For Those Who Missed It...

British Prime Minister David Cameron gave what was an apparently quite powerful speech asking the Archbishop of Canterbury to start promoting Christianity in Britain.  From the December 16, 2011 Daily Mail:

David Cameron last night called on the Archbishop of Canterbury to lead a return to the ‘moral code’ of the Bible.

In a highly personal speech about faith, the Prime Minister accused Dr Rowan Williams of failing to speak ‘to the whole nation’ when he criticised Government austerity policies and expressed sympathy with the summer rioters.

Mr Cameron declared Britain ‘a Christian country’ and said politicians and churchmen should not be afraid to say so.

He warned that a failure to ‘stand up and defend’ the values and morals taught by the Bible helped spark the riots and fuelled terrorism.

At Christ Church Cathedral in Oxford, where Dr Williams used to teach, Mr Cameron said the time has come for public figures to teach ‘right from wrong’, and questioned whether the Church of England has done enough to defend those values in the face of the ‘moral neutrality’ that pervades modern life.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2075205/Speak-Christianity-Cameron-tells-Archbishop-PM-calls-Church-defend-values-moral-code-Bible.html#ixzz1h8xJ9U4y

 Darn right.  Unfortunately, Britain, like the rest of the Western world (including the United States), has largely abandoned a set of moral values that are part of what made the West an important force in the world: the notion of human rights; that women were not cattle (even if they were not exactly equals); that self-discipline was a positive value; that the weak should be protected, and not abused. 

And yes, this last idea includes the notion of both personal obligations to the needy, and a social obligation as well.  It is unfortunate that progressives destroyed the legitimacy of social obligation to the poor by untethering it from the idea that personal morality is something worth encouraging, even if it means that both social pressure and law are used to coerce decency.  A society where girls are getting pregnant at 13, where men (actually, often just boys) feel no fear of what may happen to them if they cause that pregnancy, and where the dominant values are lust, greed, and selfish, is not a society that can long last.