Our Christian heritage has been in the news quite a lot recently, with David Cameron defending the role of Christianity in our national life. It appears that he is trying to win back some of those voters who have left him for UKIP over the furore of ‘gay marriage.’ It is probably too late now, because the Conservatives have crossed the line too many times into non-conservative policies and people are waking up to a one party system with three faces in the UK, and have had enough.
‘Fear of causing offence drives the “Notting Hill claptrap about diversity”. “We need a much more muscular defence of our Judaeo-Christian heritage. Yes, we’re open to different cultures but we have to defend our values. That’s the message I want to hear from the Archbishop of Canterbury and from our politicians. Anything less is appeasement of the worst kind.”
So said Nigel Farage recently in an interview in November 2013, and he’s got something. If you deny our Judeo-Christian heritage then you deny an important element of who we are as a nation. It’s almost like trying to remove someone’s DNA. If you do so, they will die. It’s given many people have no obvious religious faith, many claim to be atheist or agnostic, many sneer at religion or its followers, but the indigenous British have been shaped substantially by Christianity. Even in our recent past, although there are many that will again sneer at it, the Christian roots of the UK came to the fore. In the dark days of the Second World War there were several national days of prayer called by the King and government. At the end of the War Winston Churchill led his MPs into St Margaret’s Church in Westminster to thank God for giving the allies victory in the Second World War. You never hear much about these incidents in accounts of our ‘finest hour’ as a nation. But emphasising such will have latte sipping liberals spitting into their coffee.
This again will chime with UKIP supporters and lays the lie that UKIP is just a single issue party. UKIP want out of the EU and much less immigration, but there is significantly more to their arsenal. They realise the importance of the Christian faith to our heritage and identity, and are not afraid of saying so. Plenty of people will warm to this message rather than the cold and clinical codes of equality and antidiscrimination legislation bought into by the main parties.
Whatever you say, there is strong evidence that a society’s or country’s religion has an awful lot to do with its position in the world. It is no accident that Great Britain was the world’s most influential nation for a very long time, followed by the USA since the early twentieth century, and that Christianity was their main religion. This does not whitewash all their actions by any means whatsoever, but in recent history these two nations were in the vanguard of standing against Hitler and Nazism, and stood for freedom and democracy. Then there are the shades of Christianity which seems to differentiate even further. For example it has been said that Catholic countries are generally behind the curve on economic statistics compared with Protestant nations. Out of the top ten nations in the world HDI index, which measures human development in terms of life expectancy, education and income, eight are traditional Christian Protestant or strongly Protestant nations. Here is the link:
Communist China did a recent survey which again proves rather inconvenient for the liberal left. They looked into the reasons why China has always been trying to catch up with the most socially, economically and militarily advanced countries on earth, what we generally understand as ‘the West.’ They looked at various factors as to why more advanced nations are more advanced, and found that the factor that made the difference was Christianity. You can see related information in this report from the BBC
https://data.undp.org/dataset/Table-1-Human-Development-Index-and-its-components/wxub-qc5k
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-pacific-10942954 , and also in this article:
Put that in your pipe and smoke it Mr Dawkins!
A good dose of Christianity makes a society, kinder, more compassionate and tolerant than it would otherwise be, and has some immense practical benefits for everyone whether believers or not. They may not like it, but militant secularists, atheists and God haters are busy sawing off the branch that holds them up, for fused into the root of our liberty as a nation (now fast disappearing) is a healthy dose of Christianity. They are hollowing out a vacuum that will be filled by a wicked and dark force that they will not be able to control, unless there is a major push back against it now.