LET me tell you a little more about David Silvester, who is a former sports groundsman and professional tennis coach. Among his many charitable activities, he has been a committee member of the Reading Torch Trust for the Blind, chairman of the Henley Toy Library, and a volunteer for 13 years in the town's Oxfam shops. A Baptist, he has worked on the budget-management team of Christians against Poverty, and has served on the area's Christian Aid committee.

Sadly, Mr Silvester is not best known for any of this admirable activity. Rather, he is the UKIP councillor in Henley-on-Thames who has been excoriated for pronouncing that the current deluges are the punishment of God on the British nation for having made same-sex marriage legal.

Being a UKIP man, Mr Silvester feels that the divine wrath has been directed particularly against our Conservative Prime Minister. David Cameron, he says, has acted "arrogantly against the gospel", although Mr Silvester has also taken a pop against the Queen for signing into law the Marriage (Same Sex Couples) Act - in breach, Cllr Silvester believes, of her coronation oath.

The United Kingdom Independence Party has suspended him for his trouble. About 24,000 townsfolk have signed a petition demanding that he resign from the town council. One of the locals, a fellow Christian, has declared: "Clearly he's been reading the Old Testament, but we're on the New Testament now."

Mr Silvester's view of the nature of God is not one that I share. But it is revealing to consider the black-and-white way in which he is presented to the nation. All his good qualities are blotted out by his single tragic flaw. We Christians can be our own worst enemies sometimes. The same thought occurred to me a few weeks ago, when a Nottingham care worker, who converted to Christianity only a year ago, Rory Green, came into the public spotlight because he had written to one of the most notorious inmates in Guantánamo Bay.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged mastermind of 9/11, who is accused of hijacking, murder, and terrorism, faces the death penalty if convicted. Why it has taken 11 years to bring him to trial since he was captured in Pakistan is a subject for another day. But, after the 24-year-old Mr Green wrote to him, the detainee dispatched a 27-page reply, engaging in a good-natured debate on the virtues of Islam v. Christianity.

The problem was that when Mr Green went on national and international radio to discuss the letter, he spoke with a naïvety so breathtaking that it felt as if he was being played by the comedian Steve Coogan, whose alter ego Alan Partridge inhabits that delicate area in which it becomes impossible to distinguish between outright parody and the exquisite squirming discomfort of reflecting embarrassing reality.

Then there was the Revd Paul Flowers, the "crystal Methodist", whose alleged drug-taking and sexual shenanigans dealt a massive blow to the credibility of the Co-op Bank and its associated movement (News, 22 November). Indeed, the moral authority of a whole tribe of northern, left-leaning Christians felt undermined by caperings that felt as if they had been invented for the stereotypes of a George Formby song.

It could be, as the Sermon on the Mount has it, that Christians will know that they are acting out the Beatitudes when the world pillories them. It could be. But they could just be acting like berks.