by Aaron Edwards, That Good Fight
Notes from an Apparently Controversial Conference
If the furore around our recent conference is any indication, lots of people seem very determined to stop any efforts to actually make Britain Christian again. That is precisely why we must press on in spite of them for the glory of God and the good of the nation.
What a delight it was to be in beautiful Morecambe bay last weekend for the Make Britain Christian Again conference.
It was a wonderful time of proclamation, truth, and fellowship amidst the many attacks upon the conference from all sides, intent on misrepresenting and slandering us at every turn. It seems that some people really don’t want to make Britain Christian again, or don’t understand what it will take to rebuild what has been destroyed by secularism and much else which follows in its wake.
I have been writing on these themes for some time, particularly in a 3-part series last summer which bore the same title as our conference:
One of the key tensions I have come across time and again as people respond to these ideas, is the suspicion among some fellow Christians over whether Britain ever really was “Christian” in the first place, whether it’s a fool’s errand to make it so “again”, and whether such a venture is possible without corrupting Christianity into a debased form of nationalism which discourages true conversion and sanctification among patriotic disciples.
Some criticisms come from a place of fairly innocent ignorance, where people may find it difficult to accept something unfamiliar to them—like Christian nationalism—which feels out of sync with the worldview they were taught, or which seems radically different to the vision for Christian mission to which they inherited, even if such a vision has far greater provenance in the longer history of the Church, one way or another.
For others, however, the nature of their opposition is manifestly more dubious, either because they ought to know better, or because it exposes their own cowardice by moving beyond where they themselves are willing to go, and so they lash out. The idea of making Britain Christian may not even be entirely repulsive to them in theory, but it is when they see what might be required to bring it about in reality that they creep back in the opposite direction. Soon they find themselves not only not supporting the effort but actively undermining and opposing it with whatever means they can, whether via serpentine bureaucracy or full-frontal assault.
Read here (£)