Europe is in a really bad way, and many Europeans are now saying enough is enough. Lawful and measured migration is one thing, but allowing European nations to be flooded with mass migration – both legal and illegal – is creating such massive problems that many are now wondering whether Europe can long survive.

Islamist jihadism is just one of so many problems we find there. Many people are coming from cultures that are antithetical to the values of Europeans, and those coming too often just import their problems with them. As we now know with certainty, immigration without assimilation is an invasion.

Hot on the heels of the horrific Henry Nowak murder, we have the gruesome attempted beheading of a man in Northern Ireland by a Sudanese migrant. The images have been shared all over the social media, and it is so horrific that Belfast is now in flames as people rise up to say ‘no more’ over this.

Incredibly, authorities have said they do not know the motive for the attack, and yet have ruled out terrorism! People there are getting so fed up with European victims being ignored or even blamed by the police, the courts, the politicians and the media, while the killers and attackers are being defended and excused.

Yet the UK Government says that “cultural nationalism” is part of “extreme right-wing terrorist ideology”. They say that those who claim that western culture is “under threat from mass migration and a lack of integration by certain ethnic and cultural groups” are fomenting terrorism!

Indeed, in the UK to simply post concerns about all this can lead to your arrest. As Ann Coulter just commented, “A Sudanese migrant tried to behead a man in Belfast last night. Henry Nowak bled to death handcuffed while his killer cried racism. British courts won’t name grooming gang rapists. British police will arrest you for posting about any of this.”

As Mcgregor Mackenzie put it: “Call me racist all you like But I’m not up for getting beheaded in the street for the sake of diversity and multiculturalism.” And British commentator Will Kingston said this about the beheading attempt, “I really couldn’t care less about the far right, hurty words or social division on the same day I’ve watched a man have his eyes stabbed out on the street.”

Eva Vlaardingerbroek

No wonder so many have had enough. No wonder why Dutch Christian freedom fighter Eva Vlaardingerbroek and other Europeans are now seeking to resist the madness happening there. Now banned from entering the UK, in a recent speech she provided some shocking statistics on how European countries are losing out to migrants. She said: “The Great Replacement Theory is no longer a theory, it’s reality.”

A video of her recent 17-minute speech is found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y99fnqmWfPo

One helpful article says this about her talk:

Eva Vlaardingerbroek’s speech is framed around a single urgent question: what does it mean to be European, and what must Europe do to preserve itself? Her answer is direct, uncompromising, and deeply controversial. She argues that Europe is not merely a political arrangement or a geographical expression, but a historic civilization rooted in ancestry, continuity, and cultural inheritance….

 

Vlaardingerbroek insists that Europeans have a right to remain the ethnic majority in their own homelands. She presents this not as an act of hostility toward others, but as a moral claim rooted in inheritance and responsibility. Europe, in her argument, is the homeland of its native peoples, shaped by generations who built it, defended it, and passed it on.

 

That is why she rejects the idea that civilization can be treated like an “open-air museum,” something admired from a distance while being fundamentally detached from those who created it. Heritage, as she defines it, requires active stewardship. If a people cease to protect what they inherited, she suggests, they also cease to deserve it.

The article continues:

To support her case, Vlaardingerbroek points to migration figures that she says illustrate the scale of Europe’s transformation. She states that more than 80 million migrants have entered Europe over the last 50 years, including 30 million in just the past decade. She adds that in 2024 alone, roughly 4.2 million immigrants entered the European Union from non-EU countries.

 

She emphasizes the pace of that inflow by translating it into daily terms: approximately 11,500 people per day. Presented that way, the statistic becomes, in her words, the equivalent of a small European town or a football stadium being added to the continent every single day. The rhetorical goal is clear. She wants the scale of demographic change to feel immediate and concrete rather than distant and technical.

 

A central claim in the speech is that Europe was promised successful integration and did not get it. Vlaardingerbroek says Europeans were told that migrants from Africa and the Arab world would become as European as the populations receiving them. In her view, that has not happened.

 

Instead, she describes public life as increasingly tense and unstable, arguing that Europe’s public spaces now feel unpredictable and fearful. Her language is stark, and she uses it to reinforce the idea that multiculturalism has not produced harmony but fragmentation. Whether one agrees or disagrees with her conclusion, this is one of the defining pillars of the speech: integration, she says, has failed, and Europe must stop pretending otherwise….

 

Vlaardingerbroek argues that modern European society is structured in ways that weaken, demoralize, and paralyze native Europeans. She links this to cultural ridicule, falling birth rates, public insecurity, and policies that, in her view, discourage European populations from reproducing or defending their interests.

 

From there, she poses a deliberately provocative question: what do you call the deliberate destruction, in whole or in part, of a national, ethnic, racial, or religious group? Her answer is “genocide.” It is the speech’s most incendiary claim, and she uses it to argue that Europe is approaching a point of irreversible loss if current trends continue unchanged.

It concludes this way:

The speech ends not with a policy memo but with a rallying cry. Vlaardingerbroek says that remigration is the one hill she is willing to die on and calls on others to treat it with the same seriousness. Her conclusion is explicitly pan-European. She addresses Britons, the French, Germans, and the Dutch in turn, urging each to stand up.

 

That closing matters because it reveals the speech’s real form. This is not a detached analysis of Europe’s identity crisis. It is a political appeal rooted in nationalism, civilizational anxiety, and demographic urgency. Whether one regards it as a warning, a provocation, or a manifesto, its purpose is unmistakable: to force the debate over mass migration, sovereignty, and European identity into the open.

 

Vlaardingerbroek’s argument touches nearly every fault line in contemporary European politics: immigration, integration, national identity, demographic change, public safety, and the future of sovereignty inside the EU. It is controversial because it does not soften its language or hedge its conclusions. It is also controversial because it speaks to fears and frustrations that many mainstream institutions prefer to discuss in narrower, more technical terms.

 

That is why speeches like this resonate so strongly in today’s Europe. They are not only about data or border policy. They are about belonging, memory, legitimacy, and who gets to define the future of a continent. For supporters, this is a necessary alarm. For critics, it is dangerous rhetoric. But either way, it is impossible to understand the current European political debate without understanding arguments of exactly this kind. https://medium.com/@therodachannel/eva-vlaardingerbroek-europe-is-changing-forever-why-no-one-is-talking-about-it-172f7cdee7dd

Eva and fellow Europeans have just set up the Save Europe Act. It calls for a moratorium on mass migration, and urges that steps be taken in remigration. Within a few days of setting up the website, nearly 300,000 people have so far signed their support. 

This is what they are signing up to: “We, the undersigned citizens of European nations, demand the immediate enactment of the Save Europe Act — a legislative framework restoring sovereign borders, lawful order, and the continuity of European civilisation.” Their site is found here: https://www.save-europe-act.com/  

Whether this new endeavour will help to correct some of the mega-problems we find in Europe remains to be seen. But at least it is a start. With daily shocking headlines informing us of the assaults on individuals by those who clearly despise Europeans and the European way of life, something must be done.

