There’s been much ado in the British press over the case of Shirley Chaplin, an NHS nurse who was told to stop wearing a crucifix necklace on the outside of her uniform. Chaplin said she felt her religious rights were violated by the mandate, and refused compromise measures offered by the hospital, who felt the loose necklace posed a potential safety hazard. Despite an employment tribunal panel ruling that Chaplin’s rights were not violated, the case has sparked a spate of public soul-searching on if Christianity is being “marginalized” in the growingly secular UK.

“We’ve redefined oppression as hurting people’s feelings, and suddenly the whole citizenry from the secular society to hospital patients are declaring themselves hurt by everything that in the least savours of Christianity. Muslims may wear their burkas, gays their earrings [?!] and Sikhs their turbans, but Christians may not wear crucifixes.”

Of course, the tribunal pointed out that the hospital put limitations on all public manifestations of faith in the hospital (a policy that has been since modified in the wake of the offered compromises), not just Christianity, but that hasn’t quelled cries of secular persecution.

“In his ruling Mr Hollow said that the hospital had treated staff from ethnic minorities equally by ordering Sikhs to remove wrist bangles and Muslim doctors to switch to tighter-fitting hijabs.”

This tempest over religious jewelry is, in my opinion, just the latest birth pang in an emerging post-Christian Britain. Just as ponderings last year over if the British soul was “pagan”, and the fall-out over revelations that British churches were bleeding female membership the year before that, were. Where once nurse Chaplin’s crucifix might have been seen as completely normal, in a post-Christian secular society her religious expression is just one of many, and is treated as such. But since Christianity, especially Anglican protestant Christianity, have enjoyed generations of cultural and legal dominance, the process of making Christianity just another faith will often explode into legal battles over expression, and hand-wringing editorials over the “ruling elites” assault on Christianity.

“The highest echelons of both the Church and the judiciary seem incapable of grasping why Christianity is crucial to this country and has to be upheld and defended against attempts to undermine and destroy it, from wherever such attacks may come.”

But a post-Christian society doesn’t want to “destroy” Christianity, it just acknowledges that there are many voices, and many competing interpretations of what exactly is “crucial” to Britain.

“Senior church leaders have been known to make the claim that Britain’s constitution has been shaped by Christian faith. But it is the statue of the goddess Justitia, not Jesus, who sits above the Old Bailey and in the ante-chamber to the House of Lords. Based on a Greco-Roman idea, she depicts a model of justice whose primary concern is to weigh alleged law breakers in the balance, and then deliver the appropriate punishment.”

The real question is if a once-dominant Christianty facing demographic and cultural diminishment will keep its complaints within the context of judicial arbitration and civil debate, or if it will devolve into violent fantasies of revolution and returning to the power it once held. For my UK readers, what do you think? Is Christianity losing its grip on British society? Do you feel like you live in a post-Christian state? Do you think the Chaplin case was handled fairly? Let us know.

Tags: Christianity, law, litigation, post-Christian, Religion, UK