Heads up to a blog I have just discovered, ‘A Grain of Sand’ written by ‘Campbell’, a retired minister from Scotland. It’s not very cheerful, but then neither is a cancer diagnosis-yet if the disease is present, the diagnosis must be made and communicated before action can be agreed that may save the patient. The chances of success decline the longer that diagnosis and treatment are delayed.
In the linked post, last in a series of four, Campbell laments the failing state of the Church in Britain and sadly can only see things getting worse. He mentions the fact (usually forgotten, overlooked or denied) that our Western Civilisation, and certainly Britain, was founded to a large extent on Christianity. Just as fish do not see the water they swim in, we do not see the Christian assumptions that underlie so much of the world view that we grew up with.
We hear people talk about ‘British Values’ but seldom are these values set out and defined. 50 years ago, there was a much clearer shared understanding that these values derived from the Bible, particularly the Ten Commandments and The Sermon on the Mount, but that shared set of ethical values and view of the world has been steadily eroded-and no accident. The revolutionary Left hates ‘Traditional British Values’ as understood by people over 60 and has been working steadily to overthrow them for at east the whole of my adult life time. And now they find that Islam is a useful tool for their purposes-overthrowing all of the institutions of the West. This might seem very incongruous, since the things they hate about Christianity are present in much stronger and less compromising forms in Islam, which prescribes the death penalty for homosexuals (*), but a shared hatred of Bible religion can be quite a strong motivator. Logic was never a strong point for the Revolutionary Left.
What is interesting to me is that recently a growing number of public intellectuals such as Pat Condell, Douglas Murray, and David Starkey (all professing atheists), and homosexuals like Starkey and Andrew Doyle are writing and broadcasting with growing anxiety about the possible, if not probable, Islamification of Western Europe. Of course they are shouted down by the usual people with the usual slanders, smears and slogans, but looking at comments across a wide range of social media, many people feel the same sense of unease that ‘something‘ has gone badly wrong in our culture. There is a sense that we have lost something that we could not afford to lose (what could that ‘Something’ be, how and where and when and why did we lose it, and can we possibly get it back?) and are gaining some things that will be worse for us that we can at this time imagine.
In his greatest novel ‘That Hideous Strength’ C S Lewis prophetically imagines humanity being surrounded and threatened by the coming together of two forces, re-discovered evil magic from the Dark Ages and a powerful modern technologies deployed by corrupt men who have been ‘freed’ from all restraint by their throwing off of the Christian morality they had inherited from their ancestors. Each of these forces was powerful, but the greatest threat to liberty came from the conjunction of the two. A growing number of commentators-including atheists and homosexuals (see above), see the alliance between revolutionary Jihadism and revolutionary Marxism as the greatest existential threat to Western Civilisation.
Watch this space, and do give Campbell a read. Hopefully both he and I will not be censored or arrested for these forbidden views.
(*) I am of course well aware that the Law of Moses in the Bible also prescribes the death penalty for male homosexual acts, but I am not aware of any Christian church or organisation (apart from the notorious Westboro Baptist Church, who are extreme outliers and are detested by all Christians I know), who calls for this, and it is certainly not a New Testament ordinance. Male homosexuals are actually being executed today in many Islamic countries, not least in Iran, which arms and trains the genocidal Hamas rapists and killers under whose flag leftists are proudly marching.
Old Hampshire C S Lewis Society 