Bring back the Christians

I don't want to be controversial, but it seems to me that women have made a complete mess of the so-called equality they have been given in the last 35 years. Given the fact that the most significant "right" they have acquired during this period has been the right to dispose of their unwanted babies, one could argue that they have comprehensively misused this freedom and, moreover, have shown themselves to be unworthy of it. However, this is not quite the argument I have in mind here.

Rather, I want to argue that women were ostentatiously given a few social baubles (that did not amount to anything or they would never have been given them) plus the right to do what certain powerful interests wanted them to do. Our present condition of social malaise can be pretty well blamed upon these significant changes and the consequences to which they inadvertently gave rise.

Any century dominated by war is bound to suffer from social dislocation. This century opened with a sort of golden age which continues to look that way even when sceptics try to tell us that every age looks back on a previous one as having been "golden." This is not true, and it is as desperate a claim as the similar one that every great art-form is unappreciated in its own day but comes to be valued in time by a grateful public. This is usually invoked to support unloved and hideous artworks of the type which will, unfortunately, continue to be seen like that, no matter how much time passes.

In the same way, nobody writing at the end of the twentieth century is going to glow with pride at the many and varied improvements which have been made on the technical front this century when, in our own societies, these have been accompanied by unprecedented levels of personal and communal breakdown and decrepitude. It becomes bathetic to dwell on achievements which seem to have brought so little happiness and fulfilment to the recipients.

This is very different from the state of affairs described by the leading article in The Times of London in December, 1899, which marked the passing of the Nineteenth Century. On an occasion such as this, the writer has to be very careful of what he says. Truth and realism are an absolute necessity if he is to maintain credibility, since readers will be particularly alert to self-delusion or complacency.

In this case, whilst acknowledging the poverty and crime of the earlier part of the century, and the social unrest which accompanied bad working and living conditions, the Editor soberly commended the efforts made by intelligent and public-spirited people to bring about change and improvement. He cited the significant drop in the infant mortality rate and the comparable decline in poverty, crime and vagrancy. He welcomed the introduction of universal education, and insurance to protect people from unexpected disaster. He commended as an improvement the fact that more than ninety percent of married women were able to stay at home to rear their children. The humane and civilised measures he cited which had brought about these things included forbidding women, or children under twelve, to do certain jobs which were too heavy or dangerous for their physical strength.

The resulting labour shortage in certain industries which relied upon cheap and plentiful labour, meant that employers had to compete for men's labour, and the average wage rose to levels which were sufficient to support a family, without the woman having to work as well. Women went back home in droves, to care for their children and keep a watchful eye on their communities-leaving the way clear for feminists who had never read anything earlier than Gloria Steinem to claim that they had never had the opportunity to work.

Altogether, the article was about as different as could be imagined from the ones which will be written here, and probably in America too, in the next few years. They were looking back on a century when men and women had made a concerted effort to bring about change, without the ability to bribe the objects of their attentions with state benefits or welfare. It had to be done on the basis of a credible argument and a faith in God, and it worked beyond what we would believe possible today.

For our part, we are looking back on a century where war first broke the social order; and then commerce came on stream to break the moral one. It is very true-though it has become a rather overdone cliche-that all you need for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing. The difference between us and the Victorians is not that they were better people and we are worse; it is that they believed in something worthwhile and acted to protect and assert it, and we don't. That is to say, we probably believe in very much the same things but we have lost the confidence to maintain them publicly.

That is where the spirit of the age comes in: ours is essentially timid and easily embarrassed, despite making a great show of confident selfassertion. The things we are encouraged to be assertive about-sexual preferences and intimacies of the bedroom and bathroom for exampleactually don't matter. It is like a person monumentally announcing the time of day. No amount of manner can make up for the lack of matter. On the other hand, we are warned to be "non-judgemental" about almost everything that matters, which is essentially a shopkeeper's philosophy: "The customer is always right" is good for business but simply won't do as a philosophy on which to run society, as we are beginning to discover.

It is in the nature of business to operate within the parameters set up by society and to take advantage of everything which is open to it, in order to better its position. This makes it competitive and efficient, which is in everyone's interest in the long run. However, the other part of the equation, society's parameters, is vastly more important and must lead, not reflect what business wants.

