Winston Churchill provided a good definition of a fanatic as “someone who can’t change his mind and won’t change the subject”. However, I think that the Israeli writer, Amos Oz, provides more illumination of the nature of the fanatic’s mind with his telling observation that the fanatic is "always a great altruist". He comes to this conclusion on the basis that, viewed in the fanatics’ own terms, they are never simply trying to inflict their will on you but are simply trying to save you from yourself.
Christians have long been exhorted to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is, in many respects, very laudable advice. However, Oscar Wilde provided an important gloss on this principle when he said that people should do no such thing, as others may not like what you like.
The fanatic’s chief sin is the failure to accept that it is legitimate for others to have goals for their own lives that may seem self-defeating or wrongheaded; a certainty that the goals one values one’s self are also good for others.
It is this certainty of the primary importance of one’s own moral goals, the failure to relativise one’s beliefs, the inability to accept that the goals of others are as important and legitimate as your own that characterise the mind of the fanatic.
The intervention of Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, in the case of MacFarlane v Relate is an excellent example of such a mindset.
Between 2003 and 2008 Mr MacFarlane was a relationship counsellor by Relate, a charity that provides counselling to couples. The contract of employment that he signed explicitly required Mr MacFarlane to abide by Relate’s anti-discrimination policy which includes a commitment to “avoid discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation”. In late 2007 however, he refused to provide sexual counselling to same sex couples on the basis that his Christian beliefs led him to view such conduct as sinful and following disciplinary proceedings, he was dismissed.
Mr MacFarlane took a case to the Employment Tribunal alleging that his dismissal amounted to discrimination on grounds of religion. Having lost in both the Employment Tribunal and the Employment Appeal Tribunal, he appealed to the Court of Appeal where he was represented by an activist Christian legal group. Lord Carey sent in a witness statement in support of Mr MacFarlane which contained the following:
"3. I make this Witness Statement in support of the appeal of Gary McFarlane for his case to be heard before the Lord Chief Justice... and a specially constituted Court of Appeal of five Lords Justices who have a proven sensibility to religious issues...
10. The description of religious faith in relation to sexual ethics as 'discriminatory' is crude; and illuminates a lack of sensitivity to religious belief. The Christian message of 'love' does not demean or disparage any individual (regardless of sexual orientation); the desire of the Christian is to limit self destructive conduct by those of any sexual orientation and ensure the eternal future of an individual with the Lord.
12. The comparison of a Christian, in effect, with a 'bigot' (ie a person with an irrational dislike to homosexuals) begs further questions. It is further evidence of a disparaging attitude to the Christian faith and its values. In my view, the highest development of human spirituality is acceptance of Christ as saviour and adherence to Christian values. This cannot be seen by the Courts of this land as comparable to the base and ignorant behaviour. My heart is in anguish at the spiritual state of this country.
The judgmentof Lord Justice Laws (http://www.bailii.org/ew/cases/EWCA/Civ/2010/B1.html), who is himself a devout Anglican, described Lord Carey’s observations as “misplaced” and goes on to demonstrate that they are based on a misunderstanding of the nature of the law of discrimination:
In cases of indirect discrimination(....) the law forbids discriminatory conduct not by reference to the actor's motives, but by reference to the outcome of his or her acts or omissions. Acts or omissions may obviously have discriminatory effects – outcomes – as between one group or class of persons and another, whether their motivation is for good or ill; and in various contexts the law allows indirect discrimination where (...) it can be shown to have justifiable effects. Accordingly the proposition that if conduct is accepted as discriminatory it thereby falls to be condemned as disreputable or bigoted is a non sequitur. But it is the premise of Lord Carey's position.
