The State of the Nation

Introduction

I have been asked to talk this evening on the State of the Nation? How do you check on the health of a nation?

For a society to be healthy, you need a good economic order; you need a good political order; but you also need a good moral and spiritual order. It is like a three-legged stool. Today we are trying to exclude one of those elements of life - spiritual order. You now can have a novel about Jesus, entitled Quarantine (and just published) that is blasphemous, "thoroughly and deliberately heretical," in the words of one reviewer, with "Jesus ... a weak, gangling, semi-literate hysterical adolescent" and a thief - and no one bats an eyelid!

It was Jesus himself who said, quoting the Old Testament, that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that proceeds out of the mouth of God. Yes, the Christian faith is being excluded from our public culture. But the majority do not want that. The opinion polls show that the lead in the de-Christianizing of our nation is being taken not by the majority but by a minority who have influence in the media, the therapeutic services and education.

You all know about education. I needn't mention the state of Christian Assemblies and RE in our schools; and the de-Christianizing that is going on in our schools. But where there is a Christian School, like Emmanuel Gateshead - a Christian City Technology College - it not only is among the best in the country in terms of the inspection and performance league tables [and that when it is serving an inner city area] but also the parents - working class parents - are desperate to get their children enrolled. Given the choice most parents want their children at least to have the option of rejecting the Christian faith. But our education is being de-Christianized.

Yesterday I was in the United States. It is the same there. A best selling book by William Strauss and Neil Howe called The Fourth Turning argues that the United States "feels like it's unravelling." The authors go on:

Though we live in an era of relative peace and comfort, we have settled into a mood of pessimism about the long-term future, fearful that our superpower nation is somehow rotting from within.

Neither an epic victory over Communism nor an extended upswing of the business cycle can buoy our public spirit ... We yearn for civic character but satisfy ourselves with symbolic gestures and celebrity circuses. We perceive no greatness in our leaders, a new meanness in ourselves. Small wonder that each new election brings anew jolt, its aftermath a new disappointment.

Britain is a mirror image of the United States in fundamental areas of public life. True we have many different traditions. But America, as Talcott Parsons described it, is the "lead society". It often gets there first: we get there in the end.

Someone, no doubt, is saying "this is all alarmism. Have there not often been times of public self-doubt in previous generations?" I therefore need to be specific. I want to take the case of children and young people. You only have to see what is happening to our children to realise that something must be done.


Pscychosocial Disorders in Young People

Two years ago Sir Michael Rutter, a Professor of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry in London, and David Smith, a Professor of Criminology in Edinburgh proved there were, indeed, serious issues that we ignore to our peril. They showed that what common sense knows, serious study now confirms. In their publication, entitled Psychosocial Disorders in Young People (a massive 843 page book), they edited a multinational collection of papers on young people's problems researched by a group of leading European and American scholars. The findings are frightening. The authors focus on disorders that are increasing in the teenage years: crime, suicide, suicidal behaviour, depression, anorexia and bulimia, alcohol and drug abuse. At the launch of the book, Sir Michael Rutter claimed that

this is the first major study to highlight the upward trend in psychosocial disorders of youth since the Second World War across the most developed countries. It is striking [he went on] that this increase in psychosocial disorders happened at a time when physical health was improving."

David Smith added:

It is also striking that a major increase in psychosocial disorders happened in the 'golden era' of low unemployment and rising living standards between 1950 and 1973. Increasing psychosocial disorders are not related to deprivation or to increasing affluence in any simple way.

The key findings were these.

First, in Britain, the rate of recorded crime (mostly committed by young people) increased tenfold from 1950 to 1993; and over that period there were substantial increases in psychosocial disorders of young people - this is also true in nearly all developed countries. But these increases of the past 50 years were sudden increases. There had been no similar increases earlier in the century. And, very importantly, as psychosocial disorders were increasing, physical health was improving.

Secondly, in most countries alcohol consumption increased greatly among the young between 1950 and 1980, with deaths from cirrhosis of the liver increasing in a similar way, as did alcohol-related problem behaviours.

