God is Dead and it’s Killing our Society!
I was on holiday when the riots struck. As looters began to torch my city, I was on a plane with my family heading towards America. It was a disconcerting feeling being on the other side of the world watching footage of my country tearing itself apart.
In the weeks since, I’ve heard countless stories of businesses decimated, their owners losing everything; individuals who found themselves being caught up in the moment, doing things they would never before have imagined doing, suddenly finding themselves sent to jail for stealing bottled water; and families who spent the week fearful and housebound, bags packed in case they needed to escape quickly. The consequences of these riots will be felt in our nation for a long time to come.
As I read various people’s attempts to come to terms with what occurred, I was struck by the proliferation of voices, diverse in their worldviews and faith positions, but united in their diagnosis: ‘This is exactly happens when a society tries to kill God.’
These recent riots are but one example of a larger epidemic. In the last week or so we have seen bandit attacks on the border of Somalia, a 20-hour multi-pronged attack by the Taliban in Kabul, and of course the tenth anniversary of the devastating attacks on the Twin Towers on 9/11. All point to the fact that society is broken.
In between seeing the sights of New York and catching up on the news from England, I read The Rage Against God by Peter Hitchens. He argues that without God, there is no reason to enter into the ‘inconvenient obligations’ upon which our society is based, and where atheism has flourished at the hands of the ‘Militant Godless’, society has been all the weaker for it.
As I watched the riots, and as I read the news, I am inclined to agree.
From where does a decent, well-meaning, selfless human being get his internal sense of morality if not from a divine moral lawgiver? And from where do those who commit atrocities against their own kind get their permission to do so, if not from the denial of that same lawgiver?
Even Russell Brand, commenting on the riots, wrote
‘I know, as we all intuitively know, that the solution is all around us and it isn’t political, it is spiritual.’[1]
Writing in The Wall Street Journal[2], Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argued that we are now feeling the force of decisions made decades ago in which Judeo-Christian morality was jettisoned. We thought we could do away with God and still maintain a strong society. How wrong we were. The West is particularly guilty of ‘attempted deicide.’ In fact as Micklethwait and Wooldridge of the Economist note in their book God is Back Western Europe is one of the few places in the world where the belief that God is dead still exists!
Sachs cites a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, tasked with finding out what gave the West its dominance. He said:
‘At first we thought it was your guns. Then we thought it was your political system, democracy. Then we said it was your economic system, capitalism. But for the last 20 years, we have known that it was your religion.’
I was fascinated to read the BBC report last week suggesting there may be as many as 60 million Christians in China; more than in the whole of Europe! When other nations begin to covet our Judeo-Christian heritage, this should cause us to think carefully about giving it up.
For societies to flourish, they need at their core a belief in the existence of God. It is not simply the foundation for moral action, it’s what gives us hope and keeps us straining and striving towards a better future. And not just any god; after all, plenty of atrocities have been committed in the name of religion, but a God whose nature is both merciful and holy, kind and righteous, patient and unchanging; love personified[3].
Society should think twice about killing off God, lest in so doing it signs its own death warrant.
A shorter version of this article previously featured in Friday Night Theology[4]
Footnotes
[1] http://www.russellbrand.tv/2011/08/big-brother-isnt-watching-you/
[2] http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424053111903639404576516252066723110.html
[3] Micah 7:18; Isaiah 6:3; Psalm 89:14; Psalm 11:7; Exodus 34:6; Hebrews 13:8; 1 John 4:8
[4] http://www.eauk.org/fnt/
Comments
By Colin Perkins on 26/09/2011 at 22:14
I agree David but I’d respectfully suggest we need to avoid any explanation for the riots that gives only one answer, including the answer that chimes most easily with what us Christians already think. Riots, like much inner-city crime, are like an ink-blot test: people see what they’re already looking for. Socialists see the retreat of the state; conservatives see the breakdown of traditional authority; racists see feckless black youth; evangelical Christians see a godless generation and proclaim the need for strong fathers and a return to biblical values. People generally don’t like complexity, Christians included. Yes I’d agree that the erosion of Biblical values was a/the cause of the riots, but that erosion was and is multi-faceted. At the very least it includes some of the more extreme injustices of unfettered capitalism, so that a young man growing up in an inner-city council estate can earn twenty times as much dealing drugs as he could in the minimum-wage jobs that are the only ones open to him. I’ve worked with those young men in Birmingham, ones who really did go on to join gangs (as opposed to the majority of the rioters). There’s no excuse for their behaviour but there are reasons, and the reasons are more complex, both in cause and solution, than is suggested by any plea to a return to ‘godly’ values. The USA is the most Christian country in the Western world but part of it’s inner cities are now so entrenched in gang violence that most commentators view that situation as permanent. Godliness is a political as well as a religious reality, an economic and social one witnessed to not just by our churches but by our jails, our schools, and our banks. Please read the article I’ve linked to below; when evangelicals start analysing problems like that, then I think we’ll have the authority to speak about a return to godly values.
ttp://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/camila-batmanghelidjh-caring-costs-ndash-but-so-do-riots-2333991.html