Although Laws LJ notes acidly that the relevant “concerns are formulated at such a level of generality that it is hard to know precisely what Lord Carey has in mind”. He goes on to comprehensively contradict the oft-repeated claims that the law is in some way biased against Christians. The judgment, which is superbly clear and intelligently written, contains marvellous paragraphs such as the following one which ably demonstrate why a secular legal and political order is the only possible option for liberal democracies:
“We do not live in a society where all the people share uniform religious beliefs. The precepts of any one religion – any belief system – cannot, by force of their religious origins, sound any louder in the general law than the precepts of any other. If they did, those out in the cold would be less than citizens; and our constitution would be on the way to a theocracy, which is of necessity autocratic. The law of a theocracy is dictated without option to the people, not made by their judges and governments. The individual conscience is free to accept such dictated law; but the State, if its people are to be free, has the burdensome duty of thinking for itself.”
There is nothing to be added to Laws LJ’s fantastically clear writing. What I do want to highlight however, is the mindset revealed by Lord Carey’s witness statement.
Lord Carey sees “acceptance of Christ as a saviour and adherence to Christian values” as the “highest development of human spirituality”. He is entitled to this view which is shared by many millions of his co-religionists. He further argues that the “love” shown by the Christian who wishes to discriminate against a same sex couple in the provision of services is merely” the desire of the Christian is to limit self destructive conduct by those of any sexual orientation and ensure the eternal future of an individual with the Lord”.
It is difficult to imagine a clearer example than this of the fanatic’s mindset as outlined by Amos Oz. Lord Carey seems to place remarkably little importance on the fact that the individual being “loved” in this manner may not be interested in being saved, or may feel that their eternal future with the Lord is not compromised by their sexual relationship.
On Lord Carey’s analysis, to throw a gay couple out of a hotel, to refuse to serve them in a shop is to love them. Not, of course because he wants to impose his views on them, but to improve them and ensure that they may have the eternal future with the Lord that he thinks they should want, ie that they should live their lives in accordance with the he just knows are the best.
Indeed, why does he stop with discrimination laws? Shouldn’t this love extend to the criminalisation of homosexuality to “limit self-destructive conduct and ensure the eternal future of an individual with the Lord.” Wouldn't it also represent love to censor any information about non-Christian religions so that individuals do not engage in the self-destructive act of leaving Christianity and depriving themselves of their eternal future with the Lord? Once we accept that it is legitimate for us to impose our version of the good life on other adult citizens on the basis that we know what is best for them there is no limit to the degree of control we can take over the lives of others.
This is not what any reasonable person would regard as love. It is the love of a Joseph Fritzl who, of course, did not imprison his daughter selfishly but who argued that he did it to stop her falling in with bad company. It is the kind of love shown by the Taliban and Inquisition whose concern for the immortal souls of others leads them to punish heretics in order to ensure that others would not risk their souls by adopting heretical beliefs.
What Lord Carey and others perceive as “persecution” of their beliefs is nothing more that the refusal to allow them to persecute others. As society's mores have changed the restrictions on free conscience involved in all anti-discrimination laws have come to restrict discriminatory practices of Christians in a way in which they did not when conservative ideas of sexual morality were the majority view.
I understand that it is difficult to adjust when the previously dominant conservative and discriminatory sexual morality one has lived by suddenly becomes the minority position. It is particularly hard when this causes anti-discrimination laws to bite on conduct that was previously free from legal regulation. However, religious people must realise that in a free and equal society they cannot demand exemptions for themselves from laws on the grounds that their beliefs are religious in nature and therefore more important than the beliefs of everyone else. If an employer who strongly believes, for non-religious reasons, that that mothers working outside the home is wrong, is required to employ appropriately qualified women who have children, there is no reason his counterpart who holds the same views, with the same intensity, for religious reasons, should not be similarly coerced.
More importantly people like Lord Carey must internalise the reality of a liberal society and accept that individuals must be free to live in ways that he feels are wrong and self destructive. We all have some desire to “improve” others and have all, at times, wished we could just get someone to see how wrongheaded they are being in their choices. However to move from the desire to improve others to attempting to pressurise individuals into following one’s own view of how life should be lived upon them by witholding from them services such as hotel accommodation or relationship counselling as Mr MacFarlane and Lord Carey wish Christians to do, is the essence of fanaticism.
