I awoke on Sunday morning to news of another terrorist incident in the UK, the third in as many months. First the attack on Westminster Bridge, then the suicide bombing at the Manchester arena and finally Saturday night’s killing spree at London Bridge and Borough Market. As is to be expected, the media’s coverage has been extensive and often perceptive. My interest is how we, as those shaped by Christian convictions, need to think about these events and in a particular give them a larger context. Let me offer a few suggestions.
(1) This is Historic Islam
One of the misconceptions banded about by the media and secularised Muslims living in Britain is that the men who are carrying out recent attacks are not true Muslims; that Islam is a religion of peace. The reality is that the men doing the killings are acting in conformity with clear injunctions in the Koran to kill the infidel and pursue a holy war against them. Furthermore they are following the example of the first Muslims who used the sword to spread their creed with a merciless zeal. No one doubts that through the centuries there have been atrocities perpetrated by people purporting to be Christians, but the difference is that these misguided people have acted in contradiction to the clear teachings and example of their leader, Jesus Christ. By contrast when Muslims use violence, they are really returning to the roots of their religion and acting in accordance with their founder. We need to face this.
(2) A reminder of worldview differences
One of the lessons of these attacks is that they remind us of the reality that people really do hold vastly different beliefs about the world we live in. The perpetrators of these outrages see themselves as soldiers for Allah, attacking a degenerate and soon-to-collapse West with the reward of martyrdom and immediate entry into paradise. That life narrative is poles apart from that of the majority of people living in the economically-developed world with its focus on personal self-expression and pleasure-seeking with little – if any – interest in moral boundaries or an afterlife of any kind.
Clearly in outlining these worldview differences, I seem to be stating the obvious. But there is an important point to be made here. In the West, during the last half of a century, a sense has arisen that differences between people are minor; that all the peoples of the world can live harmoniously side-by-side, learn from each and reconcile any disputes through dialogue, compromise and the democratic process. Furthermore the assumption often is that all people want to build that kind of society. We might call this approach, multiculturalism. It’s been the cornerstone of UK public policy thinking for decades. Now I’m aware that the terror that’s come to the streets of Europe (and beyond) is perpetrated by a pretty small number of people, and that not all Muslims share their ideology, but nevertheless it’s a reminder that worldview differences really do matter. Culture is not as superficial and benign as is often thought; in fact cultures grow out of deeply held worldview convictions. A similar thing can be said about religion; the differences between religions are not superficial either as is so often incorrectly suggested. People really do answer the biggest questions of life radically differently and in mutually exclusive ways. Just think how differently jihadists and secular people formulate answers to these questions: (a) why is the world here? (b) what is a human being? (c) what’s wrong with the world? (d) how can the world be fixed? (e) what brings about a happy and meaningful life?
Now if cultural and religious differences are not shallow but reveal radically differing beliefs that people hold about the world, there must be limits to the extent to which peoples with competing worldviews can in the end live side-by-side. Or to put this another way, there are serious questions that have to be asked about the whole multicultural project. It seems to be based upon a massive amount of naivety about how the world really functions.
These terror attacks remind us of these realities; we have people in our midst who want to destroy the United Kingdom in its present form. At root they are not ‘right thinking’ people who ascribe to the creed ‘live and let live’ but are driven by completely different objectives. Of course when we look out at the wider world, we should have realised this a long time ago. Many people on this planet don’t subscribe to the liberal democratic model of life at all. But the question, I want to ask is, ‘Did anyone not think about these hard-realities in the post-war years when people of every culture and religion were invited into the British nation?’ It seems to me that so much public policy in this area has been formulated with little knowledge of how the world really works.
Now at this point let me say that I am not against immigration per se; what I am questioning is thoughtless immigration and believing that a nation can survive in the long run with numerous mutually-exclusive worldviews operating side-by-side. Nations have to stand for something and should expect those who immigrate to adopt values that align with their core beliefs. Worldview commitments are like plate tectonics; we don’t see the plates that make up the world’s crust but they are immensely powerful and shape the landscape of this world. We ignore them at our peril. That leads me to a second reflection that follows directly from this first one.
(3) The United Kingdom was established upon a Judeo-Christian heritage
Although I think that the idea of a Christian Britain can be overdone, it seems beyond question that our democratic constitution and institutions have their roots in our Judeo-Christian past. The fact that all human beings are considered to have equal worth regardless of our wealth, skin colour or gender is derived directly from us being created in the image of God. Furthermore, historically at least, our concept of law-making reflected the reality that there was a higher law that underpins human laws, the law of God. Moreover, the Biblical teaching of the sinfulness of all human beings after the Fall, reminded us that power corrupts those who have it. Hence, it is a good idea to disperse power as much as possible and ensure that no one person can stay in power for too long. If we’re willing to (and many people today are not), we clearly see foundations that come from Christianity.
The longer I live and observe the wider world, the more I think that real democracy has to grow out of a certain soil; without that soil, it rarely works or even takes root. Moreover, it is not something universally desired or admired. But in the context of this blog post, the point I want to make is a different one. I’m persuaded that the pursuit of a multicultural society has seriously weakened the fabric of the principles that the United Kingdom was built upon and will overtime result in a crumbling of much that we have come to cherish and hold dear. Let me explain this by looking back at history and seeing what Christianity has given us. Before the Gospel penetrated the Greco-Roman world, compassion, humility and kindness were despised virtues in that society. In fact from my reading of history, people hardly had a concept of them. The twin fuels that drove that world in those days were fear and power. And the Greco-Roman world is not an isolated example; as far as I can tell, all the great empires before that time, were fear and power systems, as later was the Islamic world (at it is today). Living on the Continent of Africa, I frequently see a similar pattern in operation. It was Christianity that brought moral goodness into the world.
Many have been hood-winked into thinking that concern and respect for others, compassion, the rule of law, freedom of conscience and so on are universal values and found in all cultures. I’m increasingly persuaded that that simply isn’t true. Now I concede that all human beings can – to a certain extent – live in accordance with their God-given conscience, but fundamentally it was the coming of the gospel that made European nations (and their daughters like America and Australia) stable and free societies. In Britain we owe a massive debt to the protestant reformation and arguably even more of a debt to the fact that in the eighteenth century two men roamed the land, opened their Bibles and taught the people the Gospel. Their names were John Wesley and George Whitfield; the evangelical revival and social transformation followed in their wake. Christian roots were sunk down into the British nation that lasted for generations. Today we treat some of those roots as weeds and in our ignorance work hard to pull them up; others that we cherish, are falsely labelled humanist and secular.
Here’s my point: it is inevitable that the embrace of every culture as equally valuable and equally wise will undermine – and in the end undo – the nations founded on Christian principles. As western societies become increasingly secular, our Christian roots are conveniently forgotten and we naively think that we can be good without God. The reality is that what we today call ‘western secular societies’ are really thieving societies: what is good about them has been stolen from a Biblical worldview that held sway in the past. As Christians we must remind our nations of our roots, roots that we ignore at great cost. I quoted the words of Os Guinness in a previous post; they are worth restating again here:
“Will the Western World sever or restore its roots, roots which are decisively Jewish and Christian? [According to Guinness] the West is now post-Christian and is really a “cut flower civilisation”. Cut flowers are beautiful for a while but they soon die, because what made them beautiful – their roots – has gone.”
First published on Challenging Thinking on 2017-06-06. Reproduced here in the CWT essay archive without style or semantic changes.