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All Along the Watchtower

~ A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you … John 13:34

All Along the Watchtower

Tag Archives: Christian civilization

A decadent civilization?

26 Monday Jun 2017

Posted by John Charmley in Abortion, Church/State, Faith, Islam, Politics

≈ 19 Comments

Tags

Catholicism, Christian civilization, Christianity, controversy, Decadence, Faith, history

Yesterday something remarkable happened. Bosco, our resident evangelical anti-Catholic stopped repeating his script and wrote:

No problem. I believe you. The world is like it is, no matter what we call it. We can jabber about it, but we cant do much to change it. Now, Europe has a immigrant problem. This is a game changer. The Europe of the 40s and 50s and even 60s is gone. Now its a shooting gallery, a killing field.Instead of being grateful, these muslims are running down the very people who let them in. Europe is in chaos. Trump is trying to keep them out of here, and that means the good ones with the bad ones. the good ones have to suffer because of the bad ones. Could this be the beginnings of Jacobs troubles? The muslims are raging all around Israel, but are largely leaving Israel alone. That is going to change.This is when Gods fury comes up in his face. I want out of here.

The old, shall we say, random spelling, and the same old script were both gone, and suddenly we saw something of the man behind the persona. There was enough of the old apocalyptic Bosco to stop me asking “who are you, and what have you done with Bosco?” – but the tone and content was serious. As well it might have been.

The Roman Empire into which Christianity was born was a civilization of license for the elite, and it has much in common with our own, except that here that license is for the many and not the few. We fail to reproduce at anything like the level needed to replace ourselves, and whilst the NHS spends millions on abortions, it also spends millions on IVF treatment, often for older women who have reached the age when their fertility was not what it was twenty years before. We do not join this up and suggest that ‘unwanted’ babies should be born and then matched to families who would want them; instead we kill them in the name of a ‘woman’s right to choose’, and in Europe at least, apart from some Christians, no one bats an eye-lid. For all the talk about ‘British values’, it seems that our school inspectors insist that gender ideology is taught in schools – or else. even Catholic schools adopt ‘gender neutral’ uniforms, despite the Pope himself, on this issue, speaking against the liberal tide. Dissent will, it seems, not be allowed.

Within this decadence, there are immigrant communities, some now in the third generation, who do have families, and who do have firm values based on their religion. When Bosco says that Muslims are ‘running down’ our society, I would qualify that by saying that what they are criticising is our decadence; many Christians would agree with the moderate Muslim critique that we have become a decadent society. A society which has no confidence in its own future, so does not reproduce, and which seeks it own pleasure first, and so aborts when convenient. That’s not to deny the hard cases, but it is to say they are very far from being the majority.

One of my youthful heroes was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who received great acclaim in the West during the late Cold War period because of his status as a dissident against the Soviet system. He fell out of  favour in the late 1970s when, in 1978, he delivered a stinging cruitique of Western decadence in an address at Harvard:

Without any censorship, in the West fashionable trends of thought and ideas are carefully separated from those which are not fashionable; nothing is forbidden, but what is not fashionable will hardly ever find its way into periodicals or books or be heard in colleges. Legally your researchers are free, but they are conditioned by the fashion of the day. There is no open violence such as in the East; however, a selection dictated by fashion and the need to match mass standards frequently prevents independent-minded people from giving their contribution to public life.

A prophetic set of comments indeed. As an Orthodox Christian, Solzhenitsyn did not need to wonder what ‘values’ he supported, they were those formed by Christianity.

Many years before, in his The Idea of a Christian Society (1939), as well as other works, T.S. Eliot argued that the humanist attempt to form a non-Christian, “rational” civilization was doomed. “The experiment will fail,” he wrote, “but we must be very patient in awaiting its collapse; meanwhile redeeming the time: so that the Faith may be preserved alive through the dark ages before us; to renew and rebuild civilization, and save the world from suicide.” He did not want society to be ruled by the church, only by Christian principles, with Christians being “the conscious mind and the conscience of the nation.” We are now well into that experiment, and it has failed. Only Christianity can redeem the times.

 

 

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A Christian society?

