“For the BNP, Christian is just another word for white, just as Islamic has become another word for Asian. Now that the religious hatred bill has been watered down, groups like the BNP are free to use religious affiliation as code for race, translating illegal incitement to racial hatred into legal incitement to religious hatred…. what is so utterly ridiculous about the BNP’s desire to defend ‘Christian culture’ is that the vast majority of Christians in the world are not white. The average Anglican, for instance is a black woman living in Africa.”
An interesting article by Giles Fraser, vicar of Putney, on the failure of the BNP’s attempts to link up with evangelical Christians.
However, Fraser’s claim that the breakdown of relations between the fascists’ front organisation, the Christian Council of Britain, and the fundamentalist group Christian Voice “demonstrates how deeply resistant Christianity is to all forms of racism” is questionable to say the least. Christian Voice’s position on Islam – “no Muslim has any assurance of salvation, except as a Jihadist, and it is this belief that physical fighting in the cause of Allah is the highest calling that makes Islam so dangerous and implacable” – is in fact a clear illustration of Fraser’s point about how denunciations of a religion are used as a cover for whipping up hostility against minority ethnic communities. If relations between the BNP and Christian Voice have soured, it is for reasons other than the latter’s attitude towards the fascists’ anti-Muslim racism.