Anglican Mainstream

By Peter Riddell, Timesonline

Voters are deeply pessimistic about the state of Britain today, believing that society is broken and heading in the wrong direction, a Populus poll for The Times has found.

Nearly three fifths of voters say that they hardly recognise the country they are living in, while 42 per cent say they would emigrate if they could.

But worries over the pace of social change and dislocation are balanced by the belief that life will get better, according to the survey undertaken at the weekend.

It suggests that 70 per cent believe that society is now broken, echoing a Conservative campaign theme of the past two years, while 68 per cent say people who play by the rules get a raw deal and 82 per cent think it is time for a change.

The snapshot of Britain also confirms, however, that the battle between the parties has tightened with Labour two points up at 30 per cent.

Women, working-class people and Tory voters were more likely to say that they hardly recognise their own country.

Overall, 64 per cent think that Britain is going in the wrong direction and just 31 per cent believe it is on the right track.

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By Albert Mohler

You do not have to look far to find evidence of the fact that males are in trouble in these confused and confusing times. On the university campuses, women undergraduate students outnumber young men by a clear margin — 60% to 40%. A frightening percentage of young males are or have been behind bars, and the vast majority of young men are delaying their assumption of adult roles and responsibilities until well into their twenties or early thirties.

A crisis of fatherlessness marks the lives of millions of boys and young men, with boys growing up without fathers in the home now comprising a majority within some ethic groups and urban populations. At almost every grade level, boys are performing below girls, and are often left behind as girls go on to more advanced levels of learning. Then, adding insult to injury, reports from scientists indicate that both sperm counts and testosterone levels are falling among some boys and men — blamed on anything from hormone supplements in the food chain to chemical contamination of ground water.

In many churches, young men and older boys are simply missing. The absence of young men ages 18 to 30 is just a fact of life in many congregations. Though this is especially acute in the mainline Protestant denominations, it is increasingly true of many evangelical churches as well.

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By Martin Beckford, Telegraph

Tolerance has become a “negative virtue” in Britain as important but contentious subjects are no longer discussed, according to the Archbishop of York.

The Archbishop, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, also echoed Pope Benedict XVI's criticism of the Equality Bill. Photo: PA Dr John Sentamu warned that differences over areas such as immigration and funding of public services are just being “thrust into the margins” where they “fester” rather than being talked about openly.

He claimed the Government is trying to “remove religion from public life” in the name of tolerance, and force people to keep their faith behind closed doors. 

The Archbishop, the second most senior cleric in the Church of England, also echoed Pope Benedict XVI’s criticism of the Equality Bill this week as an "unjust" restriction on religious freedom.

He said that a clause attempting to define religious workers – in order to exempt them from the anti-discrimination law – would have caused serious problems for churches had it not been removed in the House of Lords, by making it impossible for them to demand that new employees were Christian.

In a speech to Newcastle City Council on Wednesday, Dr Sentamu said: “This is symptomatic of a trend which has intensified in Britain over the past fifty years in the name of tolerance.

“That is, an attempt to remove religion from public life. And in the process, tolerance, which is supposed to be the tool to help us deal with difference and disagreement has instead, become a negative virtue – a means of diminishment and marginalisation.

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By Theodore Dalrymple, The American Conservative

Will America follow Europe into anomie and atheism?

In some ways, things have never been better for Europe. When my father was born, in 1909, his life expectancy was 49; if he had been born today, his life expectancy would be approaching 80. The increase in wealth and standard of living has been startling. In 1960, Sicilian peasants still slept with their farm animals, and my working-class patients remembered sharing lavatories with other households. In France, the years in which it lost its colonial empire are known as les trente glorieuses, the glorious thirty, when the French economy grew so fast that absolute poverty was eliminated and the country obtained the best infrastructure in the world. Germany’s Wirtschaftswunder after the war really was a wonder, transforming a country that U.S. Secretary of the Treasury Henry Morgenthau Jr. wanted to keep forever in a state of rural pre-industrialization into the largest exporter of manufactured goods in the world.

