Britain's Anti-Christian Kulturkampf

Hal G.P. Colebatch on 2.20.09 in The American Spectator writes,'Things seem to be moving faster in Britain, and not in a nice direction. In the area of religion, here are five incidents reported in the course of barely a week.
A foster mother has been struck off by a council after a teenage Muslim girl in her care became a Christian. Interviewed by the Daily Mail, the carer, who has looked after more than 80 children, said she was devastated: "This is my life. It is not just a job for me. It is a vocation. I love what I do. It is also my entire income. I am a single carer, so that is all I have to live on." She said she had recently bought a larger car and had been renting a farmhouse, with a pony in a field, so that she could provide more disadvantaged children with a new life.
"That was always my dream. I am now in a one-bedroom flat." The girl, now 17, is understood to be back with members of her family, who have not been told of her conversion. (There have been quite a number of cases about what has happened to girls in Muslim families who convert.) A second girl the woman was fostering has been moved to another carer. The woman insisted that she had put no pressure on the girl, who was 16 at the time, to be baptized, but council officials allegedly accused her of failing to "respect and preserve'" the girl's faith and tried to persuade her to reconsider her decision.
Caroline Petrie, 45, a Christian nurse in Somerset, was suspended without pay for offering to pray for an elderly woman patient. She was reinstated only after thousands of people protested to the National Health Service. The patient had not complained about the offer of prayer, but had merely mentioned the matter to another nurse, who reported it.
School head Julia Robinson was forced to resign after replacing separate school assemblies for Muslim pupils with a single gathering for all faiths at which, it was claimed, hymns were sung.
A primary school receptionist, Jennie Cain, whose five-year-old daughter was told off for talking about Jesus in class, is facing the sack for seeking support from her church. According to the Daily Telegraph:
Mrs Cain sent a private email to close friends to ask for prayers for her daughter after she was called into the school where she worked in Crediton, Devon, to be reprimanded.
Her daughter Jasmine had been overheard by a teacher discussing heaven and God with a friend and had been pulled to one side and told off.
Mrs Cain contacted 10 close friends from her church by email but the message fell into the hands of Gary Read, the headmaster of Landscore Primary School where she works. …Mrs Cain has been told she may be disciplined and was warned she could face dismissal…Mrs Cain, who has worked part-time at the school for two and a half years, describes herself as a "quiet Christian" who would never force her beliefs on others. But she said she was angry about the way she had been treated: "I felt embarrassed that a private prayer email was read by the school--it felt like someone had gone through my personal prayer diary."…
On January 22, Mrs Cain went to pick up her children…"My daughter burst into tears, her face was all red and she was clearly upset. She said, 'my teacher told me I couldn't talk about Jesus' -- I couldn't believe what I was hearing."
Mrs Cain said she decided to wait until she wasn't working to discuss the issue with the teacher, Sharon Gottelier, as a parent rather than an employee. But she was called into Mr Read's office the next day over another matter before he started discussing Jasmine. "He started talking about my daughter and about how he wasn't happy about her making statements about her faith. At that point I froze, I felt very small and I felt trapped as I was a junior member of staff."
That weekend, she emailed a prayer request from her personal computer at home to 10 friends from her church. "I asked them to please pray for us, please pray for Jasmine, please pray for the school and pray for the church."
A few days later she was called back into Mr Read's office. "I didn't think at this point I could be more stunned. He had in his hand a copy of my private, personal email and it was highlighted all the way through. He said that he was going to investigate me for professional misconduct because I had been making allegations about the school and staff to members of the public." Mrs Cain, who was not suspended, said he refused to tell her where he had got the email but said two independent governors would be taking statements and calling witnesses. He said the investigation could be followed by disciplinary action up to and including dismissal because of this private email.
The Telegraph quoted Read as saying: "An investigation by the governors of the school is being held into the conduct of a member of staff and at this stage I cannot comment any further."
