In November, Trump was elected President of the USA largely on the basis of putting God back in His rightful place (In God We Trust). In December, The Wall Street Journal reported that Bible sales were up 22% while sales of other books were essentially flat. In fact, in 2019, 9.7 million copies of the Bible were sold in America. Last year, that number approached 14 million, with most sales driven by “first-time buyers.”
Or consider the “moment” God is having among secular thought leaders. Richard Dawkins and Elon Musk, recognizing the importance of Christianity to the West, have labeled themselves “cultural Christians.” Former New Atheist Ayaan Hirsi Ali experienced and defended a conversion to the Christian faith, as did her husband, well-known historian and Hoover Institute fellow Niall Ferguson. Former atheist and popular historian Tom Holland’s bestselling book has changed the narrative about the positive role Christianity has played in making the Western world. Psychologist and author Jordan Peterson often references Scripture and just released a 500-page book attempting to draw lessons and meaning from the Old Testament. And, of course, podcaster Joe Rogan recently interviewed Christian apologist Wesley Huff for his 14 million subscribers.
[T]hey say God moves in mysterious ways. I see signs that he is moving in the minds and hearts of secular intellectuals. Many of them are recognizing that secular humanism has failed and, against all their expectations, seem to be on the verge of embracing faith instead.
Brierley thinks this “wider turning of the secular tide in the West,” is a result of secularism’s failed predictions. A couple of decades ago, the New Atheists promised a rational utopia in the wake of religious decline. Instead, we got a crisis of meaning, widespread “confusion, a mental health crisis in the young, and the culture wars.” Now, a “New Theist” movement has sprung up, and even those not converting to Christ have toned down the anti-Christian rhetoric. Some are even suggesting that faith is good for the world.
Still, Brierley cautions that what we’re seeing is far from a revival. Many of the “cultural Christians” of our moment are not believers, nor are they claiming to be. There’s a big difference between regarding Christianity as a “useful fiction,” able to restore vigor and cohesion to the West, and submitting to it as the ultimate truth that demands our allegiance and devotion. For the millions of new Bible owners, the difference is between looking for sage advice and looking for God. Neither a better world nor a better you is what Christianity fundamentally offers.
Though a “vibe shift” in favor of religion is welcome, and cultural Christianity is genuinely a good thing, Christ does not claim to be “useful.” He claims to be the risen Son of God and King of kings, before whom every knee must bow. Those hoping to make Him “useful” overlook that the West did not become a great civilization because people believed Christianity offered good advice, but because they believed it was true. Anyone who tries to use the God of the Bible to some earthly end will only be repeating the blunder of Mainline Protestantism, not doing something genuinely new or important.
At the same time, the truth about Christ is compelling. Thus, the renewed interest in this cultural moment can be welcomed and celebrated. Secularism has failed to satisfy the human soul or build the utopia that was promised. But Christ will not fail, not in this world nor in the age to come. Our task is to point insistently to the full and glorious truth of His rule and reign.
We can direct the curious to resources like The Bible Project, or Graeme Goldsworthy’s classic book, According to Plan, both of which explain what the Bible is and what it teaches. Proven apologetic classics like C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity are incredibly helpful resources for those willing to give God a new look. Most importantly, the Church must be the Church, with the Word faithfully taught and lived. After all, we know that God’s Word will not return void, and He is at work through His people in this and every cultural moment.
In recent years what is inelegantly referred to as “cancel culture” has moved from focusing its attention on present-day matters to imposing its narrative on how we view the past. Indeed, in the Anglo-American world, the principal battlefield on which the culture wars are fought is that of the past. That is why so much effort has gone into corrupting the historical memory of America and Australia.
With the ascendancy of the decolonisation movement, a campaign that seeks to exact vengeance against the past has acquired an unprecedented intensity. It promotes the claim that the very foundation of the Anglo-American world must be condemned. From this perspective, its past has no redeeming features. It encourages the public, especially the young, to learn to hate their Christian heritage.
The beginnings of Australia, Britain, Canada, and the United States are represented as a form of original sin that still haunts society.
Australia is demonised as an evil settler-colonial society whose past is a history of shame. The Australian historian Geoffrey Blainey has characterised it as the “black armband” view of history. From this perspective, the past is inherently evil and corrupt; its influence is malevolent, and the sway it exercises over present-day society is implicated in oppressive and exploitative behaviour.
