Volume > Issue > Note List > Labour Is Still "More Methodist"

Labour Is Still “More Methodist”

It’s long been said that the wonderful thing about the British Labour Party (which is currently in power) is that “it’s more Methodist than Marxist.” Ah, but what is meant by “Methodist”? The headline in The Times of London (July 2) reads: “Sikh Chosen to Lead Methodist Church.”

Sikh? Sikhism is that hodgepodge religion from India combining aspects of Hinduism and Islam. The Times reports that the Rev. Inderjit Bhogal has been elected the next President of the Methodist Conference in Great Britain. Bhogal, The Times tells us, “ministers to about 50 people” at his Methodist church in Sheffield on Sundays, “then goes to a Sikh temple nearby.” Bhogal’s two children are being raised both Sikh and Methodist, and Bhogal is quoted as saying “I am not someone who rejected the Sikh faith when I turned to Christ.”

So Bhogal adds Methodism to his mishmash of Hinduism and Islam, and is rewarded by the desperately moribund liberal Methodists in Britain, who make him their leader.

In a decade or so we’ll probably be seeing a headline saying “Atheist Chosen to Lead Methodist Church.” No, we’re not being facetious, for before choosing Bhogal as its leader, the Methodist Church declared (according to the London Daily Mail, June 11) “that belief in God is now an optional extra for its members.”

Enjoyed reading this?

READ MORE! REGISTER TODAY

SUBSCRIBE

You May Also Enjoy

Media Comfort

Media comfort is the enemy of media debate. If you don't listen to all sides in politics, you are not staying intellectually sharp.

Total Personal Creation: The Restoration of Philosophical Sanity?

The tension between God’s will and human freedom is resolved in a manner that acknowledges the transcendence of God’s nature.

Briefly: March 1995

Reviews of Wittgenstein: A Religious Point of View?... In the Shade of the Terebinth: Tales of a Night Journey... The Homeless... Beautiful Losers: Essays on the Failure of American Conservatism... Dead Right... City on a Hill: Teaching the American Dream at City College... A Tremor of Bliss: Contemporary Writers on the Saints... The Kiss from the Cross: Saints for Every Kind of Suffering... Catechism of the Catholic Church...