The Archbishop of York, Ugandan-born Dr. John Sentamu, one of the notably few senior Anglican clergymen to speak out against what is happening, said of the Petrie and Cain cases in an article headed "The intolerance towards Christians in the public sector is an affront":
In their actions, they were as far away as it is possible to be from the caricature of a proselytising fundamentalism that seems to lie behind the views of those seeking to discipline them.
However, the suspension of one of these women and the continued disciplinary action faced by the other leads us to questions about how it is that those who share or express a trust in God -- or more precisely, in these cases, in the Christian faith -- are deemed worthy of discipline … There is a deep irony at work here, and not simply because the first free schools and hospitals operating in this nation were run by the churches.
Those who display intolerance and ignorance, and would relegate the Christian faith to just another disposable lifestyle choice, argue that they operate in pursuit of policies based on the twin aims of "diversity and equality"… "diversity" apparently means every colour and creed except Christianity, the nominal religion of the white majority; and "equality" seemingly excludes anyone, black or white, with a Christian belief in God.
A cricket team, the Middlesex Crusaders, has been forced to change its name to The Panthers because of the Christian associations of the word "Crusaders."
One need not be paranoid to see that a deliberate war is being waged in Britain to destroy Christianity and Britain's Christian identity.
The actual intelligence directing this war is not so easy to see, however. None of the agencies responsible for the above cases is directly part of the national government, which answers ultimately to electors, whose Members sit in Parliament and comprise the Ministries and Cabinet. The apparatchiks responsible for these and countless similar acts tend to inhabit not in the Parliament of Westminster but local authorities and quasi-governmental agencies, hard to pin down, hard to call to account, and very hard indeed to tip out at elections.
This is not to say the government has not condoned them -- the Prime Minister or other ultimately responsible ministers could in each case have intervened with a telephone call or word to their departmental head, but did not. Certainly the allegedly highly religious (and now Catholic convert) Tony Blair did nothing that one could detect to stop such things -- and there were already then hundreds of such incidents -- when he was Prime Minister. The links with the Government are there, but they are fudged and deniable.
Shortly before Christmas a leading Labour Party-aligned think tank, the Institute for Public Policy Research, recommended that Christmas, if it cannot be obliterated, should be down-graded to promote multiculturalism. It said that because it would be hard to "expunge" Christmas from the national calendar (although this would apparently be desirable), public organizations must be made to give non-Christian religious festivals equal footing.
The report was commissioned when Nick Pearce, who became head of public policy in the Prime Minister's Office, was the Institute's director. He has been described as "One of the leading policy-makers in Great Britain." Much of this activity, such as attempts to ban calling certain well-known holidays "Christmas" and "Easter," has been carried on by Labour-controlled councils, though many other councils involved are under the control of the trendy-left Liberal Democrats, such as Islington, where a Church of England school was ordered to drop the word "Saint" from its name. Some councils involved are even under Tory control.
Plainly there is more to it than Christianity. But here Christianity is the canary in the coal-mine. Non-believers also have cause to be deeply alarmed (certainly, too, Jews have cause -- anti-Semitism is increasingly tolerated and legitimized, but that is another story). There is really no longer even a pretence that what is under way under the slogan of Celebrating Diversity is anything but a massive kulturkampf aimed at creating a new Homo Britannicus. Traditional political processes of Parliament, votes, and even parties seem barely relevant.
So far, while many people are plainly angry and protesting, much of the reaction seems to be bewilderment. "Political correctness gone mad!" is a description used beyond the point of cliché for countess such outrageous incidents -- but if it is madness it is a very clever, cunning and strategically-conscious madness.
In 1922 Nikolai Bukharin claimed one of the Bolshevik Revolution's principal tasks was "to alter people's actual psychology," and in 1928, in a special edition of Izvestia on the subject, said: "One of the first priorities is the question of the systematic preparation of new men." When, 10 years ago, I wrote of the election of the British Labour Government with foreboding, I never looked to anything like this.
Spectator