Arguably, one of the most significant achievements of the war against the past is to racialise the origins of Western civilisation and, by implication, subject contemporary society to a racialised imperative. Virtually every important historical personality is cast into the role of a racist villain. Aristotle has been denounced as the philosophical inspiration of white supremacy. Shakespeare’s plays are demonised as a purveyor of white privilege. Some academics and educators dismiss Winston Churchill’s status as a heroic foe of Nazi Germany and accuse him of being a war criminal.
In the case of America, the decolonisers assert the US was founded to entrench slavery and contend that, to this day, the nation is dominated by this legacy.
As a cultural practice, the racialisation of society has cast its net wide so that the most unlikely normal aspects of life can be deemed a manifestation of white privilege. Its most visible targets are the symbols of our past, such as statues or street names. However, the war against the past is so driven by hatred that it lashes out against the most trivial targets. Australian activists have denounced classical music and opera as racist. Even the names of plants and animals have been brought into the frame of decolonisation.
Dr. Brett Summerell, the Australian Institute of Botanical Science’s chief scientist, has decried that the “names of effectively all Australian plants were defined by white – primarily male – botanists”. He observed that many plants were “named using Latinised terms to describe features or locations, and a number are named after (usually white male) politicians or patrons”. As an illustration of the problem of allowing white male scientists to give plants a name, Summerell points to the plant genus Hibbertia, named after George Hibbert, a man “who made his fortune from slave trading”.
The logic of the crusade against the past is that there is literally nothing about Australia’s past worth celebrating. This message is continually communicated by institutions of culture. Schools have become an important site for indoctrinating young people with a negative rendition of their cultural inheritance.
This development is particularly striking in Britain, where the war against the past is relentlessly pursued in the classroom. British schools often rely on teaching material that instructs teachers to avoid presenting the British Empire as an equal balance of good and bad. They are told the British Empire should be taught as any other power that committed atrocities. The curriculum guidelines suggest that the deeds of the British Empire are comparable to those of Nazi Germany. In effect, these guidelines seek to make British children feel guilty about their nation’s past.
All aspects of the past come with a health warning and even school libraries are being cleansed of old books. School libraries in Australia have removed “outdated and offensive books on colonialism” from their collections.
The purge of a school library in Melbourne was guided by Dr Al Fricker, a Dja Wurrung man, and expert in Indigenous education with Deakin University. While auditing all 7000 titles on its library shelves, Fricker justified removing books because they were almost 50 years old and were “simply gathering dust anyway”.
There is something truly disturbing about the idea that a library ought to rid itself of old non-fiction books. Once upon a time, old books were treasured and treated with care by libraries, not treated with suspicion. It is not just old books targeted in schools; any appreciation of the legacy of the past is cleansed from the curriculum.
From a very young age, children are exposed to a form of education that aims to morally distance them from their cultural legacy and deprive them of a sense of pride in their past. In the UK, primary schoolchildren as young as five are offered US-style lessons about “white privilege”. Teachers are instructed to avoid teaching “white saviour narratives” during lessons on slavery by de-emphasising the role of white abolitionists such as William Wilberforce.
Significant sections of these societies have adopted the attitude of thinking the worst about their nation’s history. These sentiments are often transmitted to schoolchildren, and many youngsters grow up estranged from their communities’ past. According to a survey by the London-based Policy Exchange think-tank, almost half of the young people between the ages of 18 and 24 agreed that schools should “teach students that Britain was founded on racism and remains structurally racist today”.
Their reaction is not surprising since 42 percent of 16- to 18-year-olds have been taught that “Britain is currently a racist country”.
Often, during history lessons, more time was devoted to disabusing pupils’ beliefs in the celebrated accounts of their communities’ past than to acquaint children with the important deeds of their ancestors.
This curriculum is more likely to motivate children to feel emotionally alienated from their ancestors than to feel a sense of pride about their nation’s past.
Apologists for an anti-patriotic curriculum continually protest that the past needs to be painted in even darker colours than is the norm. One American website advising history teachers complained: “History is an essential theme of the education curriculum. This is because learning about a nation’s origin is very important. However, in children’s history classes, kids are deprived of the parts of history considered murky. The curriculum is more focused on portraying America as a rational and noble nation.”
