Campbell looks at the Church and the world and wonders where it all went wrong
Due to a recent health scare it has been decided that it would not be wise for me to continue with Grain. I hope soon to be able to contribute the occasional piece to Prophecy Today and TCW Defending Freedom.
I would like to thank all those who have supported Grain through the years, your patience and encouragement has been greatly appreciated.
Now it only remains to sign off as Looney Tunes used to back in the day and say,
If a government wishes to keep something away from public attention, what do they do? The simplest thing is to give people something else to think about. This is the tactic used by our ruling elites. We are constantly told we should be afraid of the dangers of the ‘far right’ in order to draw our attention away from the real challenge facing the UK today, Islamism.
This deflection tactic reached the ludicrous level of a child of nine being referred to Exit Hate Trust, a de-radicalisation charity. Nigel Bromage, the head of the charity, confessed that often well-educated, middle-class white children ‘who feel lost’ were referred. Perhaps the fact that well-educated middle-class white children have not been enlisting as far-right suicide bombers or going on stabbing rampages or driving cars into crowded markets is down to Exit Hate Trust’s splendid work in de-radicalising them. Somehow I doubt it.
Continue reading “THE HATRED THEY DARE NOT NAME”If I were asked about writing, among the advice I would give would be ‘Never write whilst you are angry.’ You are liable to write things in the heat of the moment that you later regret, and you are liable to get carried away in your reasoning. For these reasons I decided a few days ago not to write this post.
We Should All Be Angry A subscriber had sent me a link to ‘Southport killer sentenced to 52 years’, a substack written by Charlie Bentley-Astor who has been covering the Southport stabbings for some months. Her piece focuses on the sentencing during the last day of the court case, but touches on the whole crime.
Continue reading “WHY I CHANGED MY MIND”Nothing says Islam is a religion of peace quite as clearly as shooting someone dead for saying that Islam is not a religion of peace.
At the end of last month Salwan Momika, an ethnic Assyrian from Iraq, was murdered in a Sharia-style execution in his home in Sweden. At the time he was awaiting the verdict in his trial for ‘incitement to racial hatred’. His crime? Having first-hand knowledge of the persecution faced by non-Muslims in the Middle East, he had burned a Quran in protest against Islam in Stockholm in 2023.
Continue reading “ONLY ISLAM”The USA seems to be in the midst of a welcome fightback against destructive woke ideology. On this side of the Atlantic we are still on the back foot as woke disciples relentlessly push their beliefs in every sphere of activity, nowhere more so than in our educational structures. From kindergarten to post-graduate study, all have been taken over by progressive teachers, lecturers and educational unions pushing a woke agenda.
We cannot over-emphasise the importance of teachers and their influence. They can open a child’s mind to endless possibilities, or they can close thought down and ensure it runs on approved lines. In 1929 Norman Douglas wrote: ‘Education is a state-controlled manufactory of echoes.’ Things have not improved in the century since.
Continue reading “IN THE FRONTLINE OF THE BATTLE AGAINST WOKE”He Means Business This Time In his first hours as returning President, Donald Trump signed an order restoring biological truth and recognising ‘two sexes, male and female’, saying this is set at birth and cannot be changed. He ordered immigration officers to ramp up deportations of people in the country without authorisation. He signed executive orders to leave the World Health Organization and withdraw from the Paris climate agreement.
Trump’s other initial executive orders included a move to end birthright citizenship (the automatic American citizenship granted to anyone born in the country) and a measure declaring a near-total halt of the US refugee admissions programme — a move widely opposed by Trump’s religious critics.
Continue reading “THE BISHOP GIVES VENT TO TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”It’s childish, I know, but it is entertaining to watch one’s opponents squabbling amongst themselves. Particularly when we witness some of our most effective opponents emerging on the right side, even if only this once.
Atheists often characterise Christians, especially evangelicals, in fundamentalist terms. Evangelicals are seen as religious bigots who pick up their Bibles and put down their brains. We are assumed to have an anti-science outlook and judgemental attitudes, and never listen to reason.
