I’ve lost all faith in Oxford

MAY I suggest that Oxford’s Worcester College holds an atheist exorcism, to remove all traces of the Christian conference that it hosted, and now regrets so much?

They could all get up in black robes and sing John Lennon’s dirge Imagine, while sprinkling unholy water everywhere. Then they could symbolically rub the whole place down with sanitiser.

The college is not upset because of anything that was said at this gathering, because none of those complaining actually knows what was said. So there is no specific free speech issue. It is just because actual Christians met there.

Until now, Worcester College has been mainly famous for its charming gardens and lake, and for the fact that the media magnate Rupert Murdoch once studied there (he kept a bust of Vladimir Lenin in his room, which explains a lot). But its response to the discovery of the Christian conference, like that of a Victorian maiden who has glimpsed a naked chair leg, qualifies it for greater fame.

It should be the headquarters of the campaign, which was bound to come anyway, to de-Christianise Oxford. Christians, such as I am, need to learn to grasp that this is now a formally God-hating country and that its great institutions, from Oxford and the law to Parliament and the Monarchy, now enshrine other beliefs, very different from Christian ones. Then Christians can go back to being outsiders, as we probably ought to be.

When everyone sees what a postChristian country is really like, they may begin to be interested in the gospels again.