Christianity in Britain 2007...

God help needy Christian charities

By Charles Moore

Here are a few case studies, with a common thread. In 2005, Pamela Stevens, a single mother with a grown-up son, applied to Kensington and Chelsea Council to become a foster mother for older children. She had considerable experience of looking after teenagers because large numbers of them have lodged in her house over the years as language students.

Miss Stevens's application was turned down.

Cherie Colman is also a single mother. Some time after her divorce 17 years ago, she set up a charity called Cheer (Comfort, Hope, Empathy, Encouragement, Rebuilding) to help single mothers. Cheer applied for a grant from a Department for Education programme, administered through the Peabody Trust, for its holiday activities for the children of the mothers on a south London council estate. This was turned down.

For 40 years now, the Spitalfields Crypt Trust has ministered to homeless alcoholics. It has two "second stage" houses where they can live under supervision while they are recovering. One of these houses is part-funded by Tower Hamlets Council, but now the council is threatening to take the grant away.

The common thread is that all these people and organisations were objected to on the grounds that they were Christian.

Miss Stevens was told that she would not be suitable as a foster mother because her beliefs, in the words of the letter of rejection, "prevent you from fully accepting a child's sexuality if he or she were lesbian or gay", and because "your beliefs do not allow you to actively promote another religion for a child".

Cheer was told by the grant officer that it would not get the funding for its holiday activities (which until then had been looking promising) because she had looked at its website, and it proclaimed that it was Christian. She said that this meant Cheer was not open to everybody, although in fact Cheer ministers to all single mothers, regardless of faith. Her letter of rejection identified Cheer's crime: its website showed "that your assistance for single parents includes extending Christian comfort and offering prayer".

Spitalfields Crypt Trust, responding to the endless directives that ask for statements of Equal Opportunities Policy, "Ethos" etc, drafted a document called Our Beliefs and Aspirations. Tower Hamlets Council wanted it to say: "We will do nothing to promote our faith".

The current draft, which the trust refuses to dilute, says: "It is our firm belief that a personal Christian faith offers the greatest hope, most effective dynamic and surest foundation for sustainable recovery and personal development. We want to make this faith accessible to our service-users while at the same time offering our services to people of any faith or none without obligation to engage in any exploration, observance or instruction of a specifically Christian nature."

Tower Hamlets also objects that the staff of the trust do not exhibit enough "diversity". Since the trust has only one man working in Tower Hamlets, and half of his work ministers to people outside the borough, this means that half of one man is being attacked for not being diverse enough.

One of the things that makes these rejections so strange is that the Government actually has a policy of encouraging community work by what the jargon calls "faith groups". A fifth of all charities in what the same jargon describes as "the Third Sector" – ie neither state nor commercial work in the community – are religious, the great majority of these being Christian. And the Third Sector even has its own government minister to encourage it, one of the many bright young men in New Labour called Miliband.

It is quite a Blairy idea that faith groups can provide his famous Third Way between market forces and government control.

But it turns out that, while the works of faith groups are sometimes welcomed – and almost always needed – the faith of faith groups is too much for the authorities. Thus if a Christian group prefers to employ Christians to do its work, that is discriminatory. If it offers prayer as one of the activities available to its clients, that is anti-diversity.

Another charity, which wishes to remain anonymous as it tries to rebuild itself after the loss of council funds, helped get disaffected black youths out of gun and drug crime. A council officer accused it of "brainwashing" and "being a cult". When asked why, he said that no other course in the field had been nearly so successful, so there must be something funny about it. He did not like the charity's video projector used in its courses, which showed a logo saying "We empower youth".

But of course, for a Christian, faith and works go together, the latter flowing from the former. Works without faith would be like a body with limbs, but no heart.

The faith is why the works are necessary. As Ian McColl, of the Spitalfields Crypt Trust, puts it: "We wouldn't do it if we didn't believe it."

And if you believe something, you cannot just abandon it at convenient moments. All the mainstream Christian Churches teach that homosexual acts are not the moral equivalent of heterosexual acts within marriage (though a good many individual Christians disagree with this view).

Almost all Christians, though most nowadays are ecumenically open to the idea that other faiths contain important truths, believe that Christianity is true in a sense in which Islam or Judaism or Hinduism is not.

None of this means that Christians cannot serve people of other beliefs, or people whose actions they think are sinful. In fact, the whole of Christian charity is based on the idea that we are all sinful and that you should show particular consideration to those – prostitutes, drug addicts, drunks, prisoners etc – broken down by a sinful world. But it does mean that if the public authorities start demanding Christians' assent to anti-religious doctrines, they cannot give it.

And that means that such catechising, if rigorously applied, will prevent Christians from doing the benevolent public work that the Government itself welcomes.

It is perfectly reasonable for the public authorities to say that they do not want to spend taxpayers' money on the work of conversion.

But it is another matter to attack religious beliefs, and to try to keep the people who hold them away from all public money, and from the drunk and homeless and poor and handicapped and old, and from children, all of whom need so much more help than a society without belief can give them.

This is an attack on the people in our society most motivated to help the unfortunate. Nothing like this has ever happened in the history of our country.

Another oddity is that "faith groups" of other religions – most notably Islam – seem to attract much less persecution from government and local councils than does Christianity. This is because such groups have been encouraged under the banner of helping ethnic minorities, whereas Christians in Britain, at least outside London, are predominantly white and Anglo-Saxon. Ethnicity gives you a free pass.

Many of these charities of other faiths are excellent, but few cater for the general population in the way that Christian ones do. In that sense, they are less "diverse" than Christian charities. (And I bet there are no Muslim charities where homosexuality is an approved "lifestyle choice".)

When people prevented children from coming to Jesus, he said: "Suffer the little children to come unto me, and forbid them not, for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." How would he have fared in 21st-century Britain? He was clearly promoting his faith, and so, obviously, behaving "inappropriately".