Continue reading “CRACKS BEGINNING TO SHOW IN THE CULT”The UK has been cursed by our ruling elite. In politics, academia, media, police and the institutions which regulate our lives, the British establishment is tainted.
All Are Complicit Last week at PMQs Kemi Badenoch made Keir Starmer squirm as he tried to avoid accountability for the rape gang atrocities. It is just as true that the Tories who held power from 2011, when the phenomenon was revealed, did nothing substantial to address the barbarity of it all.
The vulnerable raped girls… were the price they were willing to pay to preserve progressive ideology.
Throughout officialdom, from the cabinet down to local council and police officers, there was a repeated refusal to come to the aid of vulnerable British girls being drugged and gang-raped by Pakistani Muslim gangs.
Continue reading “PROGRESSIVISM – THE SUICIDE NOTE OF A CIVILISATION”Due to its wimpification the church in the West is declining in terms of numbers and influence. Christianity is no longer a culture-challenging force; rather it has become a meek handmaiden of progressivism. Amongst denominational hierarchies their greatest fears are the frowns of the chattering class.
In mainstream denominations surface evidence of decline in belief is widespread. Pride flags are used as altar cloths and pulpit falls. Worship is devalued with trite man-centred ditties. The church is trivialised with helter skelters, pitch and putt and ‘Raves in the Nave’. Is it any wonder the general public sees the church itself as a trivial pursuit?
Continue reading “CHRISTIANITY IS A DOWN AND DIRTY FAITH”There is a time to be angry. There is a time when it is a sin not to be angry. This is such a time.
I have served in the armed forces. I have been a prison chaplain. I have been a minister in one of the roughest parts of Glasgow. I am not naive. Yet I was unable to finish reading the details of the atrocities committed by a mainly Pakistani Muslim rape gang on white girls. some of them pre-teen. These vile acts were committed prior to 2013 yet have came to light last week. Why were they hidden? I think we know the answer.
Continue reading “PROGRESSIVE CONTEMPT FOR THE WHITE WORKING CLASS”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.
Continue reading “WE CHRISTIANS ARE EXILES IN A COLLAPSING WORLD”How many times have you entered an art gallery and had to peer at the small explanation at the side of a painting or sculpture before you knew what it was trying to convey?
How do you know whether a piece of art is good or bad? One test is whether you understand what it is trying to say, or when its meaning if any has to be explained. The purpose of art is to communicate and if a piece of art necessitates written explanation it has failed to communicate.
Continue reading “OUR ART REFLECTS THE VALUES OF OUR SOCIETY”Writing in the Telegraph Douglas Carswell finds the reason the UK faces increasing restrictions on free speech is fear: ‘Fear of Islamists who insist that their right not to be offended trumps your right to speak freely.’
The likelihood is that the Labour government will pass legislation based on the definition of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on British Muslims which sees Islamophobia as ‘rooted in racism and is a type of racism that targets expressions of Muslimness or perceived Muslimness’. This is so vague that it can operate as a catch-all definition forbidding any criticism of Islam: in effect a modern blasphemy law.
Continue reading “THE IMPERIALISTIC INVASION THAT WASN’T”Islamist rebels have taken Damascus and the regime of Bashar al-Assad has fallen. The world rejoices and there are street celebrations by exiled Syrians in the major cities of the West. Politicians including Sir Keir Starmer welcome the fall of Assad’s ‘barbaric regime’ as a ‘very good thing for the Syrian people’.
And the Christians of Syria flee.
Since the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, 90 per cent of Christians have abandoned Aleppo, the country’s second largest city. Will the remaining 10 per cent remain to welcome their jihadi ‘liberators’? What centuries of Islamic oppression was unable to do, the civil war managed and the overthrow of the Assad regime will probably complete: the destruction of one of the oldest Christian communities in the world.
Continue reading “ONE OF THE WORLD’S OLDEST CHRISTIAN COMMUNITIES FACES DESTRUCTION”Last Friday the House of Commons voted to begin the process whereby Parliament may legalise assisted suicide. This marked a significant change in the way our society thinks of the individual, the way we live together and our concept of care. There are immediate dangers which emerge from the change in underlying principle.
