Deceit

Driving yesterday I heard this horrendous interview on the radio with Gary Glitter (Paul Gadd) about his appeal against conviction for sleeping with underage girls in Vietnam:

BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Gary Glitter denies abusing girls

The line that stuck out in the vile conversation was where he said “I’m not a paedophile” – this from a man who was convicted in the UK in 1999 of having four thousand photos of children being abused on his home computer. Does he not understand definitions of paedophilia?

Of course he does. He is simply manifesting the appalling levels of deceit and self-deceit common in paedophiles. (We’ll say nothing about his apparent assumption in the interview that a man in his sixties having sex with teenage girls is OK if they are over the age of consent. And I won’t even get on to my traditional Christian views about sex and marriage.)

It is due to these levels of deceit that my denomination will not allow anyone who has been convicted or cautioned for offences against children ever take responsible posts in the church – and not just jobs working with young people. Some object to this, saying that the transforming power of the Gospel must mean hope even for paedophiles to change. It looks bad when the Christian Church doesn’t seem to believe that people can change through Christ’s forgiveness and the work of the Holy Spirit. And of course I believe that people can be wonderfully renewed by God.

Nevertheless I willingly hold the party line on this one. Sometimes the Christian ethic is not about claiming my rights, it’s about not claiming them, for the good of others. For example, the apostle Paul did not claim payment and support from the churches he served, even though he believed that those who preached the Gospel should live by it. He refused to claim his right in that respect, because he believed it would be a hindrance. In the same way it would be a terrible hindrance if we freely allowed paedophiles to hold church office. So we ask them not to claim their ‘rights’. (And there is a whole Christian problem with the language of rights anyway, as the late Lesslie Newbigin pointed out twenty years ago in his book ‘Foolishness To The Greeks’: rights are the language of the Enlightenment, of human autonomy, with nobody, certainly not God, to answer to.)

But the sting in the tail for me is this: it is easy to spot deceit and self-deceit in a criminal such as paedophile. It is fairly simple to spot it in others. But perhaps the Gary Glitter interview should be the terrible warning to us all about how easy we find it to deceive others and ourselves. Most of us, I guess, engage in our little deceits. If we are not careful, where might they lead? I, for one, am all too good at justifying myself when I feel unfairly attacked and go on the defensive. The risk is that I exaggerate and so deceive myself, let alone whoever is attacking me.

So despite feeling revulsion listening to Gary Glitter yesterday I come with a sense of ‘There but for the grace of God go I’ – not into paedophilia, I pray; but I pray more for the grace of God to enable me to live more truthfully.

Technorati Tags: Gary Glitter, Paul Gadd, Vietnam, paedophile, Methodist Church, deceit, grace