Commerce began to feel free to lay siege to women at the advent of the first World War. Before then businesses had had a fairly bad time: ordered to introduce working practices and safety procedures for the benefit of their employees; instructed about whom they could and could not employ; warned not to use or to profit from slavery wherever it operated, caricatured and pilloried as greedy and ruthless, and definitely hot accepted in polite society until they had earned their philanthropic spurs. They had learnt to be respectful of society's values as expressed by a thousand personalities more charismatic than themselves.

The war changed all that. The government needed women to work in the factories whilst the war was on, so it went in for grand campaigns to persuade them that it was both necessary and good for them.

After the Great War, many of the bulls were gone, and a melancholy spirit pervaded that expressed itself in silliness and indifference. Then came the Depression, and by this time morality was a luxury which government could not afford. To it, as to us until very recently, the panacea for poverty was fewer children. That dreadful woman Marie Stopes, whom the Victorians would have transported to Australia and the Medievals would probably have burnt as a witch, was allowed to flourish. (She was an avowed eugenicist, thought Hitler was wonderful and never spoke to her only son again after he married a girl who wore spectacles!)

It was not initially the ordinary working woman who welcomed Marie Stopes' attention at all. They knew she was bad news for the family, and there were demonstrations against her in many places. They knew-and they were probably the last people for seventy-odd years to recognise itthat what she meant by "family planning" was fewer people of their ilk cluttering up the earth. But in time the combination of necessity and propaganda forced them to accept her methods in keeping their families below replacement level; thus paving the way for the mass immigration which became necessary after World War II.

However, mass immigration brought with it its own problems; not to industry which needed its labour, but to communities and to officials who had to ensure that this work-force grafted on to society did not become distinguished by too many problems. Until this time, the 1950s, "family planning" was confined to married women, and even the divorced and separated were excluded; but following a government campaign in the West Indies to recruit workers for the London Underground and bus services, steps were taken to change this.

Clinics were set up by Helen Brook and her brother Caspar in London, and their target clients at this time were the West Indian girls who came from a tradition where having several children before getting married was common. Helen Brook recorded in an interview in 1984 that, after consultation with the Colonial Office, the West Indian High Commission and other bodies, it was decided that facilities should be put in place to ensure that this did not happen here.

In no time at all, "family planning" was turned into "birth control" and was available to whoever wanted it, regardless of whether they were married or not or, in time, whether they were even over the legal age for sexual relations. Its avowed purpose was, of course, to ensure that no "unwanted" children were conceived, let alone born, and it has failed so spectacularly that no one can quite believe it. The illegitimacy rate is now well over 30%, the abortion rate is over 100,000 a year and sexually transmitted disease has reached epidemic proportion, particularly but not exclusively in those areas obliquely termed "inner city," where the original primetarget clientele reside.

All this is distressing enough, and the cold statistics reflect a huge amount of personal misery and a society whose morals are "out of joint." Still worse, though, is the strange, not to say perverse, mechanism whereby a large-scale social experiment which fails is never actually accounted a failure by its supporters, but is rather seen as having never been properly tried-"more of the same" is always advocated as a means of containing increasinglynegative indicators, rather than a firm and principled change of tack.

We have seen this process play out very many times in this theoretical age of ours, with the prototype being the demise of the Soviet Empire: Communism didn't fail, we are told, it was just never tried! In the end, the power to continue with these disastrous experiments has to be firmly taken out of the hands of the zealots with a stake in the status quo, and given to those with less to lose, either financially or in terms of their power and prestige.

The trouble is that once morality has been displaced as a commonly-held set of beliefs upheld by society, it effectively ceases to mean anything at all. As Dr. Johnson pointed out two hundred years ago, if a man tells you his morality is "personal" rather than accepted, count your spoons before he leaves your house since his personal variety might just include helping himself to them. Thus the idea of the absolute value of the family unit did not long survive the demolition of the taboo about sex before marriage.

Here again the driving force has been women influenced by the philosophy of feminism, who saw easy divorce as a means of "empowering" themselves by being independent of a husband. Unfortunately for the credibility of this theory, the vast majority of divorced women with children at home go on to be a charge on the rest of society, until some other man takes them aboard.

So now the social scene includes large numbers of fatherless, dysfunctional families, living on the State and producing children who even those on the Left acknowledge as being severely disadvantaged. Indeed, so great are the problems associated with fatherlessness and dependence that a whole industry has grown up which is parasitic upon the condition. Social workers have a difficult job to do and they are not loved, even when they do it well. However, it must be said that they do have an interest in preserving the number of people who need them, and it would not be surprising if they were unwilling even to try anything that might decrease the number of their dependent client-group.

