Some commentary from a Christian in England...
I thought this was worth passing along. It's from a correspondent in England. He recently, in several years, has come into the Bible and faith and is a Christian, though I don't think he belongs to a church, though I would describe his doctrine as John Bunyan, which is to say: very much in the neighborhood of what the Bible says. He understands doctrine at the Federal Theology level... (There are some four-letter words ahead, so brace yourself [update: I edited them out at his request], but it's worth reading for some cultural commentary from an Englishman very much in the mix of the average daily life over there):
Final intro note: I had emailed him an article talking about how some in the Anglican Church were starting to defend the faith...
Yeah that's about right. No naffer dare stick their foot out for fear of getting dragged over the coals, finding themselves unemployed and unemployable courtesy of the PC brigade and with a fatwa on your head issued by a bunch of local kids that may just be latest al quaeda recruits. etc. and then the place stinks so high of liberal do goodness pc culture that stupid right wingers do infact provide a breath of fresh air in an unnatural way - hence their rising popularity. But to be fair about all this, Britain lost it's empire in the summer of 1966 and inevitably it went into freefall. I think it pretty clear, although it was already happening, the individual countries began to push for their own political and cultural identity - so it became sort of like the English were the imperial oppressors of the Scots, Welsh & Irish and they wanted freedom and through this process it just became dirty to be English. I remember hitching in Scotland (& I have Scottish blood) and when the driver identified me as English I was unceremoniously evicted! And when I lived there I was routinely abused and occassionally assaulted for same reasons. In a definite way it is only very recently that the English have begun to have an identity that isn't defined as son of an imperialist, colonial slave merchant oppressor, and you hear only this week that Blair will apologise for Britains hand in the slave trade. (It won't be long before we're paying out compensation claims!) But you can be sure the Welsh, Scots and Irish won't be feeling guilty - that's the English identity. So the very idea of what it is to be English is really a fag end world with nothing left, burnt to the tip. (People have taken refuge in their regional identities, which is understandable but small and backward). So you have this State idea that Britain could be redefined as multicultural and they really pushed it to such an extent that you have tourist information that will tell you about the history of an area, and the migrant communities that live there, the wonderful range of foodstuffs you can buy in their markets, etc, and there will be no mention that until 1970 this place was a solid hardcore white working class community that had existed since the early days of industrialisation - [stuff] like that happens everywhere. And obviously in the wake of 9/11 and 7/7 the undercurrent mumblings about all this bull[stuff] are just set to explode if they aren't resolved so we now see people like Jack Straw fair sticking his neck out to talk about veils, because in an odd way, all of this inordinate focus on muslims within Britain has catalyzed the outbreak of the whole issue of what it is to be English and British. But I still state that as a nation the UK is in a peculiar place being in this identity crisis/shift flux after the fall of empire - and the denial of anything that might associate the modern Briton with any hand in that history and God, it looks sad and pathetic being so timid and fearful of contemporary values. Sometimes I think Britain, even Europe, will implode into a very messy civil war of guerilla violence such as you see in Iraq and other times I see it as a successfully managed state in ultra fine balance accomodating a plethora of values and beliefs and the cost of that society is everyone gently tip-toeing not to offend their neighbour. Not being a particular lover of violence, unless it's in the ring, I'd favour the second scenario but as we sort of have that already, it may just be too stifling to stomach. Sorry just a ramble ...
And then, on another level again ... what a time and place for [the practice of godliness]! I should be truly grateful, historically this all seems especially rare and then perhaps not but it's the scale, and the politics that make it unique.
