The De-Christianization of Great Britain

The American Spectator features a chilling article on the de-Christianization of Great Britain.

Some there want to do away completely with Christmas, christening ceremonies, and ban religious schools. Try this on for size:

Last year it emerged that three out of four employers were no longer putting up Christmas decorations in the workplace for fear of offending political correctness policing, and as I wrote recently Christmas lights are disappearing from High Streets, ostensibly because of the cost of complying with the expanding torrent of health and safety regulations as well as because of enforced political correctness. However, attempts to rename Christmas "Winterval" and/or to remove Easter from the calendar by some local authorities a few years ago were dropped in the face of public protests and defiance.

The report proposes Christening services be replaced by "birth ceremonies" in which the parents of children and the State agree to "work in partnership" to raise children, and that action is taken to "ensure access" by "ethnic minorities" to the countryside which so far remains largely populated by British people. (How? Are they to be shipped forcibly into Vietnamese-style New Economic zones?) The apparent motivation for this is a determination to ensure that nothing of traditional British identity remains. It seems typical of the "soft totalitarianism" that has never been far below the surface in the Britain of New Labour.

When I spent three years in England back in the late 1980s, the country was already far more secularized than the United States. Every little village had a beautiful, elegant cathedral--a testament to the great revivals in Britain in ages past--but many of them sat almost empty or completely unused. Many were museum pieces featuring self-guided tours hosted by the British Heritage Society.

Still, all is not as lost as some would make it out to be:

"We can no longer define ourselves as a Christian nation, nor an especially religious one in any sense." This is very peculiar, and may be an exercise in wishful thinking on the part of the report's authors because the last census for which figures are available, that of 2001, actually showed 71.6% of the population was Christian, and the total of all religious believers who answered the census was 76.8% of the population.

I think perhaps this is just another case of the media and the elites working toward a self-fulfilling prophecy. They are probably impatient to have the Aldous Huxley type world they long for.

That type of soul-less society, the one liberal elites so yearn for, is not inevitable, either here in the United States or in Great Britain. But if people of faith are unwilling to stand up for their beliefs and their heritage (which is what got us in this situation in the first place), then it will surely come to pass.

And we will have no one to blame but ourselves.