Anglican Mainstream

By Peter Saunders, CMF

The costs of sexual freedom and relationship breakdown to the taxpayer and wider economy total some £100 billion annually; about twice as much as alcohol abuse, smoking and obesity combined.

This is the astounding conclusion of the latest ‘Cambridge Paper’, ‘Free sex: Who pays? Moral hazard and sexual ethics’, by Jubilee Centre researcher Guy Brandon.

Rather than addressing fundamental moral issues around sexual freedom, Brandon employs a utilitarian approach and attempts to quantify its financial impact. He argues that sexual freedom ‘represents an enormous moral hazard and, as a result, unsustainable and unjust public expenditure’. Furthermore, these costs are imposed on society as a whole, rather than borne solely by the individuals most directly responsible.

He first surveys the ‘changing landscape of sexual freedom’. The average age of first intercourse has fallen from 21 in the 1950s to 16 now. The divorce rate has risen from 4.4 per 1,000 in 1970 to 11.1 people per 1,000 in 2010. Forty years ago 85 per cent of first unions were marriage but now 85 per cent are cohabitations. Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) in England rose 74 per cent between 1998 and 2009 and abortions increased from 54,819 in 1969 to 189,574 in 2010. 
  
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By George Conger, Get Religion

The front page of Wednesday’s Independent is devoted to a story that chronicles the collapse of public and private morality in Britain.

[...]  The bottom line … the Independent article presents a classic example of a religion ghost in a secular news story. The topic under review — public and private morality — is inherently connected with religion, yet no word about religion appears in the story.

Should the Independent have noted the absence of religion in the public morality report? Is religious belief intrinsic to morality? Can the two be separated? Given Prime Minister David Cameron’s widely publicized December speech about Christian Britain — how could the Independent not touch upon religion in its report on collapsing public and private morals.

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By Stanton L Jones, First Things

The social sciences cannot settle the moral status of homosexuality.

Many religious and social conservatives believe that homosexuality is a mental illness caused exclusively by psychological or spiritual factors and that all homosexual persons could change their orientation if they simply tried hard enough. This view is widely pilloried (and rightly so) as both wrong on the facts and harmful in effect. But few who attack it are willing to acknowledge that today a wholly different, far more influential, and no less harmful set of falsehoods—each attributed to the findings of “science”—dominates the research literature and political discourse.

We are told that homosexual persons are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals, that sexual orientation is biologically determined at birth, that sexual orientation cannot be changed and that the attempt to change it is necessarily harmful, that homosexual relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones in all important characteristics, and that personal identity is properly and legitimately constituted around sexual orientation. These claims are as misguided as the ridiculed beliefs of some social conservatives, as they spring from distorted or incomplete representations of the best findings from the science of same-sex attraction.

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By Janet Daley, Telegraph

[...]  when the government has no (or too little) money to spend, how can it impose "values" on society, because, as Mr Miliband put it, "values cost money." So there it is: the core belief of the newly reconstructed Labour party: government spending is the only force in society that can deliver social morality. Hence, what he sees as the central problem of our time (and of his leadership): how can he promise to provide "fairness" when he would as prime minister have almost no money at his disposal?

This refrain was absolutely consistent, presumably because it is too fundamental even to be questioned. Throughout his speech, he relied repeatedly on the assumption that promoting values meant spending public money. ("Some people say [that] fairness is a luxury we can't afford .") I suspect you can see the problem here. He is apparently unrepentant about Labour's fundamental error – absolutely impervious, in fact, to the argument that government is not the unimpeachable arbiter of fairness and the only force for social good.

For him, the absence of government funding is, by definition, an absence of moral progress. So the dilemma must be to find ways around this, rather than to welcome the possibility that in the absence of government intervention, communities or individual members of society might find other ways of helping and supporting one another. Instead of accepting even the possibility that government "getting out of the way " (as he correctly described David Cameron's view) might be a salutary thing, he insisted that it was still entirely the business of goverment to inject social values into national life.

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By Kathleen Gilbert, LifeSite News

By Matthew O'Brien, Witherspoon Institute

By Michael O'Brien, LifeSite News

[...]  If I had to encapsulate it in a thumbnail, I would say that everyone is fighting a battle to the death with a dictatorship of moral relativism. This struggle is waged primarily regarding national laws to protect the unborn and to protect various aspects of life, but it’s on every other level of culture as well.

Confusion is created everywhere through media. Media is the primary shaper of consciousness of our times. In every nation that I visited it was the primary concern of apostolic people—clerics as well as lay apostles. The unprecedented power of film, television and Internet is something we Christians have never had to deal with before on this scale. And it was encouraging to see that new strategies are being initiated everywhere in every country where I went.

Common to all the people I met was the sense that we are facing a Goliath, a monster that feeds on, or is driven by money, profit, and an underlying agenda of social revolution on a scale I don’t think we have ever seen before in the history of man. What we are looking at is the dismantling of the great treasure Christianity gave Western civilization.

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by Christopher O. Tollefsen, Witherspoon Institute

Moral absolutes are not “mere” restrictions on our actions. Nor should they be suspended even when upholding them might bring about grave consequences. They are essential for protecting human wellbeing.

