LAST month the Co-operative Bank obliged the evangelical group Christian Voice to close its account, due to the group’s “discriminatory pronouncements based on sexual orientation”. Undaunted, Christian Voice this month organised what it claimed to be “the first UK demonstration” against the London Gay Pride march.
Christian Voice’s founder, Stephen Green, said after that event that he was “deeply saddened by the sight of so many men and women celebrating their involvement in a sinful lifestyle characterised by deceit, degradation and death”.
The group has since petitioned other Christian organisations to boycott the Co-operative Bank on the ground that it is not the bank “for those who honour the name of the Lord Jesus Christ”.
Meanwhile, the Catholic Action Group (CAG), which promised “eternal hell fire” to Catholics who did not follow the indications in its voter guide at the last elections, is campaigning against the Catholic aid agency Cafod for its refusal to condemn the use of condoms in safer-sex campaigns.
These are the more extreme examples of activist Christian groups which have proliferated in the UK in the past few years. This phenomenon bears striking similarities with the Christian campaigning organisations which sprang up in the US in the 1980s and 1990s. The British groups mirror the aims and strategies of their US cousins in their determination to make an impact on public life.
At first sight such heterogeneous organisations would seem unlikely to form an effective political bloc, ranging as they do from Christian Voice to the mainstream Faithworks; from CAG to the Linacre Centre, a sober bioethics think-tank supported by the Catholic bishops. Yet the Christian Right in the US covers an even wider spectrum — from the National Conference of Catholic Bishops to the militant Protestant anti-abortion group Operation Rescue, whose founder Randall Terry once declared: “Our goal is a Christian nation. We are called by God to conquer this country. We don’t want equal time; we don’t want pluralism . . . theocracy means God rules.”
Yet it is the very breadth of this constituency in the US that has proved its strength. It took over effective leadership at grassroots level from groups such as the evangelical Christian Coalition, Focus on the Family and — on the Catholic wing — Legatus, to weave these disparate threads into politically effective networks.
In fact the features which united US conservatives can be found in the new British organisations. The rallying point for the US groups in the 1980s was the “pro-life” campaign against abortion. Father Richard John Neuhaus, a convert from Lutheranism and a leading Catholic neo-conservative, points out that for the Christian Right in the US abortion is “the crucial question. It’s not simply a question of 1.5 million unborn children being killed each year, as important as that is. What’s behind that is a whole set of philosophical, moral, legal, political presuppositions.”
By the mid-1980s the grass-roots support of the “pro-life” fight was predominantly evangelical Protestant. Abortion had become the basis of an alliance between Protestant fundamentalists, the New Right and conservative Catholics. Neuhaus likes to point out that the right-wing evangelical leader Jerry Falwell attributed his decision to enter politics to Catholic opposition to abortion.
The same process can be observed in the UK: 20 years ago, anti-abortion groups, such as Life and Spuc, were crypto-Catholic, no matter how strenuously they disavowed any denominational or religious links. Now numerous evangelical institutions, such as the Christian Institute, Care and the Evangelical Alliance, place the fight against abortion high on their list of campaign issues — though their tone is more nuanced than that of their US counterparts and they restrict their activities to political lobbying. They are certainly not coy about their Christian identity.
Like the US groups, the UK organisations have widened their briefs to cover such issues as state funding for faith-based initiatives; censorship and blasphemy; abstinence-only sex education; opposition to liberal legislation on stem cell research, euthanasia and legal recognition for same-sex partnerships. Care, the Evangelical Alliance and the Christian Institute lobbied against the abolition of Clause 28 and the equalisation of the age of consent for homosexuals.
As in the US, disparate groups are now coalescing: the mainly evangelical Centre for Bioethics and Public Policy (CBPP) lists among its members the Evangelical Alliance, Care and the Christian Institute. Countess Josephine Quintavalle, the Catholic founder of the Pro-Life Alliance, is a member of its executive board. The CBPP has collaborated with, among others, the Linacre Centre, Care, the Christian Peoples’ Alliance, Quintavalle’s Core, the Guild of Catholic Doctors and the multifaith Medical Ethics Alliance.
The other unifying factor is the political nature of the new groups. Political lobbying is a key activity for Faithworks, the Evangelical Alliance, Care, the Christian Institute and the CAG. Many employ techniques proven in the US, such as issuing voter guides before elections; monitoring the voting records of candidates; grassroots lobbying of parliamentarians and regular large-scale mailshots. At the 2005 elections, two Christian parties, Operation Christian Vote and the Christian People ’s Alliance, fielded candidates on a “pro-life”/pro-family ticket.
Care’s “Make the Cross Count” campaign quoted the slogan of the US conservative Right — “Religion in the public square” — coined by Neuhaus.
Another US import that is enjoying a huge influence in Britain is the “charismatic” movement. One example is the startling growth of Alpha among both Protestants and Catholics. The “Bible-based” approach of the charismatic movement favours a traditionalist approach to values and a vehement opposition to such things as homosexuality.
Some British organisations, such as the million-strong Evangelical Alliance, are reluctant to be too strongly identified with the Christian Right in the US. They dissociate themselves, too, from the intemperate pronouncements of groups such as Christian Voice and caution against presenting God as a “mascot” of a particular political party.
But although the approach and language of activist Christian groups may differ, their aim is the same: the imposition of Christian moral values through legislation.
