TOO LATE

The Three Laws Robert Conquest the British-American historian of the Soviet Union had considerable insight into the workings of political bureaucracy. Although probably misattributed, what have become known as Conquest’s Three Laws are still instructive when we consider how organisations work, and more importantly how they fail.

The Three Laws are generally understood as:

1.        Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.

2.        Any organisation not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

3.        The simplest way to explain the behaviour of any bureaucratic organisation is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

UNBELIEF OPENS THE DOOR

It gets tiresome. Again and again we run into the argument from non-believers, especially in the comments sections of social media, that Christianity has caused far more deaths than anything caused by atheists. ‘Religion is the major cause of wars’ is the usual line.

When meeting this argument we must first be honest and admit to our shame that there are events in the past where Christians, in the name of Christ, have perpetrated wars and slaughter, usually of fellow Christians. We have also too often allowed our faith to be used as a pretext for war or to justify war.

AN UNGODLY ALLIANCE

Strange Bedfellows Why is it that the further left Westerners move, the more likely they are to embrace the militant advocates of sharia law? We have seen this played out in the streets of every major European and American city; tens of thousands of Leftists ranging from well-meaning liberal-minded citizens, to indoctrinated students, to rabid rent-a-mob protesters from the Socialist Workers Party, all marching arm-in-arm with militant supporters of Hamas. It’s straightforward: they share a distrust, even loathing, of the West, especially those remnants of Christianity clinging on in an increasingly deranged society.

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’.