Should the Bible be read and the gospel preached at a cathedral? It's a no-brainer, surely? These places are the most prominent religious buildings in the country, devoted for centuries to Christian prayer and worship. If a Bible-believing Christian is prevented from proclaiming the faith there, it's deeply sinister and just shows how far the church has drifted from its orthodox moorings.
That, at least, is what we're meant to take from a story about London's St Paul's Cathedral and Allan Coote, 55. Mr Coote has been trying to read from the Bible in front of the cathedral since January and has usually been asked to move on, but a few days ago he was briefly arrested.
He said: 'The security staff were not happy for me to read it as they claimed I was on private property. I quoted to them that there is a constitutional position, the Epistle Dedicatory, that encourages The Bible to be read in the Church of England and on its land.'
He's now been offered half an hour a week, but isn't satisfied. 'There should not be a limit,' he told the Telegraph. 'If I want to go all week, I should be allowed to do this without interruption.
'If I want to read from Genesis, which would take me all week as it contains around 50 chapters, then I should be allowed to do that.'
Comparisons with the Occupy event in 2011, when the forecourt was taken over by a tent city of anti-capitalist protesters, are inevitable and fair enough.
What isn't fair, however, is to portray this as a battle between a faithful Christian and a faithless Church. Here's what the cathedral said: 'In order to provide a prayerful and safe space for all, St Paul's has a policy of limiting any form of public oration, protest, demonstration, preaching or other source of disturbance to people.
'Our policy is to allow a short interval and then ask the person to stop, and to involve the police if they refuse to do so or to move off the cathedral's land.' Coote was arrested because he refused to go.
It's difficult to see how anyone could possibly object to this. The cathedral cannot allow anyone to read or preach whatever they like. No one could object to a reading from the Sermon on the Mount, but there are other parts of the Bible that are not at all suitable for public consumption.
The truth is that rights aren't absolute, whether they are the rights of Christians in a 'Christian' country or not. As Helen Hall, an Anglican priest and lecturer at Nottingham Law School, told Christian Today, the headlines generated by the St Paul's row are 'stark, but also also potentially misleading'.
'There are those who would want to present it as the compromised established Church oppressing biblical Christians, as the Pharisees sought to silence Christ. However, that simply does not reflect legal or factual reality,' she says.
While the Human Rights Act guarantees everybody a right to hold religious beliefs and express them, that doesn't mean they have carte blanche to do whatever they like. 'If someone shouting – whether or not they are preaching – is preventing others from praying in peace, then the law has to protect the religious freedom of everybody involved. St Paul's and the police were seeking to protect, not trample, religious liberty by enabling people to enter and worship undisturbed.'
Furthermore: 'An absolute right to read Scripture in public could be abused. Who would want a malicious person to have the right to read about Jezebel's corpse being eaten by dogs, or sexual encounters from the Song of Songs, loudly in a park next to a group of small children and their parents, solely to cause distress? Allowing one individual's choices to eclipse everybody else's needs would not advance religious freedom.'
The trouble is that the case of Mr Coote – taken up by the Barnabas Fund, which is inviting people to sign a petition urging the government to 'enshrine fully and permanently our hard-fought-for religious freedoms' – plays to a particular narrative. This narrative is about the de-Christianisation of the country, about a 'faithful remnant' being persecuted by the wicked or uncaring majority and about the failure of the institutional church. And none of it's true.
As the cathedral also said: 'The Bible, including the King James version, is read within the cathedral at every one of the four weekday services, five on Sundays. We seek to engage a wide range of people with the riches of the Bible through our work with schools and families and through our adult learning department. An event last year saw 2,000 people listen to the actor David Suchet read the whole gospel of Mark. The video of this has been watched more than 70,000 times by people around the world.'
Follow Mark Woods on Twitter: @RevMarkWoods