Moral absolutes, and the role of the so-called principle of double effect, play an essential role in the discourse of those who are committed to natural law reasoning about contemporary moral issues. To give just one example, consider the on-going controversy about the placentectomy that was performed on an expectant mother in Phoenix who was suffering from pulmonary arterial hypertension, an operation that saved her life, but resulted in the death of her child. That controversy is precisely over whether the moral absolute against murder was violated, or whether the death of the child was a “side effect” and not an intentional abortion at all. Yet moral absolutes—what they are, why they obtain, and how they are to be applied—are not always well understood. Both with a view to casting light back over other essays I have written, and with a view to an upcoming essay on the intentional killing of innocent persons in war, I here offer some thoughts on the nature of this essential part of practical ethics.

The natural law view that underlies much of what I have written for Public Discourse is rooted in the idea of St. Thomas Aquinas that the principles of the natural law are directives toward human goods that are aspects of human well-being. Moving beyond St. Thomas, we could say that each basic good gives to human agents a basic reason for action, rooted in those aspects of human well-being and perfection promised by instances of those goods. But there are many such goods: human life and health, knowledge, aesthetic experience, work and play, friendship, marriage, personal integrity, and the good of religion.

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by Melanie Phillips

By Ian Drury, Mailonline

Britain has lost its ‘moral compass’ and should look to the conduct of the Armed Forces to instill proper standards of decency, the former head of the Army argues today.

A series of scandals that have rocked the country are evidence people in the UK are struggling to differentiate between right and wrong, warns General Lord Richard Dannatt.

They include MPs shamelessly milking their taxpayer-funded expenses, phone hacking, bankers paying themselves obscene bonuses and the summer riots, he will explain.

But in a lecture tonight Lord Dannatt, the ex-Chief of the General Staff, says that society could learn lessons from the military.

He says the Armed Forces today place as much importance on teaching recruits moral and mental strength as it does on physical training.

He says: ‘In past generations, it was often assumed that young men and women coming into the Armed Forces would have absorbed an understanding of the core values and standards of behaviour required by the military from their family or from within their wider community… I would suggest such a presumption cannot be made today.

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By Bill Muehlenberg

The fate of a nation’s survival and the state of a nation’s morality are closely intertwined. Mess with a nation’s morals and you will soon see the end of that nation. The enemies of the West have long recognised this truth. As Stalin once put it, “America is like a healthy body and its resistance is threefold: its patriotism, its morality, and its spiritual life. If we can undermine these three areas, America will collapse from within.”

The fate of a nation is intimately tied up with its moral and spiritual condition. Modern free and democratic nations especially must recover this truism. Certainly America’s Founding Fathers fully believed this. As President John Adams stated, “Without virtue, there can be no political liberty.”

Or as he stated elsewhere: “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” And again, “Statesmen may plan and speculate for Liberty, but it is Religion and Morality alone, which can establish the Principles upon which Freedom can securely stand.”

Benjamin Franklin put it this way: “Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” Thomas Jefferson said this: “Can the liberties of a nation be sure when we remove their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people, that these liberties are a gift from God?”

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By Peter Hitchens, Mailonline

Some actions ought to be unthinkable. Even the lowest, dimmest lout ought to know that you do not defile monuments to the dead. Till a few years ago, the worst crook in Britain would have stopped himself from ripping a bronze plaque off a war memorial.

Those who claim that this country is not falling to pieces need to explain why such crimes are now becoming common.

Something has disappeared from the hearts of the people who do this. They are different from any generation that lived before. Let me explain.

[...]  And now they are being pillaged, demolished, smashed, stripped, overturned and desecrated by people who probably cannot even read what is written on them and would not care if they could.

If that is not a fit subject for a moral panic, I do not know what is. These metal thieves are no better than grave-robbers, and we have bred and raised them among us. These sombre and thoughtful shrines are not glorifications of war, but memorials to beloved people who went to their deaths in the belief that they were saving civilisation.

It seems that they failed.

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By Peter Hitchens, Mailonline

I don't normally think of Dame Joan Bakewell as an ally in my campaign to re-moralise Britain. I tend to feel she did her bit to de-moralise it in the Sixties. But I think she should be praised for pointing out what is missing in our country.

She said: ‘Religious commitment to charity and kindness has declined. Nobody learns that. They don’t learn it in their homes, they don’t learn it in their school, it’s seen as soft. It’s not what you’re about.

'You’re meant to stand up for your own individual personality, make your way in the world and good luck to you. Kindness, empathy, generosity are all in short supply and people used to learn it from the churches – I learnt it at Sunday school. Where do you learn it now? I don’t know.’

Nor do I.

By Scott Stephens, ABC Religion & Ethics

By Melanie Phillips

By Ed West, Telegraph

by Zac Alstin, MercatorNet

by Hilary White, LifeSite News

When in August thousands of British youth started spontaneously rioting and looting shops in some of the country’s largest urban centres, a great deal of ink was spilled assessing the reasons for the riots. For those not watching out the window, videos were almost instantly available on YouTube of hoodie-clad children, teenagers and twenty-somethings kicking in shop windows, cheerily smiling and laughing while they helped themselves to an array of popular commercial goods.

By Timothy Dalrymple, Patheos

Britain is the latest country to pay the price for what happened half a century ago in one of the most radical transformations in the history of the West. In virtually every Western society in the 1960s there was a moral revolution, an abandonment of its entire traditional ethic of self-restraint. All you need, sang the Beatles, is love. The Judeo-Christian moral code was jettisoned. In its place came: whatever works for you. The Ten Commandments were rewritten as the Ten Creative Suggestions. Or as Allan Bloom put it in “The Closing of the American Mind”: “I am the Lord Your God: Relax!”