I think there is very little awareness of it. People who are not necessarily Christian are very shocked that this could have happened in Britain but it does. And although I had said in the programme that this might happen, I was told in email by someone almost immediately after the programme that this had already happened and didn't I know this? Well I didn't.
CT: Some politicians and church leaders are using the language of persecution in reference to Christians in the UK, such as at the time of the BA cross fiasco. Do you think Christians in the UK are being persecuted?
BM: I think that Britain is moving away from being a society that was based on the Christian faith and Christian values to being something else. My argument has always been that it is not necessary for Britain to do this, that it is quite possible to be an open society while at the same time acknowledging the Christian basis for its institutions, customs and laws and so on - indeed that may be the only way to be a genuinely open society because secularity has the effect actually of marginalising everybody.
But if that is not to be and society does move away from its Christian basis then of course Christians and Christian churches will come more and more into conflict with what the state is doing, for example with questions on the beginning of life and the end of life - we are already seeing that - the dignity of the human person, and freedom for human beings in terms of what they believe and how they express or change their beliefs. One of the things we have lost in Britain now for the first time in centuries of Christian history is any public doctrine of marriage and family.
Now, if you say these things there are all sorts of people who will oppose you and the state may well take their side and that will result in difficulty for Christians.
CT: Do you think Christians are being pushed out of the public square?
BM: I think there is a very strong constituency in Britain of very powerful people who want the public square to be naked because they think that is what ensures fairness, but I disagree with that view on the sorts of grounds that I was just talking about. The problem with a naked public square is that something will always fill it and that something may not always be what we want.
CT: Looking at the bigger picture of persecution around the world, how do you see Christianity developing from this?
BM: The story of the church is a story of persecution and the blood of the martyrs has been and is and will be the seed of the church. If you look on the west front of Westminster Abbey there are ten new statues and each of them is of a modern martyr, somebody who was killed in the last century for their faith.
This is a continuing story and in a strange kind of way it is a story of God's blessing because through these people who are being persecuted we are being blessed.
