Anglican Mainstream

By Gillan Scott, God & Politics in the UK

[...]  Much of modern politics has been influenced by the twin ideologies of social and economic liberalism. From the 1960s onward, the liberal left has won much of the the social and cultural argument and since the 1980s, the liberal right has been winning the political and economic argument. Both forms of liberalism champion unfettered personal choice and freedom from constraint. We can see that these beliefs have been accepted across the political spectrum by the way the main parties have been increasingly drawn towards the centre ground as they progressively embrace both of them. This liberalism has had its benefits , but there has been a cost; the financial markets through deregulation have badly overheated and a lack of self-control ultimately led to the financial crisis we are now having to deal with. Personal debt has also spiralled. Social liberalism has eroded communities and a communal sense of morality leaving many of us more concerned about our own happiness and material wealth at the expense of our relationship with others.

By Julian Mann, Virtueonline

[...]  The spiritual and moral debt is even worse. I remember as a trade reporter in 1989 working for a small publishing company in Swanley, Kent, being told by the lady who ran the accounts' department that my monthly net pay cheque was going up due to the married man's tax allowance. It was not so much the financial boost that warmed the heart at the time but the sense that the institution I had just entered into was hallowed by wider society. Is there any sign that such practical political support for the institution of marriage will be resurrected under the politically-correct consensus that has gripped the governance of the UK?

Mrs Thatcher's hated Section 28 regulation, which forbid the promotion of homosexuality in schools and was later repealed under the new morality, was seen by many Conservatives at the time as an important protection against the proselytisation of children by the Jesuits of the permissive society.

The truth is that a person with Lady Thatcher's convictions would never be selected as a Conservative parliamentary candidate in the post-Blair world of politics. If they were by some mischance, then they would be rapidly de-selected by Central Office.

I did not know until I read her personal assistant's tribute in The Daily Mail that Mrs Thatcher had prayed at her hotel bedside for those bereaved by the IRA's Brighton bombing atrocity. Apparently, until her magnificent speech to the Church of Scotland in 1988, she was reluctant to give her Christian faith too high a public profile because of her support for some of the social measures introduced in the 1960s such as easier divorce and legalised abortion, which she knew were strongly opposed by many Christians.

Read here 

by Peter Mullen

Margaret Thatcher’s judgement has been vindicated by the disgraceful celebrations of her death: the vile demonstrations in the streets by the spoilt and petulant underclass and the bile spoken in the mass media by people who ought to know better. Slogans such as “The Bitch is Dead” and the chant “Maggie, Maggie, Maggie; Dead, Dead, Dead.” are among the less offensive responses to the former prime minister’s passing. The gloating nastiness of George Galloway, Ken Livingstone and Gerry Adams could have been taken for granted. The mealy-mouthed self-justification of Neil Kinnock and Roy Hattersley is only to be expected of men who have put in a lifetime’s effort to perfecting mealy-mouthedness. But what words are left to describe – and don’t tempt me because I can’t afford the lawyers – the likes of Elton John and his Christmas musical excrescence: “We all celebrate today ‘cause it’s one day closer to your death”?

So how has Margaret Thatcher’s judgement been vindicated? “Judgement” means “crisis” and it comes from the old Greek word (…… krisis. You can check its etymology, if you like, with any member of the underclass – or even, I suppose, with Ken Livingstone.) And what a crisis does is to expose the truth. It does so, as the Americans in their colourful way, have it, “When the chips are down.” In her malevolently-misquoted speech about society, Margaret Thatcher expressed her judgement very clearly. She said “There is no such thing as society” and so suffered the hysterical wrath of Marxists, the left wing press, the BBC and the academic sociologists who make a fine living out of their worship of the abstracted concept “society.” But she went on to say that we are individuals in families and in all kinds of benign associations and groups and that we have a responsibility to one another. In other words, Margaret Thatcher paraphrased that most hated thing, Christian morality.

