It would be necessary for a university to advertise itself as pursuing a particular purpose only if it were talking to people so ignorant that they had to be spoken to in baby-language.
Michael Oakeshott
The new U.K. Government has wasted no time in transmitting its intentions with respect to universities: they are going to be transformed into an arm of the state, and their purpose is now simply going to be the achievement of the state’s purposes. A single, short written statement issued to Parliament last Friday by the new Secretary of State for Education, Bridget Phillipson, makes this all perfectly clear. And as a result it therefore represents very neatly what I referred to in a recent post as the “moral enormity” of the kind of purposive Government which Labour always pursues when in power.
Much media commentary on the statement has focused on Phillipson’s announcement in it of her intention to delay the commencement of an Act which came into effect only last year, under the previous Government, and which was about to become active in most respects at the beginning of August. This is the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023, which was enacted in order to try to prevent the kind of censorship, cancellation, de-platforming and mobbing which increasingly goes on at universities these days, and which would have worked by creating a statutory tort permitting academics, students and invited speakers to sue universities for failing to secure their freedom of speech.
Phillipson has now well and truly put the kibosh on that idea (to use the technical term). Owing to the fact that most of the provisions of the Act only commence on the say-so of the Secretary of State for Education, and since said Secretary of State is now of course Ms. Phillipson, it is in her power to delay commencement indefinitely. Since she has not put a date on the duration of the delay she has announced, and since she has said that during it she will be considering all options “including repeal”, it seems pretty obvious what will happen. The Act is no more – it is an ex-Act. Cue Monty Python impressions.
There is plenty of noise being made about this, and a number of commentators have described it as a “declaration of war on free speech“. And no doubt it is troubling, if for no other reason than that a Government Minister should as a matter of constitutional principle not be using powers which she technically possesses to subvert the settled will of the legislature. But I have nowhere seen picked up for analysis the content of the rest of Phillipson’s statement, which may in the long term prove to be much more important, and which in any event puts the decision to shelve the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act in a rather different context.
You see, Phillipson also took the opportunity on Friday 26th to announce the publication of the conclusions of an independent review of the Office for Students (the U.K.’s higher education regulator, or OfS), titled ‘Fit for the Future: Higher Education Regulation towards 2035‘. This review, penned by somebody called Sir David Behan CBE (more on him in due course), is intended as a “forward-facing strategic review” of U.K. higher education regulation in light of a “rapidly developing global debate on reimagining the nature and purpose of higher education”.
What is interesting about this review is not its concrete recommendations, which are a combination of snore-fest and statements of the obvious (“the OfS [should consult] the sector when implementing changes to regulatory methods and then [pilot] such approaches before formal roll out”; “the OfS [should contribute] to the overall improvement of the higher education system”), but rather for what one might call its enabling function: this is a document that is designed to build the case for much more direct Government control of universities, achieved through the OfS itself.
Hence it is not the recommendations that we really need to pay attention to, but rather the message, reinforced throughout the review, that there is “a clear role for Government as an active player” in “shap[ing] higher education teaching and research for the future”. Thus, Behan envisions a “virtuous policy cycle”, wherein “Government sets out its strategy for higher education and the policy levers it intends to deploy to achieve strategic outcomes” and universities respond:
Elsewhere, he describes Government as nothing less the “architect of the higher education system”, and posits the role of the OfS as being an “active collaborator” not just with universities but with the Department for Education and the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology – all pulling together in the same direction and towards the same ends. He even goes out of his way to address the complaints – let’s call a spade a spade: the whinges – from universities that under the previous (Conservative) Government, Ministers (and the OfS itself) were sometimes a bit too confrontational: they used nasty, hurtful rhetoric like “poor quality HE” and “robust investigations”. In the new era, there will be none of that – the OfS and the universities will have a more “confident, trusting, and respectful relationship”, working hand-in-glove to improve quality and equip U.K. society to face the future.
This all gives the lie to the notion that the OfS will be particularly “independent” of Government. That word appears again and again throughout the review, in a “the regulator doth declare her independence too much” sort of way; in truth the intention is clearly the opposite. Government will set out its “strategy” and pull “policy levers”; universities will respond; and the OfS will monitor exactly how they do so and give “feedback” to Government. This is not about independence so much as plausible deniability: when things go wrong it will doubtless be the OfS’s fault, but in normal times its role is clearly not being envisaged as that of an external auditor. Its job will be to make sure that when Government tells universities to jump, the only question they will be asking is “How high?”