Their power has not only increased as the size of the problem has increased, but their ideological bent has also ensured that few ordinary people feel inclined to join them in their work. The radical, anti-family ethic which still pervades the profession has enhanced their position and reinforced their relative power as the only people prepared to do the job. In September of last year, a senior Social Services manager, writing in the social-workers magazine Community Care, said he had been "stunned" to discover how few young social workers wanted to enter the fraught area of child-care.

In reply, a colleague said that he must have been the only man in his position in England not to have known that, since the passing of the Children Act 1989, with its provision that children in care can virtually do as they like, no sane person would want to enter this area, preferring instead the relatively tranquil waters of handicap or old-age.

Thus, a philosophy enshrined in an Act has been the means by which the profession which implements the Act has been denuded of recruits to the profession. Far from being dismayed by this turn of events, however, those activists with a definite agenda in view have used the difficulty in recruiting people to their profession as a reason for encouraging alternative family-groupings for children; in particular those including homosexuals.

This is simply incredible in view of the pejorative view taken by officialdom of everything which might produce an adverse effect on health. Indeed, the fact that one of a couple who propose themselves as fostercarers is a smoker is quite sufficient to make them inadmissible.

Homosexuality, on the other hand, is not considered even potentially dangerous despite the number of child-abuse cases coming to court in the last few years, involving homosexuals employed by the social-services department. The scale of the problem was described as "staggering" by one of the police chiefs involved in the ongoing inquiry into fourteen separate areas of the country. Yet an official report commissioned by the Secretary of State for Health and published last November concerning "The Safeguards for children living away from home," does not mention the word "homosexual" even once in its 230 pages.

This peculiar, almost mystical blindness, is echoed by all who discuss the subject at present and causes the Daily Telegraph, which is by no means politically correct in these matters, to illustrate their page of comment on the report, with a photo of a distressed little girl.

"Paedophile" is, fortuitously for homosexuals, a non-gender specific word, and this is used to disguise the fact that all the cases currently under investigation, and all thirteen men who have been jailed so far for hundreds of paedophile offences against children in their care, have been homosexual.

Such blindness, wilful or otherwise, has been shown by social scientists before now. A lecture on child-abuse at the London School of Economics early last year by two scientists, Margo Daly and Martin Wilson, drew attention to the fact that in every society across the world, children are at far greater relative risk from step-parents than from natural parents. They referred to a recent review of child-abuse drawn up by social-services officials, which listed 89 different risk factors-and paternity was not mentioned! The Home Office in Britain does not even record the difference between parents and step-parents in the household when collating statistics on crimes against children. As Daly and Wilson put it, "It is remarkable that almost two decades of intensive child-abuse research elapsed before anyone asked whether step-parent households are really more dangerous than genetic-parent households."

Remarkable it might be; but it figures, as you say over there. If you are anti-traditional family, you want to do everything you can to discredit it. Anything which indicates that it has advantages must be glossed, so that others cannot see the truth. The same process is currently at work on homosexual involvement with children. It is apparent that it is inherently dangerous, even on the shrouded evidence available to us because, as one of the convicted men said himself, "A man often does not admit even to himself that he is a paedophile."

There are interesting parallels here between the way feminism has hijacked the morals of women with the way the politics of "gay rights" has commandeered the morality of individual homosexuals. The rank and file of these groups have been swamped by the activists who speak on their behalf with an essentially amoral, selfish voice.

They have been encouraged, if not pressurised, into acting as if they have no responsibility to uphold the morality by which everyone has to live. They are urged to deny their duty to try and be moral beings and are encouraged to think of themselves as uniquely entitled to do whatever they want. They demand tolerance from other people and yet are extremely intolerant of those who do not approve of their lifestyle; their demand for mildness and charity is one-sided.

Women too are constantly offered a distorted image of themselves by a media that seems to be in the grip of a manic desire to make women other than they are. They are encouraged to see themselves as aggressive, physically tough and amoral by films like "Thelma & Louise" which assume them to be foolish and incapable on the domestic front but tigers when it came to beating the men at their own game. Thelma and Louise were, however, incapable of moral action in defence of their rights. Their foulmouthed intemperance was a carbon-copy of the worst of men, and represented two people without a single serious virtue.

What was ironic is that no one seemed to make the connection that the word "virtue" has an essentially masculine connotation, and involves taking personal responsibility for moral action. The Director unconsciously illustrated the truth of the word by portraying the two vacuous girls as having the vices of both sexes and the virtues of neither.