I for one will keep Eva and the others in my prayers as they seek to preserve Western civilisations from those who want it destroyed.

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A credo is usually thought of in terms of a religious, philosophical or theological declaration or statement of beliefs. What I offer here is sort of different, because the main aim I have in laying this out has to do with the social media. As anyone who posts on controversial issues knows, there is incessant warfare and battles to be found there. It is not a place for the faint of heart.

So it seems that one way for me to avoid some unnecessary controversy and enmity is to declare my hand early on. I have discovered over the years that I might post some things that folks quite like, and they want to become my friend (as on Facebook) or follow me (as on X).

But sure enough, after they stick around a while they start to find things that I write or believe or post that they really dislike. Often they get into major fights with me or simply block me. Indeed, it is a bit humorous to watch all this unfold.

One minute the number of my followers is going up, and the next minute it is going down. Folks see something I posted and think I must be worth following, but then they see something about me that they cannot stomach, so they quickly give me the flick. But thankfully the number of followers overall is slowly going up.

So to prevent anyone from going down this route of first quite liking me, only to discover that they can’t stand me, let me lay out some of my core beliefs and values. It is up to you to then decide if I am worth following – or being in the same room with!

My (social media) credo

For anyone thinking about become buds with me on the social media, or latching on to this website, let me be quite open about where I stand on key matters. I will try to go from the greater to the lesser – from what matters most to what I am more flexible on.

-First and foremost, I am a Christian. More specifically, I am a Protestant, and more specifically still, an evangelical, biblical Protestant. If you hate Christians and Christianity, then CultureWatch is not for you, nor is my presence on the social media. Please feel free to avoid me like the plague if it offends you to hear biblical truth and Christian conviction.

-After some years as a radical lefty and Marxist, I am now firmly in the conservative camp when it comes to political, cultural and social issues. Thus I reject socialism, wokism, political correctness, identity politics, critical race theory, cultural Marxism, intersectionality, sexual revolutionaries, DEI, race-baiting, and so on.

-No one claiming to be a Christian (or anyone with a heart and soul) can promote the slaughter of millions of unborn babies. Thus I am thoroughly pro-life and oppose both abortion on demand and euthanasia. Pro-lifers support both the mother and the child in the abortion debate. Human rights begin with the right to life.

-No one claiming to be a Christian (or anyone concerned about the fate of Western civilisation) can claim to promote the war against marriage and family. The ideal of raising children in a two-parent heterosexual home must be paramount, and the Christian rejects all forms of sexuality outside of heterosexual marriage.

-The trans war against reality and biology (and against women and children especially) must be utterly opposed. Maiming children for life and stripping rights away from women to placate the delusions of men who pretend to be women is just not on.

-I strongly understand that the 1400-year reign of terror by political Islam MUST be resisted at every turn if the West is to have any hope of surviving. While decent individual Muslims exist, this ideology is simply a murderous death cult and is totally inimical to Western values and beliefs. We are NOT the same.

-I strongly support the right of Israel to exist in its ancestral homeland (the only Jewish state in the world) and defend itself. If that makes me a Zionist, then I am proud of it.

-I will not tolerate pathological antisemites, Jew-haters and Israelphobes on my page. But there is a place for constructive criticism of Israel and some of its policies.

-I will not tolerate pathological nutters with a bad case of Trump Derangement Syndrome on my page. But there is a place for constructive criticism of the Trump administration and some of its policies.

-I will not tolerate pathological nutters who worship at the altar of the increasingly unhinged grifters like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Megyn Kelly on my page. As with so many other conservatives, I used to quite like these three folks, but now they have become a house of cards and a den of demons sadly.

Lastly, because I am a committed Christian, I will of course constantly share Bible passages, Christian quotes, and scriptural and theological truths. If that gets you bent all out of shape, you are not obliged to remain friends or to follow me.

Note: this is a partial listing, and I could add more things, but hopefully you get my drift.

On secondary matters and co-belligerency

There are of course all sorts of less important matters where I can agree to disagree with others. For example, if you are a Christian and have a differing view on eschatology and the like, I will not cast you out as a heretic. Similarly, if you are a lefty but are moving rightwards, like American Democrat John Fetterman, I have a lot of time for you.

Another example is the ongoing trans wars. I am dead set against the trans lunacy, and as such, I am getting plenty of folks liking my posts on that matter and following me. But we may be at best co-belligerents. That is, we are happy to work together on this particular issue, while differing bigtime on other matters.

Thus there can be a number of feminists, lesbians and atheists who I am happy to support on the trans issue. But they likely want nothing to do with me given my stance on feminism, homosexuality, atheism, secular humanism, and so on.

As but one particular example of this, tennis great Martina Navratilova is doing a terrific job in attacking the trans madness. But as a lesbian and a gung-ho lefty (just check out her X page), I realise that I have next to nothing in common with her. Thus I will not follow her, and I am sure she will never follow me, but I sometimes share posts of hers on the trans issue.

Let me offer one more particular example. I mentioned just above that I support Israel and loathe antisemitism. When I got heavily involved with X a few months ago (after being booted off Fakebook), I quickly found that many Jews or supporters of Israel were following me.

But then some Jews ended up turning on me, because I made it clear that I was a Christian. That was of course disappointing, so early on I had to post the following to lay out where I stand:

Having been a regular on X for barely a month now, it is sad that I have to say all this:

-In general, evangelical Christians are among the most vocal supporters of Israel today.

-I am an evangelical Christian who supports Israel and has many Jewish friends.

-If you are a Christian who hates Jews and rails against them, you are not my friend.

-If you are a Jew who hates Christians and rails against them, you are not my friend.

-If any of this upsets you, then do not follow me because I will not follow you.

-If you want to go to war over this, I will just block you.

That resulted in a few more folks unfollowing me. But that particular problem now seems to have abated on my X page. So it seems it was worth spelling things out and taking a stand on this. And I may likely have to do it again sometime in the future.

In sum, on some issues I will work with others because they are important issues, but that does not mean I agree with them in every other key area. The truth is, I need to pick my battles carefully, and I need to discern who I can work with and who I should avoid.

Indeed, we all must decide what our core values are, and who we are happy to partner with, and those who we have to say no to. So my list is admittedly subjective, but it reflects where I am at and where I stand on some vital issues. If you more or less can countenance all this, then feel free to keep coming to this website, and/or following me on the social media.

If not, well, adios.

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The post My Credo appeared first on CultureWatch.

During World War II there was a small minority of Christians who were gung-ho pacifists who thought it was wrong to join the Allies in resisting German and Japanese aggression, imperialism and genocide. While pacifism has long been around, it has never been a mainstream Christian option in church history.

