EASY TARGET

Not many people, I imagine, have heard of a musical ensemble called Cradle of Filth. Their exploits are generally recorded only in specialist publications and their records never trouble the charts.

Nevertheless, in their modest way, they offer a neat little parable for a great deal of hypocritical modern thinking about religion.

Cradle of Filth are exponents of a brand of music known as "death metal" or "black metal" - loud, fast and, unlike other kinds of loud, fast music, openly Satanist.

Here, perhaps, some socio-musical context is in order. In Scandinavia, "black metal" is a highly sinister phenomenon that has produced church-burnings and, on more than one occaision, murder (a Norwegian musician named Varg Vikernes is serving a life scentence for slaughtering a bandmate).

Outside Scandinavia, on the other hand, it tends to the mildly comic-book, expressing itself in inflammatory T-shirts and rougueish promotional videos on which bare-breasted lovelies wallow in vats of fake blood.

Among other items of merchandise, Cradle of Filth have produced an eye-catching T-shirt stamped with an extremely blasphemous slogan about Jesus which is unrepeatable in a family newspaper.

The picture accompanying it is equally disgusting.

It is with a bundle of these garments, reposing on the shelf of Tower Records in Glasgow, Scotland, that our story begins.

Alerted by the Lord Provost (or mayor) of the city, who had received several complaints, police entered the Argyll St premises earlier this year and ordered the apparel to be removed.

At a subsequent press conference, the Lord Provost disclosed that he had written to the company expressing his disgust and "to underline that material like this must never be put on sale again".

Strangely, within a week, the T-shirts were back in the shop.

"We pride ourselves on offering the largest range of products available," Tower Records' managing director explained, "and leaving it to the customers to choose whether they wish to purchase them."

Now, free speech - and presumably the liberty to sell deeply offensive T-shirts falls into this category - is a wonderful thing.

All the same, Tower Records' defence of its marketing policy raises some interesting questions.

Let us say, for example, that I was to sit down and manufacture a couple of dozen T-shirts emblazoned with an obscene message about Mohammed - or Vishnu.

Would Tower Records feel like stocking them?

The answer, one imagines, is no. And the reason would be as much practical as ideological, if only because a band of outraged imams and their followers would be capable of causing a much bigger stink in the streets of Glasgow than the Lord Provost can.

Curiously, this stand-off between shocked city fathers and a right-on retailing giant was set in context by the religious service staged to commemorate World Holocaust Day in late January.

No television viewer who watched the proceedings for a moment could have failed to note that the rather dusty Anglicanism that generally surfaces in official ceremonies was out, and that it had been replaced by a fanatical inclusiveness.

As Catholic priests rubbed shoulders with Orthodox monks while Hindu votaries brought up the rear, the subliminal - and government-fostered - message was abundantly clear.

Although I inhabit a notionally Christian country - which is to say that a Christian ethical and administrative framework still stretches above the rising secularist tide - a comprehensive religious tolerance is enjoined.

By the same token, any outrage done to religious sensitivities is routinely deplored.

But to assume that all religious belieds are of equal validity in early 21st century Britain would be a mistake.

If one wanted a convenient summary of the attitude towards religious belief shown by most sections of the British media, it would be this: All religions are equal, but some are less equal than others.

And Christianity is the least equal of all.

Evidence of this prejudice is apparent throughout the modern British media.

On the most basic level, it manifested in our broadcasting medium's constant reluctance to fulfill its statutory obligations in the field of religious programming.

An estimated 7 per cent of the UK's population regularly attends places of Christian worship - more than the aggregate attendance at Premiership and Nationwide League soccer matches each Saturday afternoon - and yet the BBC's nods in the direction of its Christian audience are generally limited to a bland hymn-based half-hour called Songs of Praise and a few late-night religious documentaries.

Without watchdog vigilance, it is probably accurate to say that the television channels would give up on "God slots" altogether.

