The Lord’s Prayer isn’t offensive. But it could be.

The God of the prayer is our father (not Stalin or Kim Jung-un or whatever tin-pot Caesar claims the mantle of beloved, caring, paternal leader). It is he from whom we seek physical sustenance (whoever said faith is concerned only with the otherworldly?) It is he, above anyone else, from whom we ask forgiveness. It is he to whom we offer that fearful hostage to fortune “as we forgive others”, tying our plea for clemency to our capacity for granting it.

The potential to offend dictators here is pretty obvious, but the prayer could be rendered politically explosive even in a culture as, er, tolerant as our own. The line about “our daily bread” is recited at a foodbank, intercut with footage of Iain Duncan Smith speaking at the Tory Party Conference. The line about the forgiveness of sins is cut with pictures of the invasion of Baghdad and with footage of refugees or of terrorist atrocities. The potential to poke the powers that be remains, even here, even now.

This, however, is not the version that the good people at the Digital Cinema Media (DCM) agency have decided to ban. 

That version shows a lot of ordinary people – police, refugees, schoolchildren, weightlifters, a sheep farmer, a gospel choir – along with the Archbishop of Canterbury, each saying a single phrase from the prayer. Inclusive, yes; strangely warming, yes; politically explosive, no.

In the absence of political incendiaries, DCM reached for our culture’s two best-worn stock-in-trade responses to keeping Christianity out of public life.

Reason 1 was that the advert might offend those of differing faiths or no faith. It might. And if it did – seriously, egregiously, nastily – then DCM would be entirely right to refuse it a licence. But this advert doesn’t. I have yet to hear an atheist say they are offended, and Shaykh Ibrahim Mogra, the assistant secretary general of the Muslim Council of Britain, has been widely quoted as saying he was “flabbergasted that anyone would find this prayer offensive to anybody.” (As an aside, one might add that the widespread response to those Christians who claimed offence at Jerry Springer – The Opera was “Tough – deal with it”, and that the values of much commercial advertising is mildly offensive, not to mention dreadful.) In other words, ‘offence’ is not simply a red herring, but it is being applied here too tightly: DCM acting as cinematic baby-sitter, overanxiously shielding delicate audiences from anything that might graze their emotions.

Reason 2 is that the policy to deny licence to advertising connected to religion (and politics) works across the board. “DCM treats all political or religious beliefs equally”. In other words, if something is done in the name of equality, it’s OK, even if the result is silence. The fact that this might affect people unequally (those with sincere, intense or motivating beliefs are invariably affected more than those who are generally indifferent or apathetic) or that the end result is a denuded public discourse in which serious difference is subtly muffled, is, it seems, immaterial.

Put these together and you get the conundrum of the moment: worried about how we live together with strong and intensely felt views, the authorities (or in this case DCM) act as a kind of overzealous bouncer, using ‘offense’ and ‘equality’ to turn away any views that might possibly even slightly disturb the order within. The motivation might just be commendable; the result it is not.

This was a bad call by DCM and should be reversed. Yes, that means things will get messier, when the precedent is created and some cranky Christian sect or the Scientologists apply to have their less than gentle advertisement played in cinemas. Messiness is a pain but it is also the price paid for a genuinely, as opposed to fictitiously, open public square.

But Christians should not, in their justifiable frustration, sell the pass here and argue that the prayer is obviously innocuous and has no potential to offend. It could. Jesus did. If we think otherwise, we too are losing the plot.

Nick Spencer is Research Director at Theos

Image by bigbirdz from flickr.com, available under this Creative Commons Licence