Oxymorons Aplenty

Private Religion Only Need Apply

One potent component of Tolkien's Lord of the Rings is the author's ability to describe and convey the slime, the decay, the degradation of Mordor and its works.  It befouled everything it touched. 

We have seen Mordoresque societies in recent history.  These have not been fictional representations.  They are the real article.  Peter Hitchens reflects upon life in the Soviet Union as he experienced it for years as a foreign correspondent.  Reading these words makes Reagan's "honorific", the Evil Empire appear apt.  But we must bear in mind that the Soviet Union was overtly created to be the first atheist civilization--the first self-conscious civilization of Unbelief.

Mistrust and surveillance were not the only things that quickly struck me as different about this society.  Soviet life, I learned speedily enough, was incredibly harsh and often dangerous.  My Russian acquaintances thought my wife and I were ten years younger than we were.  We thought they were ten years older than they were.

Life began with harshness.  Even for the married, the main form of family planning--in a society that had little room for big families--was abortion, legally unrestricted in the post-war USSR as the need for a vast conscript army receded.  In 1990, there were 6.46 million abortions in the USSR and 4.85 million live births.  Birth itself was an authoritarian ordeal, with the newborns snatched away from their mothers by scowling nurses in tall chefs' hats, tightly wrapped like loaves, and denied breast or bottle until the set time came around.  You could spot a maternity hospital by the strings hanging from the windows bearing pathetic messages of love or need from wives to husbands . . . .

While tourists and distinguished visitors were taken to the ballet, ordinary male Muscovites (women wouldn't have dared go there) patronized beer-bars so horrible that I could only wonder at the home life of those who used them.  You took your own glass--usually a rinsed out pickle jar--and a handful of brass coins worth a few pennies, along with some dried fish wrapped in old newspaper.  You fed your coins into a vending machine, and pale, acid beer dribbled intermittently out of a slimy pipe into your jar.  You then went to a high table, slurped your beer (which tasted roughly the way old locomotives smell), and crunched your fish, spitting the bones onto the floor.  There was no conversation. . . .

It is absolutely true--I saw it many times--that traffic stopped dead when rain began to fall, as every driver fetched windshield wipers from their hiding place and leaped out to fit them to their holders.  Any wipers left in place while the car was parked would be stolen as a matter of course.  Petty theft of unsecured property was universal--and universally accepted as normal.  [Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God: How Atheism Led Me to Faith (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), p. 87, 88.]

Civilization, says Hitchens, is not racially, nor even culturally grounded.  It comes from the heart of the populace.  After life in the USSR, he concluded that high moral standards cannot be reached and maintained unless they are generally accepted and understood by an overwhelming number of  people.  He goes on to tell us that he has since seen evidences of Mordor in Britain:

I have since concluded that a hitherto Christian society that was de-Christianized would also face such problems, because I have seen public discourtesy and incivility spreading rapidly  in my own country as Christianity is forgotten.  The accelerating decline of civility in Britain, which struck me very hard when I returned there in 1995 after nearly five years in Russia and the USA, has several causes.  The rapid vanishing of Christianity from public consciousness and life, as the last fully Christian generation ages and disappears, seem to me to be a major part of it.  (Ibid., p. 91)

 Hitchens recounts how the recovery of his faith was a long, slow and gradual affair.  Initially, his faith remained intensely personal and private and familial--precisely the kind of faith that secularists insist upon being the only valid and tolerable manifestation of Christianity.  They would have cheered him on--a model Christian they would say, as they settled down to tea and crumpets.  What jolted him out of this ghettoised Christian faith was his experiences in Russia--and his days of terror in Mogadishu where he was confronted by hell upon earth.  He writes:

At this point in my life I had already returned to Christianity, rather diffidently, having been confirmed into the Church of England about seven years before.  My reasons had been profoundly personal, to do with marriage and fatherhood, a cliche of rediscovery that is too obvious and universal, and also too profound, private, and unique to discuss with strangers.  I saw no particular connection, at the time of my return to religion, between faith and the shape of society. I imagined it was a matter between me and God. 

The atheist Soviet Union, where desecration and heroic survival were visible around me, began to alter that perception.  Mogadishu accelerated the process.  I thought I saw, in its blasted avenues, its private safety and public terror, and its lives ruled by the gun, a possible prophecy of where my own society was headed--though for very different reasons.  I still think this. (Ibid., p. 92f)

He provides a vivid description of the terror of Mogadishu when life was nothing and terror ruled, bribery and guns one's only feeble protection.  When he eventually got out and back to safety the point hit home.  He writes:

Safely back in London, I was shown old pictures of Mogadishu as it had been a few years before.  the lineaments of the great wide avenue where I saw the armed trucks were just discernible.  But where I had seen mud, gangs, and wreckage, there were Italian-style pavement cafes, smart cars in orderly lines, a white-gloved policeman directing the traffic, well-dressed and prosperous people passing by, even a telephone box, and of course, modern shops and civilized looking hotels.

This was the familiar world that I was used to, and in a short time it had become the miserable urban desert in which I had rightly feared for my life.  I am sure nobody ever set out to get from the one to the other.  But they had done so all the same and in a very short time.  (Ibid., p. 97f).

God has so created the world that religion (or cult) generates culture and culture generates governments.  Evil or superstitious religion produces a brutalized or fearful culture and a government which reflects the culture of the day.  We will either have God or Baal, Belief or Unbelief, Gondor or Mordor, Jerusalem or Mogadishu.

Every Christian has a duty to reject outright the insistence amongst the Pagans that Christianity must remain private.  They only seek the privatisation of Belief more easily to facilitate the imposition of their version of Mordor upon us all.