Disabusing the young of the belief that their country is a noble nation is one of the drivers of a curriculum designed to deprive pupils of possessing a sense of national pride.
Why does all this matter? If schools and other institutions of culture transmit a narrative based on suspicion and hatred for the past, society is in serious trouble. It means young people are not only dispossessed of their historical inheritance but are also indoctrinated to feel estranged from it.
Until recently it was recognised that education and the socialisation of young people depended on acquainting the young with the experience of the past. Education is a realm where young people become acquainted with the experience of the past and learn about the values that have evolved over the centuries through a generational transaction. This occurs principally through the family and young people’s education at school.
Throughout the modern era, leading thinkers from across the ideological divide understood the significance of transmitting the knowledge of the past to young people. The conservative thinker Matthew Arnold’s formulation of passing on “the best that has been thought and said in the world” is virtually identical to the ultra-radical Lenin’s insistence that education needs to transmit the “store of human knowledge”. Writing from a conservative perspective, the English philosopher Michael Oakeshott concluded: “Education in its most general significance may be recognised as a specific transaction which may go on between the generations of human beings in which newcomers to the scene are initiated into the world they inhabit.” Oakeshott went on to call it a “moral transaction”, one “upon which a recognisably human life depends for its continuance”.
This socialisation of young people through the intergenerational transmission of the legacy of the past forges connections between members of society. It provides young people with the cultural and moral resources necessary to make their way in the world and gain strength from the experience of their elders. A 16-year-old boy who knows that his uncle and grandfather served in the Navy has a model of duty available to him even if he doesn’t join up when he comes of age. A girl whose mother commits herself to environmental activism grows up oriented towards valuing the planet. This is more than school-acquired knowledge; it is fundamental to the adulthood that children and teenagers envision as they get older. The stories that children hear from their parents, relatives, and neighbours help them to understand who they are, and where they come from.
Through this intergenerational dialogue, the experience of the past is both tested and revitalised.
Unfortunately, institutions of culture have become captured by a spirit that is entirely antithetical to the project of transmitting society’s historical legacy to young people. Instead of transmitting the values upheld by previous generations, educational institutions are often in the business of dispossessing young people from their cultural inheritance.
Consequently, they are complicit in promoting the condition of social amnesia. In effect, the younger generation is deprived of the knowledge that would help them to know where they come from. They are historically disconnected from the experience and influence of previous generations. Uprooted from the past they are often disoriented and confused about their place in the world. Nor is the problem confined to institutions of education. The project of estranging society from its historical inheritance has proved to be remarkably successful. The media and the entertainment industry – for example, Netflix and Hollywood – communicate the sentiment of intolerant anti-traditionalist scorn.
This deep-seated mistrust of tradition goes so far as to warn mothers and fathers to be wary of the child-rearing practices used by parents in previous times. The advice and views of grandparents is frequently attacked as irrelevant and possibly prejudicial to the development of the child by so-called parenting experts. As a result of the institutionalisation of these attitudes, children are no longer socialised into the values held by their grandparents and certainly not by their more distant ancestors.
It is through the alienation of society from its history that opponents of Western culture seek to gain moral and political hegemony. The stakes are high in this conflict since the project of contaminating the past diminishes the capacity of society to endow people’s lives with meaning. A society that becomes ashamed of its historical legacy invariably loses its way. It weakens society’s capacity to socialise children and dooms them to a state of a permanent crisis of identity.
This article is from The Australian and it does not make mention of the role Christianity had in our history and the fact that we are in a spiritual battle that is in its last stages. Satan and his demons know their time is short. Their strategy has changed. The theory of evolution which convinced most that God is not needed to explain the existence of the Cosmos is under threat from the discovery of DNA and the electron microscope. DNA is complex information that controls the highly complex machinery in each cell. The only source of highly complex information is an intelligent source outside of its creation. Satan knew the evolution strategy would eventually fail so he prepared the younger generation in particular for his next strategy – ALIENS. Even the most outspoken atheists such as Richard Dawkins when pressed on the evidence for intelligent design “It could come about in the following way. It could be that at some earlier time, somewhere in the universe, a civilization evolved, by probably some kind of Darwinian means, to a very, very high level of technology and designed a form of life that they seeded onto, perhaps, this planet.