The legalisation of same-sex marriage and the acceptance of transgenderism are symptoms of a society in decline, one which lost its way when it deliberately rejected its Christian foundation. Same-sex marriage was a rejection of the natural order. The legal fiction that a man could become a woman and a woman a man by merely wishing it were so is a rejection of science. The acceptance of physician assisted suicide is a rejection of humanity’s most basic right, the right to life. The UK has taken one more step down the road towards paganism.
Continue reading “BLACKEST OF FRIDAYS”Many of the great anti-totalitarian novels of our times have been written by British writers and set in the United Kingdom. George Orwell’s ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’ and ‘Animal Farm’, and Aldous Huxley’s ‘Brave New World’ stand out on any list. Anthony Burgess’s ‘A Clockwork Orange’ deserves mention as does Jasper Fforde’s ‘Shades of Grey’ and the graphic novel ‘V for Vendetta’ by Alan Moore and David Lloyd. We can all make our own lists, but the real question is: Why do so many dystopian and anti-totalitarian novels come out of the UK, a liberal democracy?
It is possibly because Britain has been a liberal democracy and the shock of contemplating a totalitarian Britain has greater impact than if the novel was set in one of our continental neighbours who have experienced actual and terrifying totalitarianism. Curbs on free speech and the restriction of public expression of political and social opinions would seem especially horrific if they happened in staid, cosy old Britain; we don’t do that sort of thing here. Or do we?
Continue reading “LOSS OF FREE SPEECH IS NO LAUGHING MATTER”You won’t know about it if you rely on the mainstream media, but Christians throughout Europe are experiencing anti-Christian hate crimes at an alarming rate. Print media has rightly been filled with pages on the Orwellian raid by police on journalist Allison Pearson for an unspecified ‘non-crime hate incident’. Meanwhile it goes unreported that throughout Europe Christians are being harassed, threatened and physically attacked in unprecedented numbers.
Widespread Attacks In its latest report released on 15 November, the Vienna-based Observatory on Intolerance and Discrimination against Christians in Europe (OIDAC) identified 2,444 hate crimes against Christians in 2023. These were crimes documented by police and civil society in 35 European countries, and included 232 personal attacks on Christians, such as harassment, threats and physical violence.
Continue reading “RISING TIDE OF ANTI-CHRISTIAN ATTACKS IN EUROPE”The catastrophic failure of the Democrats in the recent USA election which resulted in the triumph of the Bad Orange Man has had a fallout of comic proportions. Many conservatives have been metaphorically ‘bathing in liberal tears’ as the realisation hits the wokerati that what was unimaginable has happened.
Social media has been full of progressive women shaving their heads and wearing blue bracelets in order to identify the ideologically pure with whom they can sit and commiserate now that they have entered into the realms of ‘The Handmaid’s Tale’. Some have gone so far as to swear off sex for the next four years, which at least has the upside that there might be fewer abortions.
Continue reading “YOU MUST BE BAD IF EVEN THE AMISH ARE UP IN ARMS”Adam Smith wrote that there’s a ‘great deal of ruin in a nation’, by which he meant that it takes an awful lot of bungling by political leaders to bring down a state. Over the last few decades the great and the good of the UK seem to have been testing Smith’s proposition to destruction.
Whilst nations can withstand incompetence and bungling there are few which can withstand the corrosive effects of withdrawal of trust between the governed and the governors. Growing suspicion and mistrust results in ties within society being weakened and finally dissolving.
Continue reading “DISAPPEARING TRUST”The media assure us there is no culture clash, no war of competing ideologies. Perhaps there is in the brash USA, where they are not as nuanced as we sophisticated Europeans, but not here in the UK.
Britain’s history demonstrates many culture wars and revolutions, and if the present struggle is not outright war with opposing forces lined up against each other, it is because Christians are no longer marshalling their armies because our generals are sitting drinking tea with the enemy. Biblical Christians are reduced to small groups waging guerilla warfare.
