By Campbell Campbell-Jack
January 6, 2025
Christianity was fundamental to the development of the West. It provided the forms of thought without which those institutions defining the West would likely never have emerged. Those institutions such as the rule of law, democracy, capitalism, science, education and the family, are being undermined by the progressive left today.
The Enlightenment and its commitment to bare rationality which did so much to undermine Christianity is now being undermined by the deconstruction of post-modernism and its successors. As a consequence, the West is adrift without a coherent guiding principle.
Britain was once a country based, however imperfectly, on Christian principles, those principles have been deliberately abandoned in favour of secular ideals. At present we are in the uncomfortable transition period between a consciously Christian nation and a consciously pagan one which will be totally unable to resist the demands of an increasingly confident and aggressive Islam.
We increasingly speak of broken Britain. Wherever we look we see our institutions floundering and social cohesion fracturing. The police have lost their way. A police force with an abysmal record in crime fighting focuses on the language used in tweets. Obedient to our progressive politicians the police have initiated anti-thought-crime strategies against people who, concerned by the mass murder of babies, have the temerity to pray silently near abortion clinics
The NHS supposedly the envy of the world and employing nearly 1.5 million people, demands a higher proportion of government spending than anything else and delivers sub-standard medical results. Typical of progressive priorities the Guardian boasted that the NHS ‘performed better than its counterparts on fairness, ease of access and administrative efficiency’ before admitting that ‘outcomes for people with potentially fatal diseases fell short of those in western Europe and Australia.’
A two tier judiciary is destroying trust in law and order. David Spring, a 61-year-old retired train driver was sentenced to eighteen months imprisonment for nothing more than making ‘gestures’ at the police and chanting ribald songs about ‘Who the [expletive] is Allah’. Meanwhile Gabriel Abdullah who terrorised staff at a kosher supermarket in Golders Green demanding to know their views on Israel and Palestine as he threatened them with a large knife, was given a suspended sentence.
The harshness with which the Southport rioters were treated demonstrates the establishment’s fear of the white working class. The establishment refused to acknowledge that they were facing a genuinely spontaneous and uncoordinated reaction from people who had had enough of having their concerns over uncontrolled immigration being ignored by the political class. The anger of the white indigenous working class was blamed on a fictional far-right. There is no organised political far right, yet the bogy man of the English Defence League which ceased to exist ten years previously was trotted out by a complicit mainstream media.
These examples illustrate the social consequences flowing from an absence of political and spiritual leadership. Our political parties and churches fly under false colours. The Conservatives conserve nothing, Labour are interested in the workers only at election time, and the Liberal Democrats are anything but liberal or democratic.
The leadership of the mainstream churches has been taken over by progressives who are frankly embarrassed by the claims of Christ. He is too divisive, saying you must be born again (John 3:3) and making claims to be the only way of salvation (John 14:4). As for the apostle’s saying there is no other name given by which we must be saved (Acts 4:12), that politically incorrect preaching is seen as insulting to other faiths. For the mainstream church hierarchies the bureaucratic management of institutional decline has replaced evangelism as a priority.
The mainstream denominations have reduced the once omnipotent and compassionate Lord God Almighty of the Bible to the level of a political activist, moralising self-help guru, or doddering grandfather existing only to approve of whatever his grandchildren get up to. Is it any wonder that people refuse to listen to such churches.
It is doubtful that the man in the street would be able to recognise Christianity as the single most important element in the creation of Western civilisation. Due to the abject failure of the church people today are dangerously ignorant about their own heritage. Just as fish cannot see the water in which they swim, so Westerners cannot see and value their Christian heritage and its benefits.
The West does not have the stomach or the self-belief to defeat that which is now in our midst. It will be a long, slow crumbling, but the West will fall. It might take 50 years or 100 years but the trends are clear; it is inevitable. One day decent unbelievers will regret their complacency when they find themselves getting what they wanted: a new age unhampered by Christianity.
Christians in the West are a rapidly shrinking minority. To face the future we must accept that Christians are outsiders and stop caring about what others think of us. The norms of secular society are not our norms. We must accept that we Christians are living as exiles in this world (I Peter 1:1), and that means we must live with far greater spiritual discipline.
This involves more than praying and immersing ourselves in Scripture, although these are vital. Spiritual discipline means radically reordering our lives, being a creative minority who centre their lives on Christ alone. This entails going it on our own, networking to create our own responses to need, all the way from education of the young to care of the elderly. Creative Christian response to need must surely be better than reliance on a faceless bureaucracy.
Christians need to live in such a way that we preserve the faith for future generations, or our great- grandchildren will despise us. Despite a grim immediate prognosis we can look forward with confidence, Christianity has a God who knew the way out of the grave.
First published in TCW Defending Freedom
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