Last July I took my kids on the train to the Royal Society summer science exhibition which coincided with that year’s Pride march. On the way we passed by a number of men in leather butt-less chaps, some had whips, a few had gimp masks, others wore hotpants, men and women held up signs saying things like “Jesus had two dads” and “God loves Gays”.
A couple of months later I took them to the Sea Life centre in Brighton. Unbeknown to me, it was naked bike ride weekend. We parked some distance away and had to manoeuvre through streets packed with naked people with everything on show. We hadn’t even got to the Octopus, and they were already traumatised.
At home, they turn on the television and are shown how to size up naked people and select someone solely on lust for exposed breasts and genitalia, and if middle aged naked desperados don’t float their boat they can flick over to watch young beautiful people having sex on a luxury island, or Sam Smith gyrating breathlessly and unashamedly in nothing more than nipple tape, sparkly comfort knickers and devil horns. Thank God that Sam’s plurality exists only inside his own head and not in reality, one of him is bad enough.
At school they are instructed in the art of touching themselves and others, told how to maximise pleasure and avoid pain. My girls are told about a pill that will help them to be happy, free and independent.
At the hospital my adult daughter is treated like a circus freak for choosing not to take this pill, by medical professionals who can’t compute that a young beautiful unmarried woman wouldn’t want to treat her natural fertility like a sickness.
On the steps of our parish church recently, we were accosted by people waving Palestinian flags and issuing leaflets with images of mutilated bodies and calling for the genocide of Jews.
When, a few years ago, I decided not to participate in the Covid-19 endless booster programme, I was harangued by friends and strangers alike, I was badgered by snail mail, email, billboards, texts, news headlines, all telling me that I was a selfish upstart who didn’t care about the elderly. I was excluded from public places for choosing not to wear a flimsy piece of cloth across my face. My freedom of movement was curtailed.
All these and more are the ways in which I am offended. Constantly. Daily. In schools, on trains, in my own living room, at libraries, museums, art galleries, national trust properties, hospitals, on pavements paved with rainbows. I am scandalised and offended. My children are scandalised and offended. And worse yet, we are told that if we don’t sign up to a diversity, inclusivity and equity agenda that is antithetical to our faith, we will be excluded.
Does it matter? Not so much. Why? Because I am a Christian.
But a Muslim who wants to stand for First Minister of Scotland will not have his religion raised as a barrier against him. A woman who seeks to kill her child must be shielded, guarded, protected and saved from anything that might interfere with her sacred right to do so. A group of students at elite universities who, motivated by anti-Semitism, trash property, create chaos and make genocidal calls to violence are emboldened to do so by a society so uprooted from its own founding vision that, as <a href="https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/05/what-the-pro-palestinian-campus-protests-are-really-about">Carl Trueman</a> says, “it becomes clear that, for all of the blather about ‘human rights’, these people share no common vision about what it means to be human”.
Without rooting this vision in Judaeo-Christian belief, the idea of “human rights” is up for grabs. And grabbed it has been by those who believe that a new global ethic should be constructed <em>ex nihilo, </em>as if human nature and divine law did not exist. Authority becomes redistributed to interest groups which are not only without legitimacy but also often radical.
Under this new ethic, we are all equal, but some are more equal than others. Christians only need compromise one little thing in order to level up - their Christianity.
But Christians can’t compromise their Christianity and it’s about time they said so.
As Peter Kreeft says, “we have to move past the warm fuzzies, the fur coats of psychology disguised as religion, into a world where we meet Christ the King, not Christ the kitten”.
Only a Christian vision can ground human rights and ensure true freedom.
Pope Leo XIII, writing in <em>Libertas praestantissimum</em>, said: “True freedom, freedom worthy of the sons of God, is that freedom which most truly safeguards the dignity of the human person. It is stronger than any violence or injustice. Such is the freedom which has always been desired by the Church, and which she holds most dear. It is the sort of freedom which the Apostles resolutely claimed for themselves. The apologists defended it in their writings; thousands of martyrs consecrated it with their blood”
Uprooted from this vision, we have lost what Alice von Hildebrand calls the “exquisite sensitivity” between man and creator. “Great musicians,” she says, “perceive the slightest disharmony. Am I wrong in fearing that modern man, deafened by sound and poisoned by images, can no longer register cacophonic sounds which harm the sensitive enamel of their souls?”
A look around suggests she is not. Now is not the time for Christians to retreat and surrender to a false vision of the human person, now is the time to step up and be counted.
<em>(Pictured: Anna Richardson, the host of Naked Attraction, Channel 4's nude dating show)</em>