Most believers over the centuries have recognised that Scripture affirms the importance of justice and the defence of the innocent, and that some things are worth fighting for and using force against. Sometimes there are necessary just wars. Sometimes the clear Christian option is to resist a Hitler or other tyrannical aggressors.

As I was writing this piece, I happened to come upon a speech Ronald Reagan gave in France on June 6, 1984, commemorating the 40^th anniversary of D-Day at Normandy. He began his moving speech this way:

We’re here to mark that day in history when the Allied armies joined in battle to reclaim this continent to liberty. For 4 long years, much of Europe had been under a terrible shadow. Free nations had fallen, Jews cried out in the camps, millions cried out for liberation. Europe was enslaved, and the world prayed for its rescue. Here in Normandy the rescue began. Here the Allies stood and fought against tyranny in a giant undertaking unparalleled in human history.

Here is another part of it:

The men of Normandy had faith that what they were doing was right, faith that they fought for all humanity, faith that a just God would grant them mercy on this beachhead or on the next. It was the deep knowledge — and pray God we have not lost it — that there is a profound, moral difference between the use of force for liberation and the use of force for conquest. You were here to liberate, not to conquer, and so you and those others did not doubt your cause. And you were right not to doubt.

 

You all knew that some things are worth dying for. One’s country is worth dying for, and democracy is worth dying for, because it’s the most deeply honorable form of government ever devised by man. All of you loved liberty. All of you were willing to fight tyranny, and you knew the people of your countries were behind you.

 

The Americans who fought here that morning knew word of the invasion was spreading through the darkness back home. They fought — or felt in their hearts, though they couldn’t know in fact, that in Georgia they were filling the churches at 4 a.m., in Kansas they were kneeling on their porches and praying, and in Philadelphia they were ringing the Liberty Bell.

 

Something else helped the men of D-day: their rockhard belief that Providence would have a great hand in the events that would unfold here; that God was an ally in this great cause. And so, the night before the invasion, when Colonel Wolverton asked his parachute troops to kneel with him in prayer he told them: Do not bow your heads, but look up so you can see God and ask His blessing in what we’re about to do. Also that night, General Matthew Ridgway on his cot, listening in the darkness for the promise God made to Joshua: “I will not fail thee nor forsake thee.”

 

These are the things that impelled them; these are the things that shaped the unity of the Allies….

 

We in America have learned bitter lessons from two World Wars: It is better to be here ready to protect the peace, than to take blind shelter across the sea, rushing to respond only after freedom is lost. We’ve learned that isolationism never was and never will be an acceptable response to tyrannical governments with an expansionist intent. https://voicesofdemocracy.umd.edu/ronald-reagan-normandy-speech-point-du-hoc/

You can watch and listen to his inspiring 13-minute talk here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTLVIp1AjAg

The Islamic invasion of the West

I write all this not to revisit the legitimacy of just war theory and the like, but to look at some parallels today. Just as America and Europe had to fight off the invasions of the Japanese and Germans last century, so too today we have a similar sort of invasion happening in the West.

Every day boatloads full of military-aged single young men from Muslim nations are coming ashore in Britain and Spain and Italy and elsewhere. Whether these are illegal immigrants or mass migrations allowed by leaders like Macron and Starmer and Sánchez, the whole face of the West is changing radically and rapidly.

As we know, immigration without assimilation is an invasion. While many Muslims are not jihadists, we know that so many are, and they have made perfectly clear their aims to bring the West down and bring it under sharia law and submissive to an Islamic caliphate.

As one Islamic scholar in France stated: “In 30 years, France, Belgium and Europe will be Muslim. In Brussels today, Muslims are 43% of the population. Among the youth, Muslims are already the majority. Infidels should be ready, it’s going to get very difficult for them!”

Such quotes can be multiplied at length. Here are just two more. An Islamic preacher in Germany said: “You can’t stone a woman for adultery in Germany, but when we establish an Islamic state here, stoning will be legally fully allowed under Sharia.”

And Uthman Farooq, an Islamic scholar in California, said this: “You can’t stop Islam in America. This is NOT your country, this is OUR country. This is the land of Allah. If you want to live in a place with no Muslims, I suggest you go to hell.”

As one Italian commentator rightly said, “In Europe churches are on fire and mosques are built. In France they’re building Europe’s largest mosque, 10,000 square meters, funded by Turkey and Qatar at a cost of €32 million. The Arab countries, with complicity of corrupt EU politicians, want Europe to become an Islamic caliphate. This won’t end well.”

Whether by acts of mass migration, terrorism, demographics, or by having clueless Westerners actually voting them into office, as with Mamdani in New York City or so many cities in England and Europe, the Islamic wave has become a tsunami. And the question is, do we just sit back and allow this to happen, or do we seek to resist this in various ways?

Just as there were undiscerning Christians last century who refused to acknowledge the diabolical evil of the Nazis, so too we have many today who have not the slightest understanding of political Islam and their designs on the West. They think we should just welcome them in with open arms, regardless of their clearly stated hatred of Jews and Christians, and aims of world domination.

There are so many Christians who cannot see the threat that stares them in the face. And we have various stories of naïve pastors and priests in Europe providing shelter and sanctuary to Islamist migrants, only to end up being murdered by them.

It is one thing to allow yourself to be killed this way, but it is quite another to put your family or congregation at risk and in such danger. There is nothing virtuous or Christlike about this sort of misplaced and skewed ‘Christian compassion.’ Jesus did command us to be wise as a serpent, but too often Christian leaders are simply gullible and clueless.

And then you have some believers who will say, ‘Yes, but it is hard to share the gospel in Muslim countries, so isn’t it great that millions of Muslims are coming to the West.’ It is easy enough to respond to that objection. First, I suspect that a good 95 per cent of Western Christians are not sharing the gospel with anyone, let alone Muslims.

Second, a whole lotta Muslims arriving in the West ARE engaged in dawa, or Muslim mission, to reach and convert Westerners. Sadly, they tend to take their faith a lot more seriously than most Christians. So it is mainly all one-way traffic here when it comes to spreading religion in the West.

It is one thing to encourage believers to pray for and reach out to their Muslim neighbours if they have come here legally, and have made it clear that they accept – and do not reject – the host country’s values, culture and beliefs. But far too many Muslims coming to the West certainly do NOT want what the West offers, and are looking to destroy the West and turn it into another Islamist hellhole.

Christians are under no biblical obligation to put up with that. Just as Christians could pray for the success of the Allies in WWII, and pray for our troops, and even pray for the Germans and Japanese, asking God for success in resisting their plans to invade and take over, so too here.

Christians can pray for the conversion of Muslims while also resisting the Islamist plans to wipe out Jews and Christians and turn the West into another Islamic state. We can pray for and evangelise any Muslim neighbours that we encounter, while also steadfastly opposing the Muslim takeover of Sydney or London or New York or Paris.

