Michael Burleigh
The Philadelphia Society
National Meeting, April 12, 2008
Arlington, Virginia

The West and Religion prompts a few thoughts about culture. The main threats to western Judeo-Christian civilisation in my country are: family breakdown, rampant drug and alcohol abuse, welfare dependency, widespread subscription to irrational conspiracy theories, with many still believing that MI6 killed Princess Diana despite a three month inquest, and an almost uniquely vulgar popular culture. You may have heard of a TV reality show called ‘Big Brother’. Ironically, this is made by a company called Endemol, whose boss is the Old Etonian descendant of Bazalgette, the great Victorian engineer who built London’s main ring sewer system. 

Then we have the BBC and the Left humanities departments in the university- the illiberal liberals as I would call them. Both still subscribe to the divisive public creed of multiculturalism, despite this being disavowed by all three major political parties, notably the Tories. British academics have started to ban the military from campuses, while greedily scooping up donations from Saudi Arabia which fund subversive ‘Islamic Studies’. The BBC recently ventured boldly into unknown territory. It made a quasi-anthropological series, not about pygmies in Papau- but called ‘WHITE’. Now there are obviously many white, and Black and Asian, people on our televisions. What the BBC meant was the white working class who it admitted it had totally neglected because it did not like its views. Predictably, the series culminated- after programmes devoted to pigeon-fanciers and the like- in play about a girl from a dysfunctional working class family finding meaning and structure in her life, yes, you guessed it, by converting to Islam. 

Which brings me to the malign interaction between aggressive secularists and finger-jabbing radical Islamists and their impact on the churches. One response, that of Archbishop Rowan Williams of Canterbury, has been to make common cause with the imams, by suggesting we modify common law to incorporate sharia, which as you can imagine is the path to (expanding) enclaves of legal separation, that in turn anticipate the inauguration of a caliphate. Such “unclarities”- perhaps due to the Archbishop’s lifelong immersion in Greco-German theology- provoked a storm of outrage and condemnation by the leaders of all three major parties. We already have such enclaves already. In Britain they are becoming ‘no-go areas’ for non-Muslims. In France they are the notorious ‘banlieues’; in the Netherlands the ‘dish cities’ where satellite TV is tuned to North Africa. I suppose the popular response to the Archbishop was based on a diffuse sense that we are cultural Christians, even if church attendance is increasingly something that Pentecostalist Africans or Polish Catholics do. Of course, ‘cultural Christianity’ depends on successful transmission through the generations. As ‘New Age’ cults have discovered that is no easy matter. Leaving aside an ageing clergy, Christianity will find this especially so if religion is excluded or marginalised in school curricula, and banned altogether from mention in the draft EU constitution. It will become like the folk customs- the song of the washerwoman- which Winston Smith dimly remembers in George Orwell’s 1984, and then as incomprehensible as Egyptian hieroglyphs. 

Now, lest I leave you in despair, there are some signs of life. In Britain the Conservatives are taking culture seriously, or at any rate, more seriously than the Thatcher governments of the 1980s which focused on economics and foreign policy. The BBC is likely to find its annual poll-tax (the license fee of about US $200) being gradually diverted to other public service providers. Some also urge them to do the same with university funding- perhaps by encouraging research based think tanks through tax breaks to donors. These are as urgent challenges as Marxist trades unions in the 1980s. 

Some of the recent successes of our security services and police against terrorist conspiracies resulted from information initially supplied by concerned Muslims- notably the unravelling of the Heathrow airport planes plot which is currently in the courts. Former Hizb ut-Tahrir extremists who have seen the errors of their ways- like Ed Husain, author of a book called The Islamist- have banded together in the recently launched Quilliam Foundation to prevent young British Muslims following the path they pursued earlier. 

Finally, while the Netherlands clearly has a special problem, elsewhere the evidence is that second and third generation European Muslims adopt local norms of family size- which in several European countries means 0. Ironically, it has been the sudden influx of 1 million Catholic Poles (who in the rural Lincolnshire town of Boston are 25% of the population) that has meant that ‘population movement’ (the preferred euphemism for immigration) can be discussed honestly and without cheap charges from the Left of racism. For the first time there has been discussion of such taboo subjects as to whether immigration has any net benefit. Some have concluded that the benefit is equivalent to a weekly Mars Bar for the indigenous inhabitants. Constant supremacist self-assertion by radical Islamists has also led to discussion about whether we want the cry of the muezzin in predominantly non-Muslim East Oxford, or a 35,000 seat mega mosque- funded by Wahhabists- next to the 2012 Olympic stadium in London. So after many wrong turns, the road ahead seems slightly clearer, although as you friends say over here……way to go.