LAST Saturday, as I was preaching in the open air, I was confronted by a militant atheist who vigorously claimed that Christianity is a nasty religion which endorses slavery. He got very agitated at my refusal to accept his arguments and my defence of the Bible’s authority. He then threw the contents of his can of orangeade in my face. I did not after this ring the police and say that I had been the victim of hate speech and ‘Christianophobia’. This kind of interaction is all par for the course in taking the gospel message into the public square.
The incident, however, leads me on to consideration of the Government’s new Islamophobia definition, rebranding it as ‘anti-Muslim hostility’, and I offer this follow-up to Bepi Pezzulli’s recent insightful piece in TCW.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s new definition is bound to influence all our public bodies, such as the police, councils and educational institutions, museums and libraries. The business world and the media will also be affected. Indeed, the definition will inevitably permeate most layers of society. It includes the following:
‘Anti-Muslim hostility is intentionally engaging in, assisting or encouraging criminal acts – including acts of violence, vandalism, harassment, or intimidation, whether physical, verbal, written or electronically.’
Acts of violence and intimidation are already crimes under existing legislation when directed towards any individual regardless of his identity, and regardless of any social grouping which he belongs to. So why should Islam now have special additional treatment in terms of the ‘anti-Muslim hostility’ concept?
In anticipation of this objection, the Ministry’s statement affirms that ‘creating a new definition of anti-Muslim hostility is not about granting special privileges, giving preferential treatment to particular communities, or protecting the religion of Islam’. However, the legitimacy of these words must be disputed, because no parallel statement has been compiled to protect other major religious groupings.
The Government statement claims that Muslims in the UK are in particular a victim group, subject to distressing levels of discrimination, and that many are living in fear. This seems a strange claim when one considers that many towns around the country have Muslim mayors, including England’s capital city, and the Home Secretary is herself a Muslim.
Furthermore, if many UK Muslims are subjected to discrimination and are living in fear, why does this country continue to be such a popular destination for migrants who are also Muslim? Why do Islamic ‘asylum seekers’ risk their lives by crossing the English Channel in dinghies to reach a country where the likelihood is that they will be the victims of anti-Muslim prejudice and hatred?
‘Anti-Muslim hostility’ is also defined by the Government as being ‘the prejudicial stereotyping of Muslims, or people perceived to be Muslim including because of their ethnic or racial backgrounds or their appearance, and treating them as a collective group defined by fixed and negative characteristics, with the intention of encouraging hatred against them, irrespective of their actual opinions, beliefs or actions as individuals’.
It is illogical to state that those who follow Islam with its holy book (the Koran) and the collected sayings of Muhammad (the Hadith) cannot be treated as a ‘collective group’. How is it humanly possible not to make generalisations about a religion which has specific doctrines and core holy texts, along with a vigorous, close-knit community identity? Surely many if not the majority of Muslims regard themselves as ‘a collective group defined by fixed characteristics’.
Does the fact that there are Muslims who do not adhere to Islam’s official teachings mean that no generalisation can ever be made about what Muslims believe based on the religion’s holy texts?
The Government’s statement further declares that ‘hostility with the intention of encouraging hatred against others, because they are Muslim or perceived to be Muslim, is conduct [which the] government is committed to challenging’.
The problem with this is: who decides what the motivation of the heart is when someone strongly refutes Islamic teaching or practice? Who decides if the denunciation is a matter of sincere conviction and devoid of hateful intent, or if it is a malicious attempt to stir up hostility? Will not the anti-Muslim hostility definition induce an unhealthy lack of debate, whereby people simply keep quiet for fear of being accused of hate speech, even though they have no hateful intention?
If a Christian preacher says that Jesus Christ is the only way to salvation and that therefore there is no salvation in Islam, and that Allah is not the God whom Christians worship, and if he publicly questions the character of Muhammad or denounces the doctrine of jihad, will he be accused of stirring up anti-Muslim hostility? Will he be guilty of treating Muslims ‘as a collective group defined by negative characteristics’?
It is the duty of any Christian minister to uphold Biblical teaching and to refute religious error. He of course does so out of love for his neighbour, and never as an act of hatred.
In 1 John we read:
‘Every spirit that confesseth not that Jesus Christ is come in the flesh is not of God: and this is that spirit of antichrist’ (1 John 4:3).
John here speaks of the falsehood of denying that Jesus of Nazareth is God appearing on earth in human form, ‘in the flesh’. Yet in open-air preaching situations Muslims have often told me that the Lord Jesus is not God, and in any case God is one, and so He could not possibly have a Son. This rejection of Christ’s true status, says the apostle John, is ‘the spirit of antichrist’. In other words, it is an assault upon Christianity’s primary truth, namely the divine and eternal Sonship of mankind’s Saviour. Yet I support the freedom of Muslims to offend me in this way, and indeed to make what I consider to be blasphemous statements about my Lord.
We repeat, as the disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we love our Muslim neighbour and always seek peaceful co-existence. Indeed, we seek the Muslim’s highest good, which is to know the Saviour, but we also assert that a Christ-rejecting world religion must not be afforded a special deference over and above the faith which is constituted by law in the United Kingdom, which precious faith has proven to be of such enormous civilisational blessing to us over many centuries.