In the vain attempt to avoid being wilfully misunderstood, she went out of her way to give simple examples – one example in particular which continues to incense the underclass and its hypocritical apologists in the media. She said that if a person is trying to find work but can’t, then financial assistance will be provided. Similarly if someone is too ill or disabled to work. But she added that there are no rights in choosing a life of idleness on the dole: “…because it is not ultimately the state which provides the dole money, but your neighbours through their taxes.”

Read the rest of this entry »

by John Bingham, Telegraph

It could take another financial crisis to force the City to “wake up” to the scale of changes it needs to make, the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales will warn today.

The Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, will liken profit-obsessed business chiefs to staff at the scandal-hit Mid Staffordshire hospitals trust who lost sight of basic morality because of an obsession with money.

He will tell an audience in the City that new regulations would not be enough to bring about real change in the wake of the banking crisis, and could itself become simply a “lazy proxy" for moral values.

But he will describe working in the City is a noble vocation, capable of doing real good for society.

And he will insist that, deep down, even the most bonus-driven bankers are “secretly tempted” to good – an instinct which could be encouraged.

His comments come in a debate at St Paul’s Cathedral in which he will argue that the pursuit of short term profit has been allowed to become the sole purpose of business, creating a moral vacuum.

Read here

By Cranmer

To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to die…a time to lose…a time to mourn…a time to weep…

Margaret Hilda Thatcher, the Baroness Thatcher of Kesteven in the County of Lincolnshire, is dead.

She was the first woman leader of the Conservative Party (indeed, of any major political party) and the first female Prime Minister of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, holding office from 1979 to 1990.

Some will doubtless rejoice at the news, but very many more will mourn. They may not have agreed with all that the Iron Lady said or did, but the vast majority respected her as a woman of conviction and of principle; a woman who said what she thought and did what she said. Surveying the modern political scene of sophistry, duplicity, inconsistency and spin, she clearly belonged to another era.

Thousands of obituaries will be written today the world over. They will speak eloquently of how she reversed Britain’s decline of the 1970s; of how she forged a distinct Conservative political philosophy; transformed economic thinking; survived an assassination attempt and won a glorious victory for liberty against tyranny in the Falkland Islands.

They will recall the Cold War era and her close friendship with President Ronald Reagan, which was based not merely on a shared distrust of Communism, but the genuine warmth of fraternity. Few obituaries are likely to mention her devout Christian faith, which was the foundation of her political programme and the bedrock of her conviction for less government, lower taxes, more freedom and greater personal responsibility.

Read here

By Melanie Phillips

Does the Labour Party really believe it was entirely right and proper that Mick Philpott, who has been jailed for life for the manslaughter of six children – five of them his own — should have been subsidised on welfare to the tune of upwards of £60,000 per year? It certainly looks as if it does.

Labour’s Treasury spokesman Ed Balls has been expressing his horror at the ‘divisive and cynical’ remarks made by the chancellor, George Osborne, who asked why taxpayers were subsidising lifestyles such as Philpott’s. It would surely have been rather more edifying had Balls expressed his horror instead at Philpott’s lifestyle.

For it was not just that Philpott had caused the deaths of six children in the house fire he had plotted with his wife and a friend to frame Philpott’s mistress for arson and gain a bigger house. It was that he used his women as milch cows, producing children so that he could live off the welfare benefits they accrued, raking in thousands of pounds per year in child benefit and working family tax credits as well as the money his wife and mistress brought in from their work as cleaners. The more children they produced for him, the more cash he trousered from them – while all the time treating them abominably.

In other words, he used his children’s very existence to gain money for his sexually depraved, drug-fuelled, abusive lifestyle. And while of course other benefit claimants do not deliberately torch their houses and kill their children, the fact remains that unconditional welfare payments, in particular child benefit which is paid on the birth of every child regardless of family circumstances, act as a direct incentive for the mass fatherlessness and the consequent instrumentalisation and gross neglect of children that now characterise welfare deserts up and down the country where depravity, cruelty, neglect, sexual abuse and violence are the norm.

