I DON’T want to see or listen to an advertisement for the Lord’s Prayer when I go to the cinema.
For that matter I don’t want to see an advertisement for the Koran, or Hinduism or the Torah or Jehovah’s Witnesses, either.
If other members of the audience want to whisper a prayer before a film starts, then that’s up to them: each to their own.
If they want to pop into a place of worship before or after the film, then that’s up to them, too: their business, their beliefs. I have no difficulties whatsoever with that.
So I don’t understand the fuss made by people like the Archbishop of Canterbury (who said, in the wake of recent events in Paris, “there are moments, sure, when you think is there a God, where is God?”) and David Cameron, over what they refer to as the ‘banning’ of the Lord’s Prayer advertisement.
No one is stopping them from praying. No one is preventing them from saying the Lord’s Prayer at church, or home, or anywhere else where like-minded ‘believers’ are gathered together.
No one is telling them to abandon their beliefs or practice them in secret.
All that’s being said is that an advertisement in which the Lord’s Prayer is being recited is not appropriate in somewhere like a cinema where there will be many people who don’t have religious beliefs of any kind, let alone Christian beliefs.
I’ve already heard the usual suspects say that this is “another attempt to undermine Christianity.”
That’s nonsense. Christianity is not undermined by a decision not to show an advertisement before the latest Bond or Disney, or Die Hard is screened.
Christ is not being made to take second place to Daniel Craig, Princess Elsa or Bruce Willis.
There is a time and place for religion and, from my point of view, sitting with a bucket of popcorn and preparing myself to be entertained, is neither the time nor the place.
Ok, I’m an atheist, so there’s probably never a good time and place for me.
But if I go to a wedding or funeral in a church (and it’s amazing, by the way, how many atheists and agnostics I’ve seen married and buried over the years) then I can hardly claim to be either surprised or irritated to hear the Lord’s Prayer.
Prayers, hymns and bible readings go with that sort of territory, after all.
But it’s not just the Lord’s Prayer I don’t want to see advertised in a cinema: as I say,
I don’t want religious advertising of any kind, irrespective of which deity or world view is being promoted.
And nor do I want to see advertisements for political parties, pressure groups or fad-of-the-month causes.
It’s worth mentioning, too, that the claims that the United Kingdom “remains a Christian nation” (which is why, according to some Christian groups, the ads should be screened) are increasingly hard to sustain.
The Bible and Christ’s teachings are no longer the bedrock of our daily lives. The overwhelming majority of people do not go to any Christian church.
Ministers and church leaders no longer command the respect that was once taken for granted.
Surveys suggest that only a minority of people — which decreases year on year — have a bible in their home; and more people can name Santa’s reindeer than the twelve disciples.
Even people who describe themselves as Christian will have competing and contradictory interpretations of key biblical passages: and many, many ministers are happy to say that they don’t think the ‘Christmas story and manger birth’ should be taken literally. Hmm.
The Church doesn’t scare people the way it used to. It can no longer force its opinions — many of which were self-serving and ‘political ’— down the throats of the masses.
Christian faith clearly matters to some people, yet it is equally clearly a minority interest nowadays.
It deserves the sort of legal protections that other ‘minorities’ can ask for, but it can no longer demand to be treated as though it were unique and specifically or significantly more important than other minority interests.
In other words, Christians are going to have to learn to compete in a market place where there are hundreds of other beliefs and value systems vying for attention and adherents.
And that means getting used to being challenged and tested on what they claim is ‘God’s Word.”
It means being forced to explain their beliefs and justify their demands. Christians say they are under pressure and under attack in an “increasingly secular world”.
Get used to it. It’s called the real world. It’s a world of minorities competing with each other and learning to tolerate each other.
It’s a world in which people are not afraid to think for themselves.
