More than 50 years ago, a Dagenham vicar gave me some of the best advice I would ever receive. He knew I was a pretty tough lad – an East End boy from a working-class background who loved a fiercely-fought game of football – but he also knew that my relatively newly-acquired religious faith would be tested as never before when I joined the hurly-burly of National Service.

I was 18 years old and excited to be joining the Royal Air Force, but this wise clergyman knew that the joshing and banter of any barracks or training camp would exacerbate any existing weakness. So the man who had so warmly welcomed me to his church only a few years earlier sent me out into the world with this rallying cry.

“Stand up for your faith, George,” he said. “Don’t wait for people to mock you for it. Live it out, be proud of it.”

Not once was I mocked for my devotions; indeed, I discovered what my Dagenham vicar already knew – that for my sincerely-held and quietly-observed Christian faith, I would gain considerable respect. In fact, my example, I later learned, would help and inspire others. But would I be able to do the same thing today? I like to think that if I were given my youth back again, my religious convictions would be as strong as ever but would I – in today’s ever-more secular society – actually be able to mark them, to celebrate them, to observe them, as I did then, at my place of work? The signs are far from encouraging.

For the Christian faith is now being increasingly marginalised in this country – as a court case last week has illustrated.

On Friday, a Devon council lost its fight to hold prayers at the start of its meetings, after the High Court found in favour of an atheist who said he was ‘embarrassed’ listening to the prayers when he was a member of the council.

While the 16 members of Bideford Town Council voted on the issue twice, and decided to keep their prayers, the councillor took his case to a judicial review, backed by the National Secular Society.

The judgment is being seen as a test case, which could leave councils across the country unable to hold their traditional prayers. This will deny Christians the right to prayer — and affect non-Christians, many of whom appreciate the time for reflection that prayers offer in their otherwise hectic lives.

Will the next step be scrapping the prayers which mark the start of each day in Parliament? The reading from Cranmer’s Book Of Common Prayer asks MPs to “never lead the nation wrongly through love of power, desire to please, or unworthy ideals but laying aside all private interests and prejudices keep in mind their responsibility to seek to improve the condition of all mankind” – a vital message for all members, regardless of their faith.

These legal rulings may also mean Army chaplains could no longer serve, and that the Coronation Oath, in which the King or Queen pledges to maintain the laws of God and the lessons contained in the Gospels, would need to be abolished.

It is clear that these sensitive matters can no longer be left in the hands of judges. It is time for the Government to act – both to amend local authority legislation, letting local councils themselves decide whether they want to continue the time-honoured custom of saying prayers, and, more broadly, to protect the Christian traditions on which the country is founded.

Christianity has helped to shape virtually every facet of British life – from democracy to law, morality, literature, architecture, art and education. In the 2001 Census, some 71 per cent of the population of England and Wales, together with an only slightly lower percentage in Scotland, described themselves as Christian. Yet the incidents of discrimination against Christians show just how far society’s view of Christianity has shifted.

I could hark back to the Twenties and Thirties, when a vicar knew every parishioner by name and churches would hire whole trains just to get their Sunday school pupils – often 1,000 or more children – to the sea-side for a Bank Holiday treat. But I’ll stick to what I’ve learned first-hand. When I was a young vicar in Durham, for instance, in the early Seventies, we had to work very hard to build up a congregation, doing everything we could to turn our Church into somewhere that wasn’t just for baptisms and weddings, confirmations and funerals, but served the community seven days a week.

And I’m delighted to say it worked, ensuring that the Church was at the heart of our parishioners’ lives and, when combined with similar efforts all over the country, ensuring that the Church of England remained at the very heart of the British nation.

Now, we live in a time when Tony Blair’s press secretary can famously brush away questions about the former prime minister’s faith with the words ‘we don’t do God’ and where Blair’s successor, Gordon Brown, the son of a minister of the Church of Scotland, voluntarily gave up the right of the Prime Minister to have a say in the appointment of bishops.

In Ireland, a country where religion has played an even more central role than our own, things have gone further. Following complaints from a humanist, the Bishop of Raphoe was interviewed by police and a file passed to the Director of Public Prosecutions over comments the Bishop made as part of a sermon he preached at the Knock shrine. And what did he say that caused such offence? That the Catholic Church in Ireland is being “attacked from outside by the arrows of a secular and godless culture’ and that ‘the distinguishing mark of Christian believers is the fact they have a future; it is not that they know all the details that await them, but they know in general terms that their life will not end in emptiness”. For this, Bishop Boyce was accused of inciting hatred.

Now that’s one case, brought in a foreign country, possibly by someone seeking publicity, but on that basis, I should be expecting a visit from the police for writing this article and, indeed, for many sermons I’ve preached over the years which, while always intending to be loving and inclusive to all, may well have contained similar sentiments.

Should we be preparing ourselves for the sight of uniformed officers marching down the aisle of a church and dragging off a priest simply because of what he’s just said in the pulpit? It sounds preposterous, but that’s the way Britain seems to be heading. We’ve become enslaved to multiculturalism, political correctness and so-called equal rights, so obsessed with the idea of minimising any possible offence to any minority group that we don’t seem to have realised that one of the great British human qualities – tolerance – has now been replaced by intolerance.

We live in one of the oldest and most stable democracies in the world, one that has been shaped by broadly Christian principles for centuries. If we lose the vital Christian element that underpins such ideas as fairness, equality, civic responsibility and charity we run the risk of losing not just our own sense of ‘Britishness’ but, eventually, democracy itself.

Will we upset our Jewish or Muslim neighbours if we celebrate Britain’s essential Christianity rather more vigorously than we have in the recent past? Everything I’ve learned in my 46 years as a Church of England priest suggests not. I’ve had regular contract with religious leaders of other faiths and they readily acknowledge what we seem increasingly fearful of saying: that Britain is fundamentally and historically a Christian country.

While many of us Christians rush around looking for cards that tactfully say ‘Season’s Greetings’ and talking carefully about ‘Winter holidays’, they are as appreciative of a traditional Christmas card as I have been when invited to celebrate Passover or Eid. We can live alongside each other and not only tolerate our differences but celebrate them too.

But there’s a real danger of all this being lost. Since the September 11 attacks, we seem to have become obsessed with not upsetting British Muslims, while successive pieces of legislation means the rights of homosexuals now seem to trump those of everyone else.

Including the rights of some Christians to express or act on views that, although at odds with mainstream thinking, are sincerely held and have been a part of Christian teaching for centuries. I’m not saying these views are right, but I am saying that in Britain, of all places, they should be tolerated, understood and accommodated.

I must take care not to overstate the case. British Christians are not being persecuted, as some have said.

But Christians need to be more muscular and vigorous in defence of our faith and it needs to be more widely understood that this faith is not something we leave behind when we go to work.

As John Sentamu, Archbishop of York, once said: “Asking someone to leave their belief in God at the door of their work place is akin to asking them to remove their skin colour before coming into the office.”

My Dagenham vicar would have wholeheartedly agreed.

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