Western civilisation is worth defending. It is not perfect but compared to what is on offer in Islamic societies, it wins hands down. And given that for centuries to speak of Western civilisation was to speak of Christian civilisation, all the more reason for Christians to start thinking straight here.

What Reagan said above and what so many others have said about the last world war is correct: We were right to ask for God’s blessing to take on Germany, Italy and Japan. Christian politicians or soldiers did not foolishly think that they should not oppose the Nazis and their plans for global conquest because it might get in the way of sharing the gospel.

They did not think that we should not fight demonic tyranny and seek to liberate the concentration camps because it might mean that Christian mission is hindered. Resisting Hitler and rescuing the Jews WAS a Christian thing to do. Indeed, it surely was not naïve utopianism and pacifism that liberated Dachau and the other camps: it was Allied soldiers, tanks and guns.

So to call for a slowing down of mass migration, demanding assimilation instead of open slather, and putting the wellbeing of one’s own citizen first is neither immoral nor unchristian. It is common sense and it is how we love our neighbours as ourselves.

Evangelism is important for the Christian, but so too is justice and the defence of the innocent. With jihadist attacks in Western lands now basically a daily occurrence, to seek the welfare and protection of Westerners and to ask hard questions about unchecked immigration is sensible, wise and Christlike.

As JD Vance just put it in response to the Henry Nowak murder in the UK: “It’s OK to want to defend your country. It’s OK to want to live in a safe neighbourhood. It’s OK to want your job to go to yourself and your neighbours and not to a stranger who you don’t even know. It is reasonable for the people in western societies to want to control who comes into their country and who doesn’t.”

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Anyone who is rather observant about the state of the West today will know that it is suffering from various crises: a moral crisis, a spiritual crisis, a cultural crisis and so on. But it is also suffering from an intellectual crisis. That is why one brand-new volume has this as its subtitle: “How to Think Clearly When Everyone Around You Seems Crazy”.

I refer to J. Budziszewski’s latest offering, Pandemic of Lunacy (Creed & Culture, 2026). Those who are unaware of the American Christian moral and political philosopher can learn more about the man and his work here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/08/17/notable-christians-j-budziszewski/  

Here he urges us to think, and avoid the dumbing-down process we see all around us. Indeed, we are made to think. In the book’s Introduction Budziszewski says this: “It takes a lot of work not to think, for the human mind tends to follow the golden path of logical consequences. Eventually, it gets to the end.” (xvii) He then offers four reasons why we so quickly take lunacies for granted. I offer the first three in bullet form:

-The mind which accepts one bad idea can become fertile ground for related bad ideas – even if they don’t follow from them logically.

-Bad ideas give rise to such unacceptable results that certain other bad ideas become more attractive than they would have been otherwise.

-The revenge of conscience.

The last one I offer in full:

The fourth, which makes clear thinking cruelly hard, is that every mistaken idea – even the craziest – has some grain of truth, which makes it seem plausible. For example, unlimited wealth doesn’t make people happy, but many believe it does just because utter destitution and squalor obviously makes people unhappy. Actually, suicide rates are high among the poorest, drop in the middle, and rise again among the very rich. But the fact that lies and errors contain truths helps explain why ordinary people who are not at all deranged can come to hold some ideas which are. (xviii-xix)

I have already discussed one of the 30 lunacies he covers in this book: that which claims that “manhood and womanhood can take any shapes that we wish”. See my write-up about this one here: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2026/06/04/on-trans-lunacy/

Some of the other lunacies are worth highlighting. In Chapter 3, he speaks of the lunacy that “sometimes we just have to do the wrong thing”. He gives the example of ethicist John Harris, who famously said killing one innocent person to save two or more dying people is morally justified.

Budziszewski looks at two crucial distinctions that need to be kept in mind here. The first is the distinction between ordinary and intrinsic evil:

Consider disappointment, fever, and fatigue. These are merely ordinary evils, and if the reasons are good enough, then deliberately bringing them about is not necessarily wrong. For their own good, children who have misbehaved may have to suffer the disappointment of being grounded. It is sometimes better not to fight a fever too aggressively, because a high temperature is one of the body’s defenses against disease. Soldiers in basic training need to be exposed to fatigue in order to learn to keep functioning under adverse conditions. We see, then, that whether an ordinary evil is wrong to bring about depends on whether more good than harm is brought about under the given circumstances.

 

But the wrong of deliberately committing intrinsically evil deeds does not depend on weighing harms, and has nothing to do with the circumstances. The most conspicuous example of an intrinsic evil is murder. I must not deliberately take innocent human life for any reason whatsoever. Thus I may not hang an innocent man even to prevent a deadly riot, gun down children in the play yard even to shorten a war, or poison my patients even to end their suffering. (p. 16)

He continues:

Here is where the second crucial distinction comes in. For good enough reasons, we may sometimes tolerate the possibility, or even the certainty, of an intrinsic evil, but we may never intend an intrinsic evil. This distinction bears the cumbersome name “Double Effect,” because it treats the tolerated and the intended results of our actions differently. Thinkers of the “consequentialist” school of thought, like Harris, consider the distinction meaningless. If something bad happens, what difference does it make whether you intended it or merely tolerated it? Whether you bring about someone’s death or merely fail to kill someone else so that he can be cured, either way he’s not alive!

 

But it makes all the difference in the world whether I drive my automobile to work even though there is always some risk of unintentionally hitting someone, and whether I drive it in hopes of running someone down. In both cases the act of driving involves the possibility of death to innocents. But in the former case I am acting permissibly, while in the latter case I am a murderer.

 

And here is another point. Trying to run down those pedestrians will be just as wrong whether I intend it as an end in itself (for instance, because I hate people or killing amuses me), or as a means to some other end (for instance, because even though I don’t want them dead per se, decisively doing away with them clears the road so that I can get to work faster). For this reason, the complete expression of the principle I have just stated goes on to say that we may never intend an intrinsic evil either as a means to an end or as an end in itself.

 

So, we must distinguish intended from unintended evils. (p. 18)

One final lunacy: “all that exists is matter”. Materialism has long been argued for, and it has long been debunked. Just one extended quote from this chapter gives you a feel for the approach he takes here:

And what about our thoughts about matter? They don’t have mass or take up space either. “Yes, they do,” the materialist may say. “Thoughts are merely something your brain is doing.” This materialist opinion has gone through many versions. In the seventeenth century, Thomas Hobbes proposed that thoughts were the motions of tiny, interconnected springs in the brain. Corpuscles of light from a horse strike the eye, the eye recoils, the motion is transmitted to the brain, and there you have it: the thought of a horse. In the nineteenth century, Pierre Jean-Georges Cabanis viewed the process as chemical: “Impressions, upon reaching the brain, make it enter into activity, just as food, by falling into the stomach, excites it to a more abundant secretion of gastric juice, and to the motions which favor their dissolution.” Today, materialists view the process as electrical.

