The Collapse of European Christianity | Peter Hitchens #CLIP

people are very distrustful of the system Politics the institutions of our society the church and they're badly fractured as well they're fragmenting into groups that seem very hostile to each other how has it come to this but it's come to this because ultimately things have an effect long after they've happened when I was a small child I lived near the great Seaport support Smith in Southampton and would go down to the beach and watch the great ocean liners which still then went backwards and forwards across the Atlantic and this game you could play you could watch say the Queen Elizabeth enormous ship pass by about two miles out and you then wait for the bow wave to come sometimes you'd wait so long you'd forgotten it was coming and then it would you turn your back on it it would whack you in the back so hard it would knock you over there was this huge distance in time between the event and its effect I think we see now the effect of the collapse of particularly of European Christianity which I think began in and and Then followed on from the first world war where the churches made the great mistake of supporting a war which turned out quite patently not to be a Christian act or to be the Great Wolf civilization that had been portrayed as being and so Associated themselves with wickedness on such a scale that they could never really recover their moral Authority and began to drain away from them from that point but of course people continue to act you don't suddenly get an audible click and people suddenly stop behaving in a Christian fashion because the churches are collapsing the the cultural Christianity the general understanding of Christian rules the general knowledge of the scriptures The Sermon on the Mount persisted in the population and still persists in people of a certain age but has pretty much vanished I was reading the other day that thanks to various uh films and and children's fiction many English children now know the Greek myths are far better than they know the gospels they simply are not taught the gospels for instance they're not they don't know The Parables which have been a huge influence for us on my life I know them you can't expect this kind of cultural earthquake to happen and for it not to have an effect the amazing thing is that it's taken so long but the wave has finally struck the beach and people are seeing it and the two great consequences the two great material consequences of Christianity for the Societies in which it's been proven our trust on which almost all uh serious activities um must be based and the rule of law over power how can anyone accept that law should be more should be more authoritative than temporal power unless they believe that it has some sort of divine origin and once that goes It goes so these things are departing from among us while we continue to live in highly Advanced physically and technically Advanced as well civilizations where those advances are ultimately based on trust in the law in the end as they departed those societies will cease to operate as they as they've done and I think it is an intellectual process which we're lucky only to be seeing the beginning of so to draw something out of that when trust breaks down in a democracy people Flee for security they well democracy is another question and I I I'm not really a Democrat I don't think that universal suffrage democracy has been a success I'm I believe that Liberty under the law is there's a great possession of the of the anglo-sphere countries and the universal suffrage democracy has tended to be inimical to indeed it is inimical to Freedom as well as we've recently seen in Turkey where universal suffrage democracy has been used to destroy the root of law to destroy freedom of speech thought and assembly freedom of the press and to create a very dangerous autocracy uh there's another example of that but under Godwin's law one can one was never mentioned the Nazis but there is they have it's not the only example where where democracy has destroyed freedom but I don't I don't rely particularly on Democracy as a defense on the things that I love it's the thing you just had to put up with I think the point I was thinking seeking to draw out though is that given that you have a democracy if people become if you like afraid they Flee for security if they think people and institutions are not going to do what they ought to to do voluntarily they Flee for the rule book and that starts to erode Freedom what they also do is they flee towards populists and the the Trump phenomenon is an example of this and sources there are many many reasons for the trumpet on uh in some ways he behaves much as the left do which is why they don't like him uh in in terms of semi-literate intolerance of opponents across the politics of themselves and all the rest of it but the other thing is of course social liberals in Western societies for many many years imagine their opponents were all like Donald Trump and so they ignored them and and paid no attention to them eventually they've got a real Donald Trump and now they're angry but if if they listen to people like me 20 years ago then they would never have got people like Donald Trump but they do but populism is is a great danger I we have the structures of universal suffrage democracy and out of it all kinds of monsters can be born and I I fear the consequences of it especially if we get as I think I know your own country has different economic problems from mine but if we get the economic crisis which seems to me cannot be indefinitely postponed given the level of particularly personal debt uh that we have in this country then then the structures go then I think the tendency towards some kind of pretty Savage populism will be strong it's hard to avoid that conclusion I think actually um and there will be another recession there always is most Western countries have used the remaining shots in their lockers they won't be able to come up with prices again we know that the same things are being done as as we're being done before the 2008 crash and with nozon and I I remember some years ago they're quite a clever but failed film called contagion and I saw an airplane because it probably in the cinema I was about two minutes before it fell which was about uh a sort of swine flu uh outbreak bird flu outbreak suddenly spreading throughout the Civilized countries and I think the reason it failed was because it was such a believable portrayal of what happens to an advanced country when there is a general breakdown of authority and where things cease to exist and if you get a situation which I very much fear where money dies and then things of that kind might happen I'm genuinely worried about about the near future I don't think it's good and particularly for my own country where we have especially strong problems one a ridiculous overestimate of our own importance and wealth and our inability trade and secondly a a tremendous inbuilt economic crisis based upon unsustainable debt [Music] foreign

Channel: John Anderson

Views: 24,167

Keywords: John Anderson, John Anderson Conversation, Interview, John Anderson Interview, Policy debate, public policy, public debate, John Anderson Direct, Direct, Conversations, christianity, UK, Europe

Id: 9QHUUoMbQ-c

Length: 7min 27sec (447 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 30 2022