Britain’s welfare system, in other words, is inescapably implicated in creating lifestyles of profound amorality and barbarism. It not only subsidises them, but actively creates an attitude of mind which is deeply self-centred, regarding the world as owing the claimant a living, sinking into patterns of indolence, hedonism and squalor, and treating those who should be recipients of love and duty instead as objects to be used for self-gratification and as whipping-boys when they dare make any demands of their own. Worse still, it then perpetuates itself down through the generations in inherited cycles of dysfunctionality, creating a class apart which is simply separated from civilised society.

Read here

Read also:  Michael Philpott is a perfect parable for our age: His story shows the pervasiveness of evil born out of welfare dependency by A N Wilson, Mailonline

Outrage over the Daily Mail's Mick Philpott headline – but the paper's critics can be just as hysterical themselves by Dan Hodges, Telegraph 

Welfare didn't make Philpott a monster. But it does allow bad people to go on being bad by Tim Stanley, Telegraph

Labour has completely lost the plot on Philpott by Iain Martin, Telegraph

By Albert Mohler

“Somewhere along the way, standing up for gay marriage went from nervy to trendy.” This was the assessment offered by Frank Bruni, an influential openly-gay columnist for The New York Times. Bruni’s column, published just as the Supreme Court was poised to hear oral arguments in the two same-sex marriage cases now before it, is a celebration of the fact that, as he sees it, same-sex marriage is soon to be the law of the land, whatever the Court may decide. “The trajectory is undeniable. The trend line is clear. And the choice before the justices is whether to be handmaidens of history, or whether to sit it out.”

By Roger Scruton, Conservative Home

Our society has not come to terms with the sexual revolution, and one proof of this is the extent to which people seem now free to accuse each other of sexual misdemeanours and ‘inappropriate’ advances, without knowing or caring whether these constitute a crime. This matter is of great concern to conservatives who, for all their reticence in the matter, are well aware that sexual life ought not to be a free for all, and that conventions, manners and a certain distance between the sexes are fundamental to both individual happiness and social peace. Like other modern people, however, they stumble through this dangerous territory without the light of religious principle to guide them, and leaning, when it is necessary to lean, on an entirely makeshift philosophy. Indeed, it seems to me that the absence of a robust view of sex is one reason for the ideological weakness of the Conservative Party. The hesitation over family values, the sudden and unexplained enthusiasm for gay marriage, the easy toleration of ‘non-discrimination’ laws that marginalise the old morality – all these are ways of papering over an enormous hole in the conservative vision, and one that simply did not exist when the founding fathers of conservatism wrote in the 18th century.

[...]  In most other areas of human life we are well aware of the distinction between crimes and misdemeanours. And, before the days of sexual liberation, we equipped our children with those habits of modesty, reticence and respect that prevented the worst abuses and gave them the means to protect themselves against them. Now, lacking any real understanding of what sex means, we have also lost all sense of proportion. Every offence is at once construed as a crime, with devastating consequences for those who are accused of it. And the worst of it is that conservatives, who should know better, are as confused as everybody else.

Read here

by Dale O'Leary

Today the discussion of almost any issue is distorted by the great lie of Relativism. Relativists claim that there is no truth, just opinions. This is logically impossible, since by definition truth is a statement which corresponds to reality. To say there is no truth is to say there is no reality. Not only that, the statement “there is no truth” cannot be true if there is no truth. Of course, the Relativists don’t really believe that all opinions are equal. They think they are right and those who disagree with them are wrong, and not only wrong, but mean-spirited, bigoted, hateful, discriminating, unscientific and stupid.

Relativists claim to be promoting tolerance, but they are not themselves the least bit tolerant. They use their positions in academia, in professional organizations, and in government to force their opinions on others and silence their opposition. They invent rights and then use these invented rights to impose the tyranny of relativism. They try and sometimes succeed in passing laws which will make disagreeing with them illegal.

The modern Relativists remind me of the ancient Romans. Most of them didn’t really believe that the emperor was actually a god and they didn’t really care what the Christians actually believed. All they wanted was for the Christians to make a sign of submission to the ideology of emperor worship – to throw a little incense on the altar. A simple act, no big deal. After all, what did it matter if there is no truth?

