BNP's 'What Would Jesus Do?'

Once you get over the fact of how a quote taken out of context can be made to serve a purpose hugely at odds with the original ethos, I think that this issue is one that comes out as one we have to seriously grapple with, it's on the Ekklesia site here: Responding to the BNP over 'What Would Jesus Do?' | Ekklesia and the issue is put most pithily thus: "the time has come to face the fact that when it uses 'Christian nation' rhetoric, the Church risks encouraging support for right-wing extremists." Yes, further rooks from Christendom coming home to roost. I'm particularly concerned because the Christian Nation rhetoric is one to which my own constituency seem to be particularly vulnerable. And part of the vulnerability is a nostalgia for power and an unthought-out set of notions about law, coercion and the gospel. The irony in all of this is that Islam, having arguably learnt state-coercive religion from Christendom, is now being used as the excuse by some tot mimic that same state-religion-coerciveness in order to 'deal with' the perceived threat of Islam (never mind Islam's fragility once it is properly exposed to the 'acids' of modernism and post-modernism).

I continue to believe that the Christendom 'experiment' was flawed by a fundamental contradiction of the gospel: the use of state-sponsored coerciveness is inimical to key values and in this I believe the anabaptists' instinct was/is right. Where I think that they need/ed nuancing is in the failure to recognise the group identity dynamics and social construction of faith resposes which Christendom was taking seriously (but overextending).

We need to be saying strongly that we welcome it when states and organisations commit themselves to policies and values that promote justice, peace, freedom of conscience and so forth, even more so when they act wisely in pursuit of such values. However, we need also to say that organisation and states can and do err, just as individual humans (including Christians) do, and so the claiming of the label Christian for a nation is perilous and should be discouraged.