Christians need to learn who their friends are

Currently London is hosting a conference of the ARC (Affiliation for Responsible Citizenship). Attending is Toby Young (now Lord Toby Young, PBUH), the founder and chief honcho of the excellent Free Speech Union and the Daily Sceptic website. Both are rare defenders of independent thought on the British scene.

Toby is interviewed by Talk TV’s Alex Phillips here to report on the first day of the conference, whose introductory speaker was Jordan Peterson. The thing that is immediately striking, because it is more or less the first thing that Toby says, is how many of the attenders, and particularly those “on the platform,” are Christians. Alex, in reply, notes how many of those active in seeking change in our rapidly disintegrating country are motivated by Christian faith. She then makes reference to “cultural Christianity.” But it is important to realise that there would be no appetite for Christian values divorced from devotion to Christ were real Christians not being seen to be unique in having a powerful answer to the problem.

This is particularly so in the USA, where a host or role-models reflects their historically confident”salty” Christians, whether Evangelical, Catholic or Orthodox. But there are some British champions too, some within the denominational clergy, and Alex Phillips is not the first to be aware of how prevalent Christians are in seeking (and praying for) national reformation. Neil Oliver also comes to mind, often commenting on the Christian convictions of his correspondents.

Toby Young is himself not a believer, and partly because of that, and I suppose partly because he wants the anti-progressive movement to be as wide as possible, he hopes there may be a more secular model to motivate the non-Christians to action. I suspect he may be whistling in the wind – and also that he may even know it, since he ends that part of the interview with a “We’ll have to see how the conference develops” remark. It was Christ who transformed Western society, and Christ who judges it. It can therefore only be Christ who restores it.

Having mentioned Jordan Peterson, I feel I have to note, and contrast, another experience of his name being dropped over the last weekend, this time by me. For trivial reasons, I mentioned his name as a sermon illustration when preaching on “The Greatest Commandment” in Mark 12 (if you want to hear why, you can watch the whole talk here). Knowing that few names of public figures are known to all ages and demographics, I introduced my allusion with words to the effect “Has anyone heard of Jordan Peterson?” In the first, the smaller, of our two morning services, with maybe forty in attendance, only two people raised their hands. The bigger second service, perhaps topping a hundred, got a bigger response – I counted about five hands. I expected that not everyone would have heard of him,. despite his appearances on Question Time, headlines slandering him and so on, but not that only 5% of a pretty well-educated congregation would.

Nowadays we draw from a pretty wide range of people, from elderly mature Christians to young enquirers and most things in between, and although a village-based fellowship probably have a social bias towards the professional classes more than manual or agricultural workers. Perhaps that explains a lot. For as we all should know, it is the working class that is most acutely aware of the problems in this country, from low wages and unaffordable housing, to the two-tier judicial system. Those with degrees, however, consider themselves well-informed because they listen to Radio 4 or read the Guardian, and as a result (as Mark Twain noted) are actually misinformed. They know that diversity is our strength and that it is safe and effective. And that Tommy Robinson is a racist thug rather than starving in solitary confinement for a dubious civil offence.

Ignorance of Jordan Peterson is not, of course, the most reliable indicator of attitudes and understanding of the way the world is. But prayer topics, during open prayer, are often a good indicator too. It is a lot more common to hear prayers for Ukrainians or Palestinians, linked with diplomatically phrased tut-tutting about the madness of the new American administration, than for Russians or Jews – directly echoing the narratives that our mainstream media have been spouting for several years.

There are never prayers expressing outrage at the revelations that a corrupt USAID has been channelling billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money into child-trafficking from Guatemala, regime change of democratic governments across the world, or the training of Islamist terrorists as a means to that and money-laundering. There is no questioning about why, if Trump and his team are such evil fools, he not only won a landslide election victory, but his approval ratings at home have continued to rise since the inauguration, whilst the Democrats whose corruption is being laid bare are tanking to record low levels. Nor is there any appreciation of how many of his team, and of his supporters, are fired by their Christian convictions.

The reasons are simple: if churchgoers rely on our mainstream media for news, they will hear none of this because the media has long been captured by the same forces that took America into such a dark place in recent decades. Indeed, there are some wise folk who believe that England is the wellspring of the rot, our own deep state exporting it to the USA rather than the reverse.

Consequently believers who have never even heard Vladimir Putin speak know he is a dictator determined to rule the world (though it is our government, with a far lower election mandate, that is blocking the finance of Evangelical Mission in Russia, whilst the Russian government encourages it for promoting traditional values). They know Viktor Orban of Hungary is a Far Right authoritarian because the TV News says so, without reflecting that his people’s conservative stance on LGBT issues, Muslim mass-immigration, and not waging war in Ukraine is what it means to promote Christianity and family life.

British Evangelicals pray for revival, but seem largely blind to the nature of the spiritual darkness that requires revival in the first place. They forget that Wesley’s and Whitefield’s paradigmatic revival, though centred around the gospel message to individuals, gained its motivation from the collapse in national moral and social values following the collapse of Puritanism and the Restoration. Without a clear and widespread understanding of the deceptions abroad in our land, and how they are maintained, Christians are in danger of the same culturally-blinkered pietistic attitudes that enabled Hitler to rise to power with very little concerted Christian opposition.

Clearly the church should not become a political entity, but if our people are getting their whole understanding of the world from an anti-Christian propaganda machine, should not providing an information antidote be part of our brief? Maybe we should be praying for Jordan Peterson and the ARC conference as well as the Baptist Union presidential elections.