I see that Reform has launched a “Christians for Reform” movement for the sort of true believer who thinks that “turn the other cheek” is a reference to mooning someone you don’t agree with.

At the launch Sarah Pochin MP* said that “we are fundamentally a Christian country”; which might be seen as trying to bolt the door after most of the horses have fled. At the last census fewer than half of the population identified as Christian (46%: 13% fewer than ten years earlier); and these combine a multitude of sins. Most of them embracing the sort of values that Nigel Farage sees as “woke”, and gives as the reason for not going to Church.

So, Reform believes in Christianity, but not the Christianity expressed by the Church of England, or, for that matter, Jesus.

Lets see…

“Love thy neighbour as thyself”.

“It is easier for a camel to thread the eye of a needle than a rich man attain the kingdom of heaven”.

Neither of those will fit neatly in the manifesto.

Which makes Anne Widdicombe’s remark that this launch was “the day when Reform and Christianity are merged” sound like an attempted hostile takeover.

Similarly Tommy Robinson’s Union Jack bedecked Carol Service in Whitehall billed as “putting Christ back into Christmas”, comes across as stuffing Him back in there hard whether He likes it or not (once He’s had His head shaved, a bulldog tattooed on his forearm and his sandals replaced with bovver boots). I do wonder what they were singing…

Possible slogans for a Christian Nationalist Christmas.

There is definitely no room at the Inn.

The only good Samaritan is a dead Samaritan.

Blessed are the gobby.

Peace and Goodwill are for wimps.

Forgive us our historic trespasses, but crush those who trespass against us.

*Last autumn Pochin famously complained about adverts being too “woke” because they were “full of Asian people”. So, she may not have noticed, is the Bible.

In a recent Guardian quick crossword, one of the clues used the phrase “diacritical marks”, so I looked it up. These are the accents put above or below letters to modify their sound that are relatively rare in English; only appearing in loan words, usually from French, like cafe. So rare that they don’t make an appearance on keyboards, which is why the accent on the final “e” in cafe isn’t there in the sentence above (implying that you’d have to pronounce it cayff, if you didn’t know better).

Looking through the list of marks revealed that a “Macron” is a straight line above a letter elongating its sound. So a macron over the “r” in Macron would be read Macrrron, or over the “o” would read Macrooon. Such a pity that there isn’t a Chancellor Umlaut. Though, I suppose, he, or she, would be a bit dotty.

One of the many repurposings of Congress House, that used to be the Coop Department Store in Grays – which was named after the TUC HQ and seemed to be the future in 1961- is “The light Christian school”, which seems to have opened recently to cater for the growing number of evangelicals in the town.

The Warehouse area at the back of the old store is now a big charismatic church, with a poster proclaiming that God can do anything: which begs the question of what He, or She, is doing about Gaza. Not a lot, by the looks of it. Reminiscent of the only joke that David Baddiel has ever told that has made me laugh, in a bitter sort of way. “God realises that he hasn’t heard any jokes about the holocaust, so he asks a survivor to tell him one. So he does. God says, “that’s not very funny” The survivor says, “well, I suppose you had to have been there to get it”.

The old Ritz cinema, with seating for 1500, has also been a mega church since 2016, having survived a post film half life as a Bingo Hall, a sort of purgatory before rapture, as is the old snooker hall above Burtons the tailors in the High Street – which now lives down its sinful past with small but very visible congregation that dresses in long white dresses and what look like chefs hats.

The same is true of the local Conservative Party; one of the factors driving its former white racist base towards Reform.

The title of the school is a bit ambiguous. “Christian light” might be thought of as linked to enlightenment, in a rapture oriented sort of way: “I see the light!” But “light Christian” implies either that is for Christians who don’t take theology all that seriously – “too heavy, man” – but find that a light smattering of Faith is helpful to get by day to day, with scripture as a series of Hallmark posters papering over existential cracks with uplifting moral thoughts, or it could, literally, be for light Christians, those with a Body Mass Index acceptable to the Kingdom of Heaven.

There is a high density of preachers in the High Street. If there isn’t a busker, who are usually uplifting, playing songs that strike chords and you can sing along to as you walk past, there’s someone with a microphone and a Bible. A bit like Northern Ireland in the seventies, except that instead of a red faced middle aged man in a dusty black suit, the preachers are whip smart young black guys, or aunties.

Sometimes this has an air of desperation about it, with the preacher shouting verses from an open Bible in a slightly wild eyed way. People drift by. No one gathers to listen, or even dispute. As in the parable of the sower. “And some fell upon stony ground”. Perhaps this gives the preacher a sense of elect distinction, that she/he is offering a way out to the heedless masses, who wander by getting on with everyday life oblivious of the heavenly apocalypse to come – as they ignored Noah before The Flood. You can lead a horse to salvation, but you can’t make it get on the Ark.

Sometimes its more discursive, as though the preacher is trying to convince themselves. Recently, as I walked past, one was arguing that the “apple” in the Garden of Eden was actually sex. I’m not sure how he got to that, as a believer in the literal truth of The Book. Take it literally, the apple is an apple. I suppose the tree of knowledge can be seen as the tree of KNOWLEDGE, as in carnal. Which begs the question of why an omnisceint and omnipresent deity would set Adam and Eve up with the temptation. Just to see if they could resist it? But, if God is omniscient, He/She would have known what was going to happen before He/She set it up. Which seems a bit sadistic. As Shakespeare put it in King Lear, “As flies to wanton boys are we to the gods; They kill us for their sport.” For “gods” read “God”.

Musing on this evident theological imperative towards sexual repression as I walked home with the shopping, I was reminded of Wilhelm Reich’s observations about debates between the German Communist and Catholic Youth Movements in the late 1920s. He said that most of these consisted of the speakers talking past each other. The Communist would talk about the Party’s economic programme. The Catholic, would talk about personal morality. Reich himself would short curcuit this by asking the Catholic speaker if they believe that God designed the human body. When they said “yes”, he would ask, “so, why did he design the clitoris?” Which opened a whole different way of looking at life. You could take this further. If you believe that “man” was “created in the image of God”, what is the divine dick for? Does God pee and poo?