 

But this is hand-waving. Yes, the brain is indispensable to thought, just as vibrations in air are indispensable to speech. But to say that the mechanical, chemical, or electrical events in the brain just are thoughts is like saying that the vibrations which convey words just are what the words convey. Any elec­trician can make an instrument which plays a recorded voice saying, “Red!” whenever red light strikes a photoelectric cell, but it would be ridiculous to think that the device has the idea of red.

 

There are so many things materialism cannot explain, among them mean­ing, thought, belief, pain, pleasure, the look of a color, the sound of a note, the soul or self, and mental experience in general. Faced with this failure, some materialists desperately resort to what is called “eliminativism.” Their idea is that we don’t need to explain any of these things—because they don’t exist! We are not actually having mental experiences, but only think we are. We are like that photoelectric cell, except that we are suffering introspective illusions.

 

This position raises unavoidable questions: If there is an illusion, then what is having it? If I am having it, then how can my self be an illusion? If it results from introspection, then what am I looking at in there? Eliminative materialism is so extreme that a consistent eliminativist can’t even believe in eliminativism—for beliefs are one of the things he can’t believe in.

 

Chesterton must have anticipated eliminativism when he wrote: “As an explanation of the world, materialism has a sort of insane simplicity. It has just the quality of the madman’s argument; we have at once the sense of it covering everything and the sense of it leaving everything out. Contemplate some able and sincere materialist . . . and you will have exactly this unique sensation. He understands everything, and everything does not seem worth understanding.”

 

Just so. In every age there have been scoffers who say that although I may be moved to awe by my beloved’s face, the glory I see in it isn’t really there. Eliminative materialists outdo ordinary scoffers by a mile. Not only is the glory in my beloved’s face an illusion—my awe is an illusion too! (pp. 154-155)

I strongly urge you to get this book and explore all 30 lunacies that Budziszewski so capably and expertly deals with.

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One would have hoped that after tens of thousands of white girls and teens were raped, tortured and sexually assaulted by Muslim grooming gangs in the UK, and police, judges, politicians and media did and said nothing for fear of being branded “racists,” that the powers that be would have learned their lessons. But they obviously have not, as the Henry Nowak case clearly shows.

It is exactly these damnable DEI policies, identity politics, political correctness, virtue-signalling, race-baiting and victimhood status that still prevails there, ensuring that whites will be seen as being primarily guilty while non-whites will be seen as being primarily innocent. And all this is coming from the top down. It is all government policy.

Consider a recent piece in the UK Telegraph that said “Officers in force that failed Nowak ‘pressured’ by diversity course: Some say they felt controlled during racial bias training”. Here is a bit of that article:

Police officers in the force that failed Henry Nowak felt “controlled and pressured” during diversity training, it has emerged… The courses taught Hampshire and Isle of Wight officers and staff about racism, “unconscious bias … privilege and the importance of being an ally”.

 

A staff survey found that one in seven officers and staff (15 per cent) had felt “controlled and pressured” to adopt certain ideas in the sessions and the same number thought “mistakes would have been held against me”. One in five (20 per cent) said they feared being “rejected for saying the wrong thing”. https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2026/06/03/nowak-police-force-officers-felt-pressured-by-diversity/

Thus we now have a two-tiered system of policing and the judiciary in the UK. Simply recall that two-tier Keir Starmer put more empathy into a career criminal 4000 miles away than a British teenager. George Floyd also cried out, “I can’t breathe” and the whole world bowed the knee to him, while the world’s media and leftist loons have totally ignored the cries of the poor British 18 year old.

Two recent pieces are a must read on all this. The first is from UK police officer Paul Birch. He begins his important article as follows:

I served for 24 years as a police officer in emergency response, public order, intelligence and counter-terrorism. I saw the best of policing, worked with devoted colleagues and took pride in work that indisputably mattered. I joined the police to make a difference. Duty, camaraderie and justice were not abstract ideals – and I believed that the force made the country safer. But, in the end, disillusionment drove me out.

 

Over time, I watched the mission of the police being hollowed out by ideological capture. Concern for public trust mutated into a top-down obsession with political correctness and policies that increasingly served political fashions, rather than the enforcement of the law. My personal breaking point came when I understood that the institution itself was eroding the principles I had sworn to defend.

He continues:

For a long time, British policing stood for impartiality, restraint and equal enforcement of the law. Nobody thinks that now. There has been a litany of cases, some high profile and others not so, where fear of that most career-ending of accusations – ie, of racism – has led to gross injustices.

 

The most infamous outrage is that of grooming gangs, which have been disproportionately comprised of Pakistani Muslim men. This was not merely a tragedy – it was a disgraceful collapse of policing and child protection. In town after town across the country – in particular areas with large Muslim populations such as Rotherham and Telford – mainly white working-class girls were subjected to appalling sexual exploitation. Police stood by, failed to act or looked the other way. Last year, a report by Baroness Louise Casey found that fear of being labelled racist was one of the primary motivators of police inaction.

Birch concludes:

For years, police forces have prioritised identity politics above public safety. The death of George Floyd in America in 2020, and the resulting mania of the Black Lives Matter protests, sent this process into overdrive.

This is a corruption of purpose. Policing is now viewed through social-justice conventions about competing identity groups, producing the notorious ‘two-tier’ mindset. Senior leaders have reinforced that impression with their own bombast. They now routinely describe policing as a vehicle for inclusion and broader social reform. When police leaders sound more like activists than law enforcers, the public is more than entitled to conclude that priorities have been badly warped….

 

I know full well that policing is hard and that difficult judgements are unavoidable. But difficulty is not an alibi for weakness. The police are not there to placate pressure groups or manage sensitivities – they are there to uphold the law and protect people from intimidation, violence and coercion. When that mission is subordinated to ideological fashion or activist pressure, trust rots. Senior ranks deserve a disproportionate share of the blame, and they must not be spared over the death of Henry Nowak.

 

Britain’s policing institutions face a stark choice: continue down a path where social-justice activism eclipses law enforcement, or return to the foundational principles of equal protection under the law. Without that change, public confidence, already at its lowest ebb in memory, will not be recovered. https://www.spiked-online.com/2026/06/02/henry-nowaks-death-reveals-a-police-force-corrupted-by-wokeness/

And an article by Konstantin Kisin also deserves to be highlighted here. He looks at the now well-known details of the Nowak case, and then writes:

Hampshire Police issued a public apology, the IOPC launched an investigation, and a country that had spent the better part of a decade being lectured about the unique and unforgivable evil of racism was left to contemplate what its anti-racism had actually produced.

 

The answer, if you’re willing to look at it honestly, is this: a new form of racism. A bureaucratic racism. An actually institutionalised racism. A racism so thoroughly laundered through the language of progress and inclusion that the people enforcing it genuinely believe they are on the right side of history.

