It’s about the need for a Christian restoration.
Transcribed by a speech-to-text tool - so may be a few blips - https://x.com/danny__kruger/status/1945963482920169677
bold emphasis added. On Hansard (which includes an interjection)
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It is an honour to stand here in this empty chamber to speak about the original purpose of this space, which was a chapel in the Church of England. The old chamber of the House of Commons on which this space is modelled, after the great fire of 1834, was St Stephen's Chapel, formerly a royal church, given by the heirs of Henry VIII to Parliament to serve as its debating chamber.
[1.4s] Madam Deputy Speaker, your chair stands on the altar steps, and the table with the dispatch boxes is where the lectern stood. I mention this because the link between this place and the Church of England isn't merely ceremonial. The prayers we say here at the start of every day aren't just a nod to tradition. Our democracy is founded on Christian faith. Indeed, this Parliament remains the law-giving power of the Church of England. We in this place have the responsibility to approve or disapprove the doctrine and the rules of the church. And that is as it should be, because the Church of England is not some private club, just another eccentric denomination. The church is a chaplain to the nation. And through the parish system in which every square inch of England has its local church and its local priest, we are all members. We all belong. Even if you never set foot in your church from one year to the next, even if you don't believe in its teachings. It is your church, and you are its member.
And so when I speak of the Church of England today, I am not speaking about the internal politics of the Anglican sect. I speak of the common creed of our country, the official religion of the English and the British nation, and the institution which, older than the monarchy, much older than Parliament, is the institution that made this country. And it is no surprise that both the church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided internally, confused, badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance and literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended.
And the country itself reflects this, unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within. at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally. Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children of nine-month-old babies, and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. I describe those laws in these stark terms not to provoke further controversy, but because those are the facts. We gave our consent to the greatest crime, the killing of the weak the most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin. And if I, standing here, have any power to repent on behalf of this House, then I hereby repent of what we did.
But Madam Deputy Speaker, in the reaction to these votes, and all around us, in reaction to the state of the country and the world, something else is happening. There is a great hunger in society for a better way of living. And I want to use this opportunity to explain what that better way is. and why we here in England have the means to follow it. The Jewish and the Christian God is a God of nations. He is interested in people as individuals, but also as groups, as communities, not only of kinship, though that too, but of common worship with a common God. And this nation, England, from which the United Kingdom grew, uniquely among the nations of the world, was founded, created consciously on the basis of the Bible and the story of the Hebrew people. [1.4s] In that sense, England is the oldest Christian country and the prototype of nations across the West. The story of England is the story of Christianity operating on a people to make the institutions and the culture that have been uniquely stable, uniquely successful. The Western model was forged and refined in England over 1,000 years, from the 9th to the 19th centuries.
So what is that model? It is simply this, that power should arrange itself for the benefit of all the people under it. and specifically for the poorest and weakest, that the law is there to protect the ordinary person against the abuse of power, that every individual has equal dignity and freedom, including crucially the freedom of conscience, of religion and belief, making space for other religions under the Christian shield, a secular space, indeed itself a Christian concept, meaningful only in a Christian world. These are ideas that only make sense if you accept that we have some intrinsic value, a value that is given to us, not of our own, making or invention. And so through all these long years, from the time of Alfred to the time of Victoria, it was assumed that a nation was a community of common worship and that our community, this country, worshipped the Christian God.
Then in the 20th century, another idea arose, that it is possible for a country to be neutral about God, that the public space, the public square, was empty of any metaphysics, that the route to freedom lay through the desert of materialism and individual reason, no hell below us, above us only sky, That idea was wrong, and the horrors of the 20th century attest to that, not least in the West, where we escaped totalitarianism but have suffered our own catastrophes of social breakdown, social injustice, loneliness and emptiness on a chronic scale. Now new threats, ugly and aggressive, are arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God we do not have pluralism and tolerance, everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. [1.6s]
All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion, we simply create a space for others to move into // as dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space that Christianity has been ejected from. One is Islam. In a debate yesterday, I said how much I find myself in agreement on moral and social matters with Muslim colleagues here in Parliament. But as I've been saying, this is a Christian country, if it is a country at all, and I cannot be indifferent. about the extent of the growth of Islam here in recent decades.
But it's the other religion that worries me even more. And this other religion is a hybrid of old and new ideas. And it doesn't have a proper name. I don't think woke does justice to its seriousness. It is a combination of ancient paganism and Christian heresies and the cult of modernism, all mashed up into a deeply mistaken, deeply dangerous ideology of power. hostile to the essential objects of our affections and our loyalties, which are families, communities and nations. And explicitly, most passionately, it is hostile to Christianity as the wellspring of the West. And this religion, unlike Islam, must simply be destroyed, at least as a public doctrine. It must be banished from public life, from schools and universities, from businesses and public services. It needs to be sent back to the fringes of eccentricity, like the modern Druids who invest Stonehenge in my constituency. with a theology that is mad but harmless because its followers are so few and no one serious takes them seriously.
Now, we can no longer pretend, as they did in the 20th century, that we can be neutral or indifferent about God, that the public square is a godless desert. The fact is that the strong gods are back and we have to choose which God to worship. And I suggest we worship the God who came in the weakest form, Jesus Christ. This God is a jealous God. It's him or nothing. We have to own our Christian story or we have to repudiate it. And not to own it is to repudiate it. And to repudiate Christianity is not only to sever ourselves from our past, but it is to cut off the source of all the things that we value now and that we need in the future. Freedom, tolerance, individual dignity and human rights. Without the Christian God in whose teaching these things have their source, these are inventions, mere non-existent aspirations. To worship human rights is to worship fairies.
But if we own our story, Remember the real sources of our civilisation. We can have these things and make them real. Real freedom and tolerance and dignity. A culture of love. And crucially, a culture of humanity. Because we are in the age of the machine. And a great choice confronts us. Whether to make machines in the image of fallen man, bent on exploitation and domination, with mankind in its sights, or to make them what they properly are, the servants of mankind, able to help us make a better world.
So Madam Deputy Speaker, to conclude, A wind is blowing, a storm is coming, and when it hits, we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand. But we have been here before. The reformers of the 11th and the 16th centuries, the Puritans in the 17th century, the evangelicals in the 19th century, all brought this country back from the edge, from idolatry or error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about. And they each, in their generation, restored this country to itself. And a new restoration is needed now, revival of the faith, the recovery of Christian politics, a re-founding of this nation on the teachings that Alfred made the basis of the common law of England all those centuries ago. This is a mission for the church, under its next leader, whoever that is. It's a mission for this place, this old chapel, which became the wellspring of Western democracy, and for us, its members. And it's a mission for our whole country, the route to a prosperous modernity, founded on respect for human dignity, responsibility for the created world and the worship of God.
