Understanding the Cult Wars (or trying to)

Toby Young (of the Free Speech Union – join!) reports that he had a moment of revelation recently when he realised that England’s current ruling class is, in fact, a “technocratic theocracy,” acting in effect as a secular State Religion, its own beliefs being unchallengable truths, and its opponents irredeemably evil.

He may be a little late to the party on that – I noted the quasi-religious nature of many of the fashionable societal trends in my 2019 Seeing Through Smoke, and so have many others. But I guess it has come to bare-toothed fruition in the whole phenomenon of two-tier justice so dramatically unleashed in the new Labour government. When dissenting belief leads to jail, one has a Theocracy.

Two things are vital to realise, especially for Christians and those who want to sit a little aloof from the spiritual fray as “cultural Christians.” The first is that this newly Established State Religion is less a religion than a cult, a distinction that perhaps Toby is not trained to make. The second thing is that it shows every sign of being, on close examination, not so much a rival to England’s historic Christian heritage, but a design to destroy it: so to acquiesce in any part of it is the equivalent of offering sacrifice to Caesar’s Genius in the second century.

I’ll come to a third mystery later, which is why this State Cult allies with an apparently antithetical militant religion, Islam. How can it be that a secular theocracy wants to make Islam the de facto State religion by enacting unique blasphemy laws in its favour? More on that anon.

In a series on popular “Christian” cults I contrasted Jesus with the typical cult leader. One key element is that cult leaders seem simultaneously to know they are peddling lies in order to control others, and yet to believe them themselves. It may be this internal conflict that makes them so insistent on conformity, and intolerant of dissent. By contrast, a simple belief system, honestly held, may well involve vigorous internal arguments and external apologetics, but will usually be self-confident enough to live alongside other views.

Religions lapse into cults when they become persecutors, and it is when they become hypocritical that they become persecutors. Consider the oppressive nature of the thoroughly worldly Catholic hegemony against which the Reformers reacted. Or more recently, the way that the Iranian “Fundamentalist” Revolutionary Guards were, during the revolution, operating roadblocks as scams to confiscate property including forbidden alcoholic beverages for their own use.

And so to me it seems to be the psychological self-deception of the cultist, in pursuit of wealth and power, and not simply religious faith, that makes them so impregnable to evidence. One can seldom catch their hypocrisy out, because they are truly self-deceived. This explains how Keir Starmer can continue to rage against Far Right sedition as the cause of Britain’s woes when he knew at the outset, from the Intelligence Services, that there are no organised Far Right groups (hence his only being able to name the long-defunct, and non-terrorist, EDR). Moreover the pattern of arrests confirms that even the rioters were nearly all disgruntled locals with no political connections. But since to the Cult fascism is the enemy (even though that is never defined), then any appearance of dissent must be the product of plotting by Far Right doctors, priests, housewives or schoolchildren, contrary evidence notwithstanding.

Similarly cultic is Ed Milliband’s Millennialist zeal to eliminate fossil fuels by 2030, however many trillions of pounds it costs, however the poor suffer, or whatever evidence is presented about its impossibility (not to mention its needlessness when the IPCC itself predicts the effects of climate change to be a few percentage points of GDP). So to Milliband there can be no question of doing a cost-benefit analysis, for the Cult says Doomsday is nigh (and unlike Christianity it does not tolerate alternative interpretations).

At this point I want to attempt to show that the seemingly disparate tenets of the Cult only really find a connecting thread in their enmity to the Christian revelation, whatever their historical roots in Marxism or their benefit to the rich and powerful. Cults cannot be understood without recognising them as primarily spiritual.

For the most part, the Cult wishes first to remove God as Creator, because then he cannot be seen as Saviour. It only really makes sense to fight against the realities of the Universe if you wish to dethrone the Creator God you hate. We have seen this most starkly in the denial of realities in gender and sexuality, when even biologists are cancelled for describing the world as it is. In Christian terms, of course, both of these have their roots in Genesis, in which God created mankind in his image and likeness, and as male and female. A little later, Adam and Eve are paradigmatic of the sanctity of marriage, in a text Jesus himself used to emphasise the God-givenness of that institution. In terms of salvation doctrine, Ephesians describes marriage as sacred because derived from the union of Christ and his Church, and sexual perversion as the first result of idolatry. That is why they must be abolished.

