It's my cross and I'm proud to bare it

By Cristina Odone for The Observer

Sunday October 22, 2006

I have worn a small gold cross almost every day of my life. It's discreet enough not to catch a mugger's eye and light enough for me to be unconscious of it most of the time. I am very conscious of it these days, though: wearing a cross has become as controversial as wearing a single earring or going bra-less used to be. No one would seize upon gays or feminists for expressing their allegiances today, yet in institutions as British as the BBC and British Airways, wearing a cross is now tantamount to throwing down a gauntlet. It says: 'Here I stand - against everything the rest of you believe in.'

Those who say that wearing the cross should be banned lest it offend Muslims are being disingenuous. Muslims don't mind obvious symbols of faith: they simply want to be allowed to wear their own, thank you very much. Diktats against the cross are fuelled not by concern for minorities, but by a secularism so rampant that it prefers a cross-dresser to a cross wearer, a plumber's bum to a veil. Secularists argue that obvious signs of religious faith in public life have no place in a nation where fewer than 10 per cent attend any religious service. (Yarmulkes are notably exempt from criticism, but then six million Jews had to be exterminated for their progeny to gain the right to wear a symbol of their faith.)

They don't want to come across a veil on their way to Tesco or bump into someone with a cross as they step out of the gym, because these emblems emphasise the wearer's 'difference'. Yes, the cross and veil brigade are different. They believe in eternity, sacrifice, humility and obedience, concepts as alien as equal pay and gay rights used to be. Individual difference, in what was once a tolerant society, was accepted, if not always celebrated. Nowadays, you can only be different in carefully circumscribed areas, like what you watch on a Saturday night or where you shop for food.

Belief, even if its tenets are as innocent as turning the other cheek and self-sacrifice, is frowned upon as too subversive. We have to ask whether we would prefer to live in a secular society or a tolerant society. Religious freedom used to be sacred. Now, it is so negligible that an MP can tell a constituent wearing a niqab that she should dress differently and the BBC can frown on Fiona Bruce wearing a cross. In the long run, perhaps Christians and Muslims need not despair: across college campuses, the hammer and sickle, once condemned as the symbols of communism, have been rehabilitated into chic elements of student decor, as popular as a Che Guevara poster or a copy of No Logo. Maybe, one day, the same will be true of the cross and the niqab.

[I really don’t understand this issue. Personally I have no problem with people wearing symbols that reflect their beliefs. Why should that be a problem to anyone? Does it bother me, as an atheist, that people wear crosses or the niqab? Certainly not. I don’t think it’s a Secular society trying to impose atheistic values on its citizens nor is it some kind of perverted Political Correctness. I’m not sure what it is.]