The news that the British cabinet upholds the ban on wearing Christian symbols at work appears surreal at first glance, but, upon scrutiny, incidents in which Christian believers face discrimination from their employers over their religious practices mirror a profound global trend.
On the Surface
Two episodes in which the British authorities adopted a clearly anti-Christian position recently drew ample coverage. Shirley Chaplin, 56, from Exeter, and Nadia Eweida, 59, of Twickenham, south-west London, had at different times been discriminated for wearing crosses at work but took to defending their rights in court. As the cases eventually reached the European Court of Human Rights, the British government responded by passing a resolution which gave employers the power to ban wearing crosses at workplaces and to lay off the employees who refused to comply. While wearing crosses is not a “mandatory requirement” in many protestant denominations, Shirley Chaplin and Nadia Eweida regarded doing so as an element of their faith.
The conflict involving Nadia Eweida, a Coptic Church member, began in 2006 when, citing the British Airways corporate rules concerning jewelry, a Heathrow Airport manager told her not to wear her cross openly. Notably, religious garments or symbols such as the Sikh turban and kara bracelet, or the Muslim hijab, were not frowned upon at the same workplace, prompting Eweida to refer the clearly discriminatory approach to court. Worried that the rising scandal would cause a faction of the customers to shun it, British Airways offered Eweida two alternatives – to either wear the cross pinned on their uniform lapel or to switch to a job out of the passengers’ sight, but Eweida rejected both.
The dispute between Shirley Chaplin who worked as a medical nurse at an NHS hospital and the institution’s administration flared up in 2009 when she was unexpectedly notified that her wearing a cross was a breach of health and safety regulations. Chaplin’s supervisors alleged that a patient could try to grab it and get traumatized and, when the woman suggested that she would wear the cross on a magnetic clasp to avoid such accidents if they were at all possible, stated that having the cross on was in a any case a violation of the dress code. “I have worn my cross for 38 years and it has never harmed anybody. If I am forced to hide it, I feel I am denying my Christian convictions“, says Chaplin, adding that everybody in the hospital knows about her Christian faith and that her Christian views motivate her to care for people.
The British government which professes tolerance and diversity staunchly hold its own when confronted with Christian advocacy. No doubt, the above only represents the tip of the iceberg. In less publicized cases, children who were Orthodox Christians were not allowed to wear crosses in British schools, Christians were laid off for declining Sundays shifts, and a registrar became jobless after denying confirmation to a same-sex partnership. Overall, one gets an impression that being Christian is increasingly perceived as an offense in Britain.
Probing Deeper into the Problem
Suspicion is growing within the British Anglican community that the pressure comes in response to the church’s attacks on the government of D. Cameron over the recent legalization of same-sex marriage. Priests in Great Britain deem it likely that the sexual minorities lobbyists are thus taking a kind of revenge…
The habitual picture of Britain is that of a country cherishing its traditions, a one where citizens have immense respect for their church and monarchy, and where you can always rely on the word of a polite albeit aloof gentleman. All of that, however, may be in the process of being swept away by a tide of changes.
There was an epoch in the British history when proponents of different religious doctrines clashed over the date and circumstances of the advent of Christianity to the country. Protestants claimed in the late XVI century that the religion came to Great Britain not from Rome but from the East, and that Great Britain’s Christianity could be traced back to St. Joseph of Arimathea, the man who donated his own prepared tomb for the burial of Jesus after the Crucifixion. In contrast, Roman Catholic authors stressed the role of Rome, the importance of the mission of St. Duvian and St. Fagan, and the influence contributed by St. Augustine. These days, the theme as a whole has receded from pubic discourse and a cross on a necklace chain somehow upsets the British society obsessed with political correctness, while gay parades and public displays of gay pride are perfectly welcome. Only a handful of those who remember Christ’s saying “He who is not with me is against me” retain the ability to look at things critically and to voice some sort of dissent.
Under the circumstances it might be the key question what is to take the place of Christianity, but today’s people are being cunningly distracted from the problem and act as if chips are installed into their brains to steer them away from tradition.
It is common knowledge that the aggressively advertised deviant models of sexual behavior – gay pride festivals, etc. – are incompatible with the moral values derived from the Bible. It is seldom mentioned in the present-day world that the Bible, the main book of the human civilization, condemns sodomites along with fornicators, kidnappers, liars, perjurers, and zoophiles, though most would still recall that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed as the punishment for their dwellers’ sins. Europe happily moves on, attracting an ever-growing number of countries to its “pride parade”, and the process anything but looks uncontrolled.
Global Secret Governance
One might ask why the pressure on Christianity in Britain started piling under David Cameron… The current British premier’s ancestors, including Emil Levita, a Jewish entrepreneur from Germany who did business in India, mostly made careers as brokers. According to media accounts, as an Oxford student Cameron befriended Boris Johnson, a US citizen and the elected mayor of London who regularly takes part in gay parades, and Nathaniel Rothschild. The latter tends to avoid the spotlight but, if mentioned in newspapers, is as a rule described as a global puppeteer. The Rothschild clan, it appears, was behind every XX century drama, and the trend will surely continue into the XXI century. Supposedly, Nathaniel Rothschild’s actual inheritance is “hidden in a series of trusts in Switzerland and rumored to be worth £40bn” and he has a vested interest in Russia.
Nathaniel Rothschild being among the architects of the rising global civilization, it would be interesting to get a glimpse of the agenda behind it. A transcript of the 1938 interrogation of former Ukrainian People’s Commissars Soviet chairman Christian Rakovsky (Krastyo Georgiev Stanchev) by Stalin’s secret police might help shed some light on it.
The interrogation was in fact a conversation revolving around world affairs, the revolution, and the enigmatic phrase dropped by Leon Trotzky to the effect that the Comintern was a “conservative organization” compared to the New York Mercantile Exchange. Trotzky’s point was that the actual revolutionaries were the bankers, the puppeteers of the revolution who sought to achieve global dominance. Rakovsky admitted that Stalin outplayed the shadowy forces of the global governance by exterminating the camp of his opponents. The dialog was as follows:
Interrogator: But if, according to you – and I think the same – they already have global political power, then what other power do they want to possess?
Rakovsky: I have already told you: Full power. Such power as Stalin has in the USSR, but world-wide.
Interrogator: Such power as Stalin’s, but with the opposite aim?
Rakovsky: Power, if in reality it is absolute, can be only one. The idea of the absolute excludes multiplicity. …Absolute power has a purpose in itself, otherwise it is not absolute. And until the present day there has not yet been invented another machine of total power except the Communist State.
The machine — known as globalization — is already there […]
Source: Strategic Culture Foundation
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