But those early Christians understood exactly what was at stake. It was a huge thing – a betrayal of everything they believed in. They refused. They were tortured and martyred and we remember their names to this day.

Read here

From Voice for Justice UK

In all the talk about legal redefinition of marriage, no one seems to have given much thought to the Ten Commandments, so VfJUK herewith offers the revised version, as might appeal to our Prime Minister.

I am the Lord your Prime Minister, who brings you out of the land of bigotry and intolerance and into the 21^st century. I do this not despite being a Conservative, but because I am a Conservative, and I would have all things relevant (and if you don’t like it, I shall use the Parliament Act).

¹ You shall stop living by an outdated value system inappropriate for our times, and you shall not foist your unacceptable beliefs, by speaking of them, onto others, even where such beliefs are founded upon Scripture or otherwise historic definitions.

²You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in the Labour or Liberal Democrat parties, because this is unnecessary in reconstituted Britain.  You shall not bow down or worship these parties, because despite being in coalition, I, the Lord your Prime Minister, am a jealous Prime Minister and will implement all such policies myself, punishing those who disagree, but showing love for a thousand days unto those who love me and keep my commandments.

³ You shall not misuse the politically correct definition of intolerance and bullying, for the Prime Minister and British judiciary will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses or casts aspersions upon the new ideology.

⁴ Remember the Sabbath day if you must, but you do not need to keep it holy, because the courts have now decided it is not a distinctive mark and requirement of the Christian faith. And besides which, we are today an inclusive society, which means that other religions are more holy than this outmoded relic of Western civilization.

⁵Honour parent one and parent two, but do not utter the blasphemous words of father and mother, for that is to imply unacceptable discrimination and hatred; and if you do so you will not live long in the land the Lord your Prime Minister is giving you, but will be fined and imprisoned for bigotry and intolerance and then cast into utter darkness.
Read the rest of this entry »

By Paul Burgess

This week’s debate in the Commons on the Government’s gay marriage bill was notable for a lack of engagement with the real issues at stake and thus missed the point of the argument for marriage. For there are many levels of engagement in this whole matter of whether marriage can be extended to include same sex couples.

On the surface is a debate about social justice: the issue of whether denying gay couples the benefits of an official marital status is essentially discriminatory. These days Western society is increasingly governed by a politically correct human rights notion of equality. It is at this level that the proponents of gay marriage argue.

On another level there is the question of theology, whether about the conclusions of a dogmatic theology based on the interpretation of the revelations of a Faith’s sacred scriptures (tradition), or about the findings of a natural theology based on the studies of nature itself (human experience and scientific discovery). It is at this theological level that the proponents of a traditional concept of marriage argue.

Attached to this theological level are two further areas of debate:

1. The philosophical discussion of the ontological (i.e. essential) nature of marriage. It concerns the issue of its category identification: is the essence of marriage about a heterosexual relationship or merely a sexual relationship?

2. The application of moral theology to the mores (relating to the moral attitudes and customs involved) of marriage. This concerns the morality of homosexual behaviour – to be sharply distinguished from orientation (same-sex attraction).

Read the rest of this entry »

By Simon Heffer, Mailonline

A glance at today’s political class makes us see all too clearly that the concept of shame has almost disappeared from public life.

Men who have lied to the House of Commons still sit there, some in very senior positions. Peers imprisoned for fraud blithely return to the House of Lords after being released from jail.

Some MPs still draw parliamentary salaries despite having deceitfully fiddled their expenses. One such miscreant, Lib Dem David Laws, even attends Cabinet meetings.

If I was to identify the moment the rot set in, I would go back to an event that ‘celebrates’ — if that’s the word — its 50th anniversary this year.

I am referring to the Profumo scandal of 1963, which changed the nature of British public life for ever.

Rumours had circulated around Westminster about an affair between War Minister John Profumo and Christine Keeler, a call-girl who had also slept with a Soviet naval attaché.