If you have not heard Dawkins speak on intelligent design then you need to listen to this interview with Ben Stein. DAWKINS IS OPEN TO ALIENS BUT NOT GOD.
Just look at all the computer games for young children and films that are about ALIENS. What about the thousands of reported UFOs and Alien abductions. Satan has prepared people for his final strategy. Demons are already manifesting as Aliens and the saviour of mankind. It is only a matter of time before the Antichrist (possessed by Satan) comes on the scene.
In this Direct interview, John Anderson (former Deputy Prime Minister of Australia) is joined by Greg Sheridan, widely-respected foreign editor for The Australian. . They discuss the Christian foundations of Western civilisation and the profound importance of religion at a societal, cultural and individual level. They delve into the deep rationality that often undergirds Christian faith, and question the capacity of atheistic philosophies to truly nourish the human soul. Greg Sheridan is one of Australia’s most influential national security commentators, who is active across print media, television and radio and also writes extensively on culture. He has written eight books. His latest, Christians: The Urgent Case for Jesus in Our World is a compelling argument for the modern relevance and importance of the New Testament. As foreign editor of The Australian, he specialises in Asia. He has interviewed Presidents and Prime Ministers across the world.
I have assembled this post from a great article by Greg Sheridan in The Weekend Australian, “Respect for women: Society will pay for loss of its Christian ideals”.
As we have moved away from our traditional Judaeo Christian roots our cultural leaders have been telling us now for more than five decades, that we can transition into a neo-pagan culture and this will somehow be good for women. Obviously, when it comes down to survival of the fittest men are going to be the winners. The teaching of evolution in our schools has undermined the very foundation of those Judaeo Christian roots and yet the latest science reveals that this highly complex universe was created. Life itself is built on highly complex codes (DNA) and the laws governing the universe can only derive from a highly intelligent mind beyond our comprehension.
In Australia, this past five weeks, from the shocking accounts of the alleged rape of Brittany Higgins and other disgraceful sexual assaults in Parliament House to the overwhelmingly powerful National Press Club address of abuse survivor and Australian of the Year, Grace Tame, have provided a wrenching examination of the national soul.
The problem with sexual assault lies with men. They are the perpetrators. But all of this — men and women — exist within a culture. And what’s happening to the culture affects what happens to the human beings within the culture.
The progressive orthodoxy, that we used to be overwhelmingly sexist and we’ve made great progress but we’ve still got a long way to go, is only about a quarter right. On some things we have made progress. On most we’ve gone backwards.
My father, and countless men of his generation, did not treat women with disrespect. Nor did the culture mandate that he should. Our culture, right now, has the greatest trouble treating anybody with respect.
“Therefore a man shall leave his father and his mother and hold fast to his wife, and they shall become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked and were not ashamed.” Genesis 2:24
We are on the brink of becoming a majority atheist nation. The loss of religious belief in society affects the way we see human beings, men and women. It goes without saying that Christians frequently do not remotely live up to their ideals, but Christian ideals nonetheless have a lot to offer the culture in this moment of truth-telling and contradiction.
Elements of popular culture today work to degrade women, and men as well. This is beyond politics. The big mistake of the Me-too movement is not to become too sharply critical of men, but to turn their movement into a left versus right culture wars battleground. Abuse and disrespect transcend ideological lines.
The astonishing abusiveness of Twitter is dehumanising. While everybody who ventures into that sewer faces some foul level of abuse, it is far worse for women because so often the abuse is sexualised and violent in its imagery.
The ubiquity of ever more degrading pornography propounds implicitly the idea that women are primarily objects. Conservatives should welcome the Me-too movement in its late discovery of pornography’s damage.
John Dickson, the historian and popular Christian author, and presenter of Australia’s No 1 religious podcast, Undeceptions, wrote a book, A Sneaking Suspicion, about Christianity, in which in the first chapter he made a measured, gentle, friendly and wise argument for sexual fidelity within marriage and even a culture of purity. About six years ago, the culture had become so intolerant of this outlook that some anti-religion zealots managed to get it banned from NSW government schools for a month or so on the grounds it was “dangerous” (the ban was later overturned).
Dangerous? Maybe Christianity has some useful things to say about men and women and how they relate to each other. Rodney Stark, the foremost sociologist of religious history, argues in The Triumph of Christianity that it was Christianity’s pro-woman stance which more than anything led to its rapid expansion 2000 years ago.
