Bothering God

I’ve got nothing against Christians, or anyone else who wants to believe in something or someone, no matter how fantastic. I don’t care if people want to worship gold statues of Princess Diana, the Duke of Edinburgh’s socks or some other mythical being. I believe that cats are space aliens who can unlock the secrets of the universe even if they can’t open a tin of Whiskas, so who am I to complain if someone’s whole value system is based on a virgin births and the raising of the dead. Everyone has a right to go to heaven or hell in their own way and as long as no one insists on telling me fairy stories about how the entire universe was built in less than a week their opinions are their own business. But I draw the line at some things. I won’t stand for wild-eyed happy-clappy preachers chasing me up the High Road threatening me with bibles. More importantly, I have declared it my duty to warn the world about one of the greatest threats to rationality since the BBC started showing Neighbours, namely Christian radio.

I wouldn’t mind if you got priest sized chunks of Mozart’s Requiem, or Handel’s Messiah, or Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius. I don’t think I’d be too pissed off if you got Sermon of the Week Live! from Canterbury Cathedral. But you don’t. What you get is a kind of Christian Hello! An interview with a Japanese Christian who’d tried to reconcile Christianity with nuclear weapons and World War 2 avoided anything ‘difficult’. Instead it sounded like they were interviewing the winner of the Best Groomed Hamster contest. Another piece of ‘serious’ reporting was little more than a promo for some American fundamentalist bible for ‘clean living' American kids. Clean living meaning that anything vaguely ‘erotic’ had been removed. You know, Samson without Delilah.

The music, when you get it, is Christian AOR/ 'light’ metal. You know the stuff; pounding riff, thumping bass and words that go something like this; "Since I found Jesus, I found a new place to dwell, down at the end of happy street, it’s the Jehovah Hotel". Yuck. The only thing worse than ‘light’ metal from that oxymoron a Christian ‘rock’ band is Christian country and western. Less stand by your man, than stand by your local preacher, get your prayer played on the radio and run 20 red lights in God’s honour. Hallelujah, pass me my Stetson.

Of course, this being commercial radio, you have to put up with Christian advertising. These aren’t masterpieces of the hot-shot-coke-crazed adman’s art; they’re the kind of thing they teach you not to do at Saatchi’s. Besides, I don’t want the entire bible on interactive CD-ROM and I certainly don’t want a ‘new information pack on how to take God to work’. It’s bad enough on Take Your Dog to Work Day without the office getting cluttered up with slightly deranged ethereal beings that think they invented the place. The only reason why I need to know that the great preacher Temperance Mather, a descendant of some Seventeenth century Puritan, is preaching in Hackney is so that I can avoid the area. But it’s not all bad; someone, somewhere must want Christian insurance, if only because that covers you against acts of God, and there have to be buyers for ‘The illustrated, serialised bible and study guide for children and parents’ if only because they want to turn the little monsters into God-fearing little monsters.

I know I shouldn’t mock, I know I should be nice to the happy-clappies and not get upset when the devout Pentecostalist tells me that television has ‘obscene, anti-Christian’ programmes like EastEnders designed to help the devil undermine the moral fabric of God’s people. The problem is that I do get seriously wound up by it all and forget the likes of Desmond Tutu and Martin Luther King. So I shouldn’t mock, now should I?

Then again, why not? The Mormons’ a new temple is topped by what the Guardian called a statue of the prophet ‘Moroni’, Christian radio is so embarrassing that it could only have been conceived with followers of such a prophet in mind. Then again, I might be wrong, I do think that cats are space aliens and sometimes I think that maybe the Romans were right and they saved on cat food. You have been warned, avoid it and it might go away.