Freemasonry pronounced to be 'ordinary' - another gratuituous reference to the Craft

Easter is the most important feast in the Christian calendar. Believers acknowledge that, in their heads; but, in their hearts, even they have to struggle against the temptation to accord emotional primacy to the obvious allure of Christmas. Yet it is Easter that matters more. God the Son's coming down upon Earth to share our human nature is indeed a wondrous thing; but if he had not persevered in his mission of redemption and then raised himself from the dead, it would have been a strangely unfulfilled phenomenon.

Last week a survey of 1,000 adults showed that, of those aged between 15 and 24, one in 10 did not know why Easter Sunday was celebrated; more deplorably, one in six had no idea of the significance of Good Friday. Contradictorily, half of them were giving something up for Lent, which suggests the penitential season has been conscripted into the new corporeal religion of dieting. Ignorance is the chief problem afflicting Christianity today: formerly Christian nations have lost all knowledge of the faith and, with it, a vital part of their culture. This ignorance is pervasive, even when conciliatory gestures are intended. Tonight Channel 4 is screening consecutively a documentary on the Shroud of Turin and Mel Gibson's film The Passion Of The Christ. Presumably this is intended as a sop to Christians, but it is cack-handed to say the least. A programme about Christ's shroud is appropriate to Easter Sunday; but a film about the passion - even so magnificent a creative work as Gibson's - most certainly is not. It should have been screened on Good Friday. By the evening of Easter Sunday the mood of Christians is one of unalloyed celebration. Does Channel 4 not have any Christian advisers who could have pointed this out? Such solecisms illustrate how far we have lost touch with our cultural roots. The main assault on Christianity today comes not from secularism but from superstition. There is a quotation attributed to GK Chesterton: "When a man stops believing in God he doesn't then believe in nothing, he believes in anything." It is acutely relevant today, when seven million Britons believe in the truth of The Da Vinci Code. That is the novel in which one of the characters felt a joyous sense of homecoming when he saw "the misty hills of Kent" spreading wide beneath the descending plane. Presumably he had been visited too often by the drinks trolley; but Dan Brown's tenuous grasp on English topography hardly enhances his authority as a guide to the arcana of biblical revelation. There is a thriving industry in the revival of heresies that have been dead for almost two millennia. Quarrying the cranky literature of the Gnostics can be hugely profitable financially. The Cathari too are popular, but since they abstained from all procreative activity, even within marriage, they are understandably thin on the ground today. The shrewd author will cast his net wide, to appeal to all tastes: the Gospel of Judas (discredited shortly after it was confected), tombs bearing names that seem to indicate a messianic burial (actually as unique as a MacLeod gravestone on Lewis), the Templars (absolutely indispensable), the Rosicrucians (the Freemasons are a trifle ordinary - most people have a next-door neighbour with an apron in his bottom drawer) and a seasoning of ancient Egyptian religion.

There was until recently a bull market in Opus Dei, but the outing of Ruth Kelly has gravely damaged the organisation's glamorous image. Nonetheless, fiction has been the main vehicle for discrediting Christianity through distortion. Typical was Umberto Eco's caricature depiction of Bernard Gui, inquisitor of Toledo, in his novel The Name Of The Rose. In historical reality, during his 16 years in office, Gui tried 913 people, only 42 of whom were handed over to the civil courts for punishment, including paedophiles and other criminals. Of those tried for heresy, he mostly concluded they were mentally ill and not fit for interrogation. Despite its image, subsequently fabricated, the Inquisition was far more merciful than the civil courts: in France, over 200 years, it employed torture only three times. Its courts were the first in Europe to provide a defence team of lawyers for the accused.

Another great canard is the Crusades: not an exercise in proto-colonialism, but a final recourse to arms after centuries of provocation and relentless Islamic atrocities against harmless Christian pilgrims eager to visit the Holy Places. Then there is Christianity's supposed hostility to scientific advance, though the sole case, over centuries, that can be dredged up is that of Galileo. The populist myth ignores the facts that both Copernicus and Galileo enjoyed generous sponsorship from churchmen, that opposition to Galileo was provoked by his failure to furnish adequate proofs for the Copernican theory (Bacon also believed the science was false) and by the need to study its effect on interpretation of scripture before making any public pronouncement. Even the eventual condemnation of Galileo was only temporary ('donec corrigatur': until it is corrected) and scientists were specifically permitted to read the works that were forbidden to the wider public. Since most scientific theories are constantly evolving, such caution was sensible. It compares favourably with today's glutton-science, when human embryos are destroyed in pursuit of supposed medical cures that can more effectively be developed through non-controversial adult stem cell research. Last week the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee objected to the government's ban on the ultimate obscenity, the creation of 'chimeras' or human embryos infused with the DNA of animals.

At a time when the media are preoccupied with the past evils of slavery, the notion that a human being might be cannibalised to provide spare parts or medication for another individual has no lack of apologists. Christians must make their voices heard on this and many other issues degrading humanity, as we regress to a high-tech version of the callous pagan societies that preceded Christianity. Today, when we celebrate the ultimate glorification of the human body rising in victory over death, Christians should re-dedicate themselves to the confident proclamation of eternal values.

Gerald Warner

Scotland on Sunday