It won't have escaped your notice that I started to write a comment piece on this news story but my blog client (which I really do need to write something about in the not-too-distant future since it's something that I've written and could possibly turn out to be quite useful to a fairly small subset of the Open Source community) fell over. Before it retired to that great stack trace in the sky, however, it managed to vomit up the beginnings of my post onto the internets (a fact about which I have filed a bug) and as a result managed to make me look like both a bit of an idiot and a bit of a bigot. I'm used to the idiot part. I don't like looking like a bigot.
Anyway, since it had made it onto my blog (and I never bothered to check that it hadn't, it also ended up propagating across the interwubs to LiveJournal, where a good friend of mine commented:
Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe. People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) – and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.
I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?
On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.
All of which, plus the fact that it was late and I was tired and lacking in the brain power necessary to sling a sentence together, let alone make a point about religion, left me thinking that I should probably re-write the post, or at least some of the post, and actually make clear my thoughts on the matter, which, exploding blog clients aside, I'd hitherto failed to do.
So, that's what this post is for. First, let's deal with the news story. I'll come to my friend's comment afterwards.
The news story goes as follows (I'm quoting only the salient points here):
Two Christians claim a police community support officer told them to stop leafleting in an area of east Birmingham where many Muslims live.
The Christian Institute has complained to West Midlands Police the men were told to leave Alum Rock Road.
My first reaction to this was "and they're surprised because…?" After all, it's reasonably common knowledge that balancing relations between Muslim and non-Muslim communities in the UK is a pretty hairy business. It always has been to an extent, but over the last six and a half years it's become even harder for fairly obvious reasons. I'm not here to debate the details of those difficulties, nor am I going to go into the reason for them coming about. Suffice it to say that those difficulties are present (I'm aware of them from having worked for a local authority whose staff were predominately non-Muslim but whose constituents were predominantly Muslim, which was always an interesting position to find oneself in).
So, when trying to put myself in the shoes of the PCSO in this situation I could see why they'd feel extremely tempted to ask them to stop what they were doing. After all, people get irritated enough by Jehovah's Witnesses coming round with copies of Watchtower. In my experience, evangelical Christians (I'm making the assumption here that these people were evangelists, though I have no evidence of that other than I can't really see, say, a group of Catholics leafleting) tend to be somewhat pushier and more obnoxious than JWs, though I confess I might simple be being too harsh on the majority of evangelists given that at one point twelve years ago I was one.
However, the story goes on:
The US Christians said they were advised they were committing a hate crime by trying to convert Muslims.
Now, that's a ridiculous stance for the PCSO to have taken for two reasons:
- It seems like the classic "this is an offense but I'm not going to punish you if you stop doing whatever it is that's making me feel uncomfy" approach that appears to get used a lot in situations where a PCSO (or indeed a regular copper) thinks something you're doing is wrong without actually knowing what law, if any, you're breaking (the whole photographing of people in public is another case in which this gets used regularly).
- It's fairly obvious to anyone that leafleting can't really be classed as a hate crime.
The article also states:
West Midlands Police has investigated the complaint and said the officer intervened to defuse a row.
Now, of course we aren't given the details of this row, nor are we likely to be, so I won't speculate about it too much. However, it did get me thinking that there's a fine line between harmless preaching and fairly offensive preaching. For example, it only takes one "you're damned; your soul will rot in hell!" from the slightly more vocal street preachers in Lancaster to get under my skin. I'm not saying that that's what these folks did, though; there's no evidence of that. It's more likely given the context of the story that they leafleted someone who chose to be offended by a fairly innocuous gesture.
Anyway, the upshot of all this is that the PCSO is quite rightly getting some training about how he communicates with the public. The preachers are demanding an apology, which is also – assuming what I've said above to be the case – a reasonable idea. However:
The men, backed by the Christian Institute, have complained to the force saying their human rights were infringed.
Annoyed me.
I don't see how anyone's human rights were being infringed here. The preachers were leafleting and were told to stop. That the manner of the telling was less than tactful is irrelevant. It's a specious claim that amounts to little more than a kid crying "it's not fair, he started it!" and stamping their feet when told off unjustly. It doesn't actually amount to anything, and this is one of those cases where people are using the words 'human', 'rights' and 'infringement' without actually knowing just how much gravitas that phrase should carry.