In the same way, we have over here the recently-released film on Oscar Wilde which glorifies his activities as a homosexual and underplays the fact that what most sickened the court at his trial was the evidence of his paedophile activities amongst poor, destitute boys from the East End of London. Men too can feel pity for the poor and abused, and the blithe assumption that such pity and concern should be sidelined if it gets in the way of sexual passion is fundamentally insulting, to whomever it is applied. These are not edifying role models to offer people in any circumstances, and are presumptuous as well as crass.

That human beings are sinful, or if you prefer it, fallible creatures has never been in doubt. What is different about our present approach is that it is so doomed to failure and to reaction that it is, quite literally, decadent. It is heading for the pit and that is all. The various ills that we are allowing will live to haunt us in terms of increased violence and disorder and, inevitably, a savage backlash will develop against them. If they were harmless, then we could all afford to turn a blind eye as we are doing. But they are demonstrably not harmless, so there will be a price to pay. It is the realisation of this which is causing many people to rouse themselves at last to take action.

Of course the Promise Keepers cause hilarity; rather as people must have laughed to see the early Christians praying and singing in the face of the wild beasts in the Coliseum. We have got rather out of the habit of seeing large groups of people standing up for something which is not purely material and it is certainly not fashionable. It strikes us as genuinely shocking-which is quite an achievement in our un-shockable age.

Rather wonderful too; imagine being able to shock some of those hardfaced feminists simply by saying you intend to keep your promises to your family and to society. It just goes to show that as long as men concentrated on making money and enjoying themselves, they were no threat to the women's movement. But the moment they start talking morality and God and the sacrifice on Calvary, the women back off in horror like Draculas seeing the sun come up.

I must confess that I rather wish the Promise Keepers would dispense with the choking sobs and the convulsive hugging, but perhaps that has been exaggerated over here by those who wish to affright the Anglo Saxon sensibility. Their hearts are in the right place and, more importantly, their heads are working again. Bless them; they are like the cavalry appearing over the horizon, raising a cheer from the besieged people and waking the sentries asleep over their weapons. Like all controversy, it tends to loosen the bonds of embarrassment which so inhibit expression of the truth.

Come to think of it, maybe that's what lies behind the almost ritualised shows of emotion by the Promise Keepers. They are practising with tears, so as not to frighten the horses, something that one day will emerge as a real cleansing fire. We have lived for so long with that ghastly creation of the women's movement, New Man, that it will be a real pleasure to see the genuine article again, standing guardian over the family and sending the interlopers packing.

They won't be alone either. Not only are there millions of other people like them who have not yet plucked up courage to declare against the enemy, but the spirit of the age is on the side of the bold. Once we have got used to people talking nonsense at the top of their voices we are far more likely to listen with appreciation to anyone who talks sense, even if they do it in similar dramatic terms. This must be the significance of the many groups of "muscular Christians" who are now asserting themselves. The medium may be the same but the message is changing and this is inevitable.

The trouble is that there is more than one way of solving any problem, and every despot has earned the gratitude of millions by solving at least some of his country's problems-even if he then went on to create more. Our germinating problems will cry out for a solution one day and that is the point at which the way the people have been educated will be significant.

We have raised the temperature at which society operates by means of the intemperance of our popular culture. We have widened enormously what it is possible to comment upon in personal relations and there is almost nothing that is too gross or intimate to make the cover of magazines read by young people scarcely out of childhood. This lack of restraint is, in political terms, harmlessly deployed at the moment, largely in the service of the sex industry and entertainment. However, the learned brutality and intemperance with which we express ourselves lies at the disposal of any problem-solvers who may one day come upon the scene.

And therein lies the danger. The head of steam which has been built up could easily be released in more than one direction-that is precisely why we should welcome the Promise Keepers, and all other Christians, doing all they can to educate people in the God-given morality which does not change.

The afore-mentioned Samuel Johnson, who seems to have anticipated every problem we have, remarked that it was no more possible for a man who knew no religion, to seek its help when he was in difficulty, than it was possible for a man unlearned in mathematics to invoke its help when his business failed. Hence the urgency. Next time, it is likely to be the Christians, or at least those who think like Christians; or the barbarians. Again.

Lynette Burrows is an English journalist and broadcaster (her book Good Children was described by the London Financial Times as "so old-fashioned it is positively radical").

Copyright Human Life Foundation, Incorporated Winter 1998
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