PAX POLITICAL CORRECTA – BETTER FOR THE GOSPEL THAN THE FIFTIES?
Cross-Post from Cranmer’s Curate:-
Following Lord Carey’s recent remarks about the effect of mass immigration on our nation’s social cohesion, the question arises: how good for the gospel was the more religiously, culturally and ethnically homogeneous Britain of the 1950s?
In the wake of the former Archbishop’s intervention, Cranmer’s Curate was invited to appear on BBC Radio Sheffield to discuss ‘What are British values?’
Your curate said that because of the fragmented state of British values we need to return to a ‘broadly Christian consensus’. He sought to argue that our Parliamentary democracy developed in a substantially Christian culture and that we are now in danger of losing our democratic privileges because our culture is turning toxic.
Whilst he stands by that argument as a reasonable historical prognosis, cc is not so sure on reflection about the desirability of returning to the culturally Christian Britain of the 1950s.
Clearly, that culture spared the Church the horrors of the Equality Bill. But the problem with such a broadly Christian culture is that people think they’re automatically Christian by virtue of being born in Britain. Such people can be especially resistant to being told that they need to be born again.
Your curate is reminded of a remark he once heard from the former Rector of St Helen’s Bishopsgate, Dick Lucas, at a Proclaimation Trust preaching conference. When Dick was growing up in the south of England in the 1940s, there were hardly any gospel-preaching churches. Now he said there are many churches where you can hear the gospel clearly proclaimed.
The spread of the gospel does require social stability, which is what we are in dire danger of losing in this country because we no longer have a unifying worldview. But the thought occurs to cc that Pax Political Correcta, though it is leading to problems for Christians, could actually be a more promising culture for proclaiming our Lord Christ’s gospel than one in which people think they’re Christian by birth. Furthermore, multi-cultural Britain presents wonderful opportunities for evangelism.
The question remains, of course, whether political correctness as the ascendant worldview in Western culture can deliver social stability. One suspects that, unlike the Pax Romana, it is a recipe for social chaos.
Tags: Christianity, Politics