Continue reading “SOCIETY AND RELIGION FALL TOGETHER”The French writer Julien Benda coined the phrase la trahison des clercs, meaning ‘the treason of the intellectuals’. By this he meant that the intelligentsia had abdicated the proper standards of intellectual enquiry and argument in favour of political advocacy. He launched his attack on the intellectual corruption of the age in 1924. Today the West is faced by another treason: that of the clerics.
The Western civilisation which until recently has dominated the world, its institutions, science and laws, and which has brought about the incredible advances in science and technology which have improved the lot of billions, was created in Western Europe mainly through the influence, teaching and power of one institution, the Church.
Continue reading “HOW TO UNDERMINE A CULTURE”We Have a Problem Although the powers that be are loath to admit it, the main driver of the great increase of anti-Semitism in the UK over the last year is the growing influence of Islam in the UK.
We have a large number of Hindu immigrants, of Sikhs, of Polish and Ukrainian Catholics, but we don’t find them organising marches through our cities crying out for the destruction of Israel and its Jews. Polish Catholics and Indian Hindus are not noted for acts of terrorism in the UK. Europe is hosting significant numbers of Ukrainians, refugees from the war. Yet, no matter how strongly they feel about the war, we don’t find them marching through London, Berlin and Paris every weekend calling for the destruction of the Russian state and its people.
Continue reading “WE MUST ADMIT THERE IS A PROBLEM”The UK is now home to more atheists than Christians. This is a conclusion from the three-year ‘Explaining Atheism’ project led by Queen’s University Belfast.
The interdisciplinary research team surveyed nearly 25,000 people from across six countries (Brazil, China, Denmark, Japan, UK and USA) to find out why people become atheists and agnostics. They also brought together converging results from the British Social Attitudes Survey and World Values Survey to show the UK now has a relative majority of atheists.
Continue reading “ATHEIST UK”Why are there so few men in church today? Go to the average church service in the UK today and you will find that most of the worshippers are women. If you are a young man it is liable to be a lonely experience.
Yet Christianity originated with a man who gathered around himself a group of other men. Most leaders of the church throughout history have been men, the great theologians and preachers have been men. Revivals such as the Great Awakening and the Welsh Revival began amongst men. Even today most theologians, preachers and church leaders are men. Men appear to be everywhere in church, except in the pews.
Continue reading “MEN DON’T WANT TO BE WIMPISH CHRISTIANS”If Christians are to have an influence on society, we have to clearly understand two things: what we believe and the context into which we speak the gospel. Presuming we constantly endeavour to improve our understanding of the faith, let us look at an important aspect of the society in which we live.
We often speak of the ‘elites’ who form the new establishment running the country. Who are they and why do they matter? Britain has always had an elite class who controlled the levers of power; what is different about the present group who manipulate the system to their own advantage?
Continue reading “THE NEW ESTABLISHMENT”With the importation of untold numbers of unassimilated immigrants, the European elites appear to be engaged in continental cultural suicide. It is frightening that the Christian church, which created Europe as it was until recently, is eager to play its part in the euthanasia of a once rich culture.
Express concern about immigration and Archbishop Welby will label you ‘far right’ and ‘unChristian’. The Pope has blessed a mission by the Italian Bishops’ Conference to ferry illegal migrants to Europe from Africa. We are instructed that it is our Christian duty to receive them and that they enrich the host countries.
Enrichment Under the Conservatives, Britain came first in Western Europe and joint second on the continent for crimes committed by perpetrators of foreign extraction. The adverse consequences of unfettered immigration manifest themselves every day, in our streets, in headlines, and on our X timelines.
It is difficult to argue that importing the low skilled of the Third World is enriching Britain. In 2023, of Britain’s approximately 4,000 homeless 38 per cent were foreign nationals. Successive governments have refused to remove them.
Brwa Shorsh, the Kurdish migrant who shoved a postman into the path of a tube train in February, had 12 convictions for 21 offences. Despite this pattern of behaviour he was allowed to remain in Britain to sleep on the streets. Shorsh was also a convicted sex offender. What benefit or cultural enrichment did his presence confer upon Britain?
