Friday 20th August 2004
WE are witnessing in our society the sustained erosion of freedom, the increasing encroachment of the state and the death of common sense, the total victory of the Darwinists, the secular humanists and postmodernists in shaping our culture. To call it a victory is stretching it a bit as the church has hardly made a fight of it: at best it seems irrelevant and and at worst is seems to have acquiesced. Its leaders concentrate instead on global warming, the level of unemployment and the UN.
Each day brings fresh news that the government is proposing new legislation to curb this or that aspect of anti-social behaviour. Meanwhile scientists have identified genes that make some people susceptible to aggression or antisocial behaviour and offer us the ‘happy’ prospect of being able to ‘isolate a foetus’ with this genetic malfunction before birth.
The general thrust of all this research and legislation is to acknowledge that Britain is witnessing a moral collapse of unprecedented proportions.
Our political leaders see the symptoms and pass laws, pass money, create programmes and build awareness. But this is the stuff of King Canute by seeking to force the waves of permissive social change to retreat down the beach.
Yet as faith retreats all we are left with is legislation, education and money. Morality and restraint have broken down and government encroaches our freedoms to create a semblance of order. The tragedy is that many in the church campaign for changes in the law rather than hearts.
Of course legislation can work, but at what cost? I know of a city of three and a half million people where there is not a single scrawl of graffiti on the walls, where there are no teenage yobs hassling visitors, where there is no materialism, no exploitation of women in the newspapers, no homosexuality, no pornography, no family breakdown, no drug addicts, no drunk drivers, no anti-social behaviour, where young people are deeply respectful of their elders. This would seem like heaven on earth, but this city is Pyongyang, North Korea, where the ruling authorities had achieved social order by legislation and fear and shutting off contact with the outside world. Order had been achieved but the cost was the systematic elimination of freedom of speech, thought or action.
This is where those who advocate ‘legislation’ as the solution for our moral chaos are taking us. Without moral underpinning, the government is left with no alternative but to erode our freedoms to enforce a synthetic man-made social order.
Who is to blame? As theologian John Stott wrote: ‘If the house is dark when nightfall comes, there is no sense in blaming the house, for that is what happens when the sun goes down. The question to ask is: ‘where is the light?’ Just so, if society deteriorates and standards decline till it becomes dark as night there is no sense in blaming society, that is what happens when fallen men and women are left to themselves and human selfishness is unchecked. The question to ask is ‘Where is the Church?’
Tom Benyon
Member of the College of Evangelists Buckingham