Paul’s statement of universality in his letter to the Galatians was revolutionary: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male and female. For you are all one in Christ Jesus.”
Larry Siedentop, the great Oxford scholar, in his history of liberalism, Inventing the Individual, judges Paul’s interpretation of Christian universalism as being directly responsible over the centuries for the evolution of liberalism. Destroying the religious distinction between men and women led eventually to destroying the civic distinction between them.
Given that the problem of sexual assault in particular, and domestic violence, of which there is a plague in Australia, is a problem with men, men could do much worse than look to Jesus as to how a man should behave towards women.
Throughout the Gospels, Jesus rebukes male power and patriarchy. In the Gospel of John there is one of the most affecting of all the scenes in the New Testament. A woman caught in adultery is brought before Jesus. The sexism inherent in the ancient world is evident in the fact that the man she was presumably caught with is not brought for punishment. Her accusers want Jesus to command death by stoning, which was the punishment in the law.
Instead, Jesus is mostly silent. He writes on the sand in the ground, and ancient tradition has it he is writing some of the crimes committed by the accusers. He then says: “Let he among you who has not sinned be the first to throw a stone.” The crowd, which had been menacing and unruly and full of that sense of violence a mob can possess, dissipates. I do not condemn you, Jesus tells the woman, go and sin no more.
If you’re not familiar with the Gospels, the best place to start is with Luke. His is the loveliest of the Gospels, because it has the most women in it, and has the most about women. Luke recounts a dinner Jesus attends at the home of a local big shot named Simon. A “notorious” woman shows up uninvited and Simon is furious. But Jesus rebukes him and defends the woman. She is welcome in my company. She is the recipient of Jesus’ love.
There are women, too, of great heroism and agency in the Gospels. Mary, the mother of Jesus, is one. She is an activist, an agent of history, she takes charge of her unexpected pregnancy. I have always liked the idea that she gave Luke all his great scoops about the incarnation of Jesus, which would show Mary already directing her story and directing history.
All the way through the Gospels the women are more faithful and more courageous than the men. The first human being to proclaim Jesus was a woman. At the cross, when Jesus was dying, there were three women, among them Mary, and only one man, John. And when Jesus rises from the dead, the first person to see him is Mary Magdalene, who tells the apostles. She is the apostle to the apostles. But with Easter soon approaching, let’s return to how Jesus treats women. As he is dying on the cross, over three hours in the most excruciating death we can imagine, as his body grows cold, as the birds find he is defenceless, as each breath is an agonising struggle to lift his shoulders and grasp some air, at that time, the last words he addresses to a human being are concern for Mary, his mother.
He tells his best friend John to look after Mary: “This is your mother.” Forget the theology of this, look just at the human love that is there.
Part of the Christian sexual revolution was to make marriage, for the first time, an institution of mutual love and respect, which was not the way it was conceived in the ancient world. Perhaps the central word in Christianity is respect, respect for human beings and human dignity. Christianity allowed its portrayal of human sexuality to become way too negative over the past 150 years. But its understanding that sex is really a big deal was a rejection of a central element of the barbarism of the pagan world.
Dr Emma Woods, in a fascinating piece on the ABC Religion and Ethics website, argued recently that just teaching the importance of consent, while obviously absolutely essential, is not enough to get respect back into relationships; there is a need to teach a morality of sexual ethics.
She contrasts the dominant cultural paradigm of today that sex is mainly recreational with the traditional human moral intuition that sex is a matter of great significance. Men’s brains are a little inferior because it’s easier for them to fall into the mistake of thinking it’s just recreation. Women are more hard-wired, according to Woods, to treat sex as something of great significance.
If it is something of no significance then it is naturally much harder for women and girls to say no — not legally or ethically harder, but psychologically. Yet this paradigm ultimately offends the innate nature of humanity.
One of the most important Christian elucidations of human sexuality is the Theology of the Body, which John Paul II, the greatest of the modern popes, produced. It is too little studied and promoted by Christians, even, weirdly, by Catholics. It is a profoundly rich meditation which cannot be easily summarised.