 

What else do you call a system in which a dying teenager’s word counts for less than his killer’s because of the colour of their skin?

 

To understand how we got here, you have to understand what the post-Floyd “reckoning” actually did to British institutions —especially the police. The response to Floyd’s death wasn’t merely emotional. It was ideological, and it was systematic. Forces across the country underwent mandatory diversity and anti-racism training. The principle drilled into officers, explicitly or implicitly, was that accusations of racism must be taken with the utmost seriousness — that the historic failure of institutions to believe minority victims of racism was the original sin, and it needed atoning for.

 

Racism is bad. Attempting to address it is good. The problem is what happens when you apply it without judgement in the real world: you train officers to weight an allegation of racism so heavily that it overrides the evidence in front of their eyes. You produce exactly the outcome we saw in Southampton — a man bleeding to death on the pavement, begging for help, being told by the officers who should be saving his life that they don’t think he’s been stabbed.

 

What is particularly striking about this case is the way it mirrors, almost exactly, the injustice that movement was supposedly designed to prevent. George Floyd died saying “I can’t breathe” while a police officer knelt on his neck. Henry Nowak died saying “I can’t breathe” while police officers knelt on his back and handcuffed him. The British establishment that wept for Floyd has been conspicuously quiet about Nowak. The politicians who marched through London’s streets in 2020 have not rushed to the cameras. The corporations that changed their logos and funded diversity initiatives have not issued statements.

 

This is not an accident, or even a surprise. It is the logical consequence of an ideology that does not actually oppose racism — it simply reassigns its acceptable targets.

Yes, we now have anti-white racism going full tilt in the UK, in Australia, in America, and in most of the West. And let’s be clear here: racism is still wrong, even when it is anti-white racism.

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There are plenty of lunacies out there. The latest book by J. Budziszewski lists 30 of them. If you are not familiar with this important American philosopher, I have discussed him before. And given that I have most of his 20 books, it is clear that I believe he is well worth being aware of: https://billmuehlenberg.com/2023/08/17/notable-christians-j-budziszewski/  

In his brand-new volume Pandemic of Lunacy (Creed & Culture, 2026), he looks at the prevailing madness that has overtaken much of the West. One should not be surprised that trans insanity is one of the lunacies he focuses on. Chapter 14 examines the lunacy that “Manhood and womanhood can take any shapes that we wish”.

Budziszewski starts the chapter by making two observations:
-“Plainly, some aspects of the roles men and women play really are variable”.
-“Equally plainly, some people are uncomfortable with their sex”.

He goes on to discuss these matters in more detail:

As to the first observation – sex roles are culturally variable – there are limits to cultural variation. Psychological research shows that many sharp differences between the sexes hold consistently across countries, educational levels, ages, and years in which the research was conducted. And guess what? The contrasts correspond closely with traditional views of sexual differences – for example, concerning average levels of aggressiveness and nurturance. In fact, not only do we find the same differences everywhere, but we also find much the same views about these differences everywhere – even in countries like ours, where confessing that we hold them is slandered as prejudiced and retrograde. We can now confirm, by advanced sociological methods, that what everyone used to know without them is really true.

 

As to the second observation – some people are uncomfortable with their sex – thinking one is a member of the other sex doesn’t make it so. There is no scientific basis whatsoever for the idea that a biological man can be a woman, or that or biological woman can be a man, or that one can change into the other. All the evidence for “transmen” really being men, and for “transwomen” really being women, comes down to the mere fact that they say they are or feel they are. How could a man who says that he “feels like a woman” know what a woman feels like anyway? He only feels what he imagines a woman would feel, or he feels a desire to be one.

He goes on to say this:

We are embodied persons. Our minds are parts of what we are, but so are our bodies. They are not just containers or prisons for our true selves, but aspects of them. Indeed, the brain is indelibly stamped male or female. Injecting hormones doesn’t erase the stamp, and general surgery doesn’t affect it at all; sewing a penis on a woman does not make her a man any more than sewing a trunk on a man makes him an elephant. Brain physiologists tell us that large parts of the brain cortex are thicker in women than in men. Ratios of grey to white matter vary, too. The hippocampus, which plays a role in memory and spatial navigation, takes up a greater proportion of the female brain than of the male brain….

Much more detail on all this is offered here, and then he continues:

External circumstances such as chronic stress, act on male brains differently than on female. Brain diseases also diverge in men and women. Even the neurological aspects of addiction differ between the two sexes.

 

[Writing in Psychology Today,] David Schmitt comments, “It is ironic that just when science is rapidly improving its fundamental understanding of sex differences and documenting the sometimes subtle ways that biology and culture interact, the progress has come under assault.” Yet there seem to be no limits to the delusion that manhood and womanhood are endlessly redefinable.

Budziszewski speaks of the arbitrary nature of the various never-ending gender lists being proffered by the trans activists, and then writes:

According to a widespread view, even if gender ideology is deluded, people can’t help how they feel, and therefore the path of compassion is to reassure them that their feelings are all right. This makes no more sense than if a patient told his doctor that he wanted to be intoxicated all the time, and the doctor concluded that his drunken self must be his true self, so that it would be unkind to discourage his drunkenness. Or if he told his doctor that he felt like a fox (some do say this!), and the doctor concluded that he must really be a fox, so that it would be insensitive to deny his inner fox-hood. Suppose the man then had the frontal lobes of his brain cut out, his limbs surgically altered for running on all fours, and his skin stimulated to grow a furry pelt, and was left in the wilderness to live in a burrow and eat mice –  living as what novelist Gene Wolfe calls a “zooanthrope.” Will this make him a fox? No, it would only make him a cruelly damaged human being. In the same way, a woman who has had hormone treatments and sexual surgery to resemble a man will not be a man, but a cruelly damaged woman.

 

Unfortunately, delusion has widening effects….

He looks at those harmful and damaging effects, and then concludes the chapter as follows:

Research shows that “transitioning” does not eliminate the very great problems of the person suffering from dysphoria about their sex – this despite popular media claims to the contrary. An important large study finds that post-surgery, transitioners have considerably higher risks for mortality, suicidal behaviour, and psychiatric morbidity than the general population. Another finds that contrary to widespread claims that gender-confused persons who don’t “transition” are more likely to kill themselves, nevertheless, when other relevant variables are accounted for, “the suicide mortality of both those who proceeded and did not proceed to GR [gender-reassignment] did not statistically significantly differ from that of controls. This does not support the claims that GR is necessary to prevent suicide. Just as this book was going to press, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services released a comprehensive 409-page review of the evidence concerning paediatric medical “transition,” finding that evidence of benefits is “based entirely on subjective self-reports and behavioural observations, without any objective physical, imaging, or laboratory markers.” On the other hand, there is a lot of evidence about possible harms, including “infertility, sterility, sexual dysfunction, impaired bone density accrual, adverse cognitive impacts, cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders, psychiatric disorders, surgical complications, and regret.”

