PETER HITCHENS ON THE NEW UTOPIANISM

Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God

(London: Continuum; 2010), p. 158.

ʻA new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from the laws and constitutions of Europe and North America.

This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits, or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation.

This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and like all such codes full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups.

These must then be policed by an ever more powerful state.

A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against the possession of narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to licence its own comfortable indulgence.

And so it permits the same freedoms to the poor, who suffer far more from this dangerous liberty than do the rich.

Inevitably it is the Christian churches who are the last strongholds of resistance to this change. Yet they are historically weak, themselves infiltrated by secular liberalism, full of uncertainty and diffidence.

The overthrow of Christian education is a real possibility in our generation.

The removal of Christianity from broadcasting and from public ceremonies is almost complete.

Expressions of Christian opinion or prayer in public premises can be punished in Britain under new codes which enjoin a post-Christian code of “equality and diversity” on all public servants.

Secularists are equating the teaching of religion with child abuse and laying the foundations for it to be restricted by law.

Britain's next monarch is likely to be crowned in a multi-faith ceremony whose main significance will be that it will be the first Coronation not to be explicitly Christian in more than a thousand years. The Rage against God is loose, and is preparing to strip the remaining altars when it is strong enough to do so.ʼ

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