Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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In the last few decades British society has neglected the large and
complex concept of the person that is represented by the Christian
account of the human being. Our culture has lost sight of the
wholeness and integrity of the human person. It regards the person
in terms of what they are owed, but not of what they owe, and so in
terms of rights rather than of responsibilities. We can no longer see
why at any fundamental level we owe anything to anybody. This
culture assumes that we are billiard balls that bounce off each other,
unaffected by any encounter. It has given up pursuit of the virtues
and self-control, given up talking about our obligations, and talked
instead about our rights. Previous generations thought about
persons in terms of both giving and taking. This generation now
thinks only in terms of taking, and it is unable to say who is
supposed to give what it is intending to take. But it is not enough
simply to be given freedom: we also have to receive it and practise it, for
only so will it truly be ours.
But our culture has given up the expectation that we will want to
develop as persons. It assume that persons need no formation. We
assume that no one can teach us anything about being human. We
no longer admit that freedom or love is not only given but also has
to be learned.
When it was in touch with the Christian faith and discipleship, our
culture and moral system was understood as a form of education by
which we could, if we wished, grow as persons. Now we now are left
uncomprehendingly holding only the fragments of a moral system
and culture. With our much diminished account of the person we do
not know why or how we may grow, as persons. With this much
diminished account, all public debate is solely in terms of the will
and desires of the individual and that individual’s power to gain
what he desires. We have found it convenient to regard the market
and state as mechanisms that supplies satisfaction of our desires,
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and does so without input from us and without any suggestion that
we learn how to control our desires for ourselves. It suits us to
believe that we do not have to grow as individual persons, and thus
do not have to undergo any form of nurture and discipline, for we
believe, growing is not something individuals need to do. The growth
of individual persons has been replaced by the growth of the
economy. The economy must grow, so that we do not have to. Here
Christians have to respond that the economy can only grow when
we ourselves grow, and we may grow as we receive the disciplines
that derive ultimately from the grace of God.
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sustain that gift of themselves to one another, day after day, for life.
Their freedom to do this is crucial to their dignity, and it is the basis
of all the other covenants of which any society consists. The man
and woman who sustain such a covenant together also provide the
best foundation on which to bring up the children who may arrive as
the result of their union.
There is a relationship between marriage and public confidence and
morale and the readiness of a society bear children, and to bring
them up, protecting them from the pressures of market and state, so
that they are motivated to bear their own children.
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We have de-motivated people with the result that they are deterred
from marriage and child-bearing. We are experiencing a decline in
fertility. The British birth rate (1.7) is below replacement level (2.1).
Our falling population is disguised, temporarily, by longer life-spans.
We are compensating for this drop in population by immigration,
particularly from those societies which, with more traditional
concept of family, are prepared to bear children, but are we
confident enough to pass on to those children the virtues by which
this culture will survive?
9. Expansive state
The state attempts to compensate for the failure of marriage and
break-up of the family. It has attempted to turn our personal
emotional burdens into public financial and fiscal burdens. The huge
fiscal consequence of this agenda de-motivates the economy as a
whole. A welfare system that attempts to replace marriage will
bankrupt the state, so that it will no longer be there for those who
do need it.
The state has grown beyond its mandate. It has become too large
and unable to acknowledge its own proper limits. It has become
ideological and directs its effort to eliminating the cultural traditions
by which we acknowledge any countervailing power to the state.
The unlimited state and market are the result of our reluctance to
govern ourselves, and our readiness to give away our own integrity.
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We have allowed government to compensate for our individual loss
of self-government. The state is becoming a self-perpetuating entity
that proposes to replace the public contribution of self-subsistent
persons.
At the same time, the state directs its effort (which is to say, our
effort) to making sex a more dominant feature of our identity. Its
spending is orientated to making us more sexualised. Our children
are encouraged to see potential partners solely in terms of sexual
attractiveness, and seek their own self-fulfilment through a process
that involves passing in and out of sexual relationships as that
attraction comes and goes. They are taught that one life-long love
relationship is not to be preferred to a series of short-term
relationships. The assumption is that the individual person
experiences love as a series of episodes, and the only constant
presence that gives unity to their lives is that of the state.