It starts with the inherent human dignity of each person, created in the likeness and image of God. It also sees the sexual relationship as an intrinsically divine element of human nature. Christians understand God as one being, but also, as the Holy Trinity, as a divine community of love. Both the Old Testament and the Gospels talks of marriage meaning that “the two shall become one flesh”. JP II sees this as a divine likeness in humanity to the community of love in the Trinity.
The Bible, Old Testament and New, is full of love, and the celebration of love, human as well as divine. Just read The Song of Solomon. But there is always the sense of the need for restraint, in order to respect oneself and to respect other people. Christian churches need to preach their positive vision of human relationships much more clearly. And the secular culture, racing to the confused and disastrous entropy of its neo-paganism, would do well to listen.
Political commentator and Daily Wire editor-in-chief Ben Shapiro spoke April 25th, 2018 to 11,000 students at Liberty University about the profound biblical values that created America, and why they’re worth defending today.
“America was built on a fundamental idea… that human beings are made in the image of God,” Shapiro said.
“Judeo-Christian philosophy (based on Biblical truth) expects us to struggle, to strive,” he added. “Judeo-Christian philosophy demands that we do our best and that we act virtuously on the individual level so that we can feel secure without invading each other’s rights. The Judeo-Christian tradition says that with freedom comes responsibility.”
Shapiro argued that those values are under attack because Americans now value collectivism over virtue.
“Collectivist philosophy, however, thinks differently—they expect us to give our individual striving for truth,” he said. “All we have to do is trade our individual responsibility for the comfort of collective power. … We can avoid that (individual) struggle by handing over all power to a nanny state.”
Shapiro believes collectivism breeds death and pointed to the case of Alfie Evans, a toddler with an undiagnosed brain condition in the United Kingdom.
The British government has forbidden his parents from seeking medical care outside of the country even though an Italian hospital has offered to treat him. The British courts have ruled it is in Alfie’s best interest to die.
“Collectivists see the state as the source of our morals, and our families as obstacles standing between individuals and their master. That’s exactly what’s happening with Alfie Evans, where bureaucrats are standing between parents and their child, saying that they know best that a child has
Shapiro, a vocal pro-life advocate, explained that collectivism doesn’t just murder babies outside of the womb, it murders baby within the womb through abortion.
Ultimately, collectivism brings the death of family, community, and society, Shapiro argued.
“So, the question becomes how exactly do we go about restoring the Judeo-Christian tradition upon which the nation was built? How exactly do we bring back the philosophy of the Founders and restore their promise?” he continued.
“To do that, we have to go back to basics. We actually have to talk about morality in politics,” he explained. “It is our job to learn, as you are doing here at Liberty, about what made our civilisation great—and what can make our civilisation great still.”
Shapiro received a standing ovation for his remarks. The truth wins out.
“As long as I am your president, no one is ever going to stop you from practising your faith,” Trump said at the evangelical Christian school in Lynchburg, Virginia, before a crowd of about 50,000 people
“America has always been the land of dreams because America is a nation of true believers,” the president continued. “When the pilgrims landed at Plymouth, they prayed. When the founders wrote the Declaration of Independence, they invoked our Creator four times. Because in America, we don’t worship government, we worship God.”
Trump added that for the same reason elected officials in the U.S. put their hands on the Bible and say, “So help me God,” while taking the oath of office. “It is why our currency proudly declares, ‘In God we trust,’ and it’s why we proudly proclaim that we are one nation under God every time we say the pledge of allegiance.”
The story of America, he continued, is the “story of an adventure that began with deep faith, big dreams and humble beginnings.”
Trump also spoke about Liberty’s founder, the Rev. Jerry Falwell Sr. “In this beautiful campus and in your smiling faces, but it all began with a vision. That vision was of a world class university for evangelical Christians. … No doubt many people told him his vision was impossible, and I am sure they continued to say that so long after he started, at the beginning with just 154 students, but the fact is no one has ever achieved anything significant without a chorus of critics standing on the sidelines explaining why it can’t be done.”
He continued, “Nothing is easier or more pathetic than being a critic. … The future belongs to the people who follow their heart no matter what the critics say because they truly believe in their vision. … A small group of failed voices who think they know everything and understand everyone want to tell everybody else how to live and what to do and how to think, but you aren’t going to let other people tell you what you believe, especially when you know that you’re right.”
LIVING ETERNAL NOW 