In this arresting article, Daily Mail (U.K.) columnist Melanie Phillips boldly challenges her readers with this headline: We have a choice. Face up to this crisis or commit social suicide. Phillips then goes on to let her readers know the gist of Iain Duncan Smith's upcoming report from his Social Justice Commission. An interim version of Smith's conclusions last year described "the enormous scale of the social collapse" in Great Britain's society. Furthermore, the interim report made clear that the reason for the crisis was the destruction of "traditional values."
The Social Justice Commission will present nearly 200 specific recommendations to begin solving this social crisis. But, as Phillips writes,
Where Beveridge [William Beveridge, British economist and social reformer writing in the 1940's) identified the five giant social problems of want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness, Mr. Duncan Smith lists the five giants that the Welfare State has helped create instead - family breakdown, serious personal debt, drug and alcohol addiction, failed education and worklessness.
Grasping the key point that morality has all but collapsed into the free-for-all of 'lifestyle choice' and 'non-judgmentalism', he is effectively drawing a line in the sand to end the culture of dependency and the appeasement of wrongdoing that the Welfare State has fostered, and to restore the notion of individual responsibility that it has so badly undermined.
According to the advance billing, his report will propose an unpicking and restitching of our entire social and welfare tapestry."
However, what Mr. Duncan Smith appears to miss entirely is that the demons are already out of the box and no amount of government directives, no powers of nannyism, no wads of wishful thinking will force those demons back. For what defined what Mr. Duncan Smith (and so many others) call "traditional values" was men's rational awe for an almighty God Who had communicated specific commandments which were required for His blessing. Barring a national repentance and a willingness to once again embrace those religious truths, the model for "traditional values" and the motivation and divine grace needed to actually live them out will be nonexistent.
No, Mr. Duncan Smith, the echoes of Christianity (i.e. those"traditional values" you are so nostalgic for) are not, in themselves, strong enough to survive the dedicated, daily attacks against them formulated by secularism, humanism, materialism, hedonism, or any one of the myriad of false religions.
But Christianity proper; that is, lifestyles marked by an appreciation of the divine authority of the Bible and a submission to the grace of God towards sinners (delivered most explicitly through the forgiveness of sins as men accept Jesus' sacrifice on the cross in their behalf)...well, that Christianity can overcome and even flourish, no matter what demonic power it encounters.
May Mr. Duncan Smith and his fellows in the United Kingdom soon recognize these realities. And may they see that the effects of Christianity which can indeed save Europe can only come when enough people enjoy an eternal, loving, liberating relationship with Jesus Himself.
