Thoughts on the Sixtieth Anniversary of the End of the Second World War

“What General Weygand called the Battle of France is over. I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of Christian civilization. Upon it depends our own British life, and the long continuity of our institutions and our Empire. The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war. If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands. But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’”

Sir Winston Churchill, To the House of Commons, 18 June 1940.

It was with these words that Churchill, speaking not just to the House of Commons but to Britain and the whole world via the BBC, signalled the gravity of the crisis at hand, and the necessity to persist in fighting the Nazi menace. It makes it all the more alarming to think back of those days, not just to merely hear, but to listen to this speech and to think of the sixty years which have passed since the war in Europe was brought to a conclusion. The Prime Minister explicitly stated what was at stake in the struggle.

Sixty years ago, a war was fought and won to defend Christian civilization, the British way of life, the long continuity of British institutions and the Empire. In the past sixty years, all have been viciously assaulted. In the past sixty years, all – save Christian civilization – have been almost entirely destroyed.

The Christian civilization for which millions fought for and died from 1939 to 1945 has today been banished to a few whispering corners of our towns, our homes, even our churches. As Gerald Warner points out in today’s Scotland on Sunday, “Britain and Europe today are so secularised that we have lost even the capacity to comprehend the religious mind.” The window dressings and façades of the old order have often been maintained – after all Britain still has a Monarch, the Commons, the Lords, and the Church of England – but these have become mere theatre props in a devastating soul-destroying drama. The current monarch, sadly trapped by decorum and blind to the grave necessisties of this age, refuses to rule and obediently rubber stamps the decress of No. 10 Downing Street. The Lords, the most stabilising force in the history of the most stable country in the history of the world, have also found themselves neutered, cut off from power, and turned into a fundraising opportunity for the Ruling Party. And, lo, the Church of England. At best it is today a woeful perversion of Christianity, at worst it is a partisan opponent of the Gospel message and a Christ-centered culture.

“Last Thursday,” writes Mr. Warner, in reference to the recent London bombings, “Tony Blair proclaimed that ‘our values will long outlast theirs’. Our values? Precisely what values in our crime-ridden, uncivil, irreligious, drug-addicted and sex-obsessed society, where family life is being eradicated with government help, was Blair invoking?”

Despite the sacrificial blood of that victory sixty years ago, we find ourselves living in that “new dark age, made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science” of which Churchill foretold. Perverted science aids us in killing the most unassailably and incontrovertibly innocent among us – the unborn – while portending of a future when humans will be grown and harvested for organs and then discarded, as well as selectly designed in a manner which that dark leader of the Third Reich could only have ever dreamed of. The infirm, the sick, and the diseased are promised life anew, at the price of experimentation on untold millions of innocent human beings; their faces we will never see, their voices we will never hear, they will be unnamed, unremembered, and callously dehumanised as “embryos” and “clumps of cells” just as in days of old the Jews were no humans (surely not!), but vermin and clumps of flesh. This noxious assault on the intrinsic dignity of the human being shows no signs of ending. On the contrary, there is much to come.

The war against humanity continues. The invented “right” to kill the unborn has now become part of political orthodoxy, which none but a lonely few of our so-called “public servants” dare to so much as question. Now we are being told that the institution of marriage – around which revolves the basic unit of human society, the family; which has gone virtually unopposed in the entire history of human civilization; and which, once entered into no man can rent asunder – must be legally equated with other relationships which are fleeting, centered on self-gratification, not open to the possibility of children, and antithetical to intrinsic purpose of real marriage. Futher, any man, woman, or child who thinks folly of these new ways and new ideas, and who thinks that what has suited man for the millenia ought to continue is ridiculously slandered as a sower of hatred.

We honour the sacrifices of our forebearers for the cause of freedom and Christian civilization. Resting on the laurels of 1945, the victory was swept out from underneath. It has been our own age which has so wickedly, so easily, and so ignorantly allowed the Enemy to win. How much easier it must have been when the purveyors of Evil were bad men across the sea worshipping around a swastika or a hammer and sickle. How difficult it is that now it is our neighbors, our colleagues, even our dear and beloved friends who sew the seeds of evil – of rebellion against God – in our midst. They are our teachers, our students, our doctors and nurses, our patients, our scientists, our policemen, our criminals, our bishops and clergy, our parishioners, they are – as are all men and women – our family. And in the mean time we must deal with the threat of foreign men with foreign ways who seek to bomb us into exchanging our wickedness for theirs.

The horrors of Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia ought to have taught us what happens when you de-Christianize a society. As the atheist philosopher Jürgen Habermas has candidly admitted, our entire tradition of liberty and civilization is owed to Christianity. Since the Enlightenment – that greivously misnamed movement – a faction of mankind has been fervently attempting to cut the branch from the tree. Yet all the evidence shows us that when our freedom, our rights, and our culture are cut off from their foundation and basis in Christian civilization, the result is death. It was true of Nazi Germany, it was true of Soviet Russia, it is true of the Modern World.

For the Christian, who is in the World but not of it, there is no choice but perseverance. We will live out lives of love, of truth, and of Godliness. Wherever we are we will build a culture centered around Christ – we will thrive in this Christian world in order that we may at least survive in the outside world – and the strength of our example, animated by the Holy Spirit, will overwhelm the Foe. No matter how few we become, generation upon bountiful generation will lift high the banners of Christ and proclaim to the world the defeat which has been dealt to sin and death. In 1945 we won a battle, but the war drags on. If we make our vision of victory the victory of Christ, then that victory is certain. As St. Paul assures us, “The victor who conquers the whole world is our Faith.”