Britain has one of the highest levels of recorded acid attacks in the world. According to the Independent, ‘Senior officers believe the horrific crimes are not always being reported, meaning the unprecedented number of known assaults using corrosive substances may be a fraction of the true total.’
Woke attempts to argue that acid attacks are part and parcel of British history are unconvincing. ‘Honour’-based acid attacks are not part of our cultural heritage. Worldwide, 90 per cent of acid attacks occur in those low-income countries where our political and business class source most of our immigrants.
Blinkered Elites Such crimes destroy social cohesion, and the unwillingness of the authorities to acknowledge them destroys faith in politics. The luxury beliefs of the progressive elites undermine our faith in the willingness of those in power to protect us.
Following the 2021 murder of Conservative MP Sir David Amess by an Islamist knifeman, fellow politicians did not demand greater action against terrorist sympathisers. Instead MPs made calls to expand and fast-track the Online Safety Bill in order to crack down on social media abuse. In the light of Sir David’s murder they insensitively named it ‘David’s Law’.
In January this year, a mother and her two young daughters were attacked by Abdul Ezedi who threw an alkaline substance over them, causing ‘life-changing’ injuries. Barrister Sam Fowles insisted that ‘Abdul Ezedi’s immigration status has nothing to do with acid attacks,’ and instead chose to blame Andrew Tate and online misogyny. The woke elites would do anything rather than address the elephant in the room.
The facts present a different story. In 2018, Ezedi, an illegal immigrant from Afghanistan, was convicted on one charge of sexual assault and another of exposure. For these crimes he was given suspended sentences.
Instead of being deported he was granted asylum in 2020 at the third time of asking. He claimed to be a Christian convert and a church witness said he believed, with scant evidence, that Ezedi had converted to Christianity.
Progressive Christians seem to be caught in a suicidal dream of universal goodwill to foreign criminals eagerly accepting their sudden ‘conversion’ to Christianity. Demonstrating their commitment to the core progressive gospel that institutional racism pervades British life, the Anglican church eagerly advocates for these supposed converts to stay in the UK.
Complementary Principles Christians’ social actions are guided by the two complementary biblical principles of solidarity and subsidiarity. Allowing one to overwhelm the other distorts the faith with a consequent impact on life. When thinking of immigration, the sentimental liberal theology of our ecclesiastical leaders prioritises solidarity .
Solidarity has its basis in Genesis 1 where we find we are all part of the same human family. All, without exception, are made in the image of God and are of value to God. The distinctions of race, sex, social standing, intelligence etc. which we value on a human level are not to restrict our care for others. We are to be brothers and sisters to all.
Subsidiarity teaches we should respect the identity and dignity of individuals and groups and their right to meet their needs in their own ways.
Our love and generosity towards others consists of a series of ever-expanding circles. Our relationship with God is fundamental, after that our spouse and immediate family take priority in our lives over our friends and acquaintances, who take priority over organisations, then wider society and nation and finally humanity. Subsidiarity teaches us to pay more attention to the group nearest to us before we move out to the others.
This is a reflection of the life of Christ who had expanding circles of relationship. Jesus was closer to some of his followers than to others. His beloved disciple John, then an inner circle of three best friends Peter, James and John, then the 12 disciples, then the 72 sent out on mission. Finally expanding all the way out to us, whom he terms friends.
Subsidiarity reminds us that charity begins at home whilst solidarity reminds us it doesn’t stop there. We need both. Emphasising subsidiarity on its own leads to an utterly selfish anarchism where ‘Me and mine’ ignores ‘You and yours’. Emphasising solidarity on its own leads to a communistic loss of distinctiveness and the freedom to exercise self-responsibility.
We must balance the well-being of immigrants seeking a better way of life against the rights and protection of those who are expected to welcome them. Both groups must be considered. Like our secular leaders, our church leaders give every indication of being concerned with only one group. We have entered the sphere of two-tier church leaders.
I shall now be taking some R&R until mid September. Hope to meet you then.
