Ramadan lights are being displayed in London’s West End over the Easter period for the second year, and judging from its comments section, Telegraph readers are livid. Predictably, London’s mayor Sadiq Khan comes in for special vitriol. Yet, according to his spokesman, Khan will be attending church on Easter Sunday (an admirable gesture, surely), which is more, one suspects, than many readers will be doing. Moreover, the Passion of Christ will be re-enacted in Trafalgar Square on Good Friday, complete with horses, donkeys, and doves. Thousands are expected to attend, but, again, one wonders how many readers will be among the crowds.
The point is that it is difficult to sustain the argument that “we are a Christian country” when only one in ten children are now baptised, under one in ten are members of a church, and only a third identify even nominally as “Christian”, with numbers falling rapidly on all fronts. Mass immigration has played its part, but so has our increasingly godless indigenous population, for whom Easter means no more than an orgy of chocolate and a long weekend. In these circumstances, is the diverse inclusive multicultural society that celebrates all faiths and beliefs, as well as none, not a reasonable settlement that reflects reality?
The problem is that as Christianity disappears from our national life and the public arena, our indigenous national culture, our English civilisation, seems to be disappearing with it. The connection between Christianity and European civilization was memorably evoked by T S Eliot in his Notes towards the Definition of Culture:
“It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend on that culture for its meaning. Only a Christian culture could have produced a Voltaire or a Nietzsche … If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes.”
Our precious individual freedoms, our reverence for freedom of thought and expression (essentially, the right to cause offence), and a good-humoured tolerance of others, are among the fruits of this inheritance. But these are contained within a moral and cultural inheritance that encompasses our literature, our arts, our customs and pastimes, our manners and sense of humour, our social fabric, our institutions, our very way of life, and that is rooted in over a thousand years of history.
Even if we no longer attend church, or count ourselves Christian, even if we are unconscious of the Christian roots of Western civilisation, we English care deeply about what we perceive as the loss of this inheritance – our common culture. It is why most of us really voted Brexit, as Eric Kaufmann’s research has revealed. And it is why we are instinctively uneasy at the sight of the Ramadan lights in London, along with much else that is visible in the parallel communities of multicultural Britain.
No reasonable person objects to individuals or minorities practising their preferred religion. That is the essence of a free society, as is the right to criticise and ridicule those same religions. The problem lies with what the Ramadan lights represent: the replacement of a common national culture founded on Christianity, into which immigrants in past generations were assimilated, by a “multicultural society” founded on the perverse premise that if oppressed minorities are to be liberated, the majority culture must be declared “hegemonic” and deconstructed. Which is why our national culture is now denigrated on an almost daily basis, our history submitted to decolonisation and rewritten, our cultural achievements belittled, our statues toppled, our countryside declared “racist”, our people discriminated against for enjoying “white privilege”, and our thoughts and utterances policed under “hate crime” legislation.
Can anything be done? The decline of faith in the West has been going on since Darwin formulated his theory of evolution in the nineteenth century and Matthew Arnold lamented the receding tide of faith in his celebrated poem “On Dover Beach”. If Western civilisation is to survive the loss of its Christian faith, the very least that is needed is a recognition that we have a common culture, that Christianity has been integral to its development, and that this culture should be transmitted, unashamedly, to future generations in our schools.
But even this might not be enough. The forces of liberalism and radical democracy unleashed by the Enlightenment’s enthronement of reason over custom and tradition seem to have taken on a dynamic of their own, culminating in the degeneration of Western society into an amorphous mass of self-obsessed consumers, whose only value is self-gratification, whose individual rights are unlimited, and where all standards are levelled to the lowest common denominator. The recent hailing of a green spray-painted wall by Banksy as “a work of art” in the mainstream media epitomises the malaise. As does the bizarre cult of transgenderism, according to which cross-dressing men are granted the legal right to claim that they are indistinguishable from biological women.
Throw in the active repudiation of our shared cultural inheritance in the form of multiculture and it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the West is in terminal decline. This being so, we must look to those religions and cultures that are more vigorous than ours, that inspire faith and the willingness to make personal sacrifices in the name of higher ideals – religious, political, or nationalist.
Happy Easter
2 responses
Well believe it or not a huge revival is coming to Great Britain, I have no dates but I’ve had many dreams, as have many others. It’s going to come or start at a time when there is great darkness in the world, a lot of people that no one have ever heard of are going to be used in this harvest they’ve kind of been hidden away, there’s a whole network of these people who’ve been given dreams and visions and preparing for this for some time. And it looks like the beginning is very near thank God.ive talked to many young people in the UK,and it’s very sad and frightening how many people young people are pro Palestinian, yes the United Kingdom is in trouble, but very soon God is going to raise up Christian spiritual warriors like the world has never seen. Mark my words it’s coming very soon
How It All Ends: Muslim and Christians.
Given current conflicts in the Middle East and Islamic extremism, we need all the light we can shed on the beliefs of Muslims. There are drastic differences, of course, between Islam and Christianity, but there are some similarities between Islamic and Christian eschatology – the study of end times – though these need to be carefully parsed out because end time is a subject of great interest to groups like ISIS.