Thirdly, with regard to drugs, national surveys in the United States show that the illicit use of drugs and drug dependency were very low for those born in 1940, but increased for each successive birth cohort afterwards. And Western European countries, like the United States have similarly experienced a massive increase in drug use and abuse since 1950.

Fourthly, there is suicide. In Europe, rates of suicide have increased over the whole of the twentieth century, but the most striking increase was among young males between 1970 and 1990.

And fifthly, there has also been a substantial increase in the proportion of the population suffering from depressive disorders, as shown by a wide range of studies carried out in the United States, Canada, New Zealand, and Britain.

What do these authors think are the causes? Rutter and Smith note that the poor, the unemployed, and people living on "sink estates" are more likely to be criminal, depressed, suicidal, and addicted to drugs, than those in more comfortable circumstances. Yet, they argue, worsening living conditions cannot account for rising levels of crime, suicide, depression, alcohol and drug abuse in young people. This is because the rise was most marked during a period of two to three decades in which living conditions improved. Between 1950 and 1973 there was a "golden era" of economic growth, low unemployment, and improving living conditions throughout the developed world. But this coincided with the post-war rise in psychological disorders. Also, high unemployment in the 1930s was not associated with rises in crime, suicide, or drug abuse.


The causes

So what are the causes?

One, there is the clear suggestion that levels of family discord and break-up may well have played a role in the rise of psychosocial disorders. Norman Dennis has virtually proved this suggestion as correct. Norman Dennis, the internationally renowned social scientist from Newcastle University and who has written and spoken for the Christian Institute, a Socialist (and not some one on the right wing of the Tory party it must be added), argues that the crime and social disorder of our inner cities are not to be analysed primarily in terms of poverty but in terms of family breakdown - the breakdown of the traditional pattern of a married father and mother providing security and stability for their insecure and unstable young and themselves committed to each other for life.

A second cause is sexual experimentation. Alongside adolescent "isolation" and a desire for independence, young people (say Rutter and Smith) "may be more stressed by early sexual experiences and the break-up of love relationships." This, of course, is the damage caused by sexual promiscuity and experimentation. It is not really clever; it is emotionally damaging; and it does not lead, long term, to sexual satisfaction. We now have other research that confirms that those most satisfied with their sexual lives and the most sexually adjusted are those who keep to biblical standards. The massive and recent Sex in America survey found that those who had the most fun in bed were married Conservative Protestants - this was mind-blowing for the researchers.

So to sum up: academic child psychiatrists, criminologists and social scientists are now saying that the serious problems they are identifying among the young are fundamentally moral.

But how do you change moral behaviour? The tragedy with so many is to propose a new moralism. But that will not work. The moral reality is that men and women do not do what is right by nature. The Bible calls that the results of the Fall. We all sin. And if you don't believe anything else in the Bible, you have to believe that. The evidence is all around you today. And there has been evidence down the centuries of history. You cannot tell people to pull themselves up morally by their moral bootlaces. It just does not work. They need the love of God the Father, the forgiveness of Jesus Christ at his Cross and the power of the Holy Spirit for new life.

If you reject the Fatherhood of God as people are doing today, before long you will find you have lost the Brotherhood of man. You can cut a plant off from its roots. It can last only for a period in a vase of water. Then it dies.

A recent study by Christie Davies, Professor of Sociology at Reading, entitled Moralisation and Demoralisation: a moral explanation for changes in crime, disorder and social problems shows how this works out. He has studied not just the last 50 years, like Rutter and Smith, but the last 150 years. He has charted the same rise in crime and social disorder over the last fifty years that Rutter and Smith highlight but also the fall in crime and disorder at the end of the 19th century.

He too shows that you cannot blame the current slide into lawlessness on conditions such as bad housing, poverty or unemployment. For there was far more of all three in the earlier part of the 20th century but very little crime. In fact there has been a U-curve. The overall incidence of serious offences recorded by the police in the 1890s was only about 60 per cent of what it had been in the 1850s and, given that the efficiency of the reporting and recording of crime was improving at the time, the real fall in the crime rate was probably far greater. The facts are clear: by 1900 Britain was not only a less violent and less dishonest country than today, but also less violent and less dishonest than it had been in the earlier part of the 19th century. What was the cause?