The gossip was fed by a group of Labour MPs who had spotted a golden opportunity, at the height of the Cold War, to embarrass and weaken an already troubled government.

This rabble, though, showed the symptoms of decline, too. For example, Labour MP George Wigg, who helped bring down Profumo, was caught kerb-crawling.

By March 1963, the rumours about Profumo had become so destabilising that he was forced to make a Commons statement.

Read here

By Julian Mann

From gentlemind

In England and Wales Quakers, Unitarians, and Liberal Jews are requesting the right to perform marriage ceremonies for same-sex couples. It is a mistake to suppose that the concept of religious freedom must lead us to grant them this right. Religious organisations already have the freedom to regard a sexual same-sex relationship as being pleasing to God. What they currently cannot do is register that relationship within the legal institution named Marriage. Instead they can register that same relationship within the legal institution named Civil Partnership. We do not need State permission to regard a relationship as being blessed, since the regarding resides in our hearts and minds and in relation to God, not the State. Since the religious aspect is already freely available in hearts and minds, the request is for a change to man-made law only. By definition, this request is not religiously motivated and therefore not one that pertains to the concept of religious freedom.

It is also a mistake to suppose that – where man-made law says that a marriage is between “any two adults” – those who regard a marriage as being between one man and one woman are likewise religiously free to regard a marriage as being what their hearts and minds tell them. Matters of right and wrong do not work like this. And where the legal definition of a marriage is concerned, there is a right and a wrong. The nature of the marriage debate itself illustrates this.

Where a man-made law is just (in harmony with natural and moral law), it is possible for those on the right side of that law to have tolerance for the views of those on the wrong side of that law. There can be tolerance precisely because the man-made law itself is just. But where a man-made law is unjust (out of harmony with natural and moral law), it is not possible for those on the right side of that law to have tolerance for the views of those on the wrong side of that law. There can be no tolerance precisely because the man-made law itself is unjust.

In the case of a just law, unjust actions cannot be tolerated BUT unjust views can: unjust actions cannot be tolerated DESPITE the fact that related unjust views can. In the case of an unjust law, just actions cannot be tolerated AND just views cannot: just actions cannot be tolerated BECAUSE OF the fact that related just views cannot.

Read here

By A N Wilson, Mailonline

[...]  I hold up my hands. I have been divorced. Although I was labelled a Young Fogey in my youth, I imbibed all the liberationist sexual mores of the Sixties as far as sexual morality was concerned.

I made myself and dozens of people extremely unhappy — including, of course, my children and other people’s children. I am absolutely certain that my parents, by contrast, who married in 1939 and stayed together for more than 40 years until my father died, never strayed from the marriage bed.

There were long periods when they found marriage extremely tough, but having lived through years of aching irritation and frustration, they grew to be Darby and Joan, deeply dependent upon one another in old age, and in an imperfect but recognisable way, an object lesson in the meaning of the word ‘love’.

Back in the Fifties, GfK National Opinon Poll conducted a survey asking how happy people felt on a sliding scale — from very happy to very unhappy.

In 1957, 52 per cent said they were ‘very happy’. By 2005, the same set of questions found only 36 per cent were ‘very happy’, and the figures are falling.

More than half of those questioned in the GfK’s most recent survey said that it was a stable relationship which made them happy. Half those who were married said they were ‘very happy’, compared with only a quarter of singles.

The truth is that the Sexual Revolution had the power to alter our way of life, but it could not alter our essential nature; it could not alter the reality of who and what we are as human beings.

It made nearly everyone feel that they were free, or free-er, than their parents had been — free to smoke pot, free to sleep around, free to pursue the passing dream of what felt, at the time, like overwhelming love — an emotion which very seldom lasts, and a word which is meaningless unless its definition includes commitment.

How easy it was to dismiss old-fashioned sexual morality as ‘suburban’, as a prison for the human soul. How easy it was to laugh at the ‘prudes’ who questioned the wisdom of what was happening in the Sexual Revolution.
 
