Blasphemy!
Blasphemy!
Blasphemy! What an old-fashioned and medieval sounding term, conjuring up images of the Spanish Inquisition or Iranian Ayatollahs, nothing to do with the modern, progressive world in which we are fortunate to live. What has this weird concept got to do with us, any rational person might ask? The Blasphemy Act of 1697 made it an offence in England or Wales, for someone educated in or professing the Christian faith, to deny the doctrine of the Holy Trinity and certain other key Christian teachings. There are no known prosecutions under its aegis and the Act was revoked under a subsection of the Criminal Law Act, passed by the Labour government of Prime Minister Harold Wilson, in 1967. This might seem a small thing, an ancient and unused law being tidied away and taken off the statute books, but symbolically it represents the moment at which the British people, through their elected Parliamentary representatives, decided that God should no longer have a place in the government of the country. The doctrines of religion were no longer relevant and the person or reputation of God no longer required consideration or protection within society. For a nation that had been built on the Christian faith since Alfred the Great had emerged from the marshes of Somerset to re-conquer the land, this was not a small thing, it was a momentous thing. Eleven hundred years of law-making and government with a specifically Christian emphasis were brought to a symbolic end. The new way forward, the way which the country had been moving for decades, was to secularism.
The ‘secular society,’ that is what we are told will deliver a tolerant society, where all viewpoints are given equal respect and no one group holds sway over another. Society is made an equal playing field where all religions, philosophies and ways of life can contend for the affections of the people. The word ‘secular’ was coined in 1851 by British writer David Holyoake, secularism quickly became an integral part of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries’ movements within European society to remove religion, contextually Christianity, from the central role it had played. Decrying the supernatural or divine, or anything dogmatic or absolutist, secularism dismantles religion or faith based elements within government and legal systems. It does not proclaim a particular world view but claims to be a neutral, non-dogmatic approach to governance. It is however impossible to be neutral while actively campaigning for the removal of a religious based legal framework, another moral system from which laws can be adduced needs to be put in its place. Fortunately for David Holyoake and his fellow-travellers another was at hand – humanism.
Humanism in its turn attempted, and attempts, to create a morality by use of human reason independent of reference to religion or faith. In its early years in the nineteenth century its morality was heavily influenced by traditional Christian virtues and standards, but as the years have passed it has diverted significantly, seeking to bring moral lessons from philosophies as diverse as utilitarianism and empiricism. Thus was born secular humanism, whereby the west was detached from its Christian roots and began its moral and cultural adventure.
The steady drift of the UK, and the whole of western society, from its roots in Christianity was such that by 1943, Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple, warned that Christianity was being undermined by a ‘secular humanism which hoped to retain Christian values without Christian faith.’ Perhaps it was that which lulled the Church into a false sense of security, that Christian values were being retained. The watchmen who should have cried the alarm remained silent, and the shepherds who should have rushed to defend us slept on. No-one recognised the wolf in sheep’s clothing that was stalking the land and the Church acquiesced to retreat from the public sphere to become a privatised and marginalised superstition. Is it any wonder that there are so few young people in the churches these days? The wolf has devoured the lambs.
Now the days are long gone when Christian values have been promoted or maintained in national life, even the values of ‘love’, ‘tolerance’ and ‘non-judgementalism’ have been twisted into a mantra for a permissive society where anything goes. Laws that were taken from Christian principles and enacted to build a healthy and prosperous society have been rooted out in the name of tolerance, equality, redundancy or simple expediency. Let us take a look at the social effects of removing some of the laws that were solidly built on Christian values and consider. The place where the most radical, wide spread and extensive changes have been made are in family and sexuality with numerous Acts being passed concerning marriage, divorce, abortion and sexual offences:
· Divorce rates have increased 85% in per capita terms since 1967, despite almost 1/5th of couples now co-habiting rather than marrying.
· 15% of families are single parent families.
o 41% of children in single parent families are living in poverty and achieve significantly lower educational grades.
· One in four pregnancies are now aborted, over 200,000 per year in the UK at a cost to the taxpayer of over £100 million p.a.
· Diagnoses of STIs are approaching 500,000 per year in England, with LGBT identifying individuals more than 6 times as likely to suffer as the general population.
· 25% of people in the UK will suffer mental health problems in any year, with LGBT individuals suffering at twice the rate of the general population.
· Approximately 1 person in 12 uses Class A drugs (for example heroin or cocaine) in any one year. The highest percentage of users are in the 16-24 year old age category with LGBT identifying individuals 3.5 times as likely to substance abuse as heterosexual individuals.
It is clear from these few statistics that 50 years of secular humanism has not contributed to human flourishing.
The inability of secular humanism to create a rational and stable moral system with a concomitant legal framework, is evidenced by the ever changing and liberalising nature of our laws. That is inevitable, depraved humanity is always ready to explore new depths of wickedness and the standard bearers of tolerance must move to accommodate them: for example transgenderism, polyamory and ‘minor attraction’ (paedophilia) have taken the place of gay rights as the new battlegrounds on the sexual frontier. Far from giving us an improved moral and legal system, all secular humanism has done is provide the slippery slope for the slide into moral relativism and authoritarianism. Relativism, for there is no objective moral standard to measure against, human reason being that most fluctuating and individual of faculties. Authoritarianism, for no other of the competing philosophies and religions can be allowed to challenge the ’tolerance’ of the secularists. In reality secular humanism erases value systems and social structures and they collapse in turmoil and confusion. The result is widespread dis-ease and distress, as society undergoes rapid and continuous change in which the loudest and most vociferous clamour for recognition and power. Secular humanism progressively destroys but is unable to build up a coherent alternative.
Judaeo-christian thought has a rich inheritance stretching back 3500 years, combined with the rationalism and scepticism of classical Greece it is the moral and intellectual soil in which European civilisation has grown. It has proven its ability to maintain and feed human flourishing over many centuries. Switching metaphors, it is the philosophical waters in which we have swum and prospered as a culture and into which the long roots of European and western society tap. The experiment with secular humanism is an experiment in cutting off the spiritual root of our society and we can see how quickly it has led to the wilting and decay of that society. It is time for the western nations to remember who they are and to graft themselves back onto the Judaeo-christian root – and it is time for the Church to remember who she is and to unashamedly offer again the spiritual riches of which she is the guardian. Blasphemy? With good reason it is written, ‘Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain,’ the fate of man has always been inter-woven with his relationship to his gods, it is time we re-wrote a blasphemy law and realigned our fate with ours.
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