Less overtly, but equally truly, divorced from the nature of God’s Creation is the Fiat currency system of the West, based on endlessly spiralling debt. The Bible is clearer than the Keynsian economists are on how borrowing is related to poverty, and how “he who does not work shall not eat,” but at a deeper level, its teaching on the nature of wealth in relation to God’s provision of real “stuff” and to human effort, to thrift and to generosity, directly contradicts the “Magic Money Tree” which produces ever bigger and more tasteless fruit for ordinary people.

Similarly, the normalisation of abortion and euthanasia, whatever their moral justifications in terms of human rights or compassion, make more sense as the denial of the Judaeo-Christian teaching of the sanctity of human life in God’s image.

At the same time that human life is cheapened, the Cult elevates the animal kingdom to higher status through veganism and rewilding. Genesis, by contrast, subordinates animals and plants to mankind. Jesus curses a fig tree to teach a lesson, condemns a large herd of pigs to save one man, and acknowledges, even as he supercedes them, the animal sacrifices of the Mosaic Law. After his resurrection, he still eats fish… as, I gather, does Keir Starmer, although his wife is reportedly orthodoxly vegan.

The cardinal sin of the Cult is, we know, racism, which has marginally more meaning than the “fascism” accusation which it throws around equally indiscriminately. But even normal people are beginning to see that “racism” has been redefined to mean, no longer unjust discrimination against someone of a different colour, but simply belonging to the wrong people group. Racism itself (in the MLK sense) is an historic phenomenon, for the natural distinctions have historically been between tribes and nations, not skin colour. By what insane logic does one bunch together the Saan, their Bantu conquerors, Australian aborigines and Cheddar man as one “race,” South American descendants of Spaniards as a second, all Europeans (including Spaniards), plus Jews, as a third, and Muslims of all nationalities as a fourth?

The Bible does not recognise these races, of course, though it does distinguish tribes and nations as valid entities. Anthropologically it unites all humanity in Adam, and soteriologically it renders them all one in Christ (the free, male, Jewish new Adam) by faith. The God-given distinction between tribes (and their cultures) is denied by mass immigration, and the worldwide brotherhood of man by critical race theory.

The linkage of race, that is to say “white supremacism,” to colonialism, slavery and by extension the whole of English history (so that “Anglo-Saxon” becomes a problematic term) is, I think, best explained by the need to abolish what is, when push comes to shove, a Christian history. As someone recently commented, for all the evils visible in British history, the Christianity that has guided us since Roman times has led to increasing prosperity, equality and kindness. The Cult seems to have condemned the first, prosperity, as an evil to be overturned, and has purloined the others as buzzwords meaning, in reality, discrimination and vindictiveness.

Environmentalism, particularly in its most militant aspect “climate change,” has taken Genesis’s creation ordinance for man to subdue nature on God’s behalf, and turned it into a belief that man controls nature and yet is criminal to do so. As I wrote in God’s Good Earth, as far as the Bible is concerned it is Yahweh who was, and is, the Lord of Creation, and who controls the climate to bless, or judge, mankind. The Cult’s alarmism is bad enough for elevating, and then blaming, mankind unjustly for improving living standards everywhere (and so wanting to see most of them die out), but worse for denying that God is God.

That just leaves the anomaly of the Cult’s irrational Islamophilia. It is a historical truth, verified around the world, that Muslims regard reaching 20% of a population as the point to start jihad, and 50% as the time to take over (which is easy when democratic institutions left over from Christianity are still in place). Since classical Islam has no truck with any of the Cult tenets I have examined, why does the Cult sow the seed of its own death by engineering Muslim mass-immigration and laws against a badly defined “Islamophobia” that appears to put the religion beyond any criticism?

This, I think, is the irrational factor that most reveals the spiritual nature of the Cult. If England (and Europe, and North America) become Muslim states, then the Christianity it regards as “infidel” becomes of mere dhimmi status – or, given the flavour of Islam that predominates in 2024, it becomes extinct. At the same time, the Jews, as the other people of God’s Book, are eradicated together with all knowledge of their God, not only in Britain, but by the help of the Cult’s adherents, in their land of refuge in Israel too.

I suppose that the Cult’s anti-Christianity could be seen as a secular product of anti-Englishness, anti-whiteness or even antinomianism. But antisemitism, combined with a self-destructive alliance with militant Islam, to me clinches the real source of Toby’s “technocratic theocracy.” It’s not secular at all, but satanic.

And therefore, as the rapper Zuby surprisingly said recently, the only hope of defeating it is Christ.