In the meantime, underfunded, marginalised and screened at odd hours, religious programming narrowly survives, never quite managing to throw off its status as a faintly embarrassing anachronism.

But this more or less benign neglect is markedly different from the outright antagonism on display elsewhere in the media.

Christianity still offers the ripest of targets for television satirists.

One of the funniest running gags in British television's Asian comedy series Goodness Gracious Me stars the upwardly mobile Anglophile Kupars who change their name to Cooper and try to pass themselves off as imitations of the English upper-crust.

A recent episode had them infiltrating their local parish church and, among other things, attempting to participate in the rite of Holy Communion.

All jolly funny - the joke being on Anglophile Asians as much as the Christian church - but you wonder what the reaction would have been had anyone attempted to transfer what is, strictly speaking, an act of sacrilege to another faith.

Imagine the outrage had a group of white, English comedians decided to mock the recent ceremony in which five million or so Hindu worshippers ritually immersed themselves in the Ganges.

But Christians, you see, are a safe target.

They don't fight back - and are biblically enjoined to turn the other cheek in any case.

And the result is that Christian-baiting is a kind of licensed public amusement.

This is not, I hasten to add, a defence of Christianity.

It is merely a defence of Christianity's right to be treated on equal terms with other religions, and a protest at the kind of mental atmosphere that allows Sir Richard Branson's Virgin empire to exploit Christian iconography for profit (for example, much-complained-about Christmas 1999 Madonna adverts in Britain) while permitting novelist Salman Rushdie who suposedly supports the Muslim community to go in fear of his life.

At the same time, it would be foolish to deny that resentment - often extending to outright hatred - of the Christian faith is one of the great animating forces of modern liberal society.

And it is worth asking where this animus comes from.

Anticlericalism, of course, is a fine old English institution, but by-gone agitators hated the church for its economic and social power - its function as a buttress for what would now be called "the establishment" - rather than its spiritual message.

In the "rational" society we now inhibit, on the other hand, though there are still people who preserve a vague folk-memory that the church is "only after your money" or that Anglican Christianity represents "the Tory Party at prayer"... how hollow that claim now sounds... it is the spiritual message that really irks, or rather the thought of its provenance.

The idea that there might be something - literally - beyond their comprehension is, of all things, the most appalling to Western liberals.

One of the consequences of this is that any institution, law or usage tainted with Christian belief - as most British institutions, laws and usages generally are - is regarded as faintly suspect by large sections of enlightened opinion: a kind of throwing the moral baby out with the spiritual bathwater which, if taken to its logical end, would leave racism and smoking as the only true sins.

The kind of paid-up Western liberal who writes sarcastic letters to the newspapers every time a bishop ventures some mild opinion about underage birth control ought logically to detest all religions.

And yet somehow his greatest contempt - this, in an increasingly multicultural society - is always reserved for Christianity.

There are, I think, two reasons for this.

One is the fact that Christianity is a profoundly soft target.

Its Anglican wing, in particular, is no longer the Church Militant but the Church Quiescent.

And it is a fact that if you put a bishop in front of a microphone he will generally start apologising.

The other reason is that attacks on Muslims or Hindus seem to be inextricably bound up with issues of racial and national identity.

No doubt the average liberal letter-writer thinks that Muslims and Hindus are credulous half-wits, but he would not dare to say so.

Criticise a mand for being a Muslim and you are implicitly criticising the colour of his skin - that is how the Western liberal mind works it out.

There is also the never quite consciously stated - and patronising - assumption that Muslims, Hindus and Buddhists are simple people whose beliefs ought not to be held up to ridicule.

Whereas Christians should be able to take any abuse that is thrown at them.

What is needed is a test case.

Ideally, the next time Tower Records display a stack of T-shirts degrading Christ, perhaps an alliance of Christians, Muslims, Hindus... and whoever else is interested... should press for prosecution on the grounds of common injury.