About one-third of marriages in Britain end in divorce

Yet, as the opinion poll shows, most of us feel at a very deep level that what will make us very happy is not romping with a succession of lovers.

In fact, it is having a long-lasting, stable relationship, having children, and maintaining, if possible, lifelong marriage.

Read here

From Voice4Justice UK

Recently, almost every other day seems to throw up fresh revelations of high profile figures involved in sex abuse. The most recent allegations relate to Sir Cyril Smith, formerly highly respected Liberal MP for Rochdale, with claims going back to the 1960s. ‘Twas ever thus,’ people say, and maybe with justification, but at the same time it really does feel as if abuse is on the increase. Certainly, as well as tarnished celebs, in recent months there have been a spate of arrests relating to organised paedophile and sex grooming rings – which we are told don’t even represent the tip of the grubby iceberg now being revealed.

Why? Has there always been this level of abuse in society, and is it simply that, with better investigative procedures, victims are now more emboldened to come forward? There may well be an element of truth in this, but, sadly, I suspect it’s not the whole story. On the contrary, I would hazard that these crimes really are on the increase, and are being fuelled by the growing climate of permissiveness that sees people self-defining almost exclusively in terms of sex and personal desire.

There is a mantra current in society today: ‘I am the centre of my own universe. What I want is paramount. I have the ‘right’ to total and complete fulfilment.’ Which would be fine, except of course that this attitude not infrequently collides with the similar claims of others. In which case, in our dog eat dog world, the stronger would appear to prevail by intimidation and bullying.

I would suggest that recent events are exposing a logical flaw to this approach.

Read the rest of this entry »

By Jonathan Tame, The Jubilee Centre

The woeful troubles at the BBC coincide with its 90th anniversary this week. Shoddy journalism, failure of governance and poor judgment have left the public reputation of the BBC in tatters. More than that, the moral standards of programming seem to keep falling. In the light of this, it's sobering to find out how the BBC Governors viewed things 80 years ago. When Broadcasting House was opened, this was the inscription at the entrance:

"To Almighty God – This shrine of the arts, music and literature is dedicated by the first Governors in the year of our Lord 1931, John Reith being Director General. It is their prayer that good seed sown will produce a good harvest, that everything offensive to decency and hostile to peace will be expelled, and that the nation will incline its ear to those things which are lovely, pure and of good report and thus pursue the path of wisdom and virtue."

One wonders for how long the staff and governors can go on saying that the BBC is the greatest public broadcaster in the world, when the values that greatness was built on have been rejected, and the moral compass they provided has been discarded.

Read here

From Evangelical Alliance

Why is it that, the more freedoms we are given, the more laws we seem to need? The Leveson Inquiry and the accompanying public debate has not got to the root of this core problem: you won't improve ethics if you ignore morality. Recommendations on the future of press regulation are evidently needed and the focus of much attention, after all, the press is interested in what concerns their future.

But it is vitally important to step back from the frenzy surrounding the media scandals, corruption, inquiry and now the report and ask more foundational questions about the place of ethics in our media. This crisis echoes a broader crisis of public leadership across all of society, whether it's politics, banking, finance, even our education system. Albert Camus once observed that: "A man without ethics is a wild beast loosed upon this world." There is a lot of talk about ethics in public life, but little acknowledgement that ethics flow from a moral framework. If we don't accept the indispensability of morality, no number of new laws and regulators will make men and women good.

The Leveson Inquiry has exposed how truth and transparency are vital for a healthy society – and how our media has shown a frequent disregard for its value. Too often we seem to be trying to cultivate public ethics in a vacuum: how can we expect honesty without a high regard for truth? It's (literally) impossible to have honesty in the media without having truth as an objective for reporting. With media outlets competing for power and profits, each one seeks to present its own worldview at the expense of the other. Fuelled by a pervasive myth of secular neutrality, the outcome is a subtle but apparent manipulation of facts and reality to suit a particular agenda – all of which has the effect of reducing public trust.

Read here

By Alexander Lucie-Smith, Catholic Herald

by Albert Mohler

Read here