The Third Reich and the Fourth ‘R’

Civitas, 17 December 2004

No one could remotely accuse today’s secularists who make up the bulk of the metropolitan ‘liberal’ elite of Europe and the United States of sharing the same political agenda as Adolf Hitler.
However, they both share one common objective that should send chills down the spines of true lovers of liberty, given how easily this iberal elite seems able to accomplish it today, and, supposedly, in the name of liberal values and ideals.
That objective is the de-Christianisation of Europe and America, and ultimately the world.

Although Hitler was prepared temporarily to play along with the Christian Church while he felt it expedient to do so, in private he let it be known he was concerned above all to free Europe, and ultimately the world, from what he considered to be the emasculating incubus of Judaeo-Christian values, and in particular, the ideal of human equality and the ethics of compassion, into whose grip he considered Europe to have fallen.
Paradoxically, it is very same values and ideals in whose name today’s supposedly liberal elites are busy pursuing the very same objective as Hitler, albeit by very different means.
Today, supposedly out of concern not to offend or discriminate against any minorities, these ‘liberal’ secular elites call for, and succeed in accomplishing, the removal of all traces of Christianity from public schooling.
How precisely this objective is accomplished varies from country to country, but the general tendency is the same. Thus, for example, in Italy, one school in Como has reportedly replaced the word, ’Jesus’ by the word, ‘virtue’, in the carols its children will be singing this year; while a school in Treviso is reported to have replaced the Christmas Nativity play by ‘Little Red Riding Hood’. Likewise, in America, school districts in New Jersey and Florida have reportedly banned Christmas carols.
Schools in Britain have supposedly been left to choose for themselves how and whether to celebrate Christmas. Increasingly, they are reported as having chosen to dispense with any reference to Christianity. As many as 25% of English and Welsh schools will not be holding carol services this year, and as many as 50% of these schools will be substituting secular seasonal celebrations instead.
All this is supposedly being done in the name of greater ‘inclusivity’, despite religious minorities in these countries being known to prefer that all take some religion seriously than none be encouraged to take any seriously.
Her Majesty’s Chief Inspector of Schools, David Bell, gave public support to this trend in a speech in April of this year to mark the 60th anniversary of the 1944 Education Act in which religious education and worship were made mandatory.
In that speech, Mr Bell questioned whether ‘we [are] right to be requiring from our young people levels of observance that are not matched even by the Christian faithful.’ He went to enquire whether there is any ‘continuing symbolic value in a common celebration of this country’s [Christian] heritage, and continuing practical value for pupils’ education, in behaving as those of faith do by undertaking an act of worship even though some are of no faith.’
For an answer to his questions,. Mr Bell would do well to turn to T.S.Eliot’s account of the ‘Idea of a Christian Society’ given in three lectures delivered at Oxford in 1939 just prior to the outbreak of hostilities. There, he wrote in support of such a form of society as follows:
‘Unless we can find a pattern into which all problems of life can have their place, we are only likely to go on complicating chaos … As political philosophy derives its sanctions from ethics and ethics from the truth of religion, it is only by returning to the eternal source of truth that we can hope for any social organisation which will not, to its destruction, ignore some essential aspect of reality’.
Some might object to such a metaphysically loaded justification being given for religious education in general and a Christian one in particular. But the propriety of such a form of justification is precisely what is at issue. While the likes of Mr Bell might have little time for religion, as many as 70% of Britain’s population turn out to be willing to own up to belief in God and the vast majority of these consider themselves to be Christian.
In such circumstances, the British educational authorities, and other countries, like Italy and the USA, no less Christian in culture, abuse their authority when they deprive the children whose education they superintend from initiation into or opportunity to participate in the religious traditions of their parents’ and their country.
Whereas Jesus bid his follows to render unto Caesar that which was his, today’s elite wishes no one to render anything save to Caesar.
As Eliot said back in 1939, the country faces three choices: to continue to sink into apathetic secular decline; to transmute into some kind of totalitarian democracy; or, finally, to become a positive Christian society, by no means the same, as he was at pains to point out, as a society consisting exclusively of devout Christians.
Currently, Her Majesty’s Opposition seems at a loss how to recapture the support and enthusiasm of the country, given how New Labour has stolen so many of its economic policies. Perhaps, the way to its recovery lies in its deciding to stand up for Britain’s predominantly Christian culture. God knows, someone needs to.
Season’s Greeting!