CHRISTIAN GIRLS – COLLATERAL DAMAGE

Q. What kind of victim fails to qualify for Western concern?

A. A Christian one.

In April last year, a 14-year-old Pakistani Christian girl, Maira Shahbaz, was kidnapped at gunpoint by Nakash Tariq and accomplices as she made her way home in Faisalabad. She was forced to deny her faith and convert to Islam in order to be married to her already-married Muslim kidnapper.

Maira Shahbaz

In a recent statement, Maira described her kidnapping: ‘Nakash and two other men took me to an unknown place at gunpoint, where Nakash repeatedly raped me. He also videotaped me naked and threatened that he would kill me and my family and also upload the video on social media if I told anyone what he had done to me.’

SCOTTISH EDUCATION

The best satire is so near the truth that it can be difficult to know just when truth stops.

Richard Lucas, leader of the Scottish Family Party, becomes enmeshed in the education system.

THE MILITANT WOKE RELIGION SWEEPING THE WEST

Religion is flourishing amongst the youth of the West, and a particularly intolerant fundamentalist religion at that.

Our schools and universities are raising religious zealots who are more than willing to seek out and punish heretics. They are the missionaries of the woke generation who are out to convert the world. They are passionate, true believers with blind faith in their beliefs, they hold their doctrines wholeheartedly and are ever eager to spring into noisy action; unbelievers will be brought to heel.

The Church of Intersectionality has a stranglehold on our education and media, with chaplains in every school and university department and preachers in every studio and newsroom.

THAT HIDEOUS STRENGTH: HOW THE WEST WAS LOST

Guest review by Douglas GJ Flett

Rev Melvin Tinker, is Vicar of St John’s Church, Newland in Kingston upon Hull, a multi-ethnic congregation with two daughter congregations and a student work linked to Hull University.

A founding member of the Evangelical group REFORM, Melvin is an international speaker and former chaplain to Keele University. With this experience, perhaps more than other ministers, Melvin has an appreciation of the things that influence the student mind. He has witnessed the growth of 1960s Marxist thinking into the many-headed Hydra evident today.

WHY DO SJW’s HATE CHRISTIANITY?

One of the more alarming, and illustrative, videos to emerge from the chaos sweeping the USA shows a pack of raging BLM activists surrounding a young woman outside a Washington restaurant. The mob are attempting to intimidate her by screaming in her face because she refuses to raise her fist in solidarity with their chants that ‘white silence is violence’.

Lauren B Victor haranuged by BLM mob

Around 11 seconds into the video, one of the aggressive rabble jabs with her finger and begins yelling, ‘Are you a Christian? Are you a Christian?’ In their eyes, being a Christian is a potential cause of someone refusing to go along with their demands. Being a Christian is seen as a cause for offence by the mob. They didn’t yell, ‘Are you a Muslim?’ or ‘Are you a Hindu?’ Nor did they make any non-religious accusations such as, ‘Are you a racist?’ or ‘Are you a Republican?’

FAMILY MATTERS

The facts are incontrovertible, but inconvenient. So what do our political and media elites do with inconvenient facts? They ignore them, and ridicule and treat with contempt any oik so uncouth as to bring them up.

The incontrovertible facts are that when a society follows the ethical norms of Scripture, especially one in which the traditional family is valued and supported, children and society are much stronger. To advocate this is to encounter a barrage of woke outrage that you are demonising ‘courageous single mothers’, alternative family structures and sexual minorities. Add to that the idea that nations have a right to decide to maintain their historic identity, and you have a recipe for progressive outrage.

THUS FAR – NO FURTHER

Guest post by David Randall

What a year it has been. Like many preachers and church leaders, I’ll often be heard exhorting the congregation to remember Hebrews 10:25, and others like it, with its admonition to not give up meeting together. But here in 2020 I have found myself closing the church and urging people to worship from the safety of their own homes. And it didn’t really feel like that much of a dilemma. Sure, there was reluctance and regret, but the decision seemed clear and straightforward.

Now notwithstanding the possibility that there may be a second wave of Covid-19 and consequently a subsequent lockdown, local or otherwise, I thought that now, as churches tentatively begin to re-open under the present restrictions, might be a good opportunity to reflect on the government’s closure of churches, along with the rest of society, in these past five months.

FRENCH CHURCHES UNDER ATTACK

French cathedrals being destroyed by fire hit the headlines. It would be difficult to ignore the destruction of Notre-Dame in Paris or the Cathedral of St Peter and St Paul in Nantes; the flames make good television if nothing else. However, the continual destruction and serious vandalism of churches throughout France on a daily basis goes unremarked.

Notre Dame Cathedral ablaze

Statistics suggest that there are nearly three attacks a day on French churches. As well as arson, statues are decapitated, crosses pulled down and sanctuaries used as public toilets.The French Interior Ministry recorded 996 anti-Christian acts in 2019, an average of 2.7 per day.

The true figure is probably higher, as it is thought that officials do not count the many fires of undetermined cause at churches across the country. Church buildings which have stood for centuries and survived revolutions and wars seem to be bursting into flames for no discernible reason in the early 21^st century.

WHAT CAN WE DO?

Whether it is a post on the state of the church or of society there invariably comes a response, ‘Yes, I’m utterly fed up with everything going down the drain, the situation is absolutely hopeless.’ Traditional Christians and social conservatives face the same dilemma: in the face of the overwhelming influence of progressive forces in society, what can we do?

The situation Given the preponderance of material churned out by the mass media, we naturally assume that we are a small minority within a society in which the majority are moving in an ever more progressive direction.

WILL NOBODY THINK OF THE CHILDREN?

The above has become a flippant cliché. But we deceive ourselves if we believe no one is thinking of our children, and a more pressing question might be: who is thinking, with what intentions, and with what capacity to realise those intentions?

The child is father of the man, said Wordsworth. The maxim attributed to Ignatius Loyola, founder of the Jesuits, is less poetic  – ‘Give me the child until he is seven, and I will give you the man’ – but has a chilling pragmatism taken to heart today by many an ideologue. 

I believe the children of the West are being silently inducted into a new utopianism no less sinister, but much more far-reaching, than Stalin’s Komsomol, the Hitler Youth or Mao’s Red Guard, ever dreamed of. Childhood is suffering a sea-change into something strange, perhaps, but not rich – rather, emptied of all its native riches. Since the de-throning of God by the secular State, both childhood and adulthood are being de-natured and chaotically blended, leaving many social conservatives continually wrong-footed.