God of our fathers, known of old,
Lord of our far-flung battle line,
Beneath whose awful hand we hold
Dominion over palm and pine—
Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!Far-called our navies melt away;
On dune and headland sinks the fire:
Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,
Lest we forget—lest we forget!Kipling’s Recessional
At the height of the British Empire, when called upon to extol its greatness, Rudyard Kipling saw that beneath the facade of strength lay a growing Godlessness and destitution that would cause the world’s greatest empire to become the “last pink bits” in under a century. Today, she indebtens herself inviting foreign scholars to her Postcolonial Studies departments to tell her that that Britain was never either great, or good.
Now, lest she forget, the United States is standing at a similar crossroads.
Do you remember with what awe the world watched the US military roll up its Iraqi counterparts?
Can you still hear the dull thud of the Berlin Wall falling to the ground?
Do you recall the effervescence of a stock market run buoyed by faith in fantasy?
For many the nineties felt like the “End of History”, a time when American military might, protoglobalism and liberal democracy would permanently triumph everywhere.
Yet beneath the surface, for anyone with the perspicacity to notice it, it was clear that something is rotten. Something is rotten when the White House becomes a harem, when senior politicians are jetting off to Jeffrey Epstein’s pedophile island, and when Satanic rituals are being performed at Bohemian Grove. Something is rotten in the United States of America.
Most Western nations today are run by elites even more hostile to Christian faith, Judeo-Christian heritage, traditional moral values, natural society, the pursuit of truth, and a traditional understanding of the nation-state. Trust in God, long absent from the money markets, academia and Hollywood, is increasingly being squeezed out of other institutions of public life. Having freed itself of the ‘shackles’ of a mindset that made it both good and great, elite thought is characterised by equal measures of naivety and mendacity. Stupidity is the penalty for sin.
In place of the Christian worldview, gullible Western elites are increasingly in the thrall of three ideologies that are razing what remains of the West: premodern Islamism; high modern socialism; and, postmodern social liberalism.
With deep pockets and naively receptive populations throughout the world, primitive Islamism idolises the same violent conquest that has left hundreds of millions dead, and legitimises a barbaric form of slave society where FGM on children and public executions of minors are acceptable. It proscribes independent thought and freedom of speech. Rather than dispensing with licentiousness, it pushes it underground and weaponises it against the weak. Islamists are bent on control of Western Europe and North America and will bribe, dupe and terrorise populations into islam if left unchecked.
Apparently, the blood of a hundred million on its hands is also not enough to undermine hypnotic appeal of socialism, be it national socialism, communism, Marxist-Leninism, or some other form of socialist statism. Elites are continually beguiled by notion that they know better than we do how to run our lives, manage the economy, educate our kids and keep us from harming ourselves. An infantalised populace results, a populace prime for exploitation.
Social liberalism as an ideology should be distinguished from immorality in a society at large, but the two clearly feed off each other. While there have always been incidents of fornication, adultery, prostitution, greed, witchcraft, sedition and revelry in society, social mores held that these were morally wrong, subject to censure, and typically illegal. Social liberalism as an ideology is the promotion of immorality as good, typically accompanied by attacks on morality and moral living, and advocacy of restrictions on the promotion of morality and criticism of immorality. In the succinct phrasing of the Bible, it is “calling good evil and evil good”.
Don’t get dragged into making a false choice between these ideologies. It is first-rate folly to make common cause with one to defeat the other, and we need not stand in their way as they go to war with each other. In foreign policy, priority should be given to cooperation with those countries of Asian rim, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, sub-Saharan Africa and Central and South America, and India, which are also battling these ideological delusions.
Ultimately, let’s remember however that these ideologies are forms of spiritual deception filling the void left by an intellectual elite determined to vest itself of any trace of Christian faith and the Judeo-Christian worldview.
In the first instance, the answer to a present malaise is not political, but spiritual. No country can become “great again” until it becomes godly. This does not mean spiritual renewal necessarily need come about in a bottom-up fashion. Would that we had more of Luther’s ‘godly princes’! However, we should not kid ourselves that there is any solution apart from addressing our immorality.
One day, you and I will stand before a just and good God bent on the destruction of sin.
For your own sake, wherever you are, repent and be baptised.
Christians, if there is undeclared sin in your life, repent!
For the sake of what is left of the West, let us entreat God that He “spare us yet”!
Article Licence: CC BY-ND 4.0
Picture of Rudyard Kipling by John Collier, 1891.
