The view expressed by attorney Tennyson Vaughn that Christians should be willing to die to get their message across is an interesting one in a society where compromise is the norm.
Indeed, few can gainsay that Christians have not been strident enough on national issues of moral importance, and when even non-Christians lament that the society’s declining morals are further threatened by issues like the gay agenda, House of Spartacus, and one columnist who has outgunned Christians on radio call-in programmes, the church’s weak response seems even more glaring.
It is equally interesting to note, though, that when the church’s strident minority speak out, support from the wider congregation is also glaringly lacking.
And one can quickly point to Reverend Ferdinand Nicholls’ raising the possibility of Christians not supporting the media commercially for a month while calling on the media to take a moral stand on news issues. This, like two pastors’ stance against Spartacus, was all but ignored by Christians, while the potentially explosive gay issue remains under the radar until some related matter – whether it be the Scout movement or a threat from the British government – causes it to rear its head.
Debate over the issue of same-sex marriages has now been revived after seeming to die a natural death nearly a decade ago when the then Attorney General and Deputy Prime Minister Mia Mottley raised the idea of decriminalizing buggery. It raised some eyebrows, but the howl from church leaders proved to be short-lived after then Prime Minister Owen Arthur urged the society to “cease and settle”.
One therefore cannot help but empathize with Vaughn’s lament about Christians’ conspicuous silence and paucity of letters, and the fact that church leaders as heads of powerful organizations boasting large numbers of people often fail to flex their collective muscle in getting parliamentarians to speak on moral issues.
But Christians, admittedly, have to pay bills, make a living in secular organizations, have their children taught by non-Christians, and daily live in the secular world, and it is therefore not easy for all of them to take a stand in a small society where victimization can be swift or where a Christian’s job is the only physical buffer between him and poverty.
Consequently, Christians who would be willing to lay down their lives for a cause today are very few.
However, If Barbados indeed contains those of a spirit akin to lone National Heroine Sarah Ann Gill or to the first century believers led by apostles who had walked and talked with Christ, then their presence would indeed be a powerful force in building a spiritually healthy country that prides itself in having the Lord as “the people’s guide for past three hundred years”.
