The Nuremburg Defence

Writing about this year’s General Assembly is never going to be easy for me.  Regular readers of this blog will understand that for me it was more than just an ecclesiastical debate.  It all became rather personal.  In fact, probably I was second only to Scott Rennie himself when it came to being the face of the debate.

Initially this was because the press had me on their books as the evangelical to call for comment.  This was because of my position as Secretary of Forward Together. 

However, the stakes were raised beyond measure on Wednesday 13^th May when my photograph appeared on page 3 of the Times (UK edition) and on the “timesonline”.  I feel it’s now time to share something of this story.

Until then I would say that the Times had been the fairest of all the newspapers, in that they were not vilifying the evangelicals.  They had run the “Life and Work” editorial story; but they also ran a balancing story the next day.  The Sunday Times too had been quite fair.

However, on the Tuesday evening I received a phone call from Times journalist, Mike Wade.  I met Mike at the Assembly.  He’s a round Yorkshire man (no photo available) who looks as if he enjoys his real ale.  If Mike’s opening line had been less confrontational that Tuesday evening things might have gone differently.  As it is he asked me straight out to comment on the reaction of people to the previous Sunday’s sermon, the reaction, he said, being one of outrage that I had compared Scott Rennie’s supporters to the Nazis.  I realized immediately what he was referring to and told him that this story was “unworthy” of him and put the phone down. 

In the sermon (from Jude) I was trying to show my congregation why I was involved in the debate, my point being that though none of us like conflict, sometimes it is necessary.  Being someone who reads a lot of war history it occurred to me that a good example was that of the French not challenging the German re-occupation of the Rhineland in 1936.  Because they avoided conflict in 1936, a worse conflict arose in 1939. 

I’m not so foolish or pig-headed to insist that another illustration (or none) would have been wiser. 

With hindsight, I realize that I was making myself a hostage to fortune, especially by putting that sermon on the blog.  But only that day I had received an e-mail from a minister telling me that people in his congregation were down-loading those sermons from Jude and finding them very helpful. 

Initially I decided to have nothing to do with the story.  But an hour or so later the Times photographer called saying that he’d like to come and take a picture of me—otherwise they’d use an old, unflattering one!  I decided that if I were to co-operate I’d better hear the story.  The photographer read the blurb which by and large was ok.  Later, when Mike Wade was going through it with me I had to warn him that if he included certain comments (Nazis, death-camps, pink triangles) I would take the matter further.  Interestingly, those comments didn’t appear in the final version.  (And yes, I did take informal legal advice—I still have friends in the profession). 

The story itself quoted the sermon accurately enough, though with some journalistic flare (apparently the sermon reached a “rousing climax”). 

What was most damaging was the headline “Anti-gay minister in Nazi battle outrage”, a headline more worthy of the Sun than the Times.  Mike says he is not responsible for headlines.  But people read headlines before they read copy.  And since journalists tend, by nature, to be a lazy crew, every other newspaper jumped on this bandwagon, more or less copying and pasting the headline and Mike’s story (after all, why reinvent the wheel.  Note, that not one journalist has actually been to see me at Kirkmuirhill; all of it is done over the phone, or by copying someone else’s story). 

The reactions have been very interesting. 

First, domestically.  It lead to a week of stress and strain in the Watson household.  It has left me with a profound sympathy for all the other ordinary people who for a day or two become headline news and whose lives are turned up-side-down for the sake of selling a few more newspapers.  I’ve even felt a twinge of sympathy for the MPs hounded out of office following the expenses scandal!

Second, personally.  I shut up.  Ironically, the press, the bastion of free speech, shut me up.  And I won’t be posting any more sermons on my blog. 

Third, the church.  The amount of support and encouragement I have received from the church locally and internationally has been overwhelming.  I have received post cards, letters, e-mails and phone calls from people I know and from complete strangers, some of them quite emotional (personal stories I wouldn’t dare share in public).  They far outweigh the filth I also received (most of which went to SPAM anyway). 

And fourth, the disappointment.  Criticism, from fellow evangelicals; friendly fire if you like.  Most hurtful of all when they hadn’t even bothered to read the sermon and believed what they read in the papers!  A friend of mine overheard two ministers speaking on the train from Glasgow to Edinburgh, decrying me for calling their side “Nazis” (a word that never appears in the sermon).  “Those evangelicals are all fascists!” she said.  That I expect.  But not from fellow evangelicals.

When I told Mike about the affect his story had had on me and my family, he answered, without a word of regret, “I was just doing my job.”  I seem to remember that defence was used at Nuremburg.