King Alfred the Great, the Saxon King of Wessex and then the Anglo Saxons from 871 to 899 AD, established the concept of England as a Christian nation with the Church at the heart of its nation and government. He established a system of English Common Law based on the Old Testament Torah, but softened by the mercy of the New Testament, with trial by jury as the central mechanism for the establishment of justice in the land.
Throughout its history in which England and then Great Britain and finally the United Kingdom weathered various crises, testing this concept of the Christian nation by establishing limits to government and kingly power. The Magna Carta, the establishment of Constitutional Democracy by the Glorious Revolution of 1688 – 1689 and the passing of the Bill Rights and finally universal suffrage with the passing of the Equal Franchise Act in 1928.
As the Church in England has withered under the onslaught of broadcast media which very early on was captured by a cadre determined to recast Britain as a ‘secular’ nation, but what they meant was a non-Christian nation, so the nation has abandoned most of the tenets of what would make it regarded as a Christian nation.
The passing of the Equality Act in 2010 was described as an act to amend and update the various laws on ‘anti-discrimination’. In fact, the law fundamentally transformed the foundations of the state’s worldview or reality model from a Christian one, in which the law of God, the Torah, informed the ethics of government, to one in which a new ethic, supposed based on Equality only, became the standard by which all social discourse would be judged. On principal and without supporting evidence, it excluded any admission of the reality of complementarity (e.g. male and female) and objective inequality (e.g the biological role of heterosexual sex, as compared to homosexual sex). This legal forcing to deny any legal force to relevant truth if it is inconvenient to the pursuit of power through bringing lawfare cases against all those who dare to speak against the damaging effects of pretending things which are unequal as equal.
It has made it virtually impossible to remain faithful to Christ in the public sphere without being subjected to harassing court cases, which campaigning judges and tribunals have been quick to use to deny Christians their rights to their livelihoods, public office and freedom of speech. It has co-opted all institutions of power to deny Christians and Christian organisation rights to holding bank accounts, meeting in public buildings, or express Christian truths in public or in private.
Nevertheless, Christian’s have remained loyal to the country, serving where they can, despite the determination of many, especially the LGBTQx lobby to use their enormous ‘pink pound’ financial muscle to campaign for the abolition of Bible-based Christianity, both outside and within the established church denominations.
The recent shocking judgement against Richard Page by the Court of Appeal has brought the issue to a head. It ruled that it was lawful for a Christian non-executive NHS director and magistrate to be sacked for expressing in the media that ‘children do best when raised by a mother and a father’. [That this is at all controversial is truly shocking.]
Mr Richard Page, aged 74, from Kent, was suspended from the magistracy and forced out of a role at an NHS Trust, after explaining on television that he had been discriminated against for his Christian beliefs on parenting while presiding over an adoption case.
After a six-year legal battle seeking justice against the decisions to remove him, today’s judgment has instead taken a significant step in developing further limitations on freedom of speech for Christians in the workplace.
In his judgment on Mr Page’s claim against NHS Improvement, Lord Justice Underhill stated that:
“The extent to which it is legitimate to expect a person holding a senior role in a public body to refrain from expressing views which may upset a section of the public is a delicate question.”
He recognised that Mr Page “had a particular interest in expressing publicly his views about same-sex adoption in the context of his removal as a magistrate, which was a legitimate matter of public debate” and that he expressed his views ‘temperately’ in the media.
However, he judged that Mr Page’s views on same sex-marriage and ‘homosexual activity’, might cause ‘offence’. [What views of import don’t cause offence?]
The ruling suggested, for example, that Mr Page should have “declined to answer” Piers Morgan’s questions on his beliefs during an interview on Good Morning Britain in 2016, despite that Mr Morgan’s treatment of Mr Page during the interview led to 70 complaints to Ofcom.
However, it was ruled that Mr Page’s responses to Piers Morgan’s questions justified his removal from his financial role in the NHS, as they might inadvertently “deter mentally ill gay people in the Trust’s catchment area from engaging with its services.”
Lawyers representing Mr Page had argued at the hearing in November 2020 that upholding his removal on these grounds would force Christians holding traditional views about sexual morality into silence, making it almost impossible for them to hold any kind of public office.
Concluding his judgment however, Lord Justice Underhill stated that, “the issue raised by this case is not about what beliefs such a person holds but about the limits on their public expression.” [So, now under British case law, you can hold a Christian belief, but God help you if you ever express it. What is the point of belief that never results in any statements or indeed actions – this indeed is the argument of St James in His New Testament letter.]
Lord Justice Underhill added that:
“The freedom to express religious or any other beliefs cannot be unlimited. In particular, so far as the present case is concerned, there are circumstances in which it is right to expect Christians (and others) who work for an institution, especially if they hold a high-profile position, to accept some limitations on how they express in public their beliefs on matters of particular sensitivity.”
[What the Lord Justice thereby established with this ruling is that were ANYONE to express any offence to the articulation of any aspect of the Christian understanding of sexual ethics, this and this alone is grounds for their removal from any office].