The key to change

The answer is religious revival and the related remoralisation of society; for these two things led to a heightening of conscience and an increase of self-control. Isn't this so relevant for today? Christie Davies has this comment on today:

For the Left the villain is capitalism and for the Right it is welfare; both are ways of avoiding the conclusion that wicked and irresponsible choices are made by wicked and irresponsible individuals.

The watershed was the 1960s when there was a new theology and a new morality. People claimed "God is dead"; homosexual behaviour was legalised; pornography was no longer "pornography" but "adult or authentic expression" and regular fare in the cinema and on TV; and society began to fall apart. Things were different before the 1960s. Go back to 1955. In 1955 Geoffrey Gorer in his Exploring English Character commented:

... in public life today, the English are certainly among the most peaceful, gentle, courteous and orderly populations that the civilised world has ever seen.

But what were the roots of that "peaceful" life? Answer: the Christian faith; and foremost was the Sunday School ...

... whose enrolments [says Davies] rose as the incidence of deviant behaviour fell in the late 19th century. Significantly, the numbers enrolled in and the influence of this institution then fell in the years prior to the reversal of the U-curve of deviance which has produced Britain's present high level of moral problems.

By 1888 about three out of every four children in England and Wales attended Sunday school, "a remarkable proportion when it is remembered that parents of the higher social groups did not particularly favour attendance." Wales which had been one of the more violent and lawless parts of Britain, became in the later 19th century an especially peaceful and law-abiding country. But it was precisely in Wales that Sunday schools organised by non-conformist chapels were at their strongest. Let me summarise with a quote from Professor Christie Davies:

it is pointless to ask whether children became moral and respectable as a result of the teaching they received in Sunday school, or whether the key factor was the pre-existing aspirations of their parents who sent them there. What is important is that these reinforced one another and that any potential delinquents were confronted on all sides and from all sources with the consistent moral view that forms of antisocial behaviour with clear and direct harmful consequences such as violence, theft, illegitimacy and drunkenness were quite simply wrong.


"Enough is enough"

At some point we have to say, "enough is enough". Sunday was Father's day. Those who are Fathers must ensure something better for their children. This past month has seen and unbelievable slide into a new moral decadence. Nor is there much opposition. There is no opposition in Parliament where many now seem to be validating immorality. There is no opposition in the electronic media where many are usually among the first to lead the way in terms of moral innovation. There is no opposition - or little opposition - in our schools or universities. As George Will has said,

there is nothing so vulgar left in our experience for which we cannot transport some professor from somewhere to justify it.

Sadly, there is little opposition from leaders in the Church. Of course, there is forgiveness at the cross of Christ for every sin. Jesus for gave an adulteress; but he said, "Go and sin no more". He didn't say, "go and change the law to fit your behaviour!" We are becoming insensitive to sin and evil. What would John the Baptist say if he was alive today. It was because of Herod's immoralities that John was beheaded. Alexander Pope once wrote these lines:

Vice is a monster of so frightful mien,As to be hated needs but to be seen;Yet seen too oft, familiar with her face,We first endure, then pity, then embrace.

That is happening at the moment.

Take the Secretary of State at the Heritage Ministry. He is a campaigning homosexual committed to removing Clause 28. What will that mean? It will mean that children will be positively indoctrinated with gay propaganda in our schools as they were in some areas in the 1970s and 1980s. That was the reason Clause 28 was introduced. It was introduced originally to protect children.

Take the new Home Secretary. He has promised a free vote on reducing the age of homosexual consent to 16. And we know that in the Gay Lobby there is a desire to reduce the age of consent to 14. In America there are those who want it reduced to 10! A National Book Award winner writes, "Nine and a half is old enough for me at least."

Take the new government and the gay rights amendment to the Treaty of the European Community it has literally just signed up to. That is consistent with the Labour MEPs who voted for Gay Marriage and Gay adoption in a European Parliament motion in February 1994. Cleverly their "spin doctors" kept this from the British Public.

Of course, these sexual sins are not the worst sin in the book, but in Romans 1 we are told that when men and women reject God, homosexual and lesbian behaviour is one of the first consequences.