 

Speaking of regret: One man who eventually had his “transition” reversed writes, “Nothing made sense. Why hadn’t the recommended hormones and surgery worked? . . . Why wasn’t I happy being Laura? Why did I have strong desires to be Walt again?”

 

Today, those who say such things are punished. As another man who sought reversal of his “transition” remarks, “Overnight, I went from being a liberal media darling to a conservative pariah.” Within hours of the release of the HHS report, it was already slammed as a politically motivated “fever dream.” At the mention of anything so vulgar as a fact, mental barriers drop like barred gates at castle entrances.

His chapter on trans lunacy, along with all the other important chapters on other equally problematic forms of lunacy, are a must read. Thank you J. Budziszewski for keeping us in the world of rationality and reality.

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The post On Trans Lunacy appeared first on CultureWatch.

By now you should have heard of the horrific murder of an 18-year-old student in the UK. A white Christian was viciously stabbed to death by a non-white non-Christian. But the police sided with the killer, ignoring the pleas of Henry Nowak as he bled to death on a cold, hard street.

The tragic tale was not just about two-tier policing and two-tiered justice, but a story that is playing itself out all throughout the West. As the Christian faith is being rejected, all hell is breaking out. The Christian faith and Western civilisation have long been interchangeable, but as the West rejects its own heritage, it is asking for, and getting, trouble – big time.

Three new articles are worth tying together here. The first two have to do with the Nowak murder and the end of the Christian West. The third piece looks at the bigger picture of why the West will NOT stand if we turn our backs on Christianity.

Let me share just the opening paragraphs of an article by Gavin Ashenden on “Henry Nowak and the limits of secular idealism”:

The tragedy of Henry Nowak raises a deeper question than guilt or innocence: what happens when a society abandons Christian anthropology and replaces it with a secular doctrine of human perfectibility? The shock of being told about the way in which Henry Nowak died, stabbed to death by a member of the Sikh community who combined murder with character assassination, leaves us wanting to hold somebody accountable and to blame them.

 

Obviously, his murderer is to blame. But that is not a sufficient solution because the police created such a gross injustice that we are shocked to our core at what this represents about what our society has become. It is also very tempting to blame the police. However difficult it is to control our sense of outrage and injustice, in the timeworn phrase, they too are casualties of a sort, for they were trained – in fact brainwashed – in the art of the new secular moral idealism that has replaced Christian philosophy and ethics. So our real enemy is not (just) the police, who committed this gross injustice because they were brainwashed by those who trained them, but rather the anti-Christian ethic that overcame Christian philosophy and culture. https://thecatholicherald.com/article/henry-nowak-and-the-limits-of-secular-idealism    

Also writing yesterday, Laura Dodsworth spoke on “Henry Nowak, the police and the banality of evil”. She looks at Hannah Arendt’s famous remarks about the Nazi monster, and then goes into some of the familiar detail of the Nowak case. She then goes on to say this:

I want to be careful here, because I mean this carefully. I don’t think those officers were bad people. I genuinely don’t. I feel sorry for them. Although I feel a great deal sorrier for Henry and his family. What I think — and what I find more disturbing — is that they are probably thoroughly ordinary people, caught inside a system that has trained them to process certain information before other information.

 

Put it this way. They arrived at a scene. One man was standing. He was claiming racial abuse. He was visibly from an ethnic minority. One man was lying on the ground. He was white. Did the categories do the thinking for the officers? It appears that Henry Nowak, bleeding on a gravel driveway, was not — in that moment — seen as an individual. People who have outsourced their moral judgement to an institution are the people Arendt was talking about.

 

While Arendt saw this as a political philosopher, CS Lewis identified something similar, as a theologian — the ‘Devil’s Strategy’. He warned that the devil rarely tempts you into evil directly, rather he relies on your intense dislike of one error to pull you into the opposite one. In this case, we might deduce that a fear of racism became an overcorrection that obscured individual accountability. And a commitment to protecting minorities cost a young man his life.

 

While Arendt drew on the incomparable horror of the Holocaust and Lewis was writing about Christian ethics, the observations are universal. When virtue is unmoored from a belief in the dignity of the human individual, it becomes its own kind of danger. Errors and tragedies will continue while human beings — complex, morally distinct, each carrying their own story and their own dignity — are sorted into categories and assigned a hierarchy of importance and credibility. Identity politics creates this trap at a civilisational scale.

 

The less important groups are the people Arendt termed the “superfluous people”. Once you have decided that some people’s lives are less important, or less believable, than others, you are already walking into very serious trouble. In this case, it appears obvious which character was the “superfluous” person.

 

And if you want further evidence that some groups of people matter more than others, notice how the people who dropped to their knees for the criminal George Floyd are emitting mealy-mouthed useless too-little-too-late statements, blaming “knife crime”. https://www.thefreemind.co.uk/p/i-dont-think-you-have-mate

Finally, Todd Huizinga of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West project looks at the bigger picture of the good Christianity does for the world. He discusses the “Five Pillars of Christian Patriotism,” arguing that “Christians have a responsibility to bless the nation in which God has placed them, where they can make real contributions to peace, prosperity and restoration.”

Here is his entire piece:

Why this list matters: Christian Nationalism, progressivism’s bogeyman, exists more in the Left’s fevered imagination than in reality. What does exist, and is crucial to restoring the West, is Christian patriotism. We can learn much from the example of five great patriots who exhibited some of the essential characteristics of Christian engagement in public life.

 

1. Seek the Good of Your Country and Your Compatriots

In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln exemplified patriotism’s fundamental priority: “…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you…” (Jeremiah 29:7). Delivered in 1865, just weeks before the American Civil War’s end and 41 days before his own assassination, it speaks hard truths about human brutality. Yet, after four years of mutual slaughter in America’s bloodiest war, he calls for grace and kindness: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, …let us strive on to…achieve…just and lasting peace….”

 

2. Speak the Truth

In his essay “The Power of the Powerless” Soviet-bloc dissident Václav Havel describes how the great lie, forcing everyone to act in all spheres of life as if communist ideology were true, “works only as long as people…live within the lie.” Only “living within the truth” can overcome totalitarianism; political or military power alone is insufficient. Truth “tears apart [the lie that] holds…[the system] together.” Christian patriots must speak the truth against all injustice, regardless of the cost.

 

3. Speak in Love

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violence in fighting racial segregation was much more than a strategy; it was done out of love for enemies. King maintained that “loving Your Enemies…is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization…. it is love that will save our world and civilization; love even for our enemies.” A model of Christian wisdom, King knew that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that; …only love can [drive out hate].”