This is all confirmed by the amusing (well, amusing if it was happening in Turkmenistan or Honduras) way in which the review was received by Phillipson and what has happened subsequently. Sir David Behan CBE, it turns out, has, after submitting his review, just been appointed to be nothing other than the interim Chair of the OfS by Phillipson “to work with the current executive to implement the recommendations of [his] independent review” (this was indeed announced in her statement of July 26th). He gets this plum position, she declares – almost in as many words – because his review’s “core analysis” chimes with what was in the Labour manifesto for the 2024 election.
If I was a very suspicious and cynical investigative journalist I might find it curious that Sir David penned an independent review that just happened to be very pleasing to an incoming Government, and delivered it a mere three weeks or so after said Government took office – and that his reward for this just happened to be an appointment to a nice warm toilet seat within the relevant regulator. But I am sure everything about the process of his appointment was entirely above board. What is important is not that there is any scent of fish in the air whatsoever here – there is none at all that I am able to detect – but the message that all of this sends: Phillipson likes Behan, and this is obviously because Behan’s review says that, in effect, universities are now basically supposed to just do what Government tells them. They’re not supposed to worry their pretty little heads about the purposes of education and academic research, because Government will tell them what those purposes are. Their jobs is really just going to be the implementation of educational “strategy”.
There are three things to say about this.
The first concerns what exactly Government will tell universities to do. What strategies will it lay out and what “policy levers” will it pull? Well, perhaps it helps to note that our friend Sir David Behan CBE, the new interim (and no doubt soon-to-be-permanent) Chair of the OfS, has never had a prominent position in university management or governance nor, I think, ever taught at a university. But he has, according to his biography “held several non-executive director and advisor roles with a number of public and private organisations across the health and social care system” and sees his own career as having had a “golden thread” running through it: namely, a “commitment to mak[ing] a contribution to a more socially-just [sic] society”. This is obviously, then, the way the wind is blowing: not so much academic rigour or the pursuit of truth, but instrumental teaching and research in the name of social justice. That, it seems, is how the purpose of universities will be increasingly construed.
The second is the emphasis which both Phillipson, in her statement, and Behan, in his review, lay on having “stability” and “financial sustainability”. Clearly, with U.K. universities in the round feeling a squeeze, this is at the forefront of everybody’s minds. But Behan’s framing of the issue is instructive:
Many providers [he basically means universities] are critical research and innovation assets, forming part of the U.K.’s strategic research capability, in which Government made significant investment to developing infrastructure, staff and facilities. Further, many higher education providers have a teaching focus or specialisation. Some are anchor institutions, rooted in ‘place’, serving the educational needs of their community, providing employment, fostering economic well-being and social cohesion.
This means that, “as [the] architect of the infrastructure of the higher education system” the Government “should consider whether the prospect of such a provider exiting the market is conducive to a more strategic organisation of higher education in England” and that it “should also consider whether… noninterventionist positioning” is “still appropriate for meeting the challenges of today”. The subtext here is easily parsed: universities will get the financial stability they crave and more “interventionist positioning” (read: too big to fail), but in return Government will get its “more strategic organisation of higher education in England”. Universities can hardly complain about the instrumentalisation of their activities which will follow: if Labour is going to fund their ongoing existence, then Labour is going to get its pound of flesh; this is as inevitable as day following night.
And the third thing to say is about freedom of speech. It is absolutely no accident that Phillipson took the opportunity to announce the publication of Behan’s independent review, his appointment as interim Chair of the OfS, and the effective cancellation of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023 all in one fell swoop – because all of these things are related. If Government is going to take more direct strategic control of universities in order to achieve whatever purposes it has in mind, then it necessarily follows that the last thing it will want is pesky academics who won’t get with the programme causing trouble. To repeat the point I made in my post the other week, when the state is imagined to have purposes, then it must follow that the population lose their freedom, because their acting against the State’s purposes, once it has them, is intolerable to it. The population in such circumstances are reduced to the status of conscripts in the state’s cause, and conscripts are not supposed to be able to say whatever they like about the cause into which they are being conscripted. They are free to say whatever they like as long as it aligns with the state’s purpose. So why on Earth would we expect the current Government – a purposive one par excellence – to commit to securing freedom of speech for academics?
But another important message was sent by Phillipson’s decision to “delay” the commencement of the Act. The point about the Behan appointment is that it is all very cosy – it is, remember, supposed to establish a “confident, trusting and respectful relationship” between universities and the OfS. Behan is obviously sympathetic to the Labour Party and his aims clearly align with those of Phillipson, but there is nothing really very unusual about that in the context of U.K. higher education, where support for Labour is almost monolithic and any dissatisfaction expressed with Labour policy tends only to come from further Left.
