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ARC’s burning afterglow demonstrates its vision is not in vain.

To their credit, Baroness Philippa Stroud and Jordan Peterson’s first annual Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) forum continues to hit hope home.

With the help of John Anderson, ARC brought together 1,500 from the world’s cutting-edge conservative fraternity.

The London event was packed with familiar names, fierce commentary, and fast-paced networking.

Touted as a “Better Story” alternative to cultural Marxist narratives pushed by the Woke World Economic Forum (WEF), ARC’s Better Vision is a serious contender.

Names making up its 45-member advisory board include: Amanda Stoker, John Howard, Michael Shellenberger, Katy Faust, John Anderson, Dan Crenshaw, Bjorn Lomborg, Andrew Hastie, Mike Johnson, Niall Ferguson, Victor Hanson, and Tony Abbott – among others.

Call to Arms

In attendance as part of the Aussie Wire team, independent journalist Rebekah Barnett reported ARC 2023’s three core concerns were: family, environment, and good government.

Sub-topics included society, population (immigration/multiculturalism), affordable energy, and free enterprise.

All six topics are part of ARC’s ‘basis for a vision that is voluntarily compelling, motivating, stabilising, and uniting.’ (ARC’s Statement of Vision, p. 5)

While COVID overreach was mentioned, Barnett said, “They could have gone harder.

“At least half the room stayed silent, or supported draconian pandemic policies.

“Given their calibre and influence over the past several years,” Peter McCullough and Robert Malone were conspicuously absent, she added.

On the brighter side, Barnett saw ARC’s debut as “elegant, respectful, hopeful, and thought-provoking.”

VIPs “mingled in the foyer and were open to conversation.”

Also attending, Family First’s Lyle Shelton said ARC was a “clarion call to rush the guards imposed by our woke elites and escape their totalitarian grip.”

Recalling the event, he described the organisation as a frontline against the “dystopian vision of ‘perma-crisis’ and climate apocalypse preached by [both] the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.

“Whether ARC has a future will depend on whether [those gathered] have the courage to fight for these ideas in public when they return.

“The conference has done its part in equipping them with the evidence and a global community. The rest will be up to us,” Shelton added.

As impressive, ARC recognises Biblical Christianity as the founder of the very Western Civics freedoms and responsibilities neopagan nihilism is hellbent on divorcing.

Published in February this year, ARC’s Statement of Vision and Invitation declared civilisational decline to be reversible.

Although there’s good news, there are challenges, they said.

‘A shadow has emerged, an adversarial challenge to this state and process of expanding abundance; an emergent crisis of meaning and purpose.’

“God is dead, or so the story goes, and the future is uncertain.

The “catastrophising has to stop,” wrote ARC’s founders.

“We posit, instead, that men and women of faith and decisiveness, made in the image of God, can arrange their affairs with care and attention so that abundance and opportunity could be available for all.

“We hope to encourage the development of an alternative pathway uphill, out of both tyranny and the desert, stabilizing, unifying and compelling to men and women of sound judgement and free will.”

ARC is a fresh image of unity-in-diversity not seen since Trump’s election shattered the WEF’s Wokeshevist masquerade in November 2016.

Gaping Lacuna

This said, hope deferred makes the heart sick. (Proverbs 13:12)

The importance of Jesus Christ and the villainy of COVID Communism were danced around.

(For two clear examples of where this was the exception, see here and here.)

So absent was any open discussion about biblical theology or any public openness about Christianity, artist, Jonathon Pageau was seemingly led to quip, “There’s really an elephant in this room.

“For the past few days, I’ve kind of noticed it. Everyone is kind of tiptoeing around it, and nobody is really addressing it.”

“To be honest, it’s a little unnerving to me. There are a lot of religious people in this room,” Pageau explained.

“It’s been a strange ghost that’s floating through some of the talks with funny code words like transcended this and faith that.”

By all accounts, ARC’s “Better Story” debut was too heavy on philosophy and too light on political theology.

Additionally, while ARC’s statement of vision is impressive academic prose, it is far too wordy for the everyman to appreciate.

The Christless chasm is all the more strange, considering the bold nature of the venture and the legitimate heroism of many who attended.

Such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whose recent article “Why I Now Call Myself a Christian” imputes credit to Christ-centred classical liberalism as the single guiding source of Western Civics and its core beliefs about responsibility and freedom.

Whether ARC can truly be THAT city on a hill will not depend on the faith of its people; it will depend on the object of their faith.

ARC has room for improvement.

As Christian Concern’s Rev. Dr Joe Boot remarked,

“We don’t just want a different type of elites; a conservative version of Davos.”

The West cannot “try and retain the fruits of the Christian worldview without taking Christ and His Word seriously.”

A Christless “Christian” Western “restoration has no future”.

The principal error of Leftism has been its promise of God’s Kingdom without God in it.

ARC needs Jesus Christ.

To paraphrase the great Man In Black: “We cannot have the kingdom, without God in it.” (The Wanderer)

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Originally published at Caldron Pool. Photo: ARC Forum/Twitter