Firstly apologies if this has already een discussed, I couldn't see it anywhere. Channel 4 ran a documentary this week called In God's Name following fundamentalist Christians in the UK, its on free on 4oD at the moment. I meant to post about it sooner when the memories were fresh but have been busy. Did anyone else see it and what did you think? The thing that stood out most for me was the contrast between the religious right here in the UK and in the US. Although there is a lot of similarity the influence and respect they command here is much less significant. The UK Christians just lack the polished, slick, well-rehearsed and practised debating and influencing skills that the US church has so succefully used to swell its numbers and increase its political clout. For me this is a good thing and I hope, though I am sure it is a futile hope, that they will stay this way.
Most notably for me perhaps was the headmaster of a Christian Faith school where creation was taught in science classes using a curriculum imported from the US and tests included questions such as how many days did God take to create the world. When pressed by the interviewer to justify teaching children that the earth was 6000 - 10000 years old he could barely string a sentence together in response let alone a cohesive argument and fell back on saying, "well if you look at this and teaching the earth is millions of years old I wonder which has more credibility?" Well clearly not you anyway mate if you can't even support your own beliefs.
Slightly more flippantly one thing that has made it here from the US is the bizarre concept of using the words 'Lord' and 'Father' as punctuation. From what I can tell Lord 'Lord' is about equivalent to a comma and should be used Lord at every opportunity Lord but when we finish a sentence Lord then we know Lord that we should use 'Father' Father. Can anyone explain the rationale behind this phenomenon?
All in all I'm glad the UK loonies haven't got their shit together yet but I guess its only a matter of time before the kool aid from the US kicks in and the slick, media savvy face of religious extremism is just as prevalent here as it is there.