Christophobia is an ugly term which piggybacks on neologisms such as homophobia and Islamophobia. Islamophobia covers everything from burning down a mosque to looking sideways at a woman in a burqa or ‘greeting someone with “Merry Christmas” or saying “God bless you” after someone sneezes’. The growing use of the term Christophobia is just as imprecise.
The Most Reverend and Right Honourable Justin Welby, Archbishop of Canterbury, is no doubt a good hearted, kind and well meaning man. One can even feel sorry for him that it has fallen to his lot to do the well nigh impossible job of trying to hold together an increasingly fractious Anglican communion.
However, it is in his main responsibility, one far beyond denominational matters, that we find him failing lamentably. It is the task of a Christian leader, at whatever level, to help his people understand the Christian path in life, to help them know how a Christian should react when difficult decisions have to be made. This requires a deep understanding of Scripture and how it applies to daily life, and a deep understanding of and compassion for his people.
Continue reading “POLITICAL NOT SPIRITUAL”We watch the USA’s 2024 Presidential election with fascinated horror as a great nation demeans itself before our eyes. The choice is between an untrustworthy narcissist who will say anything to get elected and a cackling woke incompetent who has presided over the USA’s border fiasco.
If ever there was a time for a NOTA checkbox (None Of The Above) it is now when there is no morally good choice, only the puzzle of trying to decide who is the least dangerous candidate. There is, however, something interesting in America’s slow-motion political car crash: the Vice-Presidential choices and their Christian identities.
Continue reading “TWO MEN, TWO FAITHS, TWO WORLDVIEWS”If you confine yourself to the mainstream media you will see that what is happening in the UK today is entirely a tale of ‘far right’ yobs causing mayhem. We are given no real context at all. The establishment narrative is that the riots are the product of ‘misinformation’ on social media being used by racist thugs to cause havoc.
The carnage and chaos unfolding before our eyes is not just about ‘misinformation’, ‘disinformation’, ‘social media’, or ‘far-right thuggery’. It is about an elite consensus in this country, presided over by Left and Right, visibly losing control before our eyes.
Continue reading “RULERS MUST LISTEN TO THE RULED”Woke Olympics Christians have been rightly appalled by the deliberate blasphemy in the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, exacerbated as it was by a non-apology. The organisers said they were sorry some people were offended. This is like saying, ‘We are sorry that some blinkered faith types did not have the intellectual and aesthetic capacity to comprehend the artistic significance of our creative endeavour to encapsulate the inclusivity of the Games.’
The opening ceremony was in significant part a parade of woke propaganda. The BBC naturally thought it, ‘spectacular’, ‘brilliantly frenetic and occasionally emotional’, ‘beguiling’ and ‘magical’.
Continue reading “SEWER BY THE SEINE”I didn’t realise it until recently but for the last ever so many years I have been married to a henchwoman. A henchman is usually an unscrupulous subordinate ruthlessly ready to do his master’s bidding and a henchwoman is best understood as the female equivalent.
Which probably makes me an unprincipled Sir Jasper with black cloak and curly moustache who, with an evil cackle, ties helpless maidens to railway lines. On the other hand, ‘henchwoman’ may be a way of denigrating one of the most popular groups of people to appear on social media recently, the ‘trad wives’.
Continue reading “THE TRAD WIFE”The recent furore in the press concerning President Biden’s continuing retreat from lucidity highlights a danger faced by our society at large, including Christians.
It was widely known and presented on social media that President Biden was prone to making gaffes. We had seen him wandering around as in a daze, having to be led off the stage at rallies, losing track in the middle of a sentence. Outside the mainstream media it was generally accepted that the most powerful man in the Western world had cognitive problems.
Continue reading “THE LIES WE TELL OURSELVES”The question facing Christians today is ‘How can we live in an increasingly anti-Christian world in such a way that when put to the test we choose the Lord despite the cost we might encounter?’ This is no idle question. The great business Christians should be about today is preparing ourselves and our families for an uncertain future.
The long-term future is certain. We have read the book and know how this story ends: in the triumph of God. But in the short and intermediate terms, if we read the signs of the times correctly, here in the West we face an increasing retreat from Christian standards and rejection of God and those who acknowledge Him.
