Make Me a Fundamentalist

I’ve been catching up with silly Channel 4 reality series Make Me a Christian (available on 4OD, a free service which is worth getting).

The series has generated a lot of comment, to which I have little to add. If you haven’t seen the show, it features four clerics led by evangelical George Hargreaves, trying to stem Britain’s moral decline by bringing a group of sinful citizens back onto the righteous path.

Its participants are your standard bunch of reality TV caricatures from central casting. There’s a young guy who’s slept with over 150 women, a working couple who can’t make the time to spend with kids and a genial, tattooed biker who is portrayed as the token fundamentalist atheist.

Now, Hargreaves’s idea of what constitutes ’sinful’ is very broad. Attractive, intelligent businesswoman Faye has an interest in paganism and owns several books on the subject. Hargreaves’s judgement: ‘Basically, you’re a practising witch.’ He then harangues Faye for sleeping with her boyfriend outside of wedlock. By the end of his tirade, Faye is in tears and heads off to be consoled by her partner. Many reality TV shows take people whose lives are messed up and restore their self esteem. Make Me a Christian appears to work in the opposite way: it features happy and successful people who it then reduces to sobbing petinents.

The young womaniser I mentioned is called Kevin. As Terry Sanderson says, his laziness with contraception could lead to health issues, and his philandering is unfair to his girlfriend. To tackle this he’s ordered to take a covenant not to look at women in a lustful way, he’s told that ’sex is not about recreation’ and he’s also given advice from a twenty-seven year old virgin.

Also among the participants is lesbian teacher Laura. She receives a stern judgement on her sexuality from a cleric quoting the Bible verse: ‘The adulterer, murderer, fornicator and homosexual cannot enter the kingdom of God.’ Her erotic literature is confiscated by Hargreaves’s team. She is sent up to Scotland for a counselling session with some priest who claimed to have been gay in his twenties but managed to convert himself back to heterosexuality.

By now you can get an idea of the general worldview of Hargreaves and his co-religionists. All through the programme I was wondering: what do moderate Christians think of this?

After all, we constantly hear sentiments like ‘Richard Dawkins is wrong. I do not recognise the Christianity that Dawkins attacks in his books. We are not all fundamentalists.’

And it is true – the Christians I meet tend to be friendly, articulate people who couldn’t give a damn about stem cell research.

I’m not having a go at Channel 4 for screening this programme. They showcase a wide range of opinions on religion including the secular/humanist perspective.

But is it not a disservice to Christians to have a reality TV show called ‘Make Me a Christian’ hosted by a group of biblical literalists unrepresentative of Christians?

George Hargreaves has form here. In his review of the programme (which is full of his customary wit and insight) Charlie Brooker says:

[Hargreaves's] Christian Party takes a notably dim view on homosexuality. He says things like, ‘The ancient city of Sodom could have been saved, if only righteous people could be found,’ in its election broadcasts. And in 2006 he personally pledged £50,000 to assist the nine Scottish firefighters disciplined for refusing to hand out fire-safety leaflets at a gay parade.

Given that George also wrote and co-produced Sinitta’s 1986 gay disco anthem So Macho (sample lyric: ‘I’m after a hunk of a guy, an experienced man of the world … He’s got to be so macho/He’s got to be big and strong, enough to turn me on’), this is surprising. Still, he’s a surprising guy. In 2007 he campaigned to have the iconic red dragon removed from the Welsh flag as it was ‘nothing less than the sign of Satan’.

The Freethinker also has some interesting stuff on the Reverend. He has attacked Green MSP Robin Harper because Harper is ‘a prominent supporter of homosexual issues. He is a patron of LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender] Youth Scotland. Do Christians want this?’ Justifying the rant, Hargreaves wrote that:

[The Scottish Christian Party] will work with Christians in other Parties. We will talk with other Parties, but we will oppose them when they oppose Christian values. Thus we do not attack the Green agenda, but we attack the Party for supporting homosexual practices. At the same time, the Scottish Christian Party will oppose discrimination against homosexuals as we are to love our neighbour as ourselves.

According to the Freethinker, the SCP has the following policies:

• The reinstatement of the death penalty for severe crimes;
• Legislation to ban abortion;
• Greater observance of a weekly day of rest (Sunday)’
• The promotion in school of chastity before marriage;
• The reintroduction of corporate readings from the Bible in all Scottish state schools;
• A science curriculum which reflects evidence of creation/design in the universe;
• Publicising ‘the catastrophic effect of ungodly behaviour on the life expectancy and health of people, whom God loves and we should love; particularly homosexuality, excessive drinking and the use of addictive substances’;
• The restoration of the right for parents to smack their children, and teachers to impose corporal punishment;
• Opposition to the practice of altering birth certificates to reflect gender re-orientation surgery;
• Mandatory Christian religious education.

