willing that may change. King George is a committed Christian, so together they make a very good team.”
Secular history teaches that a Christian revival in a rustic at the same time as demoralised as Britain is feasible. Christianity spread within the deeply pagan Roman Empire and is spreading in Communist China. But within the meantime potential dissidents within the UK, Christian or otherwise, against the triumphant Left would surely be smart to count the fee of resistance.Â
Julian Mann is a former Church of England vicar, now an evangelical journalist based in Lancashire.
