Majorityrights Central > Category: Christianity

I am somewhat bemused to find three men in cassocks stepping into the ring to take on the “silly bureaucrats” and the “minority in leadership who want to privatise religion”.  But that’s what has happened today.

First off, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams put his name to a piece in The Mail On Sunday saying:-

What makes some people suspicious of Christmas these days is that it’s too religious. This year there seems to have been even more stories about the banning of Christian images and words by silly bureaucrats.

Right on cue the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr George Carey, weighed in during GMTV’s Sunday Programme with:-

“We must avoid the kind of political correctness that is creeping in and undermining the public expression of the Christian faith.”

He said he was concerned about “a worrying hostility towards Christianity and all religions by a minority of people in leadership today who want to privatise religion, push it to the boundaries, not allow a voice in the public arena.”

Meanwhile the Bishop of Lichfield, the Right Reverend Jonathan Gledhill, declared his diocese to be fighting back against the politically correct approach to Christmas with a new poster campaign:-

“There have been reports from all over the country about local authorities, businesses, retail centres and even central government trying to take the Christ out of Christmas, claiming Christmas is offensive.

“They seem to want to make Christmas history - the Diocese of Lichfield wants to make Christmas His story”

Ordinarily, we would say these churchmen are part of the liberal problem and preside over an emotionally feminised version of Christianity.  However, even they have limits.  They have, it seems, noticed that the silly bureaucrats and the mysterious minority in leadership have none, and will go on chipping away at every surviving outcrop of Western culture until nothing remains.

The “hands-off” declarations of today reveal a fault-line between religious liberals and committed egalitarian activists.  In essence, the former are drawing a line in the snow.  They are refusing to let their faith be marxised out of existence - which is a point I have made many, many times in respect of Western Man in general.  When all roads lead to extinction, resistance will be the only recourse.

In rejecting their own ethnic traditions liberals are left with a major problem. What is to hold society together, if not a common ancestry, culture, religion and history?

Australian intellectuals are especially fond of “imagining” new forms of national identity which will unify society. The latest effort is called “Australia: Ideas for our Future”. The authors of this work believe that there is an Australian tradition of mateship, tolerance and a fair go for all around which a unifying Australian identity can be based.

The Anglican Archbishop of Sydney, Dr Peter Jensen, has criticised this approach to an Australian identity in an article in today’s Age newspaper (not yet online).

He is, firstly and understandably, disappointed that the proposed national identity is entirely secular. He sees this as further proof of the declining position of Christianity in Australia. In his own words, “Frankly, Jesus is slipping out of memory and imagination.”

He then points out the limitations of the proposed identity, in words which demonstrate a mixture of clarity and confusion:

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Every month I get a magazine from my old school, Xavier College, which is the leading Catholic private school here in Melbourne.

Up to now, I’ve been uncertain whether I want to send my own son to Xavier. But the latest school magazine has made the decision easy. He won’t be going.

The latest magazine shows all too clearly how far the school has drifted away from Catholicism into a modernist, secularised liberalism. In fact, going by the magazine the school has dropped religion altogether in favour of a new kind of cult called “social justice”.

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I heard about the shooting on the radio on Friday morning. A man had been gunned down in his Melbourne home during the night.

In today’s paper we get the full story. The victim was a man by the name of Jafar Heshmaty. He had left his native Iran, worked illegally in Greece, bought a Greek passport and then flown to Melbourne in 1989.

In Melbourne he was put in detention while his claim for refugee status was fought in the courts. He received support from the Baptist Church which organised protests and a Christian community sponsorship for him.

But after three years the High Court ruled against him because of doubts about his real identity. So he sought and received asylum in America instead.

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Browsing through an autobiography of authoress P.D. James, I was surprised to discover she is something of an Anglican traditionalist. She writes,

“The Church of England in my childhood was the national church in a very special sense, the visible symbol of the country’s moral and religious aspirations, a country which, despite great differences of class, wealth and privilege, was unified by generally accepted values and by a common tradition, history and culture, just as the Church was unified by Cranmer’s magnificent liturgy.”

As you might expect, she does not approve of recent developments within the C of E. She declares,

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Great men are rare beings, and the Catholic world has lost one this evening.  Few Pope’s have been more loved than the Polish Pope or meant more to non-Catholics, too.  May he rest in peace.

… which, all things considered, is a fairly appropriate moment to return to the subject of faith in our liberal times.  Earlier this month a Cassandra-like figure, Jayne Ozanne, lit up a debate in the Church of England with a private paper she submitted to the Archbishop’s Council.  It was leaked and in it she wrote this:-

I see a time of great persecution coming, which will drive Christianity all but underground in the West. I believe that this will primarily take the form of a social and economic persecution, where Christians will be ridiculed for their faith and pressurised into making it a purely private matter.

Meanwhile, the established Church will continue to implode and self-destruct, fragmenting into various divisions over a range of internal issues. There will be an increasing number who fear man more than God, and who shy away from admitting that there is any absolute truth. Instead, they will seek to promote a gospel that is socially acceptable to all. As a result, many will continue to leave – disaffected and dismayed by the lack of faith and courage needed to stand the ground.

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Are liberals willing to practise religious discrimination? In the case of Chris Cranmer, it seems not. Mr Cranmer has won recognition of his satanism on board his Royal Navy ship, meaning that he is free to publicly practise satanic rituals and to have a funeral carried out by the Church of Satan.

But then we get to the case of Signor Buttiglione who has been deemed unacceptable for a position of responsibility with the EU because of his orthodox Catholicism - this despite a promise that he would keep his Catholic beliefs private.

Matthew Parris, in a column in the Sunday Times, wrote of Mr Buttiglione that,

“Signor Buttiglione claims that he has been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination ... I think Signor Buttiglione has indeed been the victim of anti-Christian discrimination, and that such discrimination is now in order ... Catholic teaching on contraception and abortion are unacceptable and insulting, not only to me but also the majority of Europeans, and the overwhelming majority of educated Europeans. I do not shrink from according special status to the educated, for they lead thought.” (via Conservative Commentary)

So, we’ve arrived at a situation where it’s thought reasonable to allow Satanism to be practised in the Royal Navy, but that Catholicism is too “insulting” to be accepted even as a private belief by a political candidate.

Liberals, in other words, will discriminate on the grounds of religion, but just aren’t concerned to discriminate against satanists. In fact, on one very liberal Australian website, satanism was declared to be admirable for its “frank and rational hedonism”. So I don’t like the chances of a return to a more traditional ordering of things, in which discrimination was practised against satanists rather than Christians, at leat not in modern liberal societies.