Thanks for your post, Joe. Great to see your input on the site.

I have a couple of friends and aquintances who went to Edinburgh for the protest walk. They also said that it was astonishing the proportion of walkers from some manner of Christian setting - the ratio of Christian Aid and World Vision placards to others was incredible, apparently.

I wonder whether it had something to do with the rest of the country focussing on Hyde Park, 'cause Christians couldn't dig the rock and roll...? ;-)

Yeah, I think you've got something interesting there - the co-location of Christian social action (which of course has a very long pedigree (world poverty campaigns may have been born in the '50s, but Christian anti-poverty campaiging stretches way back before then - that's what gave birth to the Salvation Army, the Shaftsbury Society, etc. etc.).

In modern times, though, with the post-Christendom dissenchantment, the Church has seen it's pedigree of care for the poor and the marginalised overshadowed by a conservative fundamentalist agenda and 'louder' issues like abortion, homosexuality and the like. As you say, those clusters of Christians who still recognise the call to care haven't dissappeared, and we've been given a fresh voice through the public voices of Geldof, Bono and the like - and found that our connection to the rest of humanity is fundamental to whether or not we're 'saved'. As Elias Chacour, the Palestinian peace and reconcilliation activist said, 'You don't go to heaven without me - we both go together, or none at all!'

Curious that we've been taught an almost heretical reworking of that famous verse, John 3:16 - 'For God so loved the world...' has too frequently been enactioned as 'For God so condemned the world that he sent his only begotten son, that the church might be saved.'

Geldof et al are declaring to the church (in general) that, like the emperor, it has no clothes.

Thank God there are still Christian people who believe that poverty is fucking awful and that salvation is all about bringing heaven to earth, here and now, and liberating the oppressed, the poor and the margninalised, not about pie in the sky when you die.