Time Immortal

…Bishop [the Rt Rev Michael Nazir-Ali] made another point about the way in which the growth of Islam has been used as a pretext to dethrone Christianity in British public life.

He said “It is now less possible for Christianity to be the public faith in Britain. The existence of chapels and chaplaincies in places such as hospitals, prisons and institutions of further and higher education is in jeopardy either because of financial cuts or because the authorities want “multifaith” provision, without regard to the distinctively Christian character of the nation’s laws, values, customs and culture.”

I think this probably the most worrying aspect of the problem. Diplomacy, tolerance and good sense can - in the right conditions - almost certainly bring about integration in the divided cities of this country, given enough time and a breathing space in which mass immigration is halted.

A strong Muslim minority in this country could have many good effects (I’ll come to that later). But it is important that Islam does not gain the status of Christianity, for that will mean a moral and cultural revolution of enormous force.

One of the great puzzles of modern Britain is the political left’s attitude to Islam.

Why should an atheist, sexual liberationist, morally relaxed liberal attack people such as me (as they do) for criticising Islam? They have nothing in common.

It is in fact quite simple.

The left will deal with any ally against conservative Britain. It thinks it can use Islam to further its ends, just as in the past it has allied itself with any anti-conservative, anti-patriotic cause that was going. But the alliance lasts only long enough to allow the Left to destroy what it doesn’t like.

The trouble is, Islam is more serious and determined than any of the other people whom the left have sought to use for such purposes.

And so, while intending to dethrone Christianity and make this a secular society, the left now risks helping make this an Islamic society, which - if it comes to pass - will be profoundly hostile to everything the left wants.

These are the fruits of cynicism.

As the bishop notes, and as hospital chaplaincies so clearly show, the disestablishment of Christianity has not led to the opening of Richard Dawkins reading rooms in our hospitals, but in the increasing creation of multi-faith rooms which have an increasingly Islamic character, thanks to the fervour and devotion of Muslims, and the fading faith of the Christian churches.

Likewise the removal of Christianity from the state schools may well end in the existence if an increasing number of state schools which are in effect Islamic, while the official national religion, Christianity, goes neglected and untaught.

A Christian country would have kept the chapels, and allowed and encouraged the opening of separate rooms for other faiths.

I haven’t room or time here for an argument about the respective merits of Christianity and Islam, though it would be interesting to have one.

But I finish with this point.

There is no doubt that the laws, institutions, customs, language, marital arrangements, relaxations, family structure, even the diet of this country are the result of centuries of Christianity.

If it became a Muslim country, all these things would change, some beyond recognition.

If we want that to happen, and deliberately choose it, then all well and good.

Islam, as I stated earlier, has many admirable characteristics and would surely be better than total Godlessness, but how foolish to let it happen by mistake, and then regret it when it was too late.

The militant ‘war on terror’ sorts who inveigh against Islam still seem to think that the Maxim gun, or the CIA, or MI5, or airstrikes on Afghanistan, or invasions of Iraq and Iran, will defeat this powerful ideology.

The anti-British left seem to think, by contrast, that Islam is a pet pussycat which they can toy with, set on their enemies for while, and lay aside.

Both are wrong.

If you prefer our sort of society to an Islamic one, then you have to recognise that the good things about our society come from Christianity - and the more we throw those good things aside and the more we dismantle Christianity in our state, our schools, our culture in general, the weaker our society will become and the more likely it will be to embrace Islam - which suffers from no doubts about its rightness and is not in the least bit afraid of Professor Dawkins.

When I speak of atheism as the greatest threat to human liberty, I do so for two reasons. One is that, of course, if one is to look at the lessons of history, one observes an essentially 1-to-1 correlation between the act of a regime making atheism an explicit policy of the state and the engagement of that regime in murderous, repressive actions against its own people. The gulag is, really, the most logical outcome of officially-mandated state secularism.

But second to that is that atheism, in those states which drift toward a secular character without ever officially enshrining atheism as the ‘religion’ of the land, also serves as an enabler. Faced with the hopelessness that the materialist philosophy houses at its core, many people who have grown up in essentially secular lifestyles are finding, more and more, the need to discover meaning in their existence. And we see, in Europe especially, that they are finding it, in droves, in religion. Fortunate are those that find their way into Catholicism, or even into some of the various noble and respectable forms of Protestantism that have emerged from European tradition. Less fortunate are those whose thirst for meaning finds its fulfillment in the confidence and swagger of the more radicalized forms of Islam now sweeping through that same continent, and indeed through all the world.

Nature, as they say, abhors a vacuum, and the same can be said for the spiritual vacuum that the secular worldview causes in the human soul. So not only is applied atheism a threat, but so is ‘merely philosophical’ atheism, for it serves as an enabler for other violent pathologies to insert themselves into Western societies.

(In Soviet Russia, hat tips you: Kathy Shaidle)