Yet for all this success, there is a pervasive sense of doom. Prosperous and long-lived as never before, Europeans look into the future with fear, as if they have a secret sickness that has not yet made itself manifest by obvious symptoms but is nevertheless eating away in their vital parts. They are aware that, in Chinese parlance, the mandate of heaven has been withdrawn from them, and that in losing that, they have lost everything. All that is left is to preserve their remaining privileges as best they can; après nous, as a mistress of Louis XV is said to have remarked, le deluge.

The secularization of Europe is hardly a secret. Religion’s long, melancholy, withdrawing roar, as Matthew Arnold put it, is a roar no longer, and hardly even a murmur. In France, the oldest daughter of the Church, fewer than 5 percent of the population attend Mass regularly. The English national church has long been an object of derision, and the current Archbishop of Canterbury succeeds in uniting the substance and appearance of foolishness and unworldliness not with sanctity, but with sanctimony. In Wales, where nonconformist Christianity was the dominant cultural influence, most of the chapels have been converted into residences by interior decorators. Vast outpourings of pietistic writings molder on the shelves of secondhand booksellers, which themselves are closing down daily. In the Netherlands, some elements of the religious pillarization of the state remain: state-funded television channels are still allotted to Protestants and Catholics respectively. But while the shell exists, the substance is gone.

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By Julian Mann

Evangelical Christianity was instrumental in Britain’s commercial success in the 19th century. That statement does not endorse the prosperity gospel – the unbiblical idea taught in some churches that God promises material prosperity to faithful Christian believers in this world as well as the next. It is simply a statement of historical fact.

British merchants influenced by the Evangelical revival of the 18th century were men of their word. Since commerce relies on trust, their enterprises flourished enriching their nation.

When bad religion corrupts societies, commerce suffers. Whilst in a fallen world the wicked prosper (see Psalm 73), in the normal course of events when societies go bad, they also go broke. One does not have to believe that the recent earthquake in Haiti was direct divine retribution for the popularity of Voodoo in that nation to see that its society has been significantly impoverished by bad religion.

There is a grave danger that the religion of political correctness will do the same here. It is already putting unsupportable burdens on commercial enterprise. Employment law is becoming increasingly anti-meritocratic and the post-modern culture of style over substance, presentational spin over telling the truth, penalises the hard-working and the honest.

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By Sarah Cassidy, Independent

The number of suicides in the UK has risen for the first time in a decade as the recession took hold, according to figures released by the Office for National Statistics (ONS) yesterday.

Meanwhile, the number of divorces fell to the lowest level since 1975, suggesting that more couples may be staying together because the economic crisis left them unable to afford to split. Alcohol-related deaths also rose by 3.5 per cent over the same period to 9,031 lives lost – including 11 drinkers aged under 35. The figures will add to the growing alarm about the damage being done by Britain's culture of excessive drinking and fuel fears that the recession will have long-lasting repercussions.

The start of the recession coincided with a 6.1 per cent increase in the number of people taking their own lives – the first rise since 1998, the official statistics revealed. Since hitting a peak in 1998, suicide rates have steadily decreased, thanks to a range of initiatives to provide support to the vulnerable. But the number of suicides jumped from 5,377 in 2007 to 5,706 in 2008 – coinciding with the beginning of the recession.

Three times as many men as women killed themselves. Suicide rates for men were highest in the north east of England and lowest in the East Midlands. There is no clear regional pattern in female suicides.

There were also 9,031 alcohol-related deaths in the UK in 2008, compared to 8,724 the previous year. The number of drink-related fatalities has more than doubled since the early 1990s. Almost all the deaths were of people aged over 35, but 11 deaths related to alcohol consumption were recorded in 2008 in the 15-34 age group.

