by Gillian Philip, spiked (Photo: Unsplash)
Reason, democracy and liberty are under constant assault from those who think themselves ‘progressive’.
[…] Plenty of commentators have pointed out that it’s a little rich to expect young British men to defend a country they’ve been raised to despise. It’s unsurprising, given what that postmodern mindset has produced in every British institution from the BBC to universities to the British Army itself, that those very same young men might look at their country and think it’s not worth defending any more. It’s been a sort of self-fulfilling contempt.
The establishment’s loathing of the Judeo-Christian culture that built the UK was particularly notable in the recent assisted-suicide debate. It’s not that Christian beliefs were a deciding factor in the very widespread opposition to the horribly drafted bill. It’s that every objection, whether from disability-rights campaigners or medical bodies, was met with howls of contempt by supporters of assisted suicide about ‘religious fundamentalism’. No argument about safeguarding, boundaries or judicial oversight was entertained if some atheist on X could dismiss it with a sneer of ‘faith’.
Kate Forbes of the SNP, a former leadership contender, spoke back in June at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference. She emphasised the value of the Judeo-Christian tradition, praising Biblical concepts of ‘freedom, liberty, human dignity, the worth of life and flourishing for all’. She added with regard to the anti-religionists of the assisted-suicide debate: ‘Their moral framework, their basis of decision-making, is accepted without question, as though anybody who is free of the burden of an inner conscience grounded in historical truths is unbiased and unprejudiced.’
Forbes’s erstwhile colleague, former MP Hannah Bardell, promptly exploded on X: ‘Are you kidding?… We need to be taking [on] the far right, not aiding and abetting it, and attending their events.’
Bardell’s simplistic political ignorance has her conflate Christianity and its (albeit complex) political heritage with some fascist bogeyman. Meanwhile, Forbes is exactly right in her thesis that the West will ‘pay a heavy price’ if it betrays the culture that built the freest and most prosperous societies in history.