I was listening to David Suchet (who famously played Agatha Christie’s crime solving sleuth, Poirot) read the Bible – and he does it very well. As he did, I reflected on the fact that I was listening to literature that was between 2,000 – 3,000 years old. Imagine that! It is extraordinarily old. For that reason alone, why don’t people read it and honour it. Instead, our cultural opinion leaders ignore it, are crassly ignorant of it, and treat it with disdain by putting its words into fictional film characters carefully crafted to be despised.

It is almost as if a feeding frenzy of evil is being directed against the book that has civilised humanity by introducing the themes of equal justice for all, compassion for the poor, and education for all. As Tom Holland’s book, Dominion has reminded us, humankind wasn’t doing too well until the civilising influence of the Christian’s book was allowed to shape the thinking of society. This is why I view the sustained attack on Christianity by today’s opinion leaders with deep concern. The nature of the attack is also deeply worrying as it features ignorance, unfairness, and blind prejudice rather than balanced reasoning. As I said, there seems to be a ‘feeding frenzy’ of derision and scorn against that which has been responsible for the greatest good in human history.

Please note: I am not talking about fallible, supposedly Christian institutions that have behaved badly in history. They deserve criticism, because they have not been faithful to the tenets of Jesus Christ.

Here’s the thing: If you remove the godly wisdom of consistent biblical principles from society, humankind must inevitably collapse back into the rule of nature which is ‘red in tooth and claw,’ where only the apex predator wins. This is a brutal world where might is right. It is a world where the elite predate the vulnerable. It exhibits a morality that makes perfect sense if the highest ideal is the flourishing of yourself and your offspring above all else. It is the world of Friedrich Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ – whose philosophy of ‘will to power’ underpinned the elitist, domineering philosophy of Nazism. 

This apex predator thinking looks distinctly shoddy when contrasted with a man who washed the feet of his disciples… and who died on a cross the pay the price for the evil you and I have committed that would otherwise disbar us from God’s presence. 

So what happens when the love and grace of God is ridiculed and scorned, and culled from society? What is left? 

Well, I think we are getting a bit of an idea of what is left. We are seeing greater anger, the weaponising of resentment and entitlement thinking for political advantage, and the lack of fair debate. In other words, we are seeing the death of civility. Along with it, we are seeing the light of hope, meaning and purpose fade from the eyes of our children. They don’t know who they are, or why they are. This current generation has handed them a legacy of meaninglessness and loss of moral absolutes that is brutal.

So, may I encourage you to take a stand against the “endarkenment” of our civilisation, and to read and understand the timeless gospel story… a story that our children need to hear?