The article also notes the irony of a man who has made millions off the gay club scene using these profits to attack gay people.

Christian thinktank Ekklesia is also worried about the SCP. Highlights from its article include:

The Scottish Christian Party (SCP) is fielding 72 candidates across Scotland on the regional list – more than any other political party. It claims to have distributed 2 million leaflets opposing the newly introduced Sexual Orientation Regulations, which its TV election broadcast likened to Nazi anti-Semitic propaganda.

The broadcast, shown on BBC and STV last Tuesday, featured footage of Hitler addressing a rally in 1933. Playing ‘the Nazi card’, as one media analyst dubbed it, has caused offence in many circles, and has lead to accusations that SCP has ‘lost the plot altogether’.

The Scottish Christian Party’s leader has also suggested in interviews and press comment that a Christian anti-crime policy would include overseas transportation of convicted criminals, a 9pm curfew for children aged up to 10, the restoration of capital punishment and securing more criminal convictions by ending the requirement of ‘beyond reasonable doubt’ in trials.

Meanwhile the extreme views continue. On the Richard Evans show on BBC Radio Wales, the SCP chief questioned whether people living with HIV-AIDs and drug users should get treatment on the NHS, because their conditions were ’self-inflicted’.

Mr Hargreaves says ‘we are a Christian party but not a party of all Christians’. But he also says that SCP is ’standing up for the Lord’, which looks to be a larger claim. He recently declared: ‘We intend to high-jack the political agenda as far Christians are concerned.’

In the Glasgow and the Central region of Scotland three-quarters of a million leaflets attacking equal rights for lesbians and gays have been sent to voters in personally addressed envelopes with a covering letter.

There is concern among mainstream Christian and civic leaders that SCP’s extremism has not been condemned by major organisations like the Evangelical Alliance.

The party is also fighting in Wales. Their manifesto proposes lifting controls on over-fishing on the basis there is ’a supernatural element in the restoration of fish to our seas.’

The SCP’s views range from the sinister to the silly. Party members approached David Cameron when he was campaigning in Scotland. The party then issued this press release:

David Cameron’s response to the question: ‘Do you believe that Jesus Christ died to save us from our sins?’ was revealed to delegates at the Scottish Conservative Party conference in Perth earlier today.

Mr Cameron, who earlier this month was reported by the press as regularly attending church and has sent his daughter to St Mary Abbotts church school answered: ‘Uh, I think, um, you keep asking this sort of odd questions of me as I wander around places. I think we’ll, we’ll leave it for a while.’

Scottish Christian Party leader, Reverend George Hargreaves commented, ‘The mark of a Christian is that a person believes that Jesus Christ died to save us from our sins. Mr Cameron’s regular church attendance makes him no more a Christian as would his regular attendance to MacDonald’s make him a hamburger… {I]t is a question of whether he is a Christian or ‘a wolf in sheep’s clothing’ playing to the Christian gallery for the sake of votes.’

Ekklesia says it has received emails about the SCP. It offers a typical example:

I have been bombarded with emails daily [from the SCP] over the past couple of weeks. Each email has become more extreme. At the point where an email arrived implying that a vote for them was a vote for God and that anything else was a vote against God, I asked them to not send me anything else. I have been advising people against involvement with them as there is no place for this level of growing extremism in our churches. I look at Muslim extremists and I am beginning to find a mirrored extremism in the verbalizations of the Christian right. What concerns me most is that people will begin to believe that such extremists are representing all of us as Christians. They could not be further than the truth.

It’s a shame, then, that Channel 4 is inadvertantly representing all Christians as extremists.

I’m glad Ekklesia has spoken out against the SCP. It certainly appears to have done more research into Reverend Hargreaves’s background than has Channel 4.

I expect this will be also highlighted by the usual religious apologists on CiF and Face to Faith.

Let’s go back to Laura the gay teacher. The clerics on Make Me a Christian are trying to cleanse her of her sinful sexuality. Would C4 accept or even consider a proposal for a reality TV show in which a British nationalist tried to make a group of immigrants ‘more British’?

I mean, what’s next? Nick Griffin’s Make Me an Englishman?