Continue reading “CULTIVATE COMMUNITIES OF DISCIPLES”A New Government No one seriously thinks that a change of the political party in government is going to make a meaningful difference in the life of the British people, any more than a change of politicians in the USA, Germany or the Netherlands. The main result of elections is to effect the occasional swap amongst the political class governing us. For most of the people it doesn’t matter which party wins, it is always the establishment who hold power. There may be marginal differences in the strength of the currency or the provision of welfare, but things will go on pretty much as usual with the decline of the West, and especially the UK, gathering pace.
Why Decline? The disorder and lack of hope in British public life and society derives from more than a sense of loss of empire and world significance bringing about an acceptance of our descent into mediocrity. It is caused by more than a lack of leadership in politics, industry, academia and the church. The disorder in British public life derives from disorder within the British soul. We have lost meaning and direction in life.
Continue reading “TO RE-ORDER SOCIETY”Future historians will look back on our day with wonder. They will try to puzzle out just how it was that a handful of ideologues managed to convince the elites of our powerful institutions, political, educational, business, media and through them entire nations, to believe absurdities such as the notion that feelings triumph over science, and that sex is entirely flexible and dependent upon emotion.
Scholars will spend hour after hour writing PhD theses on how an advanced industrial culture dismantled itself by embracing the utterly fatuous idea that competence in every field of endeavour had to take second place behind perceived personal identity. Choosing leaders and workers on the basis of their sex, race or sexual preferences is a recipe for eventual destruction.
Continue reading “HOW TO DESTROY A CULTURE”Western civilisation is built upon a foundation of Christianity. It is no coincidence that as Christianity fades in the West so do those values which have distinguished the West: tolerance, freedom of conscience, the value of all life and personal responsibility. Those values which we have taken for granted are in serious danger, and the more Christianity is pushed out of the national conversation the greater the danger.
Growing Intolerance The abandonment of toleration as a civic virtue is deeply troubling. There is evidence of increasing intolerance, harassment and discrimination being shown to Christians in Britain today. It is important that Christians wake up to the growth of attacks on British Christians and our beliefs before it develops into something much worse.
Continue reading “CHRISTIANITY MARGINALISED”The right has made significant gains in the European elections. Sorry, I must correct that: according to our media the ‘far right’ and the ‘hard right’, even sometimes the ‘neo-fascist right’, has made significant gains in the European elections.
It is important for the establishment media to keep the dependent masses afraid of the populist European right. If the media insist on calling them ‘far right’, many middle-of-the-road voters will dismiss them out of hand as Nazi wannabes. This, of course, serves to reinforce the crumbling liberal order, which is the whole point.
Continue reading “A DIFFERENT CONSERVATISM”We are now into the holy Month of Pride, the Woke Ramadan of middle-class white progressive religion, where we are all supposed to genuflect before the alphabet people and acknowledge them for the wonderful, creative, vibrant people they are and how grateful we are that they live amongst us. We are bombarded with incessant propaganda extolling LGBTQIA+ people and their proclivities.
In a Wiltshire town a Pride flag was erected next to a war memorial. The town’s mayor explained it was to ‘show they are a progressive council in a progressive town’. From supermarkets to police cars and road crossings, rainbows are everywhere. No longer a symbol of God’s gracious promise following the flood (Genesis 9:13), the rainbow is now a ubiquitous proclamation of the triumph of woke homosexual propaganda.
Continue reading “RECOVER OUR RAINBOW”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.
Continue reading “TOO LATE”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.
Continue reading “UNBELIEF OPENS THE DOOR”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.
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.
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’.
Continue reading “WITHOUT FOUNDATIONS THE BUILDING FALLS”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.
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.
Continue reading “WALK THE LINE”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.
Continue reading “FATAL LOSSES”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.
Continue reading “GOD IS NOT HENRY FORD”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.
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.
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.
Continue reading “THE POWER OF BEAUTY”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’.
Continue reading “WAKE UP TO THE REVOLUTION”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.
Continue reading “DECLINE AND FALL”
A Grain of Sand 