And most academics in the U.K., it must be said, would not have been fond of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act. They would have seen it as a shield for right-wing nutjobs, racists, bigots, Christians and gender-critical feminists, and as such they will be very glad to see the back of it. What we are seeing here, in other words, is not so much a declaration of war on free speech so much as a declaration of friendship from a Labour Government to one of its most loyal voting blocs: vote for us and we look after your interests, in this case by waving a green flag to the rooting out from campus of anybody whose speech makes the mainstream Left uncomfortable.
There is nothing really puzzling or surprising about this; it is the way that the Labour machine always operates. Vote for us and you get sweeties – vote Tory and we’ll give you a smacked bottom (usually in the form of tax rises on the blocs of the population who generally vote Conservative – pensioners and people who send their kids to fee-paying schools being the whipping boys this time around). The sweetie is in this case not having to worry about occupying the same physical space or the same profession as somebody who lacks the Right Opinions. And let me tell you – I know these people – the coming repeal of the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act will be very popular amongst a great many academics in the country for precisely that reason.
The future of higher education, though, is in any case clear. It seems likely that enough money will be found from behind the Government’s sofa to keep the show on the road, so in that sense things look, in the short to medium term, relatively rosy. But change is afoot. For a very long time universities have had to play an awkward balancing game in which they have tried to pursue their own interests while under increasing pressure from Government to justify their (comparatively lavish) funding by demonstrating that the research they produce has real-world value.
It seems that this game is now coming to an end, and that the resolution has (inevitably) been worked out in favour of Government: there will go on being such a thing as ‘higher education’ and there will still be such a thing as ‘universities’, but they will increasingly resemble state-directed research institutions, teaching state-directed education. This will not likely be a coercive transformation, but – as is so often the case nowadays – oriented around nudging. Funding (except in the hard sciences) will dry up for any type of research that does not have an explicit ‘social justice’ dimension; course curricula will be to a certain extent dictated by externally-imposed requirements; scholars will be put under increasing pressure to present their work as furthering some cause or other in the name of ‘impact’.
Working academics will have to find ways to go with that grain while maintaining their commitments to their profession and their students; consequently, good teaching and good research will continue to get done. But university as it was once understood – a community of scholars engaged in the pursuit of truth – will simply depart from the scene. What will remain will increasingly resemble an extension of school, designed to educate a workforce that will suit the imperatives of the state; something that is instrumental, purposive, technical, prescriptive. This will be a great shame and will not work even on its own terms. But beggars cannot, I suppose, be choosers where messes of pottage are concerned, and the signal being sent to universities by Phillipson and Behan is in this respect as clear as day: Government will cross your palms with silver, but Government will want due consideration. And this will mean “interventionist positioning” in many more ways than one.
It probably goes without saying that the views expressed here are my own and do not represent the position of my employer.
Dr. David McGrogan is an Associate Professor of Law at Northumbria Law School. You can subscribe to his Substack – News From Uncibal – here.
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Perhaps you’re on to something, Professor Alexander.
Somehow brings to mind long-ago end-of-term school assemblies, at which our year turned out to be the last Grammar School intake, as the white heat of socialism merged three separate school sites into one comprehensive Jerusalem, built at the stroke of a Labour Education Secretary’s pen.
For around nine terms, the old Boys’ Grammar soldiered on in isolation, as the next yearly intakes were assigned to the old Secondary Mods as part of the first Five-Year Educational Plan.
So for nine terms the old-school Grammar-School Beak continued the old-school, end-of-term tradition of reading from St Paul’s Epistle to the Corinthians…
“When I was a child, I thought as a child… As if seeing through a glass darkly… And so abideth these three… Faith, Hope and Charity… But the greatest of these is Charity.”
Followed, if memory serves right, by a rousing chorus of Jerusalem lifting the assembly hall roof off, at a school at which assembled hymn-singing was generally at best patchy.
Meanwhile at home my father was an atheist and my mother a lapsed churchgoer, but the message of doing unto others as you would wish done unto yourself was well-aligned between home and school.
The past is another country, but if nothing else, it lives on inside my head, on occasion permeates how I live, and, for all I know, maybe also on occasion ripples outwards.
I’m not particularly religious despite my farther being a member of the clergy. I suppose I’m comfortable being a cultural Christian.