28 Tuesday Feb 2017

Posted by John Charmley in Anglicanism, Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Education, Faith, Politics

≈ 22 Comments

Tags

Christian civilization, Christianity and politics, T.S. Eliot

 

tse

The question arises as to what Eliot meant when he wrote about a ‘Christian society’. The first thing to note is that he did not think that the British and American society he inhabited in the 1930s was one. That society was, at best, he thought, neutral. Its values and laws were shaped by a Christian heritage, but these were, he thought, in danger of becoming vestigial; at best Western society was neutral – at least it did not actively persecute anyone for being a Christian. What was true in the 1930s is no longer so; what was vestigial then is fossilised now, and it is very easy to be prosecuted for being an orthodox Christian. At the bare minimum, a Christian society ought to be one which promotes a Christian way of life. It is not a search for an abstraction of a set of principles, it is the recognition and promotion of a way of living which recognises that man’s destiny is eternal, and that the things of this world are, at best, a means to an end, that end being eternal life. This has profound implications for what we think the ends of education are, and for how we define concepts such as ‘success’ and ‘failure’; it is a radical call to humility and to the recognition of the reality of the effects of original sin. At the very least it is a call to be sceptical about the utopian solutions peddled by liberalism, and to be cautious about changing the status quo except with evidence that it runs counter to the Gospel message. So, to take two practical examples: it would argue that slavery was bad because it encouraged the dehumanisation of the individual and ran counter to the message of Jesus; but it would argue that changing the status of marriage was a bad idea for the same reason. Why was man created as he was? The ends to which God intended mankind are actively promoted by the traditional Christian idea of marriage; that it also has a variety of desirable social outcomes is no accident; we do best as a species when we follow the lines laid down for us by God. To be blunt, He knew what what He was doing – and we don’t.

Does such a route require of us self-discipline, self-abnegation and and some discomfort? If so, the chances are we are on the right road; if not, the chances point the other way. Such a State would not be limited to having only Christians as its members, for its values are ones which people of all faiths should be able to see the virtues of; neither would it be a narrowly confessional State. As Eliot put it, a Christian society should be one in which those who govern, whatever their particular religious beliefs and personal preferences, are confined

by the temper and traditions of the people which they rule, to a Christian framework within which to realize their ambitions and advance the prosperity and prestige of their country. They may frequently perform un-Christian acts; they must never attempt to defend their actions on un-Christian principles” (CC, 23)

For this to happen, education would be crucial. If the young are not reared in the maxims and principles of the Gospel message, and if they do not see it preached and practised, then the Christian society cannot come into existence. So, what would such an education look like? To that I shall attempt to return in my next post.

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The negativity of liberalism

27 Monday Feb 2017

Posted by John Charmley in Catholic Tradition, Church/State, Faith, Politics

≈ 17 Comments

Tags

Christian civilization, Christianity and politics, T.S. Eliot

bigeliot

Liberalism. Eliot observed was teleologically negative. It sought to liberate mankind from what it considered the shackles of antiquity, as task which, in itself, required the possession of a fine conceit of oneself: on the one hand the accumulated wisdom of the ages; on the other your own intellect. None of which is to say that there are not some things which always need reforming, but which is to say, with Eliot, that:

By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negative: the artificial, mechanized or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos. (CC, 12)

Organic development often looks chaotic and in need to rationalisation, but those who call for that so often throw out the baby with the bathwater, not realising that things which have existed for a long time have tended to do so because of some inherent virtue; we should be wary of changing things unless we understand the ways in which the changes we want will be for the better – that is Eliot’s plea, or at least part of it.

It is all very well for liberalism claim, as it used to (and bits of it still do), that religion is a matter of private practice, but it becomes increasingly difficult to love a Christian life in this society. I pay my taxes (don’t remind me) and in so doing I am paying for abortion on the NHS; if I ran a small business and I refused to put a slogan supporting gay marriage onto a cake or a garment, I should find myself liable to a penalty under law; the State itself had to insert clauses into its own laws to stop the Church being forced to allow gay marriages to take place on its premises -which has not stopped Christians going to court to try to make the Church do what it secured an exemption from doing. To oppose these modish causes is to find oneself labelled a bigot and, as more than one good Catholic blogger has found, to be inundated with hate from those who say that ‘love trumps hate and have no sense of irony. The pressures to de-Christianise are many; the pressures to stick to Christian orthodoxy few.

Christian culture is not an abstract concept, it is a way of life, a society which understands implicitly certain norms, and where behaviour is regulated as much by such understandings as it is by the law; indeed the law is in many ways the final resort, to be used only when an individual deliberately violates the custom and practice of the parish – a custom and a practice build around Christian norms. Self-satisfaction and selfishness are inbuilt parts of our fallen nature, and they are not to be combatted by secular means alone – or perhaps not at all by such means. We can mandate compassion through taxation, but what we get is money to be distributed by the State and a disinterested set of taxpayers who assume their duty is discharged by the payment of taxes.

But what was it Eliot meant when he wrote about a Christian society? It is to that theme, God willing, I shall return in future posts.

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reflections, links and stories.

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A new commandment I give unto you, That ye love one another; as I have loved you ... John 13:34

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