Objecting....

Its one of the quirks of my family history that both my natural grandfathers were conscientious objectors during World War II. That raises all kinds of questions in itself, which are only compounded by the fact that my paternal grandfather's family were actually of German Jewish background. But for all that I'm strangely proud of this fact - I can remember my Gran talking about being "sent to Coventry" for 6 months by the people she worked with because her husband had refused conscription, and how she kept going into work and doing her job in that period.


The thing that strikes me about conscientious objectors is that, by that stage, they recognised that the public mood had moved on, that war was happening, and was even quite popular; but they refused, on grounds of conscience, to be part of it. It seems to me that, just maybe, there's a model here for our engagement as Christians with certain elements of contemporary society. Take sexual ethics as an example. The simple fact is that as far as the vast majority of people in the UK today, especially those under 40, Christian sexual ethics simply don't make sense. As far as those currently in their teens and early twenties are concerned, the Christian attitude to sex - whether in terms of the value of virginity and marriage, or attitudes to homsexual activity - is a foreign language.

There are all sorts of responses we can adopt to that. Some are valid and helpful, others probably less so. But maybe part, at least, of what we need to be doing is seeing ourselves as concientious objectors. Society as a whole seems to have accepted certain courses of action as valid, and shouting more loudly, or trying to influence the corridoors of power is unlikely to change that much. So maybe we should graciously but determinedly acknowledge that we will follow our consciences after all...and maybe we should be looking to train young people who are serious about following Jesus in a way that they realise that this is the deal.