Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth, for the Colson Center. I'm John Stone Street. The Christian citizenship is in heaven, but that does not mean that our cultures and civilizations here on earth do not matter. Rather, Christians are to bring Christ's kingdom to bear in whatever time and whatever place God has put them, working to renew and to restore, to turn our upside-down world right side up again. With his power.
Christians are also right to mourn whenever nations reject their Christian heritage, especially when, by doing so, they devolve into something unrecognizable. In a new film, Truth Rising, an impressive collection of British intellectuals describe just how this has happened in their own nation and what this means for the wider Western world. Baroness Philippa Stroud, a founder of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, Sir Neil Ferguson, perhaps the foremost expert in the world on the history of civilizations, Winston Marshall, formerly of Mumford and Sons, and Constantin Kissen. Best-selling author and political commentator are among the many voices in the film that describe this fraught cultural moment. The global premiere of Truth Rising is September the 5th.
You can learn more by visiting truthrising.com/slash Colson. That's truthrising.com/slash Colson. In the years after World War II, immigrants from former colonies generally integrated into those countries that had colonized them.
However, in recent decades, many European nations adopted a careless border policy. and at the same time rejected their own heritage. As a result, mass migration from the Middle East and Africa, or in Britain's case, South Asia, occurred without sufficient vetting or any expectation of assimilation. Especially migrants from Muslim countries tend to despise Western values as well as the people who hold them. Often they're explicit about their desire to transform their new countries into fundamentalist Islamic states.
The contempt for Kafir, or non-Muslims, can be seen in the grooming gangs of England. Since the early 2000s, hundreds of thousands of British girls have been raped, trafficked, and abused, some as young as 11. Often the victims are taken from care homes or lower-income communities. Countless have been murdered or were victims of drug overdoses administered by their abusers. According to the 2023 UK Strategy for Countering Terrorism, 75% of M15's caseload involved monitoring Islamist threats.
80% of counterterrorism suspect investigations were classified as Islamist. And yet, until just last month, the Labor government in Britain shut down attempts to investigate or deal with the problem of grooming gangs. police often ignored reports of the abuse out of fear for being labeled racist. Even fathers who were attempting to rescue their own daughters were sometimes arrested and trafficked girls were labeled child prostitutes as a means of shifting blame on them. For over two decades now, the UK has been more interested in protecting the reputation of the immigrant community than protecting English girls who were being abused.
Meanwhile, King Charles, who is officially the head of the Church of England, participated in very public celebrations of Ramadan and Eid al Fitr, while making no statement about Lent and only generic statements about Easter. And even more, Britain has historically championed civil rights, including free speech, but not any more. In 2023, there were over 12,000 people in Britain charged for social media posts. Many involve comments that were deemed too anti-immigrant or too pro-British. And that's why public perception is that native Brits and Christians are policed far more harshly than migrants and Muslims.
Part of this story is that British elites long ago succumbed to the progressive takedown of national identity. Thus, there's very little interest in protecting or preserving Western civilization there. And since Western culture is a product of Christianity, that has to be rejected as well. And rejecting Christianity will mean losing those cultural goods that depend on Christian values, like freedom of speech and religion, civil equality, universal human rights, and a host of other things that the West has long taken for granted. the cultural goods of the Western world will not be preserved if they are cut off from their roots.
And currently Britain is a case in point of this, and much of the rest of the West is not far behind.
Now whether or not the West can or should be saved is not clear, either from history or from scripture. God can certainly change the trajectories of nations and civilizations, but he's not revealed to us what his plans are for this specific time and place. But what is clear from Scripture is that either way, whether in times of prosperity or persecution, Christians are called to be agents of renewal. And so thus we pray out of love of neighbor and for the advancement of the kingdom of God. And so we promote and preserve those things that are good.
We oppose and resist those things that are evil. We imagine and innovate those things that we might offer the world in the name of Jesus Christ. And we renew and restore to the best of our ability those things that are broken. As we do these things, perhaps the Western tradition might be saved. Perhaps it won't.
As T. S. Eliot said, for us, there's only the trying. The rest is none of our business. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint.
Today's Breakpoint was co-authored by Dr. Glenn Sunshine. If you're a fan of Breakpoint, please leave us a review wherever you download your podcast. And for more resources to live like a Christian in this cultural moment, visit us at breakpoint.org.