May 1997

At the beginning of May I had to take part in a Central TV programme featuring two lesbians, one of whom had inseminated herself from a gay sperm donor.

There then followed a report in The Times on 21 May that:

... a girl of 11 has been adopted by a woman living with a lesbian partner after a ground-breaking ruling by a High Court judge, who overruled objections from the child's natural mother.

And last Tuesday I took part in a BBC Heart of the Matter TV debate that I believe was screened on Sunday. Among others I was arguing with one Russell Conlon who with his homosexual lover Stephen is trying to find a surrogate mother to have a baby for them. "We feel", I quote, "that the love and respect that a child brings would complete our lives. We all have the right to have children."

Something is not only sick, but quite evil. It is positive evil that is being tolerated. Children are being treated as commodities. They are now, in effect, being bought and sold. They can be acquired or dispensed with according to adult requirements. They are now being seen, by many, simply as a means to adult happiness.

Let me added categorically that study after study shows, if you take a careful look at the research, that children brought up in lesbian and gay households do suffer. What is so pernicious because children are involved is the unwillingness to face up to facts. Do not listen to what is false or misleading from the gay movement.

So why should we be surprised to discover just a week or two ago that a professional carer is jailed for abusing children and with a number of Social Services having sent him children to foster, with himself having been on a adoption and fostering panel. And all the while people knew that he was a homosexual child abuser.

Of course, we must love and help every person in their sexual temptations - whether heterosexual or homosexual. But we must face the facts. And we must urge celibacy. Many in our churches have temptations to all sorts of illicit sex. It is not being tempted that is wrong. It is glorying in the sin. That is what we have all around us - the glorification of sin. It is time for anger - righteous anger. In the words of another US best seller, we are "Slouching towards Gomorrah!"

In the airport at Orlando, Florida, yesterday I picked up a British Sunday paper. What did I read:

Police let sex offender work with boys - a police force has decided not to tell the organisers of a boys' club that they have a convicted paedophile working for them, because they fear the man will sue the force ... The force in question has decided that it will not inform the club, nor any of the parents of the children in his care, because it is worried that the man will launch a legal action against the police if they reveal his past (Sunday Telegraph 15.6.97)

In all of these issues there is the plain teaching of the Bible - whether this relates to marriage, adultery and divorce, or to homosexual relationships. The Bible is clear. Heterosexual monogamous marriage is a universal good - it is a creation ordinance. It is God's arrangement for healthy living and happy families - a man and a woman in an exclusive relationship for life. In all societies it is best for the care and nurture of children. Healthy marriages produce a stable society. But since the 1960s we have ignored the Bible in the Western World. The result, as we have seen, is dysfunctional children, dysfunctional relationships and a dysfunctional society.


A Christian response

So what can Christians do?

First, respond to the challenge. I came across this six part manifesto not so long ago.

Let me give it to you:

1) Realize the great heritage that Christianity has afforded Western civilization.2) Admit that an unfounded bias has arisen against analysis from a Christian perspective.3) Acknowledge that the Bible does not teach us to abandon the world but rather saturate it with a Christian vision.4) Realize that education is now a battlefield.5) Categorically reject the notion of neutrality - it fosters the denial of absolute truth.6) Develop an integrated Christian view because Jesus Christ is the solution to mankind's problems.

Secondly, in this climate of relativism and multi-faith indifferentism, affirm the uniqueness of Jesus Christ. The claim to the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ is a truth claim and, therefore, a question of fact. That is why all claims cannot be right. Peter Cotterell puts it like this:

Islam says Jesus wasn't crucified. We say he was. Only one of us can be right. Judaism says Jesus was not the Messiah. We say he was. Only one of us can be right. Hinduism says that God has often been incarnate. We say only once. And we can't both be right. Buddhism says that the world's miseries will end when we do what's right. We say, you can't do what's right: the world's miseries will end when we believe what is right.

The fact is that the world's religions may agree about the peripheral matters but they disagree precisely about the most important matters of all. Any intelligent person could decide that all religions are wrong. Any intelligent person could decide that one is right and the rest wrong. But no intelligent person can seriously believe that all religions are essentially the same.

