Preachers

I went to Leicester yesterday in a fruitless search for fluorescent orange hair dye; the shop I used to buy it from has closed down and nowhere else seemed to have any. But in the process of wandering around I was subjected to a barrage of religious polemic from a gaggle of preachers at the Clock Tower. These people are nearly always in evidence but I don’t know why they bother; no-one listens and from most angles they’re inaudible anyway and just annoying. Irritation is a most ineffective form of evangelism. I prefer St Francis’s approach: talk about God all the time: use words if you must – or in Quaker terms, Let your life speak. I don’t know which church these preachers are from and I don’t want to get close enough to find out, but they’re almost certainly pretty evangelical, so I’d steer clear even if they weren’t bellowing out their gospel from the centre of Leicester.

And don’t get me started on the internet. If you go on YouTube as much as OH does you can hardly avoid preachers of all stripes bellowing about abortion or Trump or how much they disagree with Richard Rohr (there’s a guy who has an entire podcast devoted to dismantling the liberal and Quaker-like Catholic priest Richard Rohr). OH listens to a lot of these because apparently ‘it’s important to hear from people you disagree with.’

‘I know,’ I said. ‘I hear from you all the time.’ As a general principle I am in accord with this but there are limits… Freedom of religion is a good thing but sometimes I wonder if religion isn’t privileged too much in comparison with other areas of life such as philosophy and politics. When we have a government seemingly dedicated to outlawing dissent we need more political and philosophical freedom of speech, not more preachers.

Here endeth the epistle.

I shall henceforward be preaching the gospel of fluorescent orange…

Kirk out