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The invasion of the sanctuary of a Polish church in Balham on Good Friday by the Metropolitan police was not only a shocking event but also a sinister piece of history. It can't be interpreted as a premeditated attack on Christianity \u2013 but it's evidence of the utter irrelevance of Britain's Christian heritage to the culture of liberal bureaucracy that is fast replacing it.In this week\u2019s Holy Smoke episode, Dr Gavin Ashenden and I talk about the blundering insensitivity of the police officer who marched into the sanctuary of Christ the King Church during the veneration of the Cross without apparently understanding anything of what the ceremony signified.
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\nBut equally unsettling, in its way, has been the relative silence of Christian leaders when confronted by this outrageous disruption of a service on the grounds that the congregation were not observing social distancing procedures \u2013 something that isn't immediately clear from the video footage. In my opinion, Anglican and Catholic bishops are just as passive in the face of liberal bureaucracy as any heavy-handed police officer. It's no coincidence that today's police chiefs and senior clergy use roughly the same vocabulary to express many of the same dogmatic platitudes.
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\nGavin and I cover a lot of ground in this episode, including Boris Johnson's extraordinary Easter Sunday address to the nation in which he appeared to be professing his own Christian faith. Was this perhaps a veiled response to Friday's public relations setback \u2013 one that would have been a full-scale disaster if the police had invaded any religious ceremony held by a recognised ethnic minority? But, of course, that would never have happened.