An insanity has fallen upon the West, like a witch’s spell. We have lived with it long enough to know it, understand it, but not long enough to resist it, to undo it. The very stewards of the truth that would remove it have left their posts. They have succumbed to its whispers, become its servants. It has infected the very air and crept along the ground like a mist until it is within us and all about us. We utter its precepts like schoolchildren taught their lines.
Its power lies
in its claims of virtuosity, distorted goodness. If presented as the vices that they are, they would be rejected.
These virtues are proclaimed from the pulpits and painted on banners or made into flags. They are established in our schools, colleges, universities, and seminaries. They are the hallucinogen making our own
cultural suicide bearable, even desirable.
They are virtues, but disordered, or they are the excess or deficiency of virtues that render them vices while still claiming to hold the virtuous middle.
They have floated to the surface of a culture once otherwise arranged. They are not alien but new in their order and
new in their definitions. They are
familiar, like cousins come to claim our inheritance.
Freedom, that supreme virtue of the West, has been
with us for some time. It stepped
forward a mighty warrior in oppressive times.
Yet it is now twisted backwards on itself, a freedom from, an independence,
a self-rule, suited only to fight tyranny but not to advance goodness. It
falters as our leader, unable to direct us in a freedom to, a
responsibility. It knows no company with
love. It grants the other her wishes, only to censure oneself. It surrenders the public square to the paranoid and delusional.
Freedom’s
companion virtue is equality, a noble virtue that restrains one's selfish desires. Equality stretches its arms out wide to the
ends of the earth. It smiles upon the poor
seeking equality before the Law. It
teaches that each individual has intrinsic worth. Equality lies at the root of Biblical justice. Yet this equality has been seized by ruthless warriors.
Its noble appearance is grotesquely altered. It is
now a new 'virtue', a new 'equity'. Equity once meant raising up the oppressed to
give them equal justice. It has become
the banditry of Robin Hood, taking from one to give preferential treatment to
others. It cloaks itself in pious
clothing, ‘God is on the side of the poor' goes the mantra—but in demanding preferential
treatment rather than equal justice. The
blind judge is led away. Justice peeks through its blindfold of equality to see who is on trial, to punish people by their class identities and not their crimes. Social justice warriors gain the high ground of
virtue. The claim of victimhood diminishes the crime and receives preferential treatment.
How sinister is equity's companion, diversity, a virtue for the undoing of a whole civilization. Even the notion of 'civilisation' is rejected. There is no progression of culture, no building of civilisation, only
cancellation of the whole past for its crimes. There is no valuation of
culture when multiculturalism is the value.
Yet for anyone past who once held the keys to the halls of civilization, there is no
forgiveness. For the Jacobites in control, repentance before execution
is demanded, but no forgiveness, no grace, no mercy, and certainly no
appreciation for anything is given at the guillotine. Multiculturalism, multi-faith,
ecumenism, religious co-existence, no citizenship, no borders, no boundaries, no laws, no
punishment—the policies of diversity.
Inclusion, so
welcoming a virtue, always wears a smile.
It arrives with diversity and equity to deconstruct a civilization. The Dark Riders have come into the Shire. That word, ‘civilization’, is itself rejected—beheaded,
shall we say. Everyone speaks instead of
‘culture’, and this is a holy word. There
are no longer any failed cultures other than Western culture, the cultures of the West lumped into one culture. All other cultures are valued, revered as creative gifts to
the human enterprise. Babel is again
being built: the achievement of humanity all together, but now as a multicultural rather than monocultural project. Multiculturalism is celebrated as cultural strength. Whisper nothing bad about your
neighbour. Everyone’s god is treated as
the same god, but never claim God to be the only One revealed in Scripture. To this the last pope himself bowed the
knee. The King of England too.
Humility, that great Christian virtue, has become self-deprecation, the tool of deconstruction. It appeared first in the Christian clothing of 'reconciliation' in post-Apartheid South Africa, where one acknowledged and stated one's acts, one's crimes, and was then forgiven. It then became self-deprecation, the grovelling of a people before the new powers, ever begging for forgiveness at the doors of the church but never admitted to the Eucharist. Thirty years on from Apartheid, South Africa is still interpreted in light of it: one never moves on.
All are welcome through
our gates, our walls are torn down, our parents' tombstones ground to dust. Humility has become humiliation, our own
self-loathing. We have mistaken seeing
others better than ourselves as a way of service for seeing ourselves as
worthless for service. We have nothing
to offer our invaders but the throne.
God’s grace is not for salvation, His mercy not for forgiveness, His
love not for sacrifice. They are no
longer necessary. They are
dismissed. The problem was not our sin but our parents calling our behaviour sin. All are now welcome as they are,
who they are, with whatever they bring, however they come, unrepentant,
unchanged. The Gospel is not about the justification of the sinner but the affirmation of the sinner as a welcome guest, indeed, a new neighbour. Someone who needs no saving
needs no grace, who has not sinned needs no forgiveness, who is simply loved
needs no sacrifice for sin. If Jesus is
not exiled, He is made to sit in silence at our inclusive table, humiliated for giving too much for an unnecessary cause. Why did you die on the cross? Not for our sins. Why did your Father let you die for nothing?
Honour is not
achieved through obedience but self-expression.
The knight has no code, no chivalry.
There is no law but that to oneself.
Even nature is outraged. We reject the Creator and set up idols to meet
our every desire, and our desires are internally disordered against our
Creator. We are Mankind, a god to
ourselves. We are not slaves to our
passions and desires but eagerly pursue them.
They define us. We honour
ourselves by making our own world, forming our own essence from mere existence. When there is no pattern to follow, honour is given for any edifice we erect. What
limit is their to what we can achieve when achievement is whatever we claim it to be? We hand out participation trophies for there are no winners.
We have turned
love, that cardinal Christian virtue, into desire, joy into pleasure, peace into surrender, patience into
affirmation, kindness into guilt for micro-aggressions, goodness into a debt owed
to victims, faithfulness into progressiveness, gentleness into riotous
rebellion, self-control into self-pleasure.
They are the fruit of ourselves, not of the Spirit. Our virtues are distorted and disordered.
What can alter the
course of such a fast-flowing river? Not
love on its own, though the chief of virtues.
Not faith that is blind to truth. Not hope when we deny the need for salvation. We bring order with a right understanding of Christian love, faith, and hope. We
correct distortions of true virtue, but only if we know these virtues rightly as Godly virtues. The love of God, the faithfulness
of God, the hope from God correct our moral vision. Every virtue is defined in Christ Jesus. We know the love of God in Christ dying for
us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5.8).
We know God’s faithfulness in bringing righteousness Himself through
Jesus Christ even when we were faithless, for He cannot deny Himself (2 Timothy
2.13). We know a living hope because
Jesus has been raised from the dead (1 Peter 1.3). Once we understand these virtues of love, faith, and hope rightly we can order the other virtues rightly and restore order to our disordered selves.
The sun rises,
the mist disappears, and we see the landscape clearly. We were once darkness, but are now light in
the Lord (Ephesians 5.8). ‘Awake, O
Sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ will shine on you’ (5.14). For a culture covered in the mists of
self-adoration, let us ‘Lift high the cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till
all the world adore His sacred name.’
Comments