The welcoming church of Sweden

Muslims murder Christians en masse, mistreat women and toss homosexuals off rather tall buildings.

And yet, in the spirit of Christian forgiveness, a Swedish bishop representing all three groups wants to remove crosses from the country’s churches to make Muslims feel more at home. Eva Brunne, the first openly homosexual bishop in Sweden, got that idea from her wife, who was deeply concerned about the Muslims’ feelings.

Now far be it from me to dispute the legitimacy of the phrase ‘her wife’, even in the clerical, nay episcopal, context.

As founder, chairman and so far the only member of the Charles Martel Society for Diversity and Multiculturalism, I readily accept that a bishop can be a) a woman, b) a lesbian and c) married to another woman. My only regret is that the proposal is so negative.

Why stop the welcoming hand halfway at merely taking the crosses down? Wouldn’t the Muslims feel even more at home if the crosses were replaced with crescents?

After all, making Muslims comfortable has to be what Christianity is all about. In Sweden at any rate.

Reactionaries might suggest that the best way for anybody to feel at home is to stay there, but such a seditious thought undermines the whole concept of multi-culti inclusion and, yes – Christianity.

Didn’t Jesus say “And as ye go, preach, saying, The kingdom of heaven is at hand”? In other words, proselytise. Welcome all and sundry. Make them feel welcome, even if it takes removing all visual references to Christianity.

Literalists may argue that he only spoke of “the lost sheep of the house of Israel” as a target audience, but that’s silly. He meant everybody, including Muslims, and don’t tell me they didn’t exist at the time.

Being fully divine, Jesus knew that six centuries later a religion would appear that would encourage its adherents to murder Christians en masse, mistreat women and toss homosexuals off rather tall buildings. God is outside time, isn’t he?

A stickler for historical detail may suggest that so far Christianity has made remarkably few inroads on Islam. Christians are being massacred all over the Middle East, and Eva Brunne’s generosity so far hasn’t been reciprocated. Saudi mosques still proudly display the symbols of their cult, and the number of churches in Saudi Arabia equals, in round figures, zero.

That, however, is no reason to give up on the Swedish version of hospitality. On the contrary, efforts must be redoubled to abase Christianity, thereby doing the Muslims’ job for them.

So yes, the Swedes should definitely replace crosses with crescents. Ideally, in the spirit of Christian proselytism, they should ban Christianity altogether and replace it with Islam as the country’s dominant religion.

That would be jumping the gun, but not by much. The demographic shifts produced by Europe’s hospitality to Muslim arrivals are working towards the same ideal anyway, so why not take the initiative?

Eva Brunne thinks so: the church shouldn’t be “stingy towards people of other faiths”. Even to the point of abandoning one’s own.

The huge potential for heresy built into Protestantism has been fully realised. If, according to Luther, “every man is his own priest”, then it’s but a short step to the notion that every man is his own God.

Hence every man – and woman! – is justified in thinking that Christianity is anything he – or she! – feels it is. In fact, the song ‘Feelings, nothing more than feelings…” should be elevated to the status of a Protestant hymn.

Such solipsism explains the fracturing sectarianism of Protestantism: if everything is open to personal interpretation inspired by feelings, the church will naturally split into numerous churchlets.

“And if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand” was a prophetic statement. The Reformation is directly responsible for the demise of European Christianity, exemplified by walking perversions like Eva Brunne and the attendant universal atheism.

Yes, Christianity is in the doldrums everywhere in Europe, including its Catholic part. But at least the firm belief still resides at the heart of the Church that doctrine may take precedence over the way people feel.

Politically correct, multi-culti modernity gnaws at the outer edges of Catholic doctrine, biting bigger and bigger chunks out. But the fangs of modernity still haven’t reached the heart.

The Pope made that clear on his recent visit to Sweden, where he was greeted by Antje Jackelén, the female head of the country’s church. Speaking at a subsequent press conference, the pontiff stated unequivocally that the Catholic Church would never have female priests.

He cited his predecessor John Paul II as the utterer of the final word on the issue, but in fact he could have gone even farther back. The Church doesn’t allow female priesthood because Jesus didn’t ordain women.

The popular counterargument is that Jesus felt constrained by the standards of his backward time. Had he chosen today’s progressive Sweden for his incarnation, he’d be consecrating lesbian bishops like nobody’s business. Thus the outdated notion of God’s timelessness has fallen by the wayside, along with Christianity in general.

One suspects that Martin Luther would be unhappy about the direction his church (and other Protestant confessions) has taken. But the law of unintended consequences worked against him. He divided the house – and it didn’t stand.