Chapter One

Where it All Began

In 1967, Parliament passed the Abortion Act. It was implemented in 1968. Since then, five million children have been savagely aborted. Currently the figure stands at 180,000 per annum, one in five of all pregnancies. Thirty years on, we sense similar pressure beginning to build, this time for Britain to follow Holland's lead in legalising euthanasia. All forms of life are now subject to genetic manipulation. We select out. We distort unnnaturally. We experiment. 100,000 human embryos are destroyed in laboratories each year. Following the passage of the 1990 Human Fertilization and Embryology Act, which permitted destructive experiments on the human embryo and abortion of disabled babies up to and even during their birth, the Archbishop of Westminster, Cardinal Basil Hume, said that Britain no longer had the right to call itself a Christian country. It was a chillingly definitive statement. In common with most Western European countries, Britain has become a post-Christian society. The purpose of this chapter is to examine what kind of society has emerged in its place over these thirty years; to trace the link between the devaluation of life before birth and the devaluation of life after birth. Ironically, many of the secular commentators who helped hasten the process of de-Christianisation are now to the fore in mourning the consequences of individualistic materialism, of selfishness and indifferentism. Few make any connection between the unravelling of Judaeo-Christian belief and practice, and the culture which has been built on its ruins. Obsessive interest in the failings of organised religion - and every excess from cruel inquisitions to individual failings of adherents - has obscured the extraordinary role which religions have played in shaping and safeguarding much that is fine in both our history and contemporary lives.

The Judaeo-Christian Legacy

Ever since Augustine first arrived in Canterbury, Christians have been at the forefront of educational provision. The monastic schools and the universities of the Middle Ages were the seats of learning and civilisation; the Church provided the first grammar schools. It was the great evangelical Christian reformer, Lord Shaftesbury, who provided the ragged schools. From the earliest times, they provided education and relief for the poor and the sick. We still draw on this rich legacy. Teachers like the late Philip Lawrence epitomise all that is good in the tradition of providing an education which does not neglect the teaching of virtue. Carers organising charitable welfare, teachers, and reformers - whether challenging slavery or eugenics - are all part of that same Christian legacy. We would be infinitely poorer without their contributions. All the great religions of the world have agreed that there is an eternal reality beyond the flux of temporal and natural things, which is both the basis for being and the basis for rationality. But Christianity goes much further than this. It, and it alone, shows how the higher reality - God Himself - has entered history and irrevocably changed its course.

Better than Sybaris

Even in the ancient world, just as today, there was a fundamental clash between those who searched for something higher; those who recognised and served the collective good, and those who lived merely for themselves. The ancient Greeks idealised the city state of Sparta, but despised Sybaris. Sparta might have been no more than a glorified barracks, but it lived by law and was prepared to sacrifice eveything for a common purpose, because its people believed there was something beyond individual satisfaction. By contrast, the Sybarites lived for themselves and made the accumulation of wealth and pleasure the standard for their lives. The Spartan sense of common purpose became a source of common strength; the Sybarite way led to degeneration. What St. Paul subsequently offered the people of ancient Greece was the logical conclusion to their search for the common good and the chance to discard the rubbish of the Sybarites - once and for all. With Christ came Christian ethics. When civilisation loses its sense of ethics; when it severs the alliance between religion and culture, it drifts into materialism, nihilism and self-serving individualism.

That Hideous Strength

One of the greatest English Christian apologists of this century was C. S. Lewis. 1998 is the centenary of his birth. During a recent visit to Russia, I re-read Lewis's 1945 novel, That Hideous Strength, which explores what happens when a society discards God. The former city of Leningrad, littered with the debris of a State which had been dedicated to systematic atheism and a calculated political ideology, was a good place to renew my acquaintance with the people and institutions of 'That Hideous Strength'. Lewis foresaw a world in which our own species would be experimented upon, manipulated and tampered with; a world devoid of medical ethics and where good people become sucked in as collaborators. Mark Studdock, the central figure of the book, faces all the dilemmas that an up-and-coming bright young academic faces today. He must have been a familiar figure in the common rooms frequented by Lewis. The not-so-nice National Institute of Co-ordinated Experiments are pouring money into Bracton College. Lord Feverstone, their Director is a fellow of the College, supported by the Progressive Element, who are ranged against the Die-Hards. Studdock chooses to ingratiate himself with the Progressive Element, who are in the ascendancy. As the Institute gradually takes over the entire College, Studdock asks its Director what was planned: "Quite simple and obvious things, at first - sterilisation of the unfit, liquidation of backward races, selective breeding". Ultimately they will create "a new type of man: and it's people like you who've got to begin to make him". This appeal to Studdock's intellectual vanity succeeds, and he becomes more and more deeply enmeshed. Overwhelmed by his life, he tries to escape, but there is always the Institute's evil Miss Hardcastle, her secret police and their sadistic methods to fall back upon, to ensure his absolute loyalty to his new masters. Lewis also uses his novel to explore the sterile relationship of Mark Studdock and his wife, Jane. The tensions spiral as she begins to repudiate the assumptions on which they had built their married life. She begins to have spiritual insights and is led by the appreciative and supportive Dimbles to Dr Ransom, who is pitted against the Institute. Ransom tells her that, "Your trouble has been what the old poets called Daungier. We call it Pride." There follows an examination of the feminine and masculine, and a rejoicing in the differences. Here Lewis foresaw some of the issues raised by contemporary feminism. Studdock's mistake was his desperate desire to be clubbable, to be included, and to be part of a new ascendancy. His journey of self-discovery; the easy assimilation of the weak into totalitarian organisations; an examination of the pressures which can so easily submerge our lives; the fashioning of the lie into an entire system, and personal capitulation to ambition are the core of this book. So is the anger that Mark and Jane both feel when they discover how badly they had been prepared for their battles. The de-Christianisation of society, and the uselessness of their secular education and upbringing left them with little wisdom and no real knowledge. Just emptiness. They cry out with frustration when they realise just how much they have lost. Lewis, during his Oxford and Cambridge university days relished his battles with his own "Progressive Element". He passionately believed in the old alliance of eruditio et religio - scholarship and religion, culture and Christianity; that good scholarship without faith is as dry as dust; that building systems for life without God is so much rubbish. Lewis held that religion provides the necessary direction for living out the restless yearning for academic discovery. He would have agreed with St. Augustine that our hearts are restless until they rest in God.

