Warning: the NT is Christian

What would you think if you saw this trigger warning on a copy of the Bible?

You’d probably describe it as virtue-signalling, preposterous and downright idiotic. You’d be right: it is all those things. But not only.

Whenever anyone puts words down on paper, he should have his intended readers in mind. If what he writes is too recondite for them, he won’t be able to hold their attention. If his writing is too basic, it’ll have the same effect.

So before composing my hypothetical trigger warning its author should have taken a moment to consider his putative reader. Had he done so, he would have realised that anyone who picks up a copy of the Bible already knows what it contains, if only in broad strokes.

He has to be aware, for example, that the Genesis story most lamentably contradicts Darwin, and that the Gospel writers failed to sidestep Jesus Christ and his message to the world. The reader may prefer Darwin to Genesis and Marx to Mark, but he’ll know exactly what to expect in Scripture.

Thus my hypothetical warning, in addition to all the adjectives you assigned to it, merits one more, and it’s damning: superfluous. It serves no useful purpose whatsoever, other than allowing its author to establish both his atheism and his intellectual deficiency (I’ll refrain from opining this once that the two are one and the same).

Moving swiftly from hypothesis to fact, the great minds of Nottingham University have seen fit to slap a trigger warning on Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, to the effect that it contains “expressions of Christian faith”.

Crikey. Who could have thought. This mediaeval masterpiece depicts a story-telling contest by a group of pilgrims travelling together from London to Canterbury Cathedral, to worship at the shrine of St Thomas Becket.

That is to say that any potential reader with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius) doesn’t need to be warned of the book’s Christian content. Unless the bright sparks of Nottingham University doubt that their students could meet that minimum requirement, the warning is superfluous – in addition to being virtue-signalling, preposterous and downright idiotic.

If those chaps felt the urgent need to caution potential readers against something in Chaucer, they could have mentioned the book’s graphic, not to say pornographic, sexual content. That was par for the course in mediaeval literature, especially after the Black Death.

Up to a third of Europe’s population died in the pandemic, and the survivors abandoned many of their erstwhile restraints. For example, The Decameron, written by Boccaccio some 20 years before The Canterbury Tales, was quite bawdy.

I discovered that at age 10 or so by defying my parents’ ban and sneaking the book out of their bookcase. Yet Chaucer outdid Boccaccio, for example in one of the Tales, about the Wife of Bath.

She shared with the pilgrims some rather intimate details of her conjugal experience with her five husbands, each one left replete and exhausted. The good wife wasn’t averse to boasting about her superlative anatomy: “And trewely, as myne housbondes tolde me/I hadde the best quoniam myghte be.” A ‘quoniam’ was a Middle English euphemism for female genitalia.

Let me tell you, something like this in a film would deliver an ’18’ rating and certainly a trigger warning of the sexual content. Such warnings are fashionable at present, with viewers forewarned not only about sex and violence, but also about drinking and smoking.

Censors go out of their way to protect our brittle sensibilities, but Nottingham University’s powers that be felt it was more urgent to caution students against “expressions of Christian faith” than against a woman boasting about her vaginal excellence.

Their censoring zeal didn’t even compel them to issue a warning about the rather sinister anti-Semitism of The Prioress’s Tale, which presented a version of the blood libel.

There, a Christian boy walks through a Jewish ghetto singing the hymn Alma Redemptoris Mater, an invocation of the Virgin Mary. Since Satan “hath [built] in Jewes’ hearts his waspe’s nest”, the Jews murder the boy and throw his body into a cesspit.

Far be it from me to suggest that such passages should have led to a warning against Chaucer’s anti-Semitism. All such warnings are nothing but glossocratic wokery, but the one about Christianity in Canterbury Tales really does take the bicky.

It offers a valuable insight into the minds of modern academics and university administrators. They are permissive in matters of graphic sex and religious hatred (provided it’s not directed at Muslims), but any reference to Christianity makes their blood boil. They instantly reach for their trusted blue pencil and scribble that moronic warning.

How long before The Canterbury Tales and other great books with a Christian content are removed from university libraries? I’d say years rather than decades. Those offensive volumes may even be used as a replacement for hydrocarbons as fuel for our homes and cars. Unless the latter have been outlawed by then.