Michael Curry is a superb preacher and a delightful man. And if everything wrong in the world could be put right by charm and beauty and wit, we would have nothing to worry about.

I was sorry to cast a cloud over what was and should be a very happy event, as two people celebrated their love in public.

One of the problems was that some events have a sub -text which is even more important than what was taking place at the time.

A wedding was taking place. Love was being celebrated. But the sub-text was the struggle for the soul of a Church and how people would hear about God. And if they did hear about Him, what kind of God they would hear about.

Some of my spiritual ancestors died and were put to death to defend the enormous and deeply precious truth about God and the quality of His love for us, so it is not much for me to risk a little social opprobrium for trying to do the same thing.

The dear couple had no idea who was being asked to preach at their wedding. It was an idea that Justin Welby, the Archbishop of Canterbury, had suggested to them. They were hardly in a position to know or refuse.

And at one level, the choice was brilliant. Michael Curry is a gifted preacher and black. What a great way of signalling the coming together of American and British culture, white and coloured.

But there was a hidden sting in the tail. There is a civil war raging at the moment in Anglicanism (and elsewhere) between progressive Christianity that takes its priorities from the zeitgeist, the present culture, and a faithful orthodox belief, that keeps faith with what Jesus taught in the Gospels.

This is quite a fight. Orthodox Christians believe that we are caught up in a very serious struggle between Good and evil, and evil tries to trick us and hide the good from us; usually by dressing up something corrupt which pretends to be goodness itself.

This ‘telling the difference’ between good and evil is as important as being able to tell the difference between medicine and poison. It may be the difference between life and death.

So when Justin Welby suggested Michael Curry as the preacher on this astonishing world-wide stage, he was also signing up one of the most effective street fighters for progressive, distorted Christianity who – with great charm and verve – presents his own preferred version of Jesus to the real one we find in the Gospels.

This matters very much. Curry’s Jesus is preoccupied with social Justice and the celebration of romance and sexual love wherever it finds you. The real Jesus warned that social justice would never happen in this world, that heterosexual marriage was to be between a man and a woman, and that equality had nothing to do with the Kingdom of Heaven.

Curry twists that round and turns it upside down. He says Jesus likes homosexual marriage and favours the quest for equality that left-wing politicians have made their life’s work.  Curry says wherever you find ‘love’ you have found God.  But when Jesus defines love it sounds very different from Curry.

Love for Jesus starts with honouring and obeying the Father who created us and renouncing anything that displeases Him and pollutes his holiness.

Jesus warned his followers time and time again against people who would come in His name and teach different things.

What we have in the Anglican world at the moment is a struggle for the soul of the Church and a struggle to tell the truth about God and present the real Jesus.

There is a wonderful saying from Orthodox (Eastern) Christianity, that our aim ought to be ‘to stand before the real God with the real self with our mind in our heart’.

If we modify the message of Jesus and the person of Jesus, we can never find the real God, and only by finding Him can we discover our real selves.

Jesus warned people time and time again that the road to heaven was going to be very difficult, so difficult that not many would walk it. It was going to involve his rejection, torture and death. It was going to involve our dying to ourselves. The other side of this death is eternal joy in the presence of God. But the other side of that joy is a place that, once they have given themselves to appetites that do not have the love of God at their centre, becomes a terrible destination of alienation and separation.

Medicine or poison.

So it isn’t enough to talk about ‘love’ as Michael Curry did. It’s a very poor word in English, because it means so many different and sometimes contradictory things. While falling in love with someone is an epic experience, it does not automatically lead to the road to heaven. In fact, it can even get in the way of loving Jesus and serving the Kingdom of Heaven.

If people are going to experience the love of God, find transformation and be brought to heaven, it can only happen by experiencing the real Jesus, and not the fake Jesus we invent for our short-term comfort.

And that is the difference between the two sides in this civil war in Anglicanism.

It was a brilliant move of Welby to sign Michael Curry up to present their joint vision of faith. But the reason for the struggle is that 90% of Anglicans in time, and nearly 100 % of Anglicans in history, do not or would not accept it as authentic, faithful Christianity.

Nor would the Roman Catholic Church; nor the whole of Eastern Christianity; nor would biblical Protestantism. Only the failing compromised liberal Protestantism that has surrendered faithfulness to Bible and tradition in favour of secular and social affirmation.

At stake is whether we offer the world medicine for the healing of their souls, or something that will have a very different effect, and nothing to do with the real Jesus.

Once upon a time, in a university Department meeting, I found myself defending a proposal I had made for a new M.A. course.

This was a course on the Oxford inklings; amongst whom were JRR Tolkien, C.S Lewis and Charles Williams. A book I had recently published had received a good review in the TLS, and got some favourable attention in America.

After I made the proposal to the meeting, there was silence. Then one by one a series of objections were made by my colleagues. I liked my colleagues. They were a creative hard-working and interesting group of people.

The questions came, and I answered each one and dealt with the objections, criticisms and hesitations.  I had the strange experience of knowing that I had won the arguments but had somehow lost the meeting.

I decided it would be better to be frank.  I asked my colleagues why, having won the arguments, as I thought I had, I appeared to have lost the discussion?

There was silence for moment and then one of the more passionate, effusive and honest, burst out unable to contain his frustration any longer.

“For God’s sake Gav, (knowing I was a priest as well as an academic, my colleagues always took care to use language they knew I would feel at home with, that was congruent with my culture and beliefs.)