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By Marcia Segelstein, World Magazine

Scientists, like doctors, hold enormous sway. When they pronounce, people listen. For example, some scientists in recent years have made much of the world believe that global warming is primarily man-made and must be stopped at all costs. The fate of the planet, they tell us, hangs in the balance. Cracks in their research reporting and their scientific neutrality regarding policy, however, have recently emerged. Could it be that they’re wrong? That’s a serious question to ponder when considering the costly, drastic steps they recommend.

Michael Cook, writing in the current issue of Salvo magazine, reveals the fact that it was science (junk science, as it turns out) that was behind China’s one-child policy, instituted in 1980. As a revered scientist, Chinese missile expert Song Jian was allowed the rare privilege of traveling overseas. In 1978, Song was shown a computer model by two Dutch birth control theorists that predicted global catastrophe if the world’s population was not brought under control. Song bought into their theory and sold it, so to speak, to his friends in the Chinese Communist Party. As Cook writes, “What Song confidently offered them was the illusion of precision. In their isolation from the West, these Chinese officials had never even seen computer modelling and graphs. They found ideas like ‘spaceship earth’ and the mathematical control of childbearing utterly compelling.”

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By Steven Malanga, City Journal

Plummeting birthrates threaten prosperity worldwide. Can America buck the trend?

In Kamikatsu, on the Japanese island of Shikoku, officials have set up an agricultural cooperative whose members log on to computers daily to check the fluctuating prices of the produce that they grow. Then they go out and pick whatever is fetching the best price that day. Unusual, yes, but what’s truly surprising about this cooperative is the average age of its members: 70. In a country where lots of folks retire at 60, Kamikatsu’s residents are working well into their senior years—and they’re doing so not only to buoy retirement earnings but also to energize the local economy. With nearly half of the town’s residents 65 and older, the government realized that there simply wasn’t enough of a traditional workforce available to build or staff most typical industries.

Kamikatsu shows in microcosm what Japan and several other nations now face—and what others soon will. For decades, demographers and economists have watched the world’s fertility rate plunge as countries grew wealthier and more urban. These days, fertility rates in much of the industrialized world are far below replacement levels—that is, the number of kids that parents must have to replace themselves and adults who remain childless. Though the steepest declines happened first in wealthy countries like Japan, Italy, Germany, and Spain, even many developing countries have seen their fertility rates head downward.

The demographic shift brings extraordinary new challenges. Economists are increasingly recognizing that the struggles of places like Japan and Italy to extricate themselves from economic slumps that began in the 1990s result in part from extreme “birth dearths” that have shrunk labor pools, dried up consumer spending, and made businesses, staffed by older employees, more risk-averse. Decades of government efforts to reverse birth dearth have largely proved fruitless.

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By Carolyn Moynihan, MercartorNet

Horrors! The next prime minister of Australia might be a man who advocates virginity for young people.

Here is this week’s shock-horror story from Australia: the country’s next prime minister might be a man who advises his daughters not to throw their virginity away on just anyone. Fair go, that’s what he dared to say during an interview with a women’s magazine. You probably heard the resulting outcry in America, above the President’s State of the Union address, above the iPad hysteria: ‘What a chauvinist! What a pontificator! What a hypocrite!’ — to recite only the more flattering epithets.

The nicest thing any pundit had to say about Tony Abbott, newly elected leader of the opposition (conservative) Liberal Party, was that he was too honest for his own good.

And all because, when asked during an interview with the Women’s Weekly what advice he would give his three daughters on sex before marriage, he said: “I would say to my daughters, if they were to ask me this question… it is the greatest gift you can give someone, the ultimate gift of giving, and don’t give it to someone lightly.”

Okay. Every politician knows that it is death by media frenzy to voice an opinion on a moral issue. Especially if the politico is a man; especially if the issue is sex; especially if, as Abbott freely acknowledges, he has not always lived up to his own standard; and most especially if he happens, like Abbott, to be a practising Catholic. Because we all know, don’t we, that Catholics are the most benighted as well as the most pontificating and hypocritical of people on the subject of sex, if nothing else.