The Coming Peril

In the 1990s there has been an almost complete break between Christian discipleship, public policy and civic values. It is no wonder then, that we have lost direction and are restless on an unprecedented scale. A person needs a deep and stable centre around which he can unify his various experiences. Christianity provides this. If we are to avoid becoming mechanical men and women, there must be this unity. Without it, the shattered mirror is incapable of reflecting the total man. G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis both perceived the dangers of the systematic secularisation of our world. Chesterton foresaw "the coming peril", describing it as "vast and vague ... of which capitalism and collectivism are only economic by-products" (The Chesterton Review, September 1995). Lewis and Chesterton prophetically wrote about the coming of eugenics, of the abuse of power, the presence of evil, and the corruption of man. Chesterton's Eugenics and other Evils (1923), and Lewis's The Abolition of Man (1943) both repay the attentions of today's readers. Even as he broadcast to the nation during the Second World War, encouraging and strenghthening his listeners, Lewis did not delude them into believing that victory over Nazism was enough. He knew that liberal freedom can become the mere power of choice, and that in its exercise we might become less free. The more fundamental freedom lies in the power to choose in the interests of others, not self; in the possession of life and in that love which is the giving of self and the giving of life. Like a gifted painter, Lewis would sketch the lights and the shadows, and encourage us to choose one over the other. The 'right to choose' has become the collective epitaph of the past thirty years. Chesterton knew that, compared with life itself, the liberal freedom of choice - the power of the pike over the minnow - was infinitely inferior, reminding his readers that, "To admire mere choice is to refuse to choose" (G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy).

Value or Price?

The challenge the modern world has set itself is the total secularisation of society and the eradication of the entire Judaeo-Christian heritage. Education, in the school and in the home, is the principal batleground. The teaching of absolutes such as the sanctity of human life has been largely jettisoned. In his Abolition of Man, Lewis graphically describes what happens to a society which abandons the Decalogue and its values: "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise ... we castrate them and then bid the geldings be fruitful". For the relativist, the men without chests, nothing is absolutely right, nothing absolutely wrong. Lewis called the new educators 'the new Conditioners': "It is not that they are bad men. They are not men at all ... they are artefacts. Man's final conquest has proved to be the abolition of Man." Lewis also wrote that Christianity had not been tried and found wanting, but rather found difficult and not tried. "As Christians," he said, "we are tempted to make unnecessary concessions to those outside the Faith. We give in too much ... we must show our Christian colours if we are to be true to Jesus Christ. We cannot remain silent and concede everything away". Having now conceded everything away, we should look at the human landscape of modern Britain, littered with casualties, and consider the consequences.

