Sometimes when we hear alarming messages about the place of Christianity in the life of our nation, we can dismiss those making them as fear-mongering doom merchants. ‘That’, we assume ‘could never happen here’. WHen as ex-PM stands in parliament and warns about the precedents being set this week, it becomes lightly harder to shrug it off as uninformed hysteria. But as Theresa May said in the House of Commons:

"I just want to make one word about public worship and echo the concerns of others. My concern is that the Government today, making it illegal to conduct an act of public worship for the best of intentions, sets a precedent that could be misused for a government in the future with the worst of intentions, and it has unintended consequences."

As you know, the decision by the government to close places of worship is facing a legal challenge. Whatever the outcome of that may be, there is an established concensus developing that in distinguishing between gatherings, and criminalising gatherings for worship (as opposed to the first lockdown where all gatherings were banned) a rubicon has been crossed. Whether we think it will ever develop into something more insidious or not, the UK now has a legal precedent for criminalising gathering for public worship, aka going to Church.

What we need to realise - and realise urgently - is that in the UK we have lived through a spiritual anomoly. There are things that have happened in the history of our country that have made the place of Christiainity in our nation almost unique in the history of the world. There are strong signs that this anomoly is coming to an end (see e.g. today’s article on the Christian Institute website about ‘Criminalising ‘hate speech’ in homes in England and Wales proposed by Law Commission’). As our anomolous expereince of living as disciples of Jesus is eroded, we will have to come to terms with the fact that the marginalisiation and in turn, persecution endured by the Church throughout most of the world could soon be our own experience.

‘It could never happen here’ are the notoriously famous last words of every free-society…