– if this course had been about Virginia Wolfe and a host of supporting Lesbian fellow travellers, we would have been all over it in a supportive rash. But they are men. White men, white Christian men, white bloody Christian men who worked in bloody Oxford- for Christ’s sake (bless him for making me feel culturally included again). What did you expect?”

Resorting impotently to the bleeding obvious, I muttered “But that’s just prejudice; what’s more though, it’s prejudice you soon won’t be able to afford. You’ll need the overseas fees to pay your salaries.”

How wrong I was. The Government soon introduced compulsory student fees, and the universities were largely protected from the ravages of consumer demand.

But if I lost a good course, that was nothing compared to what has recently happened to Felix Ngole.

He was an MA student studying for a career in social work at the University of Sheffield. But he has been purged, and thrown off the course.

He made a Facebook comment from a Christian point of view.

In 2015, during a Facebook chat that followed a news story on Kentucky Clerk, Kim Davis, Felix expressed the view that “same sex marriage is a sin whether we like it or not. It is God’s words, and man’s sentiments would not change His words”.

Two months passed, and then suddenly he received an email from a university official telling him that his comments were being investigated.

In February 2016, he was summoned to appear before a Social Work ‘Fitness to Practise’ committee. They examined him and removed him from his MA course. He was expelled.

He has, thank goodness fought back, with the help of Christian Concern. His lawyers have made the point that the chairperson of the committee, a professor, was a long standing and an eminent LGBT activist.

Whilst they didn’t go so far as to accuse her of purging her department and her university of a social worker who happened to be a practicing orthodox Christian, they did point out that she had failed to ‘declare an interest’ as chairwoman of the committee; which is legalise for “we suspect you of prejudice.”

The prejudice of course is intended to be hidden by progressive cultural values;  the expression and forced imposition of inclusivity, egalitarianism and gay-rights.

But they words are euphemisms. They don’t mean what they say.

What they really mean is something else.

Inclusion means “we are going to exclude Christians.’

Egalitarianism means “we are going to impose a hierarchy of values on you which has no room for Christians. Especially no room for you if you are a Christian who is male, and straight; and,  we are going to put an end to free speech.”

Felix is black, but in the currency of oppression that is being exercised, that wasn’t enough to save him from the social offence of being Christian, straight and a man.

And ‘gay rights’ means, –  we are going to pursue a policy that undermines the relationship between parents and their biological children, distorts the patterns of social relationship that have created the most stability and social glue, and socially, politically and professionally exclude anyone who dares to object.

This is a purge.  It’s more than a purge, it’s a putsch, a political coup. Felix’s  attempt to express himself in debate in university and in public was closed down. He was purged from his education and his chosen caring career.

Christians and democrats need to wake up. It is not just politicians like Fallon, (who got caught in the headlights) or Rees-Mogg who stared them down. It’s the small people too.

Where was the Bishop of Sheffield when a black, Christian would-be social worker was excluded from the most prominent university in the Diocese? Where was the Diocese of Sheffield when a Christian in public education was robbed of his right to free speech? Where are the bishops of the Church of England when yet one more orthodox practising Christian is mowed down by the progressive leftish convoy of attrition that they have hitched themselves to?

Perhaps they have been misled by the simplistic smearing of a pseudo-ethical icing on the toxic cake of egalitarianism?

But so far for Felix, as for so many Christian victims who have been robbed of their jobs or their freedom of speech, the bishops and Christian leaders remained silent.

Let Felix give you his warning:

I was born in Cameroon, under a dictatorship, where free speech was heavily censored. I had always been led to believe that in the UK people could share their beliefs and opinions without fear of persecution from public authorities. Of all places, I would expect universities to be places for free exchange of ideas and debate. It is shocking that, as a student, I can be thrown out just for believing in the Bible.

I find it unbelievable that the person presiding over the disciplinary panel was a ‘proud’ Lesbian and a veteran LGBT activist, and that fact was never disclosed to me.

I am also amazed by how the university has handled the visit of the controversial Islamic speaker.

I am shocked by this new evidence. As far as I can see, the university is guilty of appalling double standards.

Students go to university to discuss, debate and learn. We are seeing people banned from speaking at debating societies, and pressure groups banning anyone who dares to disagree with the liberal agenda being set by them. My case highlights the complicity of the liberal elite in this worrying movement.

Instead of banning Christian students, universities should concern themselves with the increasing censorship of Christian belief and lack of religious literacy. Britain has led the world in education and is now in danger of becoming a laughing stock.

Chillingly, it is more serious than that. We can cope with being a laughing stock. We can’t cope with having freedom of speech or freedom of employment removed from us.

The problem with being an accommodationist to a political movement that publicly wills your destruction, is that you become what Lenin dismissively described as a ‘useful idiot’.

In the 1930’s in Germany, another ideological state tried to seduce the Church into being complicit, by asking them to support a few values they were attracted by. But it was only to sedate their Christian consciences and gain their acquiescence until the political climate had changed to one strong enough to silence all Christian opposition.

Bonhoeffer saw what was really happening and refused the sedation.

He gave birth to the ‘Confessing Church.’

Felix Ngole and other victims of the progressive left, still camouflaging itself in euphemisms, deserves support from a Church that will speak out in defence of its faith, and the freedom of speech which is always a precondition of sharing that faith.

If we don’t have the equivalent of a ‘Confessing Church in the UK’, for Felix and so many others, past and to come, it’s time we did.

Copyright 2017, Gavin Ashenden-All rights reserved