WITHOUT FOUNDATIONS THE BUILDING FALLS

In Psalm 14:1 we are told that ‘the fool says in his heart there is no God’. Richard Dawkins has been such a fool for so long that it is almost possible to feel sorry for him. The man who as chief spokesman of the New Atheists thundered out his condemnation of all religions, but particularly Christianity, is reduced to a rather lonely figure trying to work out just how far he can backtrack on his maledictions without losing all credibility.

Richard Dawkins

A Cultural Christian The man who once wrote that parents who send their children to Sunday School are guilty of child abuse has now declared himself to be a ‘cultural Christian’. He cherishes the cultural artifacts and traditions of Christianity, from hymns and Christmas carols to beautiful parish churches and old-fashioned liberalism. He ‘feels the Christian ethos’, and considers the UK a Christian country and that ‘to substitute any alternative religion would be truly dreadful’.

WALK THE LINE

Before announcing that she was withdrawing from the leadership race for Scotland’s First Minister Kate Forbes was given a taste of the opposition she would have faced. Writing in the Times on Tuesday, Edinburgh-based Kenny Farquharson expressed the respectable middle-class progressive liberal view that whoever becomes the next First Minister of Scotland, it couldn’t be a Bible believing Christian.

Kate Forbes

Since devolution Scotland has had people of differing faiths and none as First Minister without their religious belief being questioned. Our outgoing First Minister, Humza Yousaf, is a Muslim who on his first evening in Bute House, the official residence, held an Islamic prayer meeting with his male relatives. The fact that no women are allowed to join such prayers was ignored by our media who usually can be counted on to leap on this. To point out Muslim misogyny would go against the narrative that Yousaf’s elevation proved how wonderfully multicultural Scotland is. For the progressive Islam is acceptable, genuine Presbyterianism is not.

FATAL LOSSES

Throughout the West and beyond we are witnessing a steep decline in marriage and birth rates. Greece’s birth rate fell by 30 per cent from 2011 to 2021 to under 84,000 per year, slipping below the death rate. Prime Minister Mitsotakis said that in effect the country recorded just one birth per two deaths in 2022. Greece is now facing the possibility of becoming the first contemporary country to experience ‘population collapse’, a sudden and irreversible decline in population.

The depopulation crisis facing the West is not confined geographically but touches those nations heavily influenced by the West. We are all familiar with Japan’s population crisis but it expands beyond rapidly ageing Japan. South Korea, the Western-influenced industrial powerhouse of the Far East, is on track to produce between four and seven great-grandchildren for every 100 Koreans alive today. This equates to a 93-96 per cent reduction in population over the course of a century. No plague or war has ever achieved as much.

GOD IS NOT HENRY FORD

Progressive Christians, intent on enforcing equality in the church, instead sow division. In their desire for absolute equality they remake God as a cosmic Henry Ford who famously told his customers that they could have any colour of Model T ‘as long as it’s black’. But God does not go in for mass production: He is a craftsman and each one of us is unique.

Injustice based on skin colour, sex, age or any of the other discriminations common in our day should be opposed, especially when it appears in the church. But Christians should also be clear on the grounds on which they oppose injustice.

PAGANISM COLONISES THE CHURCH

We are witnessing the collapse of Western Christianity as a culture-creating force. The beliefs and principles upon which the West was built and which it exported to the inestimable benefit of the rest of the world are disappearing in the area in which they took hold to greatest effect. The future of Christianity lies in Africa and Asia, whilst in the West, Europe and the English-speaking nations the Church is fast disappearing.

There is an argument that only the mainstream churches are losing members whilst those who hold to conservative evangelical beliefs are prospering. We must be realistic: apart from a few bright spots on the horizon, most evangelical churches are doing little better than holding their own and much of their growth comes from recycled Christians departing the failing mainstream churches.

THE POWER OF BEAUTY

Why is it that all around us we see the rejection of the beautiful and the celebration of the ugly? The art and architecture of the past, especially our public buildings, featured aesthetics which cause a sense of awe and wonder. They show that in their construction there was artistry, craftsmanship, passion and a yearning for even greater heights. You realise that those who built them and were raised amongst them had a sense of belonging and looked towards a better future.

Canterbury Cathedral

When we look at much of today’s architecture we find brutalism and featureless ugliness. So soulless are they that they are rarely maintained well and often become shelters for drunks and drug addicts before they are pulled down. The most interesting and colourful aspects of them are the graffiti on their surfaces.

WAKE UP TO THE REVOLUTION

Decay The West’s preoccupation with material wealth and economic growth is a sign of its moral decadence and spiritual poverty. The recent history of the West is a tale of moral decline, in which those robust virtues needed to build a civilisation have been slowly corrupted by materialism and complacency. 

Our nations have become geographical areas without purpose where our governing class, in Wilde’s words, ‘know the price of everything and the value of nothing’. The shallow Left who control our media and politics have abandoned the intellect in order to shelter in emotion. For them the greatest sin of all is disagreement, which they term ‘hate’.

DECLINE AND FALL

There are many good and godly men and women in the Church of England who simply want to worship and serve God as best they can in the way their parents did. There are ministers whose preaching and teaching has enriched us and whose books Christians read with profit. Such Christians have been betrayed by their denomination.

Sadly today the CofE, an institution which has been of inestimable benefit to Christians across the globe, has been captured by woke ideological extremists who appear determined to set the Church on a course leading to gross doctrinal error and institutional suicide. All this with the support of the liberal bishops and the middle-of-the-road clergy.

LIVING IN AN ALIEN WORLD Pt 2

How do we face life in a culture which is increasingly moving from indifference to the Christian faith to outright opposition? A world where orthodox Christians have less and less trust in the institutional mainstream church? The question we must face is how do we live faithfully as a small minority in an environment which is sometimes antagonistic, sometimes friendly, but always alien?

In ‘The Benedict Option’ Rod Dreher, as an Orthodox Christian, found his pattern in the lives of the saints, those Christians who lived the faith under fierce communist oppression. As someone steeped in Reformed theology I, like most of my readers, find my pattern in the Bible. In the inspired recording of the lives of those who faced a similar question: how to survive in an alien culture and maintain the faith.

PROPHETS OF FRAGMENTATION

In the West we live in a culture which teaches us to scorn what was once considered normal and to value and praise that which only yesterday was thought to be abnormal or even dangerous. Those things which once bound us together, such as love of country and tradition, are despised and those things which force us apart such as multiculturalism and the transgressive are held up as ultimate values.

Diversity is a good only when there is an underlying cohesion within society. A society which places the exceptional and divergent at the core of its identity is a society in the process of fragmenting. If we fail to celebrate that which holds us together we will inevitably split apart. Which is what is increasingly happening around us today. Yeats warned us that when ‘Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.’