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Sharlene Azam

Twenty-five years ago, a balding, middle-aged man approached a 13-year-old girl at a school play and invited her to model in his hotel room. Knowing her father would object, the girl asked her mother to take her.

They met in the lobby of the Hotel Vancouver, where the man told the mother to wait in the bar. Instead of insisting that she accompany her, her mother asked the teenager what she wanted.

He wasn’t thrilled, but he shot several rolls with her mom in the room.

A few weeks later the girl received a copy of the photos, along with a note indicating that she was “not model material” because she was “unable to take direction.” She understood what he meant—she had worn her mother’s modest bathing suit rather than a bikini or scanty underwear, and she had refused to peek out from behind the shower curtain or lie on the bed with her legs in the air.
That girl is me. I had allowed myself to be photographed by a complete stranger based on the promise that he could fulfill my fantasy to be gazed upon and admired by the entire world.
But I had not been able to do the overtly sexual things he had asked me to do. I had never been naked in front of anyone. I hadn’t even kissed a boy.

Would I do it today if I were 13 and asked to pose topless? Maybe. Bombarded with images that link a woman’s value to her sexual willingness, girls see their role models engaging in graphic, exhibitionist behavior—and being rewarded for it (at least in the short term).

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By Candice Z Watters, Boundless Webzine

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By Joanna Bogle, Mercartornet

Uneasy about social disintegration, Britons have yet to face the underlying causes.

With a general election pending in Britain – it looks set to happen in May – everyone is analysing political and social trends. A recent survey seemed to indicate that most people think of themselves as backing the Conservative Party – 32 per cent of the population , as against 27 per cent who consider themselves Labour supporters.

Conservative with a capital “C” maybe, in the sense of supporting the Conservatives' economic approach, or, at any rate, rejecting that of old-style socialism. You wouldn’t find much support now for the Labour slogans of the mid-twentieth century about nationalising major industries. And the old Labour lifestyle — the beer-and-cigarettes, the women who sat knitting during the annual party conference (yes, really! there are photographs) the fish-and-chips-and-mushy-peas… All that has given way to dinners in good restaurants, and Harriet Harman in a smart suit and people who feel more comfortable ordering a cafe latte and a pannini than a brew of tea and a steak and kidney pie with chips.

But conservative with a small “c”? Not so sure. Figures show that most people seem to approve of an entire social agenda which, just a couple of decades ago, would have seemed anathema: same-sex unions, adoption of children by homosexual couples, abortion on demand. There is a general, vague feeling that it is somehow a pity that some old community values and a sense of neighbourliness have disappeared, but few people would dare to link that with the decline of specific moral principles. The majority would look blank at any suggestion that there should be a general return to male/female lifelong marriage as the norm, with extra-marital sexual activity regarded as wrong, and children taught all this as a matter of course.

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From Anglican TV Ministries

By Pamela Geller, American Thinker (Hat Tip: VOL)

A new documentary, Oral Sex Is the New Goodnight Kiss, chronicles America's moral decay. Sharlene Azam, a Canadian filmmaker, says, "If you talk to teens [about oral sex], they'll tell you it's not a big deal. In fact, they don't consider it sex. They don't consider a lot of things sex." In the documentary, teenage girls talk casually about their sexual experiences and even their forays into prostitution.

One girl sums up the new attitudes: "Five minutes and I got $100. If I'm going to sleep with them anyway because they're good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?"

Azam said that this was going on in good homes right under parents' noses: "The prettiest girls from the most successful families [are the most at risk]. We're not talking about marginalized girls. [Parents] don't want to know because they really don't know what to do. I mean, you might be prepared to learn that, at age 12, your daughter has had sex, but what are you supposed to do when your daughter has traded her virginity for $1,000 or a new bag?"

This is the bitter fruit of forty years of feminist domination in the United States.

