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The ABC like their Christians as they like their gays, indigenous people and women — strictly left-leaning.

So long as you believe that Jesus was a kind of pot-smoking vegan, more concerned about renewable energy than heaven and hell; more interested in interfaith dialogue than in objective truth; more committed to preaching social justice than to advocating personal responsibility, then your Christian faith is to be lauded.

But if the mainstream media suspect that you believe Jesus was God in the flesh dying for the sins of mankind, your Christian faith is to be loathed.

This aversion towards religious people who actually believe their religion – as opposed to those whose faith is really just secularism under a cloak of respectable spirituality – began the moment Islamic jihadists crashed passenger jets into the World Trade Centre. Suddenly, religion was seen as the greatest threat to social cohesion.

Such a view is not without merit. Religion encourages adherents to believe their view of the world is right and, by implication, that all opposing views are wrong.

Such exclusive claims make it easy to disparage the “other”. If others are wrong about the big issues of life, then it makes sense to separate yourself from them. And once we have separated ourselves from the “other”, it is easy to stereotype them and then to oppress them and ultimately to commit violence against them.

What makes religion particularly dangerous is that we may do all of this with a sense of self-righteousness. If we are on the side of God, then who are they to tell me I ought not to oppress them? Who are they at all?

For a while, we believed the problem of religion would fade as economic prosperity and technological advancement made belief in God redundant. Who needs God when Google is the source of all knowledge and a meeting of bureaucrats in Paris can decide global temperatures?

But the world is becoming more religious, not less. Even in the Western world, where the number of professing Christians is declining, we are importing religion via our immigration programs.

Unable to stamp out religion, we have decided to neuter it by insisting that, while people can believe whatever they want, they must leave their religious beliefs in their church. This is why we now hear politicians advocating “freedom of worship”, rather than “freedom of religion” – a subtle but profound shift.

If we can reduce religion to an hour-long ceremony held once a week in a dedicated building, then we can quarantine it. Our preferred secular utopia will be free to advance without challenge, so the thinking goes.

Answers and Truth Claims

But religion, properly understood, is much more than a ceremony; it is a set of answers to the big questions of life. A person’s religion tells them who they are (identity); why they are here (meaning); how they may discern right from wrong (morality), and their ultimate fate (destiny).

Everyone has a view about identity, meaning, purpose and destiny. The insistence that “religion must be kept out of the public square” is really just a polite way of saying, “Keep your antiquated, traditional worldview to yourself while we impose our modern, enlightened worldview on you.”

This was illustrated perfectly when Australian rugby player Israel Folau was condemned for saying homosexuals would go to hell unless they asked God’s forgiveness.

Folau was told his views on the afterlife were wrong and that he ought not to have voiced them. But, in opposing Folau, his opponents were themselves making definitive statements about what is true and what is moral.

To pretend that only ‘religious’ people make exclusive truth claims is disingenuous. Every person, consciously or not, operates by a worldview that they believe to be true. Folau’s crime was not to have expressed a religious view, but to have expressed a different view to his progressive betters.

It is foolish to insist that people must not make exclusive truth claims since the very insistence itself is an exclusive truth claim. Those wanting to banish religion from the public square because religion encourages exclusive views are guilty of the very thing they deplore and are every bit as dangerous.

Since we all hold worldviews we believe to be true, the question is not how do we get rid of those who claim to be the holders of truth but, rather, which set of exclusive truth claims are most likely to create a harmonious society?

Truly Inclusive

History shows that the exclusive claims of Christianity, now being pushed from the public square, are actually those most suited to creating the inclusive society we desire.

A 2018 report by independent human rights watchdog Freedom House rated nations according to the individual liberties citizens enjoyed. Of the 20 freest nations, 19 had or continued to enjoy Christian majorities.

This is not an accident. Nor is it an accident that the cry for inclusivity is rising, not from Islamic or Eastern nations, but from the West, which grew out of a Christian tradition. The point being missed in the debate about inclusivity is that Christianity’s claims are not the obstacle to inclusion, but the instigator of it.

Christianity’s foremost claim is that Jesus Christ alone is divine. We might expect this view to make Christians dangerous. The idea that their founder – unlike Muhammad, or Buddha or Krishna — is God, could lead to arrogance and the oppression of those who think differently. But if Jesus is God in flesh, what does the ultimate human look like?

The ultimate person, according to the Christian faith, looks like a man who blesses those who curse him, forgives those who injure him and lays down his life for those who oppose him.

The claim that Jesus is God should produce, in all who believe, a love for and willingness to serve all who do not.

The second bold claim of Christianity is that men cannot earn God’s favour; they must instead receive forgiveness as a gift.

This should produce a humility in believers that leads them to expect those who do not believe as they do may well in fact be better people than they are. If the only prerequisite for becoming a Christian is admitting you are not a good person, there is no room for moral vanity or virtue-signalling.

The problem of religion is not solved by eradicating religion, since that only serves to replace one set of exclusive beliefs with another. And if the twentieth century taught us anything, it was that godless regimes are even more oppressive than the religious ones they replace.

The things which are exclusive about Christianity are the very things that make it the idea most likely to produce the inclusive society the Left say they want.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.

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