The Nation, Liberalism and the Gospel
By Professor Tommy MacKay
The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl be said to be bountiful (Isaiah 32:5)
There are few terms which have been more abused, both in our churches and in society in general, than the term ‘liberal’. In the above text, the only word in our English version not so commonly used today is ‘churl’. Other versions have terms such as ‘rogue’, ‘scoundrel’, ‘villain’, but we are content with our traditional rendering. The Hebrew idea is of a niggardly, withholding, mean-spirited person, as opposed to one who is ‘liberal’ in the proper meaning of the word – bountiful, generous and honourable.
It is a characteristic of godlessness to exalt those things which are wicked and to describe them with a positive vocabulary, and on the other hand to despise the things that are good and to revile those who practise them. Increasingly those who promote a godless agenda proclaim themselves to be the ones who are liberal, and all who oppose them are illiberal. The term has almost been turned into a synonym for the rejection of God and the gospel. It began with the idea of the ‘liberal’ wing of the Church. The liberals were by definition those who were unbelieving, those who rejected the Bible and its truths. Their liberality amounted to taking the bread from the children’s mouths, as hirelings who cared not for the flock.
However, we have no warrant to take the words which describe that which is good and accept their application to that which is evil. Isaiah has summarised the matter well: ‘The vile person will speak villany, and his heart will work iniquity, to practise hypocrisy and to utter error against the Lord, to empty the soul of the hungry, and he will cause the drink of the thirsty to fail’ (Is. 32:6). By contrast, ‘The liberal deviseth liberal things, and by liberal things he shall stand’ (v.8).
The godless philosophy of false liberalism has pervaded our society in almost all of its key functions and institutions. We look back on a time when the school day began with the Lord’s prayer; when our local council meetings were opened in prayer; when foul language was censored from our screens; when the shops were closed and our streets peaceful on the Lord’s day; when our laws were designed to reinforce God’s commandments in areas such as marriage, divorce and the sanctity of life from the womb to the grave. Formerly in my local town, as was the custom in towns throughout Scotland, following the local elections we had the ceremony of the ‘Kirking of the Council’, when all of the town councillors paraded to the parish church for prayers and a blessing on their work.
In many respects it would be reasonable to describe the changes that have taken place as cataclysmic. This abandonment of our former way of life has accelerated rapidly in our Western society as the old landmarks are removed. Here in the UK it can be readily summarised in relation to four aspects of national life – our national media, our local government structures, our national governments and our churches.
Our national media are reflected more than anywhere else, not in our press, but in the British Broadcasting Corporation, once the ultimate standard of impartial British broadcasting for the whole world and still commanding the highest international respect. The BBC always sought to present itself as the very emobodiment of British liberalism and impartiality. Perhaps it still does, so long as you are not an advocate of biblical Christianity. As one of its great former anchormen, the recently deceased Peter Sissons noted, Christians are ‘fair game’ to be insulted by the BBC. It is a very sad departure from its early days. Its first director general was the Christian Lord Reith, later Lord High Commissioner to the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. In 1934 it adopted the motto ‘Quaecunque’ – that is, ‘Whatsoever’. It was taken from the Christian Scriptures, from the Latin Vulgate at Philippians 4:8: ‘Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things are of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things’.
This inspired the dedication that appears in the entrance hall of Broadcasting House: ‘This temple of the Arts and Muses is dedicated to Almighty God by the first Governors of Broadcasting House… It is their prayer that good seed sown may bring forth a good harvest, that all things hostile to peace or purity may be banished from this house, and that the people, inclining their ear to whatsoever things are beautiful and honest and of good report, may tread the path of wisdom and uprightness’. What then shall we say to these things? What can we say other than, ‘Tell it not in Gath, publish it not in the streets of Askelon… How are the mighty fallen in the midst of the battle!’
As to our local government structures, I take but one of many examples. I read that in Bristol an employment tribunal upheld the sacking of a primary school teacher. Those of us who work in the sphere of public education will know just how difficult it is to get sacked from such a position in the UK. Her offence? It was her statement online that she believed that marriage is between a man and a woman and for opposing LGBT relationships education for young children. She told the tribunal, ‘I believe that God created mankind as male and female, and what he created is good. He does not make mistakes. I therefore do not believe in the modern ideas of gender fluidity and transgenderism’. The Tribunal agreed with the school’s position that readers could see her comments as ‘transphobic’ and ‘homophobic’. Ironically, the school which sacked her was a Church of England school.