I’m not religious either. Maybe I am a “cultural Christian” too. I will have to think about what that means. My kneejerk reaction is that it’s a contradiction in terms. You either believe that Christ died for our sins, in which case you’re a Christian, or you don’t, in which case you’re not. But maybe there’s more to it.
Humans do seem to need something, and so do societies and civilisations, to rally around. Race, “blood and soil”, a monarch, a specific set of ideals, a religion of some sort (even wokeism or socialism or climatism or scientism or safetyism).
Jewish people seem quite comfortable with this idea. Most Jewish people I know are secular Jews, as they refer to themselves. But unquestionably Jewish.
Then again they have about 2000 years head start on Christians.
That said, Jewish people are a minuscule proportion of the world population, so it remains questionable as to how much of winning strategy being a secular anything is.
I’d be more impressed if Western Churches were more able to defend themselves against the march through their own institutions. It seems counterintuitive but religions get their strength from the belief of their adherents – and I don’t believe(!) there are enough people who can be convinced to believe any more.
100% agree. My bias – militant Catholic. Church militant and probably born 1000 years late.
Culture is King. When your society worships fake science, does not know a penis from a vagina, believes in UFO’s, non-existing viruses and believes that because a fat face is peering into a small screen it is the apogee of development – it will implode.
Culture is King. This is why nations must exist and persist. No national cultures no freedom. This country was built by, and on, Christianity. Full stop.
I think that unless the English are willing to insist that England is Christian, and that the Church of England is a Christian church, and to make this so, not by force, but by institutional entrenchment and something like financial encouragement…
Christianity does not become a common enterprise by social expediency, but by the conversion of a significant part of the population. Otherwise it is still going to be a mere cultural Christianity, attempted by those who say “I am not a Christian, but I see the value of Christianity…” In other words, it only becomes an “enterprise association” (“εκκλεσια”, “assembly,” or “church” is the word we’re looking for) because it is seen to be true. And if it isn’t seen to be true, then there’s no point in making it our enterprise association, is there?
So the question for everyone is, if Christianity is seen to be so necessary and useful, what is it that stops it being true for “cultural Christians”? Is the refusal to commit to Christ any more than a tired old cultural conditioning by a discredited secularism?
My conclusion: we don’t need “institutional entrenchment” or “financial encouragement,” but revival. Unless Christ died for our sins, and we receive that news gladly, Christianity is nothing.
Good and interesting points. I see the value of Christianity, for sure. But I am not a Christian. Is that a result of “tired old cultural conditioning”? Maybe. I don’t feel conditioned, but I guess most of us are, to a greater or lesser degree. I just cannot get my head around the idea of God and the story of Christ. It’s beyond my ability to process.
Here’s a thought – if Christianity is true you can start anywhere to approach it. I’ve known people who became Christians by years of scientific research, and others who tore a page from a Gideon’s Bible to light a fag in prison.
For example, God is not an idea, but a person. So you could ask him to lead you to truth, and see what happens next.
Or, if evidence is your thing, look at whether today’s scientific knowledge really supports a universe without a governing mind, in the light of cosmic fine-tuning or the waiting-time problem in evolution.
Or after 200 years of destructive biblical criticism, examine whether the New Testament narrative has been debunked, or rather reinforced.
Or if Christianity is so valuable, investigate how it got that way without a rather special origin.
I don’t say all roads lead to Christ, but C. S. Lewis was right to say that, more often than not, it’s not that Christianity has been tried and found wanting, but found difficult and not tried.
Your thoughts are much appreciated.
I don’t think science can explain existence. Existence and time and consciousness seem to me to be completely, inherently, intrinsically inexplicable and miraculous to me.
I did read C S Lewis when younger, and found it helpful. Maybe I should revisit him.
Me too. And short on alternative explanations, too. “Chance and an infinite past” makes unwarranted assumptions about the powers of chance, and in any case would necessarily mean we’d never have got to a finite “now.”
“Pan-psychism” is supposed to account for consciousness, without explaining how – and doesn’t explain its existence.
Polytheism’s gods are unexplained products, not creators, of the cosmos – whose universal laws exclude the mythological political conflicts.
And then there’s the fact that everywhere you look it’s just so damned beautiful. It’s as if somebody cares. And that’s before someone shows us John 3:16.
Indeed.
I certainly don’t want or need any kind of explanation – looking for one seems pointless, a waste of time and finding one would be awful (except that I don’t see how one can be found).
