Britain is a nation deep in sin," says Stephen Green, national director of Christian Voice. "Nobody can deny that the last 50 years of legislation have turned us away from the laws of God. We say that God knows best and if we go away from God we're going to bring judgment upon ourselves." What kind of judgment? "Read Deuteronomy 28 - that tells you." Deuteronomy 28 says many things. Verse 17, for example, says that if you do not obey the Lord your God and do not carefully follow all his commands and decrees, "your basket and your kneading trough will be cursed" - not something that would compel many 21st- century sinners to adhere to the straight and narrow. Verse 20 is more to the point: if you fail to obey God's commands and decrees, it says, "The Lord will send on you curses, confusion and rebuke in everything you put your hand to, until you are destroyed and come to sudden ruin because of the evil you have done in forsaking him."
Green argues that this prophecy is coming to pass in Britain. "If you start moving away from righteousness, evil flourishes. You can see that in the alienation of our societies, in terms of family breakdown and crime levels, drug taking, profligacy and perversion." He says that Christian Voice was established a decade ago to "pray for national repentance". His website is blunter: "The enemies of God are all having their say ... It's time to hear the Christian Voice."
The group may have been little known had it not been for the campaign it mounted against the BBC's decision to screen Jerry Springer - The Opera on Saturday night. Hundreds of Christian protesters rallied outside the BBC before and during the broadcast. "We got 1,500 people out even though we don't have huge numbers of members." How many members do they have? "We're bigger than David's band, but not as big as Biblical armies," says Green, gnomically.
He will not be more specific, but according to 1 Samuel 29:6, David, the future king of Israel, had a 600-strong band of followers, though their leader was not, as the Christian Voice is, based in Surbiton. What's more, 2 Chronicles 14:9 records that one of the largest Biblical armies was led by Zerah the Ethiopian, who brought brought one million men and 300 chariots against King Asa of Judah. So Christian Voice, we can say with confidence, has somewhere between 600 and one million members, though no chariots.
Christian Voice's protest outside BBC TV Centre was less contentious than Green's decision to publish personal details of BBC staff he believed responsible for the broadcast. Green's email to Christian Voice subscribers reportedly said: "We make no apologies for giving their home addresses and in as many cases as we can, their phone numbers ... We know normal protests are channelled in such a way as to be ignored." One result of this was that BBC staff and their families were threatened with vio lence and there were reports, later denied by the corporation, that BBC2 controller Roly Keating had gone into hiding.
Yesterday Green was repentant. "I have certain God-given gifts and it is a privilege to use them because we love our Lord and care for our fellow man. But it was naive of us to expect when we posted the home addresses of the BBC staff that the site wouldn't only be visited by Christians. We regret that there have been threats. It brings no honour on the name of Jesus Christ." Shouldn't he have thought of this before? "I make mistakes because I'm fallible."
But he insists that Christian Voice "is very much needed now. In past times the nation looked to political leaders for moral guidance. Not now. Our society is corrupt from the top down. Think of the Blair and Brown nonsense, or the Blunkett affair."
The group claims to be independent of any religious denomination or political party, and not formally linked to other Christian groups that have also opposed the Springer broadcast, such as the Evangelical Alliance. That said, its political agenda is more akin to Bush's Republican right than that of any major British party. Indeed, the group's website publishes a speech by John Ashcroft that the then attorney general designate gave in 1999, pointing out that America is unique among nations in having a godly and eternal rather than a civic and temporal character. Clearly, Christian Voice wants Britain to be more like the America envisioned by Bush and his acolytes.
The website also complains that Britain has "abolished the death penalty but legalised the murder of children in the womb, enacted no-fault divorce on demand and forced mothers out to work, legalised trading on the Lord's day and instituted a national lottery, legalised pornography and homosexual acts and taught evil to our children in school, and given away the Queen's sovereignty - owed to Almighty God alone - to the EU." It adds: "We reap the whirlwind: six million unborn children have died in just 35 years, 40% of births are now illegitimate, 56% of marriages end in divorce, 29% of men are economically inactive and over a million children are in day care. There are two and a half times as many murders as 50 years ago, 45 times as much violent crime, 18 times as many rapes are reported, and crime rates generally have increased tenfold. TV, radio, and the arts are awash with blasphemy, violence and perversion, while virtue is derided."
The spur for Christian Voice's establishment was Edwina Currie's 1994 amendment to reduce the age of consent for gay sex to 16, the same as for heterosexual sex. Members of Christian Voice who pay the £20 annual subscription can receive email alerts "to enable prayer and action to be targeted swiftly on events as they arise" - which explains the turnout on Saturday night. Subscribers are asked to sign the following statement: "We believe the Holy Bible to be the inspired, infallible, written Word of God to whose precepts, given for the good of nations and individuals, all man's laws must submit. We believe all government to be under the authority of God and that its purpose is the maintenance of freedom and justice solely in accordance with Biblical principles. To uphold Christianity as the Faith of the United Kingdom."
Green, 53, established Christian Voice in 1994. "Since November 2003, the Lord has enabled me to go full time." And before that? "I was in the building business and thank God I am not. The language I heard on the building site was better than what I heard on Jerry Springer - The Opera."
Did the show really upset him? "Yes. I read critics beforehand, but it hardly prepared me for the enormity of it when I saw it. The profanities were much worse than I had thought, and they were worse because the singing was so lovely." I tell him that BBC director general Mark Thompson said: "I am a practising Christian but there is nothing in this which I believe to be blasphemous." "If he doesn't find a coprophiliac, nappy-wearing Jesus blasphemous, I don't know what faith he is following. Apart from that they offered no coherent alternative morality in place of what they were attacking - except perversity."
Green says his lawyers are still to advise him on whether the group should bring a private blasphemy prosecution against the BBC. Why doesn't he just ignore a show that, as he says, is morally vacuous? "That's what Christians have been doing for the last 50 years. There will really be a tidal wave of filth if we don't bear Christian witness against these things. So we will."