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We have to ask our media to encourage public speech by promoting
the debates in which cultures can be examined and compared for
their contribution to the common good. We must ask our media
public discussion of the contribution of the cultures of our various
immigrant populations, so we ask whether any of these threaten
others. By adopting a self-censorship that avoids ‘offence’ (in
widening but never explicit definition), we are failing to give public
examination to different ways of life, abandoning the forms of
discipleship which form us as persons and citizens, and losing our
tradition of public speech. Free speech is threatened only if
Christians stop speaking freely, regardless of the consequences. It is
lost only if Christians are faithless and afraid.
The flight from life means that there is no public recognition of the
public and long-term effect of every death. There is no
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acknowledgement that abortion shatters not one, but several, lives
because it destroys the confidence to sustain relationships. A
proportion of the population is carrying a secret self-hate. This casts
a pall over our society as a whole and makes it more difficult for
everyone to aspire for relationships that last and which produce
children who will be confident to bring up children in their turn.
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In the same way, Christians suggest that the state is constituted by
the sum of the public service of citizens. Christians insist that there
are limits to what the state can do for us, and what it can demand
of us. When the state steps beyond the mandate, spelled out by our
national political tradition, it is no longer good. Such a state must be
opposed, and Christians must point to the judgment of God that is
the backstop which preserves the distinction between state and
society, and so preserves the freedom of the individual person.
The state has no mandate to push its way into the formation of our
families, our culture and our imaginative life. It is not mandated to
take our decisions away from us, so that we are never obliged to
take our own decisions about which cultural, or charitable initiatives
to support. The state may not tell us that we may only serve if we
consent never to give our (Christian) reasons for our (Christian)
public and charitable service. Everyone is free to ask Christians to
keep their views to themselves. But they are not right to direct the
resources of the state to enforce silence on them. The state may not
silence the Church: the harder it tries the more it hastens its own
fall. Our refusal to take up everything that the state offers is some
small but necessary sign that Christians can give that the state is
limited, and that we all come under the judgment of God when it
ceases to respect those limits.
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We may share their experience of conflict and persecution, and give
thanks for it.
Then we may ask, and beg, the Lord God not to abandon us. We
remind God of his faithfulness. We ask him to cut out from us all sin
and rebellion, and to identify those ways in which we are blocking
the gospel and preventing our society from glimpsing his glory and
turning to him. We repent, at length and in public, with a renewed
litany. We offer to bear the cost of this witness, and so to sacrifice
ourselves for the sake of his witness and the future of this nation
that depends on it. We pray for the nation, saying in our prayers
what the nation cannot say for itself, but relies on us to say for it. In
the ‘person’ of the nation we confess our sins, name the powers that
we have surrendered ourselves to and we repent and beg God's
forgiveness.
We may discover that the Lord may take us through these various
crises in order to rescue us from the results of our long risk-aversion.
We may discover reasons to welcome these crises, and we must
pray that we turn out to be faithful and worthy of the trust given to
us. We pray for grace to sustain marriages, bring up children and
build a common national life. We may pray for a long-term trans-
generational perspective, so that we can see that this generation of
the Church may lay down its present comfort and security in order
that new generations of Christians may be born to the Church, and
the witness of God to this nation continue. We must pray that the
Church does not become divided as it discovers how to be faithful in
its witness. We encourage every Christian to explain how we should
all learn the whole discipleship that will preserve the holiness and
unity of Christian witness.
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unaccountable. We can only say that our culture has suffered a
decline because it has not been renewed by Christians. Christians
have not encouraged emphatically enough, and have not spoken
clearly or warned strongly enough. Christians have failed to set out
the wonder of the dignity of man. We have lowered our voices, and
with the urgency that it requires, they are guilty. We Christians must
repent. But we can repent. We can confess our sin, which involves
setting out some of these theological and cultural phenomena, and
we can do so with gladness, in confidence that the Lord God hears
us and will release us.
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