As we were coming to the end of our deliberations I happened to check the BBC news website and saw that the High Court, under Mr Justice Ouseley, had supported a case brought by the National Secular Society and ruled prayers being said before sessions of Bideford Council to be unlawful. This was an interesting intersection: a discussion about Christians and culture, whether the Church had been culpable in not preventing the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967, the enduring example of Wilberforce, and so on, and then the stark fact of prayer being declared unlawful in a setting where it has been routine for the past 500 years. The BBC’s religious affairs correspondent made the pithy observation that, “The tide has been flowing pretty firmly against Christianity in public life.”
 
A couple of weeks earlier, on Radio 4’s Thought for the Day, that staple of middle-class, middle-England, Giles Fraser, recently ‘retired’ canon of St Paul’s Cathedral launched into an attack on substitutionary atonement. Fraser resigned from his post following the furore over the Occupy movement occupying St Paul’s, and is now occupying himself by writing comment pieces for The Guardian. (About which I refrain from comment.) The context for Fraser’s critique of orthodox doctrine was comments made by David Lammy MP that the riots of last summer might not have happened had parents not been afraid of administering smacks (that’s ‘spanks’ Stateside) to their offspring.
 
Fraser’s objection to smacking is grounded in his own experience,

I was beaten a lot as a child - not by my parents, I hasten to add - but at the boarding school I went to from the age of 8. Pretty much all I remember about that school was the beatings: with the cane and the slipper and the table-tennis bat. I remember the blood in my underpants. I remember seething with injustice when my little brother got the same treatment a few years later.

This experience of what I would describe as abuse rather than smacking has – understandably – led Fraser to the place where he believes all physical chastisement to be unacceptable. It has also coloured his theology, so that he sees penal substitution as twisting “a religion of compassion and forgiveness into one that’s dangerously accommodating of violence.”
 
There are a number of non sequiturs in the Reverend Doctor’s argument, but I’m not particularly interested in defending the practice of smacking here. Rather, what interests me is the connections between the theological grid Giles Fraser represents, the High Court decision about Bideford Council, and the cultural influence of Christians.
 
How the views and values of any particular group gains cultural ascendancy is a matter of considerable academic study and disagreement, and the reality is that even when popular opinion is very strong in a certain direction, a determined Government with a big enough majority in the House of Commons can decide what it likes. We saw striking examples of this a few years ago when a million people took to the streets of London in protest at the Governments plans to ban hunting with dogs, and then a few months later when another million protested about the war in Iraq. Both protests were ineffective.
 
One of the passages of scripture we considered at the Theology Forum was 1 Peter 2. In this passage Peter instructs Christians to live such good lives that they “silence the ignorance of foolish people.” The context here (and in Paul’s similar instructions in Romans 13) seems to be that the Empire anticipated trouble from this strange new sect, but the believers were instead to prove themselves as model citizens. What is interesting is the way in which Peter then links this to the Cross. Yes, we are to follow the example of Christ suffering (1 Peter 2:21), but we are also to see how he was judged justly, as he took our place, bearing our sins in order “that we might die to sin and live to righteousness” (v24). Without Christ’s substitutionary atonement, following his sacrificial example would be hollow, as it would lead us merely down the path to moralism, and not to salvation.
 
So, the tide is flowing firmly against Christianity in public life? Yes it is, but, in a sense, so what. If a million of us took to the streets to protest this shift would it make any difference? Who knows. What we do know is that we are to live as faithful citizens now, even when (especially when!) that means we feel pressure or persecution for our beliefs. The reason we can know compassion and forgiveness is because extreme violence has been meted out against sin, in the body of Christ on the cross. Se we can be confident in the belief that Christus vicarious means the certainty of Christus victor. Or, as Andrew recently expressed it, we can go to bed and sleep “the sleep of the saved and thankful.”