HumanistLife

Archives for December 2016

The ‘good news’

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‘All I had done was to nurse from my heart. How could it be harmful to tell someone about Jesus?’

These are the words of Sarah Kuteh, an experienced nurse, who is suing Darent Valley Hospital in Dartford for unfair dismissal with the backing of the Christian Legal Centre.

Kuteh was dismissed in August following complaints from patients that she had held ‘unwanted discussions’ about her Christian faith with them. She was issued with a written warning in April this year, and claims to have modified her behaviour since; yet the hospital reportedly received three further complaints from patients, after which Kuteh was suspended pending an investigation and ultimately sacked.

There has been predictable outcry from the converted. As one commentator says on the Christian Concern Facebook page, ‘What a wonderful nurse. That is exactly the sort of person I would want nearby for myself or a family member when facing their own mortality in a time of serious illness. This action is totally unjustified and a further example of our PC society gone mad. God bless you!’

But let us imagine for a moment an alternative scenario, in which an experienced nurse is a committed and vocal atheist. When interviewing a frail old lady who volunteers for the Patient Information Form that she is a member of the Church of England, our nurse informs her enthusiastically and with love in her heart that there is no God, and that grasping this truth has made her happy. Supporting a grieving relative, who whispers through his tears the sincerely-held belief that he will see his dead wife again, she butts in to inform him that this is not the case, and assures him that he will find strength and happiness in embracing the truth.

Unthinkable, is it not? Yet it is this kind of cruel and insulting imposition which some Christians defend and practise. My own experience of it has been regular and appalling. Perhaps the worst example was when an evangelical colleague told me that a dead friend was ‘in a better place’; the friend was in his thirties and had died very suddenly, leaving his partner – a much closer friend – with her world and her future smashed to pieces.

The repeated inability of many believers to grasp just how heinous this kind of behaviour is truly baffles me – and yet is Christianity itself not founded upon the principle of sharing the Good News? In Kuteh’s own words ‘how could telling anyone about Jesus Christ really be harmful to any patient?’

To a believer, this is presumably irrefutable: when your mindset is transfixed by the alternative reality that salvation awaits the converted, the desire to proselytise to those who are touching fingertips with their own mortality must be difficult to resist. But it must be resisted, for the sake of empathy and compassion – which is exactly why the hospital issued guidelines to its staff advising them explicitly to observe restraint when it comes to their personal beliefs. This is not about ‘political correctness’ – it is about professionalism and humanity.

Listening to the interview given to camera by Kuteh, one cannot doubt her sincerity. In her view, she was giving patients strength: “I have had to reassure [patients] based on the joy and peace that I really have found in the Lord.” In the absence of full evidence, I make no comment on the fairness or unfairness of her dismissal, and trust that those involved in the legal processes will make a judgement based upon the detailed evidence brought before them – there may well be a case to answer if the investigation was not handled in the appropriate manner, as Kuteh has claimed.

Yet this story is another reminder that empathy is one of the most crucial characteristics for those who work in health care – the ability to listen to others and to support them without judgement or imposition, whatever their belief-set. Without this capacity at the centre of our approach – and even with the best and sincerest of intentions – we risk insult, harm and distress to those who are at their most vulnerable.

MP claims Christians are ‘fearful’… but Church of England research shows the opposite is true

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Alexander von Koskull reports on how Christian fundamentalists face an inconvenient evidence gap when suggesting that Christians are scared to express their faith in modern Britain.

A street preacher on Buchanan Street, Glasgow. Photo: mot/Flickr

A street preacher on Buchanan Street, Glasgow. Photo: mot/Flickr

Last week, Conservative MP Fiona Bruce attracted a lot of media coverage after making the claim in the House of Commons that Christians ‘are worried, or even fearful, about mentioning their faith in public.’ Even the Prime Minister sympathised with her statement, intimating that religious liberty could indeed be under threat in Britain, much as Bruce alleges.

But the research to back up Fiona Bruce’s claims isn’t there. Or rather, there is research commissioned by the Church of England on the attitudes of practicing Christians, but it actually suggests the opposite: that Christians do in fact feel comfortable talking about their faith openly.

Bruce is a patron of the Conservative Christian Fellowship, and her comments during Prime Minister’s Questions were intended to echo a report from think tank ResPublica which called for legal amendments that would require employers to accommodate religious beliefs of employees, which it can only do by asserting that such a thing is not already the case, or that there is some kind of public outcry worth responding to. The Church of England’s survey clearly shows there isn’t, and that Bruce’s views do not represent the Christian community as a whole.

In the Study of Practising Christians in England, respondents were asked to record their level of agreement with statements on their practice of faith and relationship to god. The results found that:

  • 71% of respondents agreed with the statement – ‘I feel comfortable talking to non-Christians about Jesus Christ’.
  • 65% disagreed with the statement – ‘I am afraid of causing offence when I talk to non-Christians about Jesus-Christ’.
  • 73% disagreed with the statement – ‘I almost always feel unable to take up opportunities which present themselves to me to talk to non-Christians about Jesus Christ’.
  • 76% agreed with the statement – ‘Talking to non-Christians about Jesus Christ is an act of evangelism’.
  • Finally, 66% recalled that they had talked about ‘their relationship with Jesus Christ with someone who was not Christian’ in the last month, half of which did so in the last week.

The calls to review the human rights law in relation to religion and belief have also been called into question by the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which argued that changing the law so that employers are explicitly required to ‘reasonably accommodate’ employees would be superfluous and would even require employers to privilege the rights of religious people to discriminate against others. The British Humanist Association embraced the EHRC’s findings and welcomes the surmounting evidence which refutes claims that Christians are fearful about expressing their faith in public under current legislation.

It is hard not to see such false claims of victimisation as a small thread in the fabric of Christian groups lobbying for greater autonomy to discriminate against others on religious grounds. They’ve been calling in recent months, both in the UK and other countries, for greater freedom to discriminate in the workplace, schools, and elsewhere.

What the Church of England’s data shows however is that no consensus even exists among Christians that their right to exercise a religion is under threat – and surely that’s because it isn’t, as the recent ECHR report found.

Changes to equality laws are not only unnecessary, but are likely to undermine the existing equal protection of people in the workplace by favouring people with certain religious beliefs over members of the LGBT community, women, and even people of other religions.

If anything, the law should be changed to limit discrimination, particularly in schools. But there is precious little sign of movement in that direction. The Government is currently planning to change the rules so that schools in England can discriminate by religion in 100% of places, with potentially very damaging results for community cohesion and fair access to local schools.