In his book The Rage Against God, Peter Hitchens claims the current intellectual assault on God in the West is not necessarily a war on all religion, but a specific and targeted attack on Christianity, the true religion.
This is highlighted by the fact that the Left is currently hostile towards Christianity while sympathetic with Islam. This is because Christianity is the religion of their homeland, Hitchens explains. Furthermore, Christianity is the form in which they have encountered the power of God in their own lives—and generally disliked and resented.
To the Left, Islam is an exotic, distant creed which has never been taught to them as their own and never required any form of obedience.
“The Left can sympathize with [Islam] as the enemy of their Christian monoculture and as an anti-colonial and therefore ‘progressive force,’” Hitchens says.
Consequently, this hostility towards Christianity has led to the emergence of a new an intolerant utopianism that’s seeking to strip the laws and constitutions of Europe and North America of the remaining traces of Christianity.
This utopianism, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, today claims to operate in the cause of “personal liberation,” and rages against any suggestion that the sexual urge ought to be restrained by moral limits or have any necessary connection with procreation.
Hichens goes on to explain:
This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and—like all such codes—full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups.
These must then be policed by an ever more powerful state. A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against the possession of narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to license its own comfortable, padded indulgence, and it, therefore, permits the same freedoms to the poor, who suffer far more from this dangerous liberty than do the rich.
The last strongholds to this change are the Christian churches, Hitchens’ claims, which have sadly been infiltrated by secular liberalism. Hitchens warns the change has already impacted much of our society:
The overthrow of Christian education is a real possibility in our generation. The removal of Christianity from broadcasting and public ceremonies is almost complete. Expressions of Christian opinion or prayer in public premises can be punished in Britain under new codes that enjoin a post-Christian code of ‘equality and diversity’ on all public servants.
In many instances, secularists are now equating Christian education with child abuse, and are, therefore, laying the foundations for religious education to be restricted by law.
Often, Leftists want to maintain the narrative that Christianity is the real threat to society. They want you to think that Christianity is the biggest threat to you because they know Christianity is the biggest threat to the advancement of their Marxist ideology.
Christianity makes men and women strong, responsible, and independent. It builds strong marriages and forms strong families. Christianity builds strong communities, which are a vital part of any stable nation.
Furthermore, Christianity is unifying. It unites people of different backgrounds, cultures, genders and ethnicities (Gal. 3:27). Leftism, on the other hand, thrives on social division. The ideology itself depends on class warfare. Everything, in the eyes of the Leftist, is viewed through the lens of ‘oppressed and oppressor.’ That’s why they so often obsess about pitting black against white, women against men, child against parent, gay against straight, fat against thin, rich against poor, and so on and so on.
But it was Jesus himself who warned us that a nation divided cannot survive: “Every kingdom divided against itself is laid waste, and no city or house divided against itself will stand” (Matt. 12:25).
According to Hitchens, there is only one reliable force standing in the way of the power of the strong over the weak. There is only one reliable force which forms the foundation of the concept of the rule of law. There is only one reliable force restraining the hand of the man of power.
And, in an age of power-worship, the Christian religion has become the principal obstacle to the desire of earthly utopians for absolute power.
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