Easter’s message of courage before the woke mob

The new hostility to religion, especially Christianity, is part of the left’s relentless political anti-culture.

We Christians must not be divided. We cannot bow to the cowardly intimidation of the anti-culture, writes Angela Shanahan.

Easter encapsulates the Christian message about suffering, death and resurrection – and the divine nature of Jesus, the Christ and spiritual Messiah. Yet apathy is widespread among people who formerly practised Christianity, and worse than apathy is downright hostility and ridicule, which has become culturally acceptable.

Recently a joke made about Jesus on Network Ten’s The Project was endorsed with spirited laughter. The belated apology to “Muslim viewers but especially our Christian viewers” by Waleed Aly was hardly in the spirit of true contrition. We Christians for whom Christ is the second person of the Trinity were lucky to come in second.

This hostility recently was brought home to me in quite select company in Canberra. Chatting about the interesting experience of staying at the Vatican for a seminar, one of my fellow guests suddenly demanded how an intelligent person could believe in all that “fairies at the bottom of the garden” stuff. He then went on to claim definitively, almost ex cathedra, that the church was dying and would soon be finished.

I pointed out that the church’s purview was universal, not just Western, and was growing in China and particularly in Africa and India. He became even more dismissive: “Oh, just among all the poor and ignorant.” Which, I couldn’t help pointing out, was exactly where the church began.

I was shocked that he was so blatantly disrespectful of my religion. Would he have said that if I were Muslim, Hindu or Jewish? I had the feeling he would not. The norms of civilised discourse are put on hold for Christianity.

This aggressive attitude to Christianity does not spring from apathy or the quite understandable disillusion stemming from clerical scandals.

Neither is it solely the dismissive ignorance of an elitist few who refuse to see that to be in awe of the numinous, to acknowledge one’s human limitations, to seek and to cultivate the spiritual, which men have been seeking for millennia, especially within a religion that believes in a risen saviour, is a rather more serious belief than “fairies at the bottom of the garden”.

The new hostility to religion, especially Christianity, is a much worse phenomenon than mere arrogant elitism and it has more than one origin. Atheism was once the preserve of the scientific materialists, who at least were usually respectful. Now it is part of an aggressive political anti-culture of the left, which has pitted itself at war with Christian values, with the Christian cultural inheritance and consequently with Christian people themselves.

Most wickedly, this new anti-culture purports to do this in the name of human rights and human values that its woke adherents claim in an ever-expanding monopoly. It operates through the distortions of social media and, like the serpent in the garden, tells our gullible young that God is not telling them the truth about themselves, about their nature. Hence sexual identity has become malleable, all sexual practices are normalised and every perceived slight, real or imagined, against some group is interpreted as hate.

Most average people are oblivious to all this so every word and nuance, real or imagined, has to be policed by the censorious intimidatory mob in the media and so-called intelligentsia for whom, as a priest friend once said to me, to be anti-Christian, especially anti-Catholic, “is the only acceptable prejudice”. It seeps into the general population’s consciousness through programs such as The Project and even the compulsory rainbow flag-waving of the NRL.

Christopher Hitchens.

However, hostility to Christianity is not the sole preserve of the left. Warriors of the right have indulged in this blind prejudice too. Look at the rage against Mother Teresa by militant atheist Christopher Hitchens because that manifestly holy woman would pick up the dying and leprous from the gutters of Kolkata, not because she thought acute poverty was in itself a good thing but to imitate Jesus, who said: “What you do to the least of these my brothers you do to me.” It is in that form of true witness that people are moved, that people see that God really exists. No wonder Mother Teresa’s order, the Missionaries of Charity, is flourishing the world over.

On a political level people such as Hungary’s Viktor Orban and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni have realised that without religion culture falls apart. The Judaeo-Christian view, particularly the commandments and the Sermon on the Mount, gave us the perceptions of right and wrong embedded in our thought processes.

The radical left does not acknowledge Christianity as the foundation of our culture, but the powers of the new culture are good at dissimulation in the name of freedom. So, we have ersatz Catholics, such as Joe Biden, telling us how Catholic they are while supporting abortion, which turns a human being into a collection of cells, and in this country in the name of human rights there is a government that will remove any of the exemptions to the woke agenda that conflict with the religious beliefs underpinning schools attended by a third of the nation’s children.

However, the most dangerous thing about this punitive culture is that it has infected the church itself, thus weakening opposition to it. In a changing world there is confusion, and there is now seemingly, a left-right divide in Christianity – even in Catholicism. But there is no left or right truth. We Christians must not be divided. We cannot bow to the cowardly intimidation of the anti-culture. At Easter the message is hope. But there is another, and it is courage.