Andrea Williams, chief executive of the Christian Legal Centre, said: “This is the first time the Court of Appeal has endorsed the perverse distinction between unlawful discrimination for Christian beliefs and lawfully dismissing someone for offending an LGBT audience by expressing those beliefs.
“This is simply an artificial way to exclude Christian beliefs from the protection of the law. Nobody would get away with applying a similar distinction to any other protected characteristic. You would not get away with dismissing a homosexual for coming out as a homosexual, and then saying: “we duly respect your sexual orientation as long as you keep it to yourself”. This is an unfair and chilling decision, and the Supreme Court should put it right.
“The judgment sends a direct message to Christian public servants that if they allow their beliefs to influence their decision-making while in public office, they must self-censor and be silent, and are ultimately unfit for that office. If they express their beliefs in private to colleagues, they will be reprimanded, and if they then state those beliefs to the media, they will be sacked and will have their lives torn apart.
[Furthermore, this ruling places a legal requirement on all Christians to disobey the command of their Lord Jesus Christ, who commanded all those who follow Him to preach the Gospel to every creature. This law is the use of the immense power of the state to stop Christians performing their religious duty to their Lord and King Jesus.]
“The idea that you can remove a director from the NHS based on a perception that members of the LGBT community may be offended by something he said in the media, is extraordinary and should concern us all.
“This ruling provides a green light for employers to punish Christian employees who do not fall in line with and unquestionably support LGBT ideology. We will continue to stand with Richard Page as he seeks justice. We will not stop until this wrong is put right.”
Responding to the outcome, Mr Page said: “This is another deeply concerning ruling from the courts against Christian freedoms, and I intend to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court.”
As a result of this ruling, the UK is now one court case away from being by policy anti-Christian. Should the Court support the Appeal Courts’ shameful ruling, the State will have fully and finally betrayed king Alfred’s vision, and will have destroyed the very definition of England. The so-called government will have failed the Bible’s test of what constitutes a government – ‘to be a terror to those who do evil and reward those who do good.’ By inverting evil and good, it will have redefined itself in God’s sight as a non-government, indistinguishable from an armed gang, and no Christian is under a moral duty to obey such a criminal entity. As Peter said: ‘We must obey God rather than man.’
Already, 1 in 6 of the population of Generation Z self-identify as gay or transgender. This is a rather surprising finding, given that the LGBT lobby had always argued they could not help their feelings, for it was because of their ‘gay gene’ – sneer quotes fully intended. Has some virus run rampant among the population in the last couple of decades, reprogramming our biology to become gay? No? Then this result may be, of course, because of the enormous social and state power being wielded upon young people, pressing them in the classroom, in the broadcast and social media and in the workplace to be gay. This acculturation is armed and supported by the full violence of the state.
The long-term result for Britain and the West of this trend is catastrophic: the widespread breakdown of the family, the inability to properly raise children to experience life with a father and a mother as the norm (yes, sociological data strongly supports Richard Page’s assertion that children do best raised by a father and a mother and to deny children that in order to satisfy misguided carnal desires is surely child abuse), all this will result in a nation with a collapsing population. Already the British Armed forces, tiny though they are, are unable to recruit more than half of the numbers they need, and the physical quality of recruits is already poor.
These policies will inevitably result in the British State being swept aside by powerful forces, both external (China?) and internal (radical Islam?). The British Parliament and Courts have written out their state suicide plan and have put it into effect.
What of the Bible believing Christians – what are we to do? Christian families and the church have a primary duty to protect their children from the Satanic forces of acculturation what seeks to persuade young people to live Godless lives filled with abominable acts. Jesus commanded His disciples: ‘let the children come unto Me.’, the very thing the State appears to want to block.
If the Orwellian Equality Act is used to make the Christians in the nation the most unequal of peoples, then, in the end and after every possibility for returning to sensible laws and policies have been exhausted (and this is a truly terrifying outcome for anyone who cares what happens to the British State) we will choose not be part of the state. We will give them what they want in full in order to protect our children: no taxes (i.e. no earnings within businesses recognised by the state), no registrations of births and deaths, no participation in the organs of the state. We will become an alternative state, a prototypical local expression of the Kingdom of God. We will be a state within a state, interpenetrating but separate. We will ‘come out of Babylon the Great’, wherever Babylon the Great finds expression. What is unsustainable for the Bible Believers is to maintain their loyalty to a state that suppresses their righteous practice of their most holy faith.
Our citizens will be the families, the poor, the excluded, the persecuted and the outcasts. We will be the tree what provides them shade and shelter. Our law will be informed by the Torah, our Courts will be our own, our highest rulers will be princes, not kings, for we have one King, and His Name is Jesus.
And being a state, we will reserve the right to protect ourselves by any and all lawful means necessary from criminal elements, whoever they may be.
So, Supreme Court, it is now up to you. Wake up before it’s too late. Be careful how you choose. God bless,
Graham Ford
President – Jesus Christ for Muslims