Muslim Eschatology: The author of a recent book, The Islamic Antichrist, uses the pen name “Joel Richardson.” He claims to have been engaged over the years in hundreds of Christian-Muslim dialogues, including dialogues regarding Islamic eschatology. But because of death-threats against him and his family, he has adopted a pseudonym in this and several other books on Islam and Judaism. He studiously avoids sensationalism, and sticks to the traditional eschatological doctrines in Islamic “holy books” – the Qur’an, the hadith (sayings of Muhammad), and the sirat (ancient revered biographies of Muhammad) – along with statements of Islamic scholars, with hundreds of footnoted references, to bring out the basic eschatological patterns.
The similarity with Christian eschatology lies in a portrayal of the “end times.” Christ and an anti-Christ appear during a final battle, in which the forces of God encounter the forces of Satan, leading to a final victory. But as one might expect, the Christian and Islamic scenarios differ remarkably in the details.
In the final days, Muslim scholars hold, Jesus comes again. But this is the Muslim version of Jesus – Isa Al-Maseeh, who just happens to fit the description of the “false prophet” described in Revelation as performing miraculous signs and being worshipped. This Muslim “Isa” (unlike what Muslims allege to be “distortions” of Jesus in the New Testament) was just one of the last in a series of prophets, all of whom testified to the future coming of Muhammad and God’s final revelation. Filled with zeal for Islam, at the end, Isa Al-Maseeh will descend and destroy all crosses, convert Christians from the most abominable of all sins against Allah (Jesus claiming to be the Son of God), and kill all Christians and others who refuse to convert to Islam.
There will also be an anti-Christ – Ad-Dajjal in the Muslim version. He will claim to be the Messiah, but is a liar. He will become the charismatic leader of the Jews, followed by Jews and women, but will finally be slaughtered by the Muslim Jesus.
The final apocalyptic battles will take place north of Israel in the land of Magog (Rev. 20:7) during the reign of the final caliph, the Mahdi (the rough Muslim equivalent of the pope), who will rule over all of Islam. The Mahdi will wear a crown and ride a white horse, matching the description in Revelation. (6:2) And with the help of Isa Al-Maseeh (the Muslim Jesus) will defeat Dajjal (the Muslim anti-Christ), resulting in a world where Islam finally is the only religion, and all other religions have been banished from the face of the earth.
This final appearance of the Mahdi is a long-standing tradition among both Sunni and Shia Muslims, beginning with Ibn Khaldun, the famous 14th century Muslim historian and author of the Muqaddima, who writes:
It has been (accepted) by all the Muslims in every epoch, that at the end of time a man from the family (of the Prophet) will, without fail, make his appearance, one who will strengthen Islam and make justice triumph. Muslims will follow him, and he will gain domination over the Muslim realm. He will be called the Mahdi.
Several jihadist groups act in the belief that their terrorism will hasten the appearance of the Mahdi.
Christian Eschatology: Although prophecies about the “last days” and the Second Coming in the New Testament are steeped in mystery, the nature and deeds of the “antichrist” are fairly clearly outlined in the epistles of John and in Revelation:
1) The anti-Christ is a deceiver who denies that there can be any relationship between Father and Son in God: “Who is a liar but he who denies that Jesus is the Christ? He is anti-Christ who denies the Father and the Son. Whoever denies the Son does not have the Father either; he who acknowledges the Son has the Father also.” (1 Jn 2:22-23)
2) The anti-Christ refuses to recognize that the Son of God has come to earth and become human: “Every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is of God, and every spirit that does not confess that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is not of God. And this is the spirit of the anti-Christ, which you have heard was coming, and is now already in the world.” (1 Jn 4:1-3)
3) The “seducer” and “anti-Christ” is one who denies this truth about God’s Son. (2 Jn. 1:7) Satan, through the ministrations of the “Dragon” and the “Beast” (Rev. 13:4ff), who promote the spirit of the anti-Christ, will seek total world domination and worship. And a rather specific form of execution will be performed on those who refuse to adore “the beast or his image” – namely beheading. (Rev. 20:4)
Reading this prophetic segment, some of us who are familiar with the emergence of ISIS and the Caliphate in the Middle East, the innumerable beheadings, the slaughter or exile of Christians, and the wholesale destruction of churches, may tend to see the “anti-Christ” as something or someone of clearly Islamic origin. From the Muslim perspective, however, the anti-Christ, Ad-Dajjal, is actually the Christian Jesus as portrayed in the eschatology of the Second Coming.
So it would be at least a semantic mistake for a Christian to call Islam or a Muslim “the anti-Christ,” since the closest avatar of the Muslim anti-Christ is Christ Himself! Muslim eschatology seems to take its cue, so to speak, from Christian eschatology, bringing in many of the same figures, but with systematic inversions – making the Christian “good” bad, and the Christian “bad” good.
All this underscores the difficulty, and maybe the uselessness, of “dialoguing” with Muslims, especially on such doctrines. And the need to know ahead of time what we – and they – are talking about, lest different understandings of key ideas lead us to think we agree when, in fact, we have diametrically opposed beliefs.