So, with the story itself out of the way, on to my friend's comment:
Interesting case. If they were only leafleting, though, I can't see the harm, and even if they were preaching in the street, I think asking them to leave was a bit severe.
Absolutely. However, in this case it sounds like there was an argu
ment going on, which is grounds enough for the PCSO to ask the preachers to leave. As far as I can tell it's the manner in which he did the requesting that left something to be desired.
People can quite easily walk past and seal up their ears (as we do every day to resist free newspapers being thrust into our hands) – and Jehova's Witnesses have been door-knocking for years without being asked to leave certain streets. The "Be a winner, not a sinner" man who yells his (Christian) faith down a megaphone in the middle of Oxford Circus every single day is seen as a local landmark, if a slightly irritating one once he starts going on about how buying stuff on a Sunday is a highway to hell.
We have a local group of evangelical Christians in Lancaster who usually occupy the space across the road from Dorothy Perkins whilst singing off-key to an out-of-tune accordion, handing out prayer booklets and telling the crowd in general that the end is nigh (and who occasionally, depending upon which leafleter you get, tell people like me, who either refuse to take their booklets or hand them back that they're going to burn in hell). Mostly they amuse people (though I suspect that the staff in DP are one quite small step away from asphyxiating each and every one of them with a stylish sequinned belt and taking a mannequin to the accordion). Unfortunately, they also seem to pick on people upon whom they shouldn't pick. I've seen them single out young mums with two or three kids in two for particularly vociferous haranguing.
I don't believe in thrusting religion down people's necks, but we accept the marketing of coffee, newspapers and shampoo samples readily enough on the basis that people can take it or leave it, so why ban people expounding on their religion in the same way, as long as they're not being aggressive or harrassing people?
And herein (and we're moving away from what actually happened in this case, but it's a good point to follow up nonetheless) lies the problem. Where do you draw the line, and how do you define "too aggressive?" Surely it's too aggressive if the person on the receiving end of the proselytising feels that it is. But how are we, the outsiders, to judge such matters?
For example, let's think about this scenario:
A man is talking to a woman in the street. The man is a Christian of an evangelical persuasion and the woman is a devout Muslim, to the point of wearing a burqa in public (I'm picking deliberately polar actors for this particular scenario to facilitate my point, but I suspect you could just make it just as well with less dissimilar imaginary people).
As our man talks to our woman he begins to talk about his religion. The woman says that that's nice for him but she doesn't share his belief, being a devout Muslim. The man tells her that, according to his religion, if she denies the truth of his religion, she will burn in hell.
Now, as I said, this is an extreme example, but the question is this: is it too aggressive? Is it too aggressive if our man says it as a statement of fact rather than screaming it, red faced at our woman, spittle frothing from his rubbery lips? Is it too aggressive if he says it as a statement of fact and she feels that, regardless of his tone, he said it as a threat?
One of the reasons I dislike proselytising is that it's far too easy for the proselytiser to step over the line of what's acceptable to the proselytised. It's exactly the same when atheists discuss matters of religion with theists; there's a constant (in my mind, at least) need to think "how can I phrase this so that my point will be made (for example about evolution over creationism or the problem of evil) without the theist to whom I'm talking thinking that I'm calling them an idiot?"
I'd much rather that people sat down and asked questions and were given straight answers (this goes for both the theists and non-theists) rather than pushing their views on others. Of course, in most cases, people standing in the town centre preaching aren't doing a whole lot of forcing because the people who aren't interested in what they're saying ignore them, but on the other hand, as I've said above, when people get into a fervour about their beliefs it can lead to things getting out of hand. I'd much rather see posters with wording like "do you have questions? Christ is the answer!" than seeing people preach in the streets, but maybe that's just me.
On a similar theme, I got handed a flyer today about a man who's riding a horse from Texas to Jerusalem (the tricky bit with the ocean wasn't explained) in the name of Jesus, to spread the Gospel. Fair dos, I thought, before turning my thoughts to how he was going to get the horse across continents.
My first reaction to that was "ah, a Southerner." Aren't regional stereotypes fun?