The Commentary

I confess I may be being premature but we must all have begun to wonder how long it will be before we see the fragmentation of our country into separate nation states.

The elections in May brought extraordinary success to the Scottish Nationalist Party, finishing the Labour Party’s 50-year dominance north of the border. Whether he will be able to do it with his wafer-thin majority is debatable, but Alex Salmond, the SNP leader, was looking for a referendum on Scottish independence within three years. Having given regional assemblies to both Scotland and Wales, many would say to Tony Blair as he steps down this month as PM, ‘Well what did you think would happen?’

Later in May saw the re-opening of Stormont and the return of the power-sharing assembly in Northern Ireland. While it was heart-warming to see the faces of old opponents, Dr. Ian Paisley of the DUP and Martin McGuiness of Sinn Fein, smiling out from the front pages of our newspapers, the question is, ‘Can it last?’ We have people sharing power whose long-term aims are diametrically opposed.

Christian cement

Economics is obviously a factor in holding our country together. Could Scotland afford to go it alone? Would an independent Wales have the resources to survive? But even if the finances do not stack up there seems to be growing support for nationalist parties.

Why is this? My own take on it is that, at least in part, it was Christian faith which brought us and bound us together as a country. Christian ideals were the ‘shared values’ out of which Britain was forged. So with the sustained attack upon all things Christian mounted by our secular society for at least the last 50 years, is it any wonder that the country itself is showing signs of break-up?

Last December, The Economist carried an article with the title ‘Postmodernism is the new black’. It sketched out the way our high street shops and the retailing industry have been radically reshaped by the postmodern outlook. With the abandonment of the concept of universal truth, the individual self is the only arbiter. Gone, therefore, is the idea of the mass market (is this why Marks & Spencer’s went through that very rough period?) to be replaced by a thousand and one ‘niche’ markets and ‘specialised’ consumer items. The writing is clearly on the wall. Postmodernism must inevitably lead to fragmentation.

And bringing the same logic into the political arena, without shared values it is inevitable that the Scots will be for the Scots, the English for the English, etc. And who knows where this disintegration will end as various subgroups of society push for their agenda? All this speaks once more of the secularists who ‘claiming to be wise became fools’ (Romans 1.22). The late Francis Schaeffer would warn us that such disintegration could lead to a dictatorship which will try to hold things together by some kind of political brute force.

No ready-made culture

T.S. Eliot, the great 20th-century poet, said this: ‘If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a culture ready-made…We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great grandchildren: and if we did none of us would be happy with it.’ Postmodern ‘selfism’ is not a culture but an anti-culture. It leads only to break-up. And surely there is a lesson for the church in all this. As the ‘emerging church’ plays around with postmodernism and tells us it is the way forward for evangelicalism it will only lead to more disunity.

Break-up of Britain?

Christian cement

No ready-made culture

John Benton

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