This week, the UK National Secular Society (NSS) backed the North Somerset Primary Care Trust’s decision to suspend a 45-year-old community nurse and mother-of-two, Caroline Petrie, for offering to pray for patients.
Today Christians can find themselves subjected to disciplinary hearings and even risk getting sacked and excluded for being open about their faith or promoting Christian values. For example, Christian colleges in Oxford were recently threatened with the loss of their university status because the education that they offer is not sufficiently ‘inclusive’. Several students' unions have tried to ban Christian Unions on similar grounds.
Petrie, who became a Christian 10 years ago after the death of her mother, is suspended for the crime of failing to comply with a Nursing and Midwifery Council code, which states that ‘you must demonstrate a personal and professional commitment to equality and diversity’. How simply offering to pray with someone, without in any way pursuing the matter when the offer is rejected, constitutes a breach of this code is a mystery.
Petrie has not taken blood tests with used needles, given the wrong drugs, taken heroin on her rounds, breached patient patient confidentiality or tried to get into bed with her patients. She simply offers patients prayers for an easy recovery. If they turn down the offer the matter ends there. Yet she has been suspended, is being subjected to a disciplinary hearing and could be sacked. A witch-hunt indeed, in the name of secularist dogma.
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