Baptisms and Burqas

Why all religions were not created equal

“I don't think we should have faith schools unless they are Church of England or Catholic” I said.

“Well, you can't do that. If you are going to allow Christian schools you have to permit other religions to have theirs” came the response.

Who says?

Photo by Elin Tabitha on Unsplash

Such immediate domestic dillution and level playing fieldism can never be in a nation’s interest. It invites the idea that cultural identity doesn't exist or deserves to be shelved.

I would doubt very much that anything slightly Bible based taught in a Church of England school could ever be in any way contentious. It’s more likely to either not exist at all, bar maybe the odd visiting vicar for a special assembly, or play out only in little ditties such as ‘Give Me Oil In My Lamp’. The remaining moral teaching will no doubt be laced with the saccharine DEI-themed PSE that if anything tends to veer further and further away from our state religion.

But in a Muslim school? You think they are teaching about little girls and little boys being equal? Gay people being just as loving as straight ones? The whole world being one human race? Tolerance? The climate crisis?

In fact, the very reason for other faith schools to exist is to shield their pupils from the domestic culture and exclusively immerse and train them in another. A culture that, when it comes to Islam, all too often profoundly clashes with our own.

When the first waves of Commonwealth migrants came to Britain they were coming from countries still steeped with empire. The new arrivals came to be British, hung pictures of the Queen on their walls, drank tea and sang the national anthem. It was assumed their children and grandchildren would be so integrated as to be indistinguishable from everyone else. While for the most part, this happened, a separate underbelly of radicals also emerged. Driven by identity politics, the pummelling of British culture and Christianity at the altar of multiculturalism, foreign funding and growing enclaves of detached, alien communities, while everything British came under attack, forcefields were built around their cultures and religions under the guise of ‘tolerance’ that monocultural neighbourhoods that are entirely removed and often hostile to our way of life have flourished on our land.

The problem we now have is unpicking decades of erosion in a humane way, befitting of our good nature.

Perhaps this week the Burqa debate sums everything up. How a cultural practice only tenuously rooted in religion that shames women from showing their face is being shielded as freedom of choice is farcical. Yes, there are the security implications. But much more than this, and the cowardly way it is being handled, is the reluctance to call out the fact Burqas represent the same twisted ideology of female purity, control and worth that finds common ground in the rape gang scandal. It is a clear sign of non-integration. How can not sharing eye contact or recognition with others be in any way a sign of wanting to fit in?

Many of you will have noticed I got Baptised. Oh the lazy attacks that this was something done for effect, as if being a Christian in Britain is so perverse it could only be done for tokenism or tribal signalling. I have been attending church for four years and finally taking the (literal) plunge to formally join God's community was the best day of my life. The joy in my face in the video shows how meaningful this was to me.

I compare the responses to the two with a mixture of sadness and panic. As it is indicative of what I have laid out above. We are now so deeply rooted in a self scepticism and loathing as a nation we would rather defend the humiliation of women than celebrate the religious journey of a Christian British woman.

So what can we do? We must never persecute or punish anybody for their beliefs. But that doesn't mean treating every culture on a level playing field. You do get to defend your own realm.

However, we have a left wing media that beattifies certain causes and demonises others, which does regrettably have a punitive impact on political courage by creating a culture of shame around certain parties, we have a multi-party system fighting under first past the post which strategically leads to ideological compromise, and a showboating establishment wilfully watching over the lot of it and compounding the schism with their own venal, vainglorious wokery. It has created such a thin unforgiving pathway to political success.

But somehow we must navigate the lot of it. And if most Western European nations and a handful of Muslim countries can ban the Burqa, so must we. Because symbolically, it's the first step to showing real intent to protecting our heritage, history and way of life.