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Why the air we breathe is being poisoned.

The air we breathe in the modern West — despite its rejection of the faith and the emptying pews — may well have been Christian, but the supply is clearly running out.

And Christians have assumed a common foundation of Christianised thinking with many Australians who no longer even hold to those assumptions, or perhaps who never did. We are headed for a serious reckoning.

Crumbling Moral Consensus

Let me explain:

The events of the past few months in Australia, culminating in Bondi, have exposed something that Christians need to take seriously. In the past, we have assumed — along with Tom Holland in his seminal book Dominion (popularised so well by Glen Scrivener in The Air We Breathe) — that Western air is Christian air.

Sure, people may have disagreements about the best way forward for the nation, but mostly those disagreements could be mined down and seen to be Christianised in their source, and therefore Christianised in their solution. This taps into the “baseline cultural narrative” that Tim Keller would speak of.

But reading Holland’s book a few years ago, I was struck right at the end by his assessment of just how strange the Christian framework is to the pagan mindset. This struck him mightily in Iraq, where he saw the devastation of Islamists. There, amidst dreadful human carnage, he realised that the West just does things differently:

Holland says (it’s a longish quote but worth the read):

“No doubt I should have appreciated this earlier. As it was, only during the early stages of writing this book, when I travelled to Iraq to make a film, did it properly dawn on me. Sinjar was a town that, when I visited it, stood directly on the frontier with the Islamic State. It had been seized from their fighters just a few weeks before.

Back in 2014, when they captured and occupied Sinjar, it had been home to large numbers of Yazidis, a religious minority condemned by the Islamic State as devil-worshippers. Their fate had been grim precisely as the fate of those who resisted the Romans had been grim. Men had been crucified; women had been enslaved.

To stand amid the ruins of Sinjar, knowing that two miles away, across flat and open ground, were ranged the very people who had committed such atrocities, was to appreciate how, in antiquity, the stench of heat and corpses would have served a conqueror as the marker of his possession.

Crucifixion was not merely a punishment. It was a means to achieving dominance: a dominance felt as a dread in the guts of the subdued. Terror of power was the index of power. That was how it had always been, and always would be. It was the way of the world.

For two thousand years, though, Christians have disputed this. Many of them, over the course of this time, have themselves become agents of terror. They have put the weak in their shadow; they have brought suffering, and persecution, and slavery in their wake.

Yet the standards by which they stand condemned for this are themselves Christian; nor, even if churches across the West continue to empty, does it seem likely that these standards will quickly change.

‘God chose the weak things of the world to shame the strong.’ This is the myth that we in the West still persist in clinging to. Christendom, in that sense, remains Christendom still.”

Post-Christian Australia

Here’s my contention: The murders and anti-semitism — indeed a bulk of the protest movement we have seen in Australia the past two years — is proof that the air we assume that we all breathe in the West is not as Christian as we would wish.

For a start, Islamism is not Christian air. It never has been. It’s the antithesis of a cruciform religion. And its extremes have been allowed to fester across the West, precisely because most liberal democracies are breathing such Christian air. Yet when liberal philosophies lose sight of the nature of true evil, they simply assume that modernity will never permit such atrocities again. This is the true myth of liberalism.

Those chanting “Where are the Jews?” or “Gas the Jews” — whatever was said, it does not matter because we know the intent, have never breathed Christian air. We need to come to terms with that. We have to gird our loins for what that is going to look like in terms of societal upheaval in the coming decades.

Yet here’s the problem. Hard progressives, raised on a diet of hatred towards the West, scornful of Christianity’s leavening power in the culture, and steeped in Marcuse, Foucault, etc., who all hated the Gospel, don’t breathe Christian air either. We are two to three generations past from any Christian recognition among leftist movements who have captured our institutions. The air on our campuses is hermetically sealed off from Christianity.

Which is why the average punter can barely believe that another Australian citizen would be happy with the deaths of the remaining 16 million Jews that live in the world.

But make no mistake, there are plenty of people in Australia now who would be happy with that, and they’re not all from Sinjar. And they include many Westerners who, even while reaping the benefits of Christian air, are not breathing it. Rather, they are hooked up to hermetically sealed breathing units that pump out poisonous gases that either have no knowledge of Christianity, or disdain it altogether.

Yes, it’s true that a good number of Australians still have underlying assumptions that Christians can tap into when spreading the Gospel, but they are being confronted with many Australians who do not.

And as we would expect, those sucking on the poisonous oxygen tanks are happy to turn up at protests, exhale that poison into the air, then lean on Western — and Christian — ideas about justice when complaining about how they are treated.

In short, I DON’T have a baseline cultural narrative commonality with those who turned up to protest at Town Hall. It’s clear from their goals and their goads.

And Christians who think they can sup with the devil need to ensure that their cutlery drawer has long enough utensils not to drag them to places that would have shocked them just a few years ago.

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Republished with thanks to Stephen McAlpine. Image courtesy of Adobe.

Appeal for the Bondi Terrorist Attack Victims

Celebrate Israel, in partnership with the Canberra Declaration and other supporters, have organised a relief fund appeal for the victims and families of the Sydney Bondi Beach terrorist attack.

Our giving team is called Celebrate Israel Australia on the platform and is part of a much larger appeal run on the Charidy giving website. All donations are tax-deductible and will be administrated by the Jewish United Support Fund.

The relief fund will provide direct financial support, helping families begin to rebuild their lives after this tragedy. Assistance is especially needed to cover essential commitments when the family’s primary breadwinner has been killed. Find out more about this appeal on The Daily Declaration here.

Please stand alongside the Jewish community as a visible demonstration of God’s love to them at this critical time of need. So far, over $29,000 has already been donated, and we prayerfully seeking to raise $100,000.

Please share this appeal button with your church networks and friends.

Give by clicking the green button below.

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