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Richard Littledale

Richard Littledale's
Views on the News: February 1999

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Sent Off!

The man in the spiritual overcoat is out in the cold again. Rejected by the Football Association, shunned by his financial backers, and savaged by the tabloids, Glenn Hoddle is looking for a job. In a swift and clever volteface, those who were calling loudest for his resignation are pushing hardest to canonise him now. Many are portraying him as a kind of tragic martyr, sacrificed on the altar of free speech and religious liberty.

Those who feel that he has lost his job for these causes should fold their newspapers down enough to look over the horizon. There are countries where the denial of free speech means the physical removal of your tongue or intimidation and imprisonment. Glenn Hoddle has not lost the right to free speech. In fact, he is freer to speak today than he was before. That is just the point. The limitations on his freedom were imposed by the job he chose to do. As a private citizen he has every right to his views on the causes of disability. As manager of the national football squad he was ill advised to express them.

Those who claim that Mr Hoddle has been persecuted for his religious beliefs would be hard put to specify what those beliefs are. If he has gone to the stake for any religion, it is the religion of Hoddlism - a belief system as personal as the man who holds it. A short plane journey would take you to countries where those who express a sincere faith in God lose not just their jobs, but their homes and their lives as well.

Ed and Mary Rosser
Ed and Mary Rosser

On the same night that Glenn Hoddle walked out of his job, an elderly couple in the Yemen prepared to walk back into theirs. Ed and Mary Rosser*, released from their two-week ordeal as hostages expressed a desire to stay on in the country. Why? Because their Christian faith compels them to work there, even with those who rob them of their liberty and deny them their freedom to speak to the world.

True religious liberty is not the right to be me, but the privilege of being Christ's, "in whose service is perfect freedom".


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*Ed and Mary Rosser were members of Teddington Baptist Church during 1962-63 before moving away from this area and joining another Baptist Church. They are currently members of Lechlade Baptist Church in Gloucestershire. Like many Christians around the world we have been praying for them and are grateful to God for their release.

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