I guess I feel a bit like this:
“…Religion used to try,
That vast moth-eaten musical brocade
Created to pretend we never die…”
Aubade | The Poetry Foundation
Do read the whole poem if you don’t know it. It’s short and easy to read.
I so agree with all your comments, Jon. I especially agree re our world being so beautiful – it all points to our Creator God.
True, though “revival” assumes spiritual life in the first place, which I would not assume. But there is a book which I am told has sold more copies than any other. It needs to be re-read.
Exactly. I value the Professor’s posts highly. I think them amongst the very best things on the site. I look forward to them and am disappointed when there isn’t one. And the posts on the place of Christianity in our world are, I think, amongst his best and most interesting. BUT, in this one, as in all the others, he sidesteps the question of belief. He sidesteps Mr Garvey’s question, ‘Is it true?’ He even sidesteps the easier question, ‘Does it matter whether we think it true or not?’ No one goes to Church to save the State or even Society. No one is or can be religious for the sake of politics. There is and can be no praying ‘Thy will be done’ in order to do mine. And any simulated religion — anything that falls short of actual belief, such belief as, it seems Muslims have — will be found wanting. An England defended by a Christianity maintained by ‘insistence’, ‘institutional entrenchment’ and anything like ‘financial encouragement’ will be as helpless to defend ‘civil association’ as civil association is to defend itself. Mr Garvey and Pilla (a few moments ago) are right: the only recourse is repentance and revival. I say so as someone as incapable of either as, I presume, Professor Alexander is himself.
The problem with a society based on “civilian association” is that it cannot even agree on its values.
This is fundamentally the reason why it is doomed.
Ultimately, it gets to the point where it doesn’t even know how to define a woman.
Sooner or later it tears itself apart. There is no cohesion, only angry focus groups fighting for dominance. Give it three or four generations and it descends into anarchy.
Gordon Bennett, what a bloody fiasco. How predictable was this, though?
”BREAKING: Le Pen and all other defendants have been “sentenced to ineligibility” for democratic elections.
Just like in Romania, the frontrunner in France’s presidential election has been expelled.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1906647772121452827
”Marine Le Pen stands poised to win the 2027 presidential election in France unless the courts disqualify her from running, new polling published just hours before a court hearing to determine her future has shown.
On Sunday, a new Ifop survey for Le Journal du Dimanche showed Le Pen leading in every run-off scenario, making her the undeniable frontrunner and obvious candidate of the right-wing National Rally.
A Parisian court is set to rule Monday on whether Le Pen, accused alongside 26 others in the long-running “parliamentary assistants” case, will be sentenced to a five-year ban from holding public office, with immediate execution even pending appeal.
She is also facing possible prison time and a fine of up to €300,000.”
https://rmx.news/article/le-pen-beats-all-other-presidential-candidates-with-ease-in-final-poll-before-expulsion-court-hearing/
The globalist b’stards obviously saw her as a real threat that needed to be dealt with;
”She was also given a four-year jail sentence, with two years suspended. She is not expected to serve any jail time.
Le Pen, 56, is a three-time presidential contender who had said the next election in 2027 would be her final run for top office.
The ban, which comes into force immediately, ends those hopes unless she successfully appeals before the campaign.”
https://news.sky.com/story/marine-le-pen-barred-from-running-for-office-after-being-found-guilty-in-embezzlement-case-13339142
”For anyone wondering, this was the latest polling for the next French presidential election, published only yesterday.
Le Pen was beating every other candidate at a canter.”
https://x.com/RMXnews/status/1906659324912386097
As in Romania now in France as the World Empire of Fascists moves to keep control. Offhand I can’t name him, but there is young man who is seen as a rising star in RN and could step up in her place and might even benefit from a backlash against the elite in the same way that having a sham conviction to label Donald a ‘felon’ was seen through by the people.
It is rather odd how every political opponent to progressive globalism is turning out to be a nefarious criminal. Thanks goodness we have incorrupt legal institutions to root them out, </sarc>
All well and good but ignores the fact that Christianity failed in Britain long ago. People vote with their feet, and don’t find spiritual sustenance in a set of beliefs based on a book, however inspiring the words may be, and however miraculous things happened 2000 years ago. (and yes, I do believe in the divinity of Jesus, and the miracles)
Singing lovely hymns can give you a lift one day a week, but what about the rest of the time? There is no spiritual METHODOLOGY offered by which one can ascend the spiritual mountain, and truly transform your self from average human to more Christ-like. I’ve seen this time & time again, both durinig my years of Chruch-going and encountering church-goers today: they have very little spiritiual growth, and are just as prone to the negativities of an egocentricc pesonality as the agnostics I rub shoulders with. Some are worse, with their self-righteousness & judgementalism.