Then there is the matter of our national governments. I read the Westminster debate on the dramatic fall in the number of children born with Down’s Syndrome, this being because new tests make it much easier for the unborn baby’s life to be taken from it in the womb. Dr Lisa Cameron, an MP for the Scottish National Party, and indeed a colleague of mine as a chartered psychologist, spoke up against it, as she has consistently done on pro-life issues. Meanwhile, her government in Scotland continues to promote a radical abortion policy, while Lisa Cameron for years has been subject to online abuse and death threats. The Scottish Government is unshaken in its statement that it will lead the world in pursuing an extreme LGBT agenda. If we oppose that agenda, even by views expressed privately in our own homes and reported to the police, they are ready and waiting to turn us into criminals through legislation more suited to China or North Korea than to liberal Britain – the nation which gave the world liberal democracy and all the judicial structures to support it.
As to our churches, we can only echo the words of Charles Wesley:
‘The floods of wickedness o’erflow,
And deluge all our guilty land,
People and priest lie drowned in sin,
And Tophet yawns to take us in.’
By way of illustration, a recent article by a member of the Church of England General Synod compared churches and Christian who uphold the Bible’s teaching on sexual ethics to ‘Holocaust deniers’ and ‘rapists’. She attacks those who ‘teach that LGBT lifestyles are sinful’, and says that churches or individuals who engage in prayer, private conversation and teaching which does not affirm homosexual or transgender lifestyles ‘should be held to account and face the full force of the law’. That is only one story of what is happening in our churches today, but they are legion.
I believe we have entered the fifth and final stage of the dismantling of Christian Britain, and it has happened within the living memory of many of us. First, we were once an outwardly and visibly Christian country. At that time Christians were respected. Christianity was the moral compass of the nation. Even unbelievers were at times apologetic for ‘not doing the Christian thing’. When we were born we were not given a ‘first name’ but a ‘Christian name’, a term used almost universally on our official public forms. Then, second, Christians were ignored. Our Christian foundations and practices were neglected. In the closing decades of the 20th Century new church memberships had fallen to one tenth of their level mid-century. Third, Christians then came to be ridiculed. This applied most particularly to evangelicals. They were caricatured as bigots and extremists. Portrayals of Christianity in most of our television series routinely became a parody, something to be mocked and trivialised. Fourth, Christians were displaced. The foundations which linked Church and State, and which cemented in a formal way a Christian nation’s claims, were systematically dissolved. Prayers disappeared from classroom and from council chambers. ‘Thought for the day’, however weak and watery we may have viewed it at times, lost its status as a Christian thought for the day. Why should Christianity be accorded a privileged position?
Finally, in the fifth stage, the process has begun of Christians being persecuted. To speak up for Christ and the gospel means to be ready to risk your job, or to lose your tenure in the Universities, or to be ‘no-platformed’, or to lose advisory positions on Government, or to be deselected as an MP, or, as noted above, perhaps soon to face ‘the full force of the law’ and lose your liberty.
How we have accepted the abuse of the godly word ‘liberal’! It is written, ‘The liberal deviseth liberal things’ (Is. 32:8). We have watched the term hung falsely around the necks of those who speak things that are vile. We ask the questions which in any other age would surely have seemed absurd. Is it liberal to shut the mouth of a woman because she says she believes men are men and women are women? Is it liberal to dismiss from employment one who believes that marriage should be between a man and a woman? It it liberal to deprive the most vulnerable sector of our society, the unborn in the womb, of their life? Is it liberal to propose that prayer and preaching based on God’s commands should be criminalised?
It takes only one change of syllable in Hebrew to turn the vile (‘nawbawl’) to the liberal (‘nawdeeb’). It is a false attribution. But God is not mocked. His verdict is unchanging: ‘Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil: that put darkness for light, and light for darkness; that put bitter for sweet and sweet for bitter;’ (Is. 5:20).
Have we any reason for optimism in these days? Indeed we do, for there is nothing new under the sun. It was all happening back in the days of Isaiah. However, Isaiah looked at it all through the eyes of faith. He saw a day coming when a king shall reign in righteousness – a day when ‘a man shall be as an hiding place from the wind, and a covert from the tempest; as rivers of water in a dry place, as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land’. In that day God will arise and the tables will be turned. The refuge of lies will be swept away. And then we shall see the fulfilment of his promise: ‘The vile person shall be no more called liberal, nor the churl be said to be bountiful’.
Professor Tommy MacKay
Ardoch House
Cardross
Dumbartonshire G82 5EW.
Email: criticalsolutions@btinternet.com
Phone: 07960 825760.