Into 2018

As we head into another New Year, we find ourselves living in a country which is facing the most serious of issues since the Second World War: perhaps the most serious matters ever. But, as citizens, we are both perpetrators and victims.
 
We have – since the Second World War and operating, as we do, within a representative democracy – elected national political leaders who (collectively at least) have dismantled the moral laws on which any nation relies as a sure and stable foundation. We have cheapened human life to the point that healthy unborn children are willfully sacrificed through a de facto policy of ‘abortion on demand’. We have facilitated the dissolution of marriages and have – most recently – reduced and distorted that ancient tradition to a mockery. Profanity, immorality, perversion and violence are a regular part of television programmes and the electronic media in which we engage.

We have created a non-stop 24/7 society which has hugely increased stress and minimalised time for families to be together. Now laws have been developed which could criminalise caring and responsible parents who discipline their children, while Orwellian systems are being devised in Scotland to invasively intrude into and interfere with family life.
 

In our ‘liberal’ push towards multiculturalism, moral/ethical relativism and religious pluralism, Political Correctness is being employed to stifle and intimidate free speech; with reasonable and informed dissent being shouted down and vilified as being “xxxxphobic”. We have made it a crime to “offend” those who object to Christian beliefs and the traditional standards for human behaviour and morality.

We are teaching our children to accept ‘alternative’ lifestyles as a new norm, and now even to question their very being. Indeed teaching the youngest of innocents to make pick-and-mix gender choices for themselves from a manufactured neo-plurality of orientations is tantamount to state-sponsored child abuse. But these changes have all been introduced by leaders of our choosing and passively accepted by us: either by agreement or in quiescent surrender. Until we, as a populace, cry out to our elected representatives to re-establish the time-honoured moral and ethical values which have served us so well, we face a dismal future.
 
However we are also victims.  We are victims of personal conduct in positions of influence and public office which, in many cases, has been revealed – over a considerable period of years within the major institutions and foundational pillars of our society – to be unethical, corrupt, immoral, dishonest, greedy and self-serving. The question therefore arises: “In whom or in what can we trust?”
 

But by far the biggest failure from which we suffer in the nation is that within Christian leadership.
The vast majority of  church ‘leaders’, within both the established denominations and related Christian ministries, have failed to speak out – publicly, robustly and with spiritual insight and authority – against the rejection of and departure from the Judeo-Christian standards, mores and laws which have, for centuries, underpinned national stability, family life and the society in which we live.

 
Until we see church leaders across the nation taking a stand in the public square and speaking clearly and boldly against the flood of degradation that threatens to drown us all, we will continue on a course which will inevitably lead to societal chaos. And until we see those leaders working strenuously to proclaim and preserve the central tenets of the teachings they claim to follow we are headed towards national calamity.

We are at a moment of profound import in the life of our nation, and the consequences of the choices and decisions we make today will shape the futures of and for our children, our grandchildren and those generations beyond.
 
So as we step out into 2018 we would do well to remember the words of King George VI in his 1939 Christmas Day broadcast. With the UK then in a state of war and facing great peril, the King addressed the nation quoting from a poem entitled ‘God Knows’ by a Minnie Haskins:

‘I said to the man who stood at the Gate of the Year, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.” And he replied, “Go into the darkness, and put your hand in the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light, and safer than a known way.” ’

As an ancient text so aptly stresses and most certainly speaks to us urgently today:

“Stand at the crossroads and look; ask for the ancient paths where the good way is, and walk in it”.

Pray God we do.

Colin Wilson
31 December 2017

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