 More than 100,000 Britons have recently downloaded "certificates of de-baptism" from the Internet to renounce their Christian faith. The initiative launched by a group called the National Secular Society (NSS) follows atheist campaigns here and elsewhere, including a London bus poster which triggered protests by proclaiming "There's probably no God.""We now produce a certificate on parchment and we have sold 1,500 units at three pounds (A$6.25) a pop," said NSS president Terry Sanderson.
John Hunt, one of the first to try to be "de-baptised," held that he was too young to make any decision when he was christened at five months old. He said he approached the Church of England to ask it to remove his name. "They said they had sought legal advice and that I should place an announcement in the London Gazette," said Hunt, referring to one of the official journals of record of the British government. So that's what he did -- his notice of renouncement was published in the Gazette in May 2008 and other Britons have followed suit.
The Church of England said its official position was not to amend its records. "Renouncing baptism is a matter between the individual and God," a Church spokesman said. "We are not a 'membership' church, and do not keep a running total of the number of baptised people in the Church of England, and such totals do not feature in the statistics that we regularly publish," he added.
De-baptism organisers say the initiative is a response to what they see as increasing stridency from churches. "The Catholic Church is so politically active at the moment that I think that is where the hostility is coming from," said Sanderson. "In Catholic countries there is a very strong feeling of wanting to punish the church by leaving it." In Britain, where government figures say nearly 72 percent of the population list themselves as Christian, Sanderson feels this "hostility" is fuelling the de-baptism movement.
De-baptism movements have already sprung up in other countries. In Spain, the high court ruled in favour of a man from Valencia, Manuel Blat, saying that under data protection laws he could have the record of his baptism erased, according to a report in the International Herald Tribune. Similarly, the Italian Union of Rationalists and Agnostics (UAAR) won alegal battle over the right to file for de-baptism in 2002, according to media reports. The group's website carries a "de-baptism" form to facilitate matters.
According to UAAR secretary Raffaele Carcano, more than 60,000 of these forms have been downloaded in the past four years and continue to be downloaded at a rate of about 2,000 per month. Another 1,000 were downloaded in one day when the group held its first national de-baptism day last October 25. Elsewhere, an Argentinean secularist movement is running a "Collective Apostasy" campaign, using the slogan "Not in my name".
Source: Agence France-Press
Used by permission Australian Prayer Network
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