Will a Fourth Reich Arise in the West?

The Limits of Western Religious Toleration

We at Contra Celsum believe that in the forthcoming decades religious freedom and toleration is likely to become an issue of significant controversy in the post-Christian world. We also believe that the liberalism of Athens is most likely going to prove acutely illiberal towards the Christian faith, Jerusalem, and Christians. Freedoms which many have taken for granted (self-evident) are likely to disappear. Christians are probably once again going to be persecuted and incarcerated—in the West, no less!

Some will no doubt view this as alarmist talk. But the signs are all there to see for any who want to consider them dispassionately. They are all part of the general trend towards a more intrusive state and a more comprehensive bureaucratic regulation of all of life. Let's firstly consider the historical macro-trends.

When the principles of religious toleration were first seriously promulgated, then finally accepted, in the West (primarily in the UK and the US) it was done within the context of an overwhelming Christian consensus. Freedom of religion meant, in this context, freedom to be a Protestant or a Roman Catholic—and to follow one's conscience in the matter. Extending the same freedom to Jews was a bit more problematic, but eventually it was done. It was a relatively easy step to move to extending the same liberty of conscience to those who wanted to be neither Protestants, nor Roman Catholics, nor Jews.

The position of religious liberty has been formally maintained up to this day. However, real and substantial religious changes have been taking place in the post-Christian West. Primary amongst these is that the West has become post-Christian. There is no longer a Christian social consensus. Unbelief dominates at virtually every point throughout the West, with the possible exception of the United States, but even in that country the case is moot.

Instead, the West has been increasingly dominated by Enlightenment philosophies, religions, and world-views. Fundamental amongst these has been materialism—the doctrine that the sum total of being, of all that exists, is physical matter, coupled with motion. There has been a panoply of different types of materialism: scientific materialism, marxist materialism, communist materialism, socialist materialism, libertarian materialism, evolutionistic materialism—the list could go on. But these are all kissing cousins—variants of the same basic world-view.

In this world-view religion and religious beliefs are regarded variously as myth, idiocy, sociopathy, psychopathy, empty speculation, social opiate, ignorance, and so forth. In this context, religious belief is regarded as relatively harmless—irrelevant to be sure, but harmless. This has progressively become the new underpinning of the Western tradition of religious freedom: religion is tolerated because it is irrelevant and harmless, rather than because it is right and just. This is the kind of “paternalistic indulgent” school of religious toleration, and it now rules the public square in all Western countries. All that is required for religious freedom to be curtailed is for society or the government to adopt a position that a particular religion is harmful, rather than harmless, and it's all over rover.

At the same time, throughout the West over the past one hundred years there has been an enormous extension of state power. Once the role of the State was restricted to a very few functions and activities in society. Now, in western democracies, the State has become the critical organ for the creation of a near-perfect society. The State is now almost universally held to be responsible for building the ideal society. It educates, teaches, trains, provides, protects, shapes and claims control of anything and everything necessary to create its vision of utopia. Debates between political left and right are reduced to debates over relative degree of state intrusion, regulation and planning. The consensus over the redemptive and messianic prerogatives of the State is broad, deep, and high. Political discourse and debate is now only about the colour scheme and interior decoration of the edifice: is it going to be ornate or minimalist? But there is no debate over the edifice itself—its existence is virtually unquestioned and unassailable, except amongst those on the fringes.

So the Christian religion in the West has been consigned to the private sphere of the psyche, being regarded as a kind of simplistic or primitive throwback to a more ignorant era. Meanwhile the State has aggressively asserted its omnicompetence, but only because of the overwhelming consensus that it was ought to do so. There is a small step between an overwhelmingly materialist world-view and a planned and controlled society. Does not the entire universe consist of nothing more than matter and motion? Society likewise should reflect the same: people (matter) in motion (guided, controlled, pushed, directed) by the Plan. It is only natural. It reflects the natural order of things.

In societies where Christians are in a minority, as at present, the fundamental concern of Jerusalem is to be left alone—to be allowed to continue to live and act conscientiously according to its beliefs. But increasingly the world of Unbelief intrudes into every fabric of life, and therefore into the very fabric of Jerusalem, claiming prior rights, for example, over the children of Christians, stipulating how they are to be raised, educated, and disciplined. Sooner or later Christian parents are going to be in indicted and convicted for raising their children as the Living God commands, contrary to the dictates of the State. Their children are going to be wrenched from them and placed in homes and schools that reflect the prevailing State ideology.

We believe this will be just a harbinger of more to come. In the last three hundred years, materialism has underpinned and spawned some of the most violent totalitarian societies ever seen in human history. The religion of materialism, in its various guises and permutations, undergirded the most bloody century yet seen in all human history. Common to all these militant aggressive societies has been an implacable rejection of religion in general and Christianity in particular.

As Western societies experience decay, as they teeter and totter, more and more controls to combat social evils and problems are likely to be promulgated. The Christian faith would then move from being seen as a harmless irrelevancy to an obstacle and finally to an evil. Persecution will then follow.

We expect therefore that the values of religious freedom and toleration should no longer be taken as a given. Jerusalem should prepare accordingly.

Postscript: Homeschooling in Germany is a crime. (Google "homeschooling Germany" for an overview.) The law proscribing it was a Nazi piece of legislation that has remained on the statute books. The State is now using the law to attack home schoolers. Christian home schooling parents have been fined and imprisoned in Germany, and their children sent for re-education. The courts have ruled that homeschooling is an abuse of custody—that is, it is child abuse by definition. Families have fled Germany as a result. (One starts to get a sense of deja vu. We seem to recall somewhere we seen this before in Germany).

In 1937, Hitler, when introducing the Nazi Ministry of Education stated:

The Youth of today is ever the people of tomorrow. For this reason we have set before ourselves the task of inoculating our youth with the spirit of this community of the people at a very early age, at an age when human beings are still unperverted and therefore unspoiled. This Reich stands, and it is building itself up for the future, upon its youth. And this new Reich will give its youth to no one, but will itself take youth and give to youth its own education and its own upbringing.

The German government wrote recently to a people complaining against their children being forcibly removed to state schools: “The minister of education does not share your attitudes toward so-called homeschooling. . . . You complain about the forced school escort of primary school children by the responsible local police officers. . . . In order to avoid this in future, the education authority is in conversation with the affected family in order to look for possibilities to bring the religious convictions of the family into line with the unalterable school attendance requirement.”

There goes freedom of religion. The new Reich is starting to look suspiciously like the old Reich. Who would have thought? Who, indeed.