Nor is this Western triumphalism. To say that Christ is unique is not to say that other cultures are always and in everything inferior; nor is it to say even that Christian activities are unique. The uniqueness simply lies in the one in whom Christians believe in. It is Christ who is unique, not the West, nor his followers.


The Law of the Harvest

Thirdly, learn from Hosea chapter 8 verse 7 where it says:

They sow the wind and reap the whirlwind.

The 1960s generation sowed the wind. Earlier this century certain famous members of the rich and leisured classes had sowed the wind of decadence and so undermined our culture and the faith of many. But without the electronic media and the 1944 Education Act, their decadence spread only slowly. There was not then such a whirlwind. But in the 1960s there was the electronic media and the 1944 Education Act was having its impact. Many of us were part of that generation that sowed the wind - I certainly was. I was a student from 1958 to 1964 and then 1965 to 1967. The consequences of that sowing are the whirlwinds that our young people have now inherited and experience that I have outlined. But now that very generation - my generation - are in positions of government and national leadership. That is why there is little confidence in our leadership - sadly in the wider Church as well as in the State. But Hosea also says something else about sowing - in chapter 10 verse 12:

Sow for yourselves righteousness, reap the fruit of unfailing love, and break up your unploughed ground; for it is time to seek the LORD, until he comes and showers righteousness on you.

There is a law of the harvest. The Bible is so clear - that law is not only true of the natural world but also of the spiritual and moral world. What you sow you reap; and you reap far more than you sow. The consequences now from the 60s are so damaging. But we can be confident that the consequences of God's people being faithful now will be out of all proportion to their effort. That is the "gospel" or the good news of the harvest. As Hosea says, we need to seek the Lord. So the first thing all of us must do is pray.

The second thing, as Hosea says, is to break up the unploughed - or fallow - ground. That is what the Christian Institute is all about. Yes, the Holy Spirit can work without our help, but so often he wants us to take action.

We need to preach the word - that the problems of society are fundamentally those of sin - the rejection of God and his will for us; that Christ alone is the saviour from sin; and that the Holy Spirit gives new life - those great 3 "Rs" - ruin, redemption and regeneration. But we also have to be obedient to the claims of God's righteousness. The law has to be understood before the Gospel can be seen as necessary. The law, says Paul, is our school-master to bring us to Christ.

Breaking up the unploughed land will mean campaigning and getting involved in the many issues the Christian Institute is involved in. It will mean supporting the Christian Institute financially if you can. It will mean standing up in a minority of one at work, at your college, in the council chamber and sometimes sadly in our churches for Christ and his standards. Then there must be a sowing of righteousness. Christians need to be in the forefront not just of those who complain, but of those who make positive changes for good. They must set up new schools that are as good as any in the country; they must set up new Christian Radio and TV stations, new Christian adoption and fostering agencies, new work among the elderly and above all new churches like this one that will have influence. They must aggressively stop the evil of abortion, work for a rolling back of the divorce culture, a rolling back of the national lottery and all the other immoral legislation enacted by the Conservative government. They must network. They must, says God through Hosea, "sow righteousness".


On all fronts

We have to work on all fronts.

Our motto at Jesmond Parish Church is "Godly Living, Church Growth, Changing Britain"

Conversion is where it all begins. Then converted people have to be in Christian fellowships - that means that if there is evangelism there must be church growth. But if everything that the new convert learns on Sunday is denied on Monday morning in the public world, his or her faith will not be strengthened. And the public world will be, as we have shown, gradually destroyed. But above all God will not be glorified. That surely must be the goal of all we do - to give God the glory. He has done great things for us. What are we going to do for him? That is the question the Christian Institute challenges us with this evening.

How will you respond? I want you to respond by saying, "yes, I will, in God's strength, stand up to be counted." Evil so often prevails when good men and women do nothing.

Don't be an unrealistic optimist. Things are not good in our Nation. And things may have to get worse before they can get better. But don't be a realistic pessimist with no hope. Be a realistic optimist. Fact the facts recognise the problems, but then be confident for our God does reign and Jesus Christ is victorious over sin, death and all the forces of the evil one.

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