AAAAAAAARGH. I have to stop reading the newspapers! It’s not good for my blood pressure. DH reads a certain religious newspaper guaranteed to have him stomping around the room, banging the kitchen cupboards, flinging said rag into a heap in the corner somewhere, only to surreptitiously retrieve it to be quietly read at a later day under the auspices of my beady eye. I feel like Michael Winner – ‘calm down dear it’s only a paper’.
In the grand scheme of things it shouldn’t matter, but the trouble is, the majority of our newspapers, be they the red-top tabloids or the broadsheets have some agenda to push. The Guardian’s has always been socialist. It’s interesting that they are now lending their support to the Lib Dems. Is this due to them attempting to poach readership from The Independent or alternatively due to the fact that the Lib Dems have the most genuinely socialist policy, certainly in terms of re-distribution of wealth?
What’s got my back up this time is this particular offering concerning Philippa Stroud. Leaving apart the factual errors in the story, but hey, let’s not let the truth get in the way of a good story, I think what winds me up is the attempt to associate the Conservative Party as being part of some worldwide evangelical conspiracy. Sure Phillipa Stroud might well be head of the CSJ, however note the phrase “the CSJ reportedly claims to have formulated as many of 70 of the party’s policies”. The key word being reportedly. It’s also worth drawing attention to the factually incorrect statement about the New Frontiers Church being closely allied to the US Evangelical Movement. Though it has in recent years expanded worldwide, including to the US, its roots are firmly in the UK, having sprung out of a church movement in the 1960s and 70s.
Many inferences may be drawn with regards to the Conservative Party’s plans to support the family unit, but the idea of the family being the cornerstone of a stable society is not limited to the Christian faith. CallmeDave has more nouse than to aggressively pursue a strongly evangelical agenda which is likely to alienate the majority of the electorate. What does the Guardian suppose is going to happen if the Conservatives get in? All of the recent equality legislation is going to be repealed and withdrawn? That’s hardly the way to secure re-election or to take the country with him as he proposes to do.
Though it might seem that Philippa Stroud has some pretty ‘out there’ ideas, and I for one am not sure quite how helpful some of her notions might be, as one former church-goer noted, she ‘is not a bad person’. Furthermore she founded a Church and night shelter that helped drug addicts and alcoholics. This is not a pontificating spirituality, but one that rolls up its sleeves reaches out and attempts to offer healing to the broken. Is this such a dreadful quality?
What this article attempts to do is ally the Conservative Party to the US Fundamentalist Christian movement in an attempt to scare voters. Don’t vote for those Tories, they’re all secret homophobes, who are going to take away all our hard-won freedoms. Any Guardian reader that falls for this is as gullible as the voter who can’t see through the agenda of the Murdoch press.
There are many reasons to be skeptical of the Conservative Party, there are many reasons not to vote for them, but this attempt to portray them as a fanatic party heavily influenced by the evangelical movement, is a red herring.
The Catechesis of Caroline 