Men without Chests

In the nineteenth century, Carlyle called it "the Condition of England Question". In what condition do we find our country today? And let us be clear that this is every bit as much a religious question as it is a political one. With what sort of values have these 'men without chests' left us? The conditioners have replaced the Beatitudes with the me-attitudes. Individualism, relativism, syncretism, libertarianism and false liberalism. Their abolition of God - and the man made in His image - have left us poor beyond belief. The abolition of God and the abolition of man are two sides of the same coin. This narrow form of individualism, which encourages us to opt out of communal responsibilites, leads to the corruption of our civic life, to ethical illiteracy, and ultimately to what Albert Camus describes as "the bloody face of history". When a society loses respect for life, it loses everything. In our darkened Britain, where once everything had a value, everything now has a price. Politicians are obsessive about economic indicators and even these are the wrong ones. The value of Sterling, the Dow Jones Index, the money markets and stocks and shares dominate economic reporting and political thinking - not debt, poverty, joblessness, abortionism or homelessness. Instead of measuring political success or failure in terms of the level of Sterling against the Deutschmark, it might be more instructive to examine the impact on family and community life. If money itself had not become a god, we might have more space for the human beings who are the victims of our economic priorities and obsessions. Take debt as an example. In a letter to me, dated 12 September 1996, the House of Commons Library confirmed that national public sector debt stood at £323 billion at March 1996 (44.5% of GDP); personal sector debt stood at £557.8 billion (71% of liabilities were in the form of mortgages and other loans secured on dwellings. These figures also include un-incorporated businesses, trusts and non-profit-making bodies). The corrosive effect on the individuals, families and communities trapped by debt is destructive beyond belief. Debt destroys marriages, relationships, careers and lives; but it is not a politically correct issue. Poverty and inequality receive similarly short shrift. The real income of the bottom decile of the UK population fell by 6% in the ten years up to 1989, despite a 30% growth in average and real incomes during that same period (J. Gray, The Undoing of Conservatism, Social Market Foundation, 1994). Unemployment has left more than a million people without work for more than a year, but long-term unemployment is hardly a burning economic or political issue. Nor are the mentally ill who sleep rough on our streets, having been discharged into the care of the community; or the 167,000 homeless households who in 1992 applied to local authorities for accommodation; or the drug addicts, the countless victims of violence, or what Lord Dahrendorf memorably described as the underclass - the people who do not even make it into the classic class system. A concern for these questions is part of a consistent pro-life politics.

The Human Ecology

Britain's decaying social infrastructure, its human ecology, is no commendation for either its political masters or for the presumptions upon which our secular State is now constructed. It graphically reveals what happens in every area of life when human dignity is jettisoned and life is accorded scant respect. The cycle of welfare dependency, the demoralisation of vast swathes of the population, illiteracy - which apparently affects one 21-year-old in seven in Britain - and the culture of poverty are all symptoms of the decay. Even worse is the violence. l The rate of violent crime in England and Wales has doubled in the past seventeen years. l In the first six months of 1996, violent crime rose by 10%, representing an increase of 31,000 crimes to 331,000 crimes. l Life-threatening offences rose by 15% to 21,000 and there were 730 homicides, including murder, manslaughter and infanticide. l Robbery rose by 15% to 72,300, with most recorded robberies being muggings in the streets. l 1.2 million burglaries were committed - including 630,000 homes which were broken into - during the same six month period. The largest increase in crime occurred in the late 1950s, from under 1,000 per 100,000 population in 1955, to 1,750 in 1961, 3,400 in 1971, 5,600 in 1981, and a staggering 10,000 in 1991 - ten times the rate of 1955 and forty times that in 1901 at the end of the Victorian era. In the United States, a baby born in 1990 and raised in a big city has a statistically greater chance of being murdered than an American soldier had of being killed in battle during World War Two. A twelve-year-old American boy has an 89% chance of becoming a victim of violent crime in his lifetime. In Britain, hardly a community or family has been untouched by crime, violence, drugs, by family break-down, abortion or the new pressures which are now posed by secularised ethics, especially in medical practice. In 1991, for every two marriages in the UK there was one divorce, and for every four successful pregnancies, there was one abortion. Our methods of reproduction, the make-up of our children, the species and uniqueness of our animals, plants and food are all being modified and altered by geneticists and eugenicists. The previously unthinkable has become a way of life.

The Zeitgeist

The human landscape of modern Britain is littered with casualties. How a nation treats and regards its children is always a good measure of its standards and its strengths. Kill a child in the womb and it is little wonder that the child is so badly treated after birth. Post-Christian Britain provides a poor environment in which to be a child. l Five million unborn children have been aborted in Britain in just 30 years. l 750,000 British children now have no contact with their fathers following the breakdown of marital relationships (Family Policies Study Centre Survey of Lone Parents). l 1.3 million lone parents are left to shoulder the responsibility of bringing up 2.1 million children by themselves. The Treasury has put the cost to taxpayers at £3.5 billion (Social Security Minister in The Daily Mail 14.9.94). l Since 1961, marriage breakdown has increased 600% (Movement for Christian Democracy). l The number of divorces has doubled since 1971 - often with catastrophic consequences for the children involved (Office of Populations Censuses and Surveys). l In 1993, one third of all babies born in Britain were born outside of marriage. 44% of pregnant women are unmarried compared with 29% a decade ago (Daily Mail 14.9.94). l Between 1974 and 1984, 1,626 children died from abuse or neglect (NSPCC). l An estimated 38,600 children were on the Child Protection Register in England at 31 March 1994 (Department of Health). l During the past 20 years, there has been a sustained attack on the family by many pressure groups. l "Never before has one generation of American teenagers been less cared for than their parents were at the same age" (the Chief Rabbi, Dr Jonathan Sacks, The Politics of Hope, Jonathan Cape 1997). l Two-thirds of 15-35 year-olds "are not sure any more what is right and wrong" (Mori poll 10.10.94.).

Click here for Chapter One (Continued)

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