Should I Stay or Should I go?

by Rob Munro
poated Wednesday, August 11, 2010
The Prevailing Culture

In recent years, Christians have increasingly wrestled with a prevailing culture that is no longer amenable to some foundational Christian moral values. The sexual revolution from the 1960’s onwards, which fuelled a systemic anti-authoritarianism, has left older received ‘norms’ in tatters. No longer is the Christian community just battling a modernism that challenges its truth claims and a relativism that challenges its moral absolutes, but now it faces a post-modernism that challenges even the concept of truth, a new atheism that portrays Christianity as immoral, a confusion of multi-faith options on offer and a new media consensus that regards religion as unbroadcastable, unintelligible and irrelevant, except to mock. The result of this multi-pronged attack has been a great decline of professed Christian faith and a crisis of confidence in its message.

The pressure of this new world on the Church of England has come to a head in one key principle. The key principle is the concept of inclusion. The current secular liberal orthodoxy has made ‘inclusion’ or ‘equality’ the new absolute for morality. ‘Inclusion’ is the dogma that every person should have equal affirmation and access to anything in society regardless of their race, disability, social class, gender or sexual orientation. ‘Discrimination’ is the only sin under this doctrine, by which is meant any limitation being put on people’s freedom to do what they want, where they want, when they want, as long as they don’t violate the full inclusion of others. Alongside the dogma comes its hermeneutics: the validity of a belief or practice has to be justified by a twin appeal, first to personal freedom – you can do what you want to do, and second by an appeal to the justification of love – if it’s loving, it’s OK. The irony of the dogma, is that its propagation requires that anyone not fully accepting ‘inclusion’ needs to be excluded, or at least prevented from enacting their objections. However such philosophical inconsistency is no problem for a postmodern way of thinking which revels in such things. the rest