In God’s Name (Part 4)

Oh dear, another defeat for Andrea Williams: the employment tribunal finds against the former magistrate’s bid to have his prejudices accommodated in the workplace. “So far Andrea has only limited success in the courts,” states the narrator who goes on to speculate that “perhaps one the problems is that she relies on evidence that has no apparent basis in reality.” When asked how old she thinks the world is, Andrea says she doesn’t think anyone has the answer but guesses it might be “about 4,000 years.”

Evidence isn’t an issue for John Pierce, a driving instructor in Bristol who sees God’s hand in everything. When in need of pupils, rather than rely on conventional advertising methods, he simply prays and the good lord delivers them to his aptly named Miracle Driving School. John is 29, lives alone and is a virgin. Affixed to the ceiling above his bed, a piece of paper with the name “Jesus” on it is the first thing he lays his eyes on every morning. This reminds him where his “focus needs to be” and allows him to block thoughts about sex from coming into his mind. Another handy method of suppression John employs involves reading “the word of God” into a Dictaphone and playing it back to himself. John claims this does more than just control “negative thoughts” — it gets rid of them altogether. In his spare time, John wanders about the streets of Bristol handing out “free tickets to heaven” to somewhat perplexed locals.

Wrapping up this part of the program, we rejoin Stephen Green and his followers back at the site of the planned mosque in east London where they’re beseeching the Christian deity to intervene on their behalf: “Lord will you stand against this, will you put obstacles in the way, and will you push back the powers of darkness.” At the end of the get together, Green makes a number of assertions bound to offend Muslims. For example, that “Islam is of the pit of Hell”; and that “Allah is Satan… because he’s just contradicting things that are in the Bible. So it’s not coming from the spirit of righteousness, it’s coming from another spirit altogether and the obvious candidate is the Prince of Darkness, the Father of All Lies — Satan himself.”