No, what the country needs is a source of spiritual nourishment that will enable visible, tangible growth from the egocentric self to a higher state of consciousness, which is why I ended up in a Japanese Zen Buddhist monastery, with spiritual giants as my companions.
The secular enterprise association used to be called the nation usually paired with the nation-state. This combination is possibly even more hated by the collective left than the church as the church could be and has been co-opted. That’s what mass immigration from not only foreign but seriously alien cultures is eventually supposed to deal with.
There are already German politicians running around in Germany who routinely claim that the myth that Germany would be the country of the Germans must finally be overcome, as it’s everybody else’s country but ours. During the recent election campaign, there were posters of the Green party demanding literally Unlimited immigration now!
Yes, I agree. The nation and the nation state could work, and that’s why they are under attack.
James do you not miss the obvious point that civil association is the civilised barrier to avoid the enterprise of civil war. A secular society is an imperative because of this threat so ably illustrated by the leathal disagreement between catholic and protestants at the reformation. The disaster now is that given the so called death of god, some idiots think there is no longer room for a significant difference of opinions. A neutral common wealth and common language has been given up by the internationalists ,who are all one. Ready to squash all difference for the sake of harmony or should that be conformity. It does not need Christianity as such it just needs politicians to one again understand that some of these positions are mutually exclusive including against internationalism, and so a civil secular common ground is required to enable them to get along.
Internationalism is not a common wealth to use individually, it is a common benefit at the behest of an elite.
Therefore it is the common appreciation that our secular society needs defending so as to also defends it’s constituent parts which is the true enterprise.
The early churches in the ancient Roman world were organised in the same way as all the other free associations that honeycombed Roman civic society. The Roman state had no control over any of these, from the craft and trade guilds to the clubs for almost any human social activity.
The Apostle Paul had to remind his converts that in coming to a church they had not come to a dining club or a debating club, as some obviously thought they had.
It was from this beginning that the saeculum had its origin. As Paul famously told his converts, they were not there to involve themselves in what today would be called politics.
Yet in the very same breath Paul created the concept of political legitimacy. The ruler – the government – was supposed to be a ‘terror’ to wrongdoers, Paul observed. That was the reason he gave as to why the government should be obeyed. But the unspoken implication in what he said is this: what if the government isn’t a terror to wrongdoers? Where then is its legitimacy?
There is nothing in Paul or any of the other evangelists to indicate that they thought that the purpose of Christianity was, as C S Lewis put it, to act as a ‘short cut to the chemist’s shop’. The faith as a means and the world an end. But by the beginning of the 20th century, the man who was the Bishop of Durham at the time was observing that much of the religion as preached in the churches had largely become social democracy; an extra impetus to social improvement.
Thought-provoking article with which I partially agree, being a strongly believing Christian (trying to follow Jesus Christ). I have paid up a one-off donation simply in order to comment!! I used to subscribe (for a few years) but have cut down dramatically on my extra-curricular giving for very valid and good reasons (money needed elsewhere, not for yours truly). I am interested in James Alexander as we used to know another professor at Bilkent university, who we presume is still there.
In this case, I agree with Jon Garvey’s comment below: it’s no good reverting to being a culturally Christian nation, repentance followed by revival is needed. Revival follows true repentance (seeing ourselves as sinners in need of a saviour). I continue to pray that God sends repentance on this nation.
Without Christianity there is either no standard or another standard to determine what is right or wrong.
If Christianity is thrown away then the concept of right and wrong, by Western standards, is also thrown away.
Without that moral standard then one cannot say that, for example, theft is wrong because maybe according to the moral standard of someone else stealing is ok.
Without a moral standard we cannot say our moral standard is better than someone else’s moral standard.
Also in Christianity we have the concept that everyone is created in the image of God and we are equal.
Without Christianity that idea of equality is thrown away.
Christians could say that slavery was wrong because it did not treat people equally.
Notice that Christians were the ones who started to do away with slavery.
The concept of equality is not in many other religions/ideologies so slavery was not against their moral code.
But, again, you can’t have Christianity for the sake of morality or equality. You can only have it for its own sake. If you try to have it for the sake of something else, what you will have is (at best) the something else, not it. I am not sure where he says it, but T S Eliot somwhere says something like ‘what we can’t have we must do without’. And that, it seems to me, is the truth of it. If you don’t believe Christ is the way, the truth and the life, you must do without Christianity.