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From Clayboy

Only six per cent think that people should faithfully follow their religious leaders; 89 per cent take the alternative view. These attitudes do not merely reflect a reluctance to be told what to do; most people simply do not believe that there are absolute standards. Sixty per cent agree that “there can never be absolutely clear guidelines of what is good and evil”; the same proportion agrees that “morality is a personal matter and society should not force everyone to follow one standard”. (p74 – my emphasis)

By Melanie Phillips, Spectator

A number of papers (Times, Telegraph, Mail) summarise the findings of the latest British Social Attitudes survey as showing that Britain has become a more ‘conservative’ nation, while others highlight the fact that it is now also more socially ‘liberal’ as revealing a fundamental contradiction (Independent, Guardian) This surely illustrates a fundamental confusion over current thinking and particularly over the understanding of ‘conservatism’. The source of the confusion is the fact that  on the one hand, a greater number think of themselves as Conservative than Labour supporters (32 /27 per cent); only two in five want more spending on public services such as health and education, the lowest level since 1984, or want greater redistribution of income from rich to poor compared with more than half of the public in 1994; but on the other hand, far fewer than previously disapprove of homosexuality (fewer than a third) or cohabitation (27 per cent).

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By Melanie Phillips

A propos my remarks in the Daily Mail this morning about the Edlington child torture case, and in particular the fact that the mother of the child sadists had fed them cannabis to keep them quiet, the anti-drugs campaigner Mary Brett makes the following hugely important point:

Prenatal exposure to cannabis could be a factor in the development of the brains of the brothers if their mother used cannabis while pregnant. One long-term study from 1978, still running, by Peter Fried (Canada) found that children aged 6 showed increased symptoms of ADHD if their mothers had smoked 6 or more joints/week. Another long-term study by Goldschmidt et al in 2002 reported children, again at 6, displaying incidents of delinquent behaviour and at 10, the relationship between marijuana smoking in pregnancy and delinquency was established. In 2007 two papers, one by Harkany and another by Berghuis found that, in the development of the foetal brain, there was interference in the signalling needed to wire up the brain in the first place. In 2008 Goldschmidt said there was a significant effect on school-age intellectual development. It does not seem to be generally realised that drugs taken by women during pregnancy can profoundly affect the way their offspring behave. 

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By Natasha Walter, Mailonline (H/T Wendy Hough)

For more than 200 years, feminists have been criticising the way that artificial images of feminine beauty are held up as the ideal to which women should aspire. From Mary Wollstonecraft's A Vindication Of The Rights Of Woman in 1792, to Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth in 1991, brilliant and angry women have demanded a change in these ideals. Yet far from fading away, these ideals have become more powerful than ever. What's more, throughout much of our society, the image of female perfection to which women are encouraged to aspire has become more and more defined by sexual allure.

Aspiring night in the Mayhem nightclub in Southend. About a dozen girls, all in tiny hotpants and towering wedge heels, with dark fake tans and shiny, straightened hair, made their way over to a group of men who were standing by a large, empty bed.

The men's job was to choose who should enter a Babes On The Bed competition.
Of the hundreds of women selected to pose on beds in nightclubs all over Britain for this contest, one would be given a modelling contract with Nuts magazine.

In this context, modelling means glamour modelling, the coy words for posing almost naked for men's magazines. 'I want to do it to make my mum proud,' said one young woman, Lauren, in denim hotpants and tight, yellow crop top.

 The girls got on the bed one by one, as Cara Brett, an established glamour model, took the microphone and began to direct them into more and more suggestive poses.

'Why not on all fours? Let's get those off,' she urged impatiently. 'If you're going to be a winner, you've got to show some skin.'  A plump young woman in mauve bra and knickers was one of the first to slip off her bra and jiggle her breasts at the cameras.  As the display became more sexual, the underwear unpeeling from the smooth skin of teenage women, the men in the club began to chant, heavily and fast, and to press nearer and nearer to the stage.

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