 

4. Respect the Human Dignity of Opponents

The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suffered unimaginable evil in the Soviet Gulag. Still, he humbly recognized the mixture of good and evil in every person: “…the line separating good and evil passes …through every human heart.” Even “hearts overwhelmed by evil” retain “one small bridgehead of good. And even in the best…, there remains … [a]… corner of evil.” This Christian view of the human person guides true patriots—respecting the dignity of our adversaries, and acknowledging our own sinfulness.

 

5. Remember that Politics Is Not the Last Word

A true patriot, in 1939 German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from his safe haven in America. Associated with the “20 July” plot to assassinate Hitler, he was hanged just four weeks before Germany’s surrender. Bonhoeffer gave his life opposing an evil political regime, but he was not political. It was not politics, but the moral imperative to aid the persecuted—born of faithfulness to Christ—that moved Bonhoeffer to countenance violence against Hitler, despite his abiding commitment to non-violence.

 

THE BOTTOM LINE

Though not all believing Christians, these patriots were models of Christian public virtue. They lived and acted in faith, hope, and love in the political realm, seeking—at great personal cost—”the peace and prosperity” of their country and compatriots. This is love of country that transcends political and religious differences. https://www.restoringthewest.com/p/five-pillars-of-christian-patriotism

As Christianity goes, so goes the West. Expect to see many more cases like the Nowak one as we in the West turn our backs on what made us great.

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The post Henry Nowak, Christianity, and the Fate of the West appeared first on CultureWatch.

Four decades ago, Thomas Howard and J. I. Packer wrote Christianity: The True Humanism (Word, 1985). Now hard to find, thankfully it was reprinted in 1999 by Regent College Publishing. In the book the authors examined secular humanism and found it wanting, while claiming that it is really Christianity that upholds and affirms humanity, and gives us our real worth and value.

Packer and Howard look at how this works out in terms of things like identity, hope, freedom and culture. Chapter 7 discusses what the Christian view of things entails in relation to human dignity. Consider a few helpful quotes from the chapter:

The strong man can exult in his strength, and the soprano in her voice, and the bridegroom in his bride without becoming guilty of idolatry. Of course these are God’s bounty rather than our own products or possessions. But that is precisely why we must fully acknowledge their created glory, their beauty and capacity and delightfulness. If the seraph or the thrush or the chamois or the bride or the soprano all said, “No, no—it’s nothing. Don’t look at me. I’m a no-good, I’m a dud, I’m a worm,” they would not only be speaking falsely, they would be robbing their Maker of due gratitude. The mock-modesty that declines to accept compliments and to be gratefully realistic in recognizing God’s gifts both demeans the creature and dishonors the Creator. True dignity emerges, not in our faithless and fawning demurrals of worth, but rather in our learning how to bear this truly royal mantle of humanness, and this coronet of beauty or strength or talent or relational joy.

 

Sometimes the mantle is a mantle of pain and loss, and the coronet one of adversity. Not from jealousy, but for purposes of love, God does from time to time take away good things that he gave, and at such times sackcloth must replace holiday dress. It is harder to exult in this regalia. To believe in the value of such experience, and to offer it to God to use, and to thank him for the way he enriches through deprivation is not easy when one is in the thick of it. Here is where Christians turn to the Son of God for their cue. He was never more glorious than when, deprived of all human rights, he was robed in mockery and crowned with thorns. His Transfiguration on the mountain exhibited his glory under the aspect of brilliance; his Passion exhibited that same glory under the aspect of love. And here the disciples must be ready to go the way their master went. That is what Christ’s call to cross-bearing means. (p. 153)

The authors continue:

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day. It concerns this strange and daunting business of how strain and pain—passion, in the sense of conscious suffering voluntarily accepted—may be transmuted into glory. If life were an art lesson, we could describe it as a process of finding how to turn this mud into that porcelain, this discord into that sonata, this ugly stone block into that statue, this tangle of threads into that tapestry. In fact, however, the stakes are higher than in any art lesson. It is in the school of sainthood that we find ourselves enrolled and the artifact that is being made is ourselves. Chisels, kilns, hammers, scissors, needles—these are the trappings we find in studios where beautiful work is being made. Translating all of this into ordinary daily experience, we see the sort of studio God has us in. We are constantly being chipped and banged and burned and cut and knocked into shape—not because the Artist hates his material but because he loves it and has an exquisite artifact in mind.

 

“Dear friends,” wrote John, “now we are children of God, and what we will be has not yet been made known. But we know that when he [Christ] appears, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is. Everyone who has this hope in him purifies himself; just as he is pure” (1 John 3:2-3). And everyone whom God has appointed for this destiny he prepares for it, using afflictions along with our other experiences as his tools for sculpting our souls.

 

Our picture of the artist’s studio reminds us that great beauty lies in all sorts of materials, beauty which is often brought out by procedures that look for all the world as if they are doing violence to those materials. That makes the picture an apt one for God’s work of sanctifying us. In our case the material is the most precious of all materials—created human beings—and the end product will be artifacts of inexpressible loveliness—Christlike human beings. For Jesus Christ, who was and remains perfect man no less than Son of God, is the model to which, so far as our natures can receive it, each single one of us is going to be conformed. We purify ourselves by decision and action, and God purifies us by the refining effect of experience, particularly experience that is felt to be adverse and diminishing, and so the life of grace goes on. (p. 153-154)

They go on to look at all this in terms of worship. We are most fully human when we worship our Creator. And worship is a 24/7 event, not just a Sunday morning affair. They write:

We were made to worship God. Worshiping is our supreme achievement and privilege, and our dignity is fullest as we do the thing we were made for. We enter into our own glory when we glorify God.

 

How then are we to worship? First, by praising God for every truth we know about him and by thanking him for every good gift and good experience, all of which come from his hand. Second, by learning specifically in and with the church to adore Christ the Savior. Third, by making worship out of all the materials of life, not just splendid talents and powers and triumphs and joys, but plodding routines and vexations and pains and humiliations and depressions and rejections and traumas and bewilderments as well. And as we labor to make offerings of worship out of these things—offerings of patience and goodwill and trust and fortitude and hope—so God is laboring in and with us to make us into the most glorious of all his works, namely, worshipers in the image and likeness of Jesus Christ. Christ’s life displayed human dignity to the full, for he worshiped and served God the Father to the full. To the extent that we follow him in this, our lives attain supreme dignity and display ultimate glory, too. But without this, whatever we do, however striking our achievements, there is neither real dignity nor true glory, only the ignoble pseudo-dignity and the short-lived pseudo-glory of the world’s applause and our own pompous conceit.

 

This is to say that the truest dignity, nobility, and glory are seen, not in heroes, pioneers, great rulers, great artists, or any other of the world’s celebrities as such, but rather in holy men and women of God who have learned the lesson of worship. Their powers and weaknesses, their successes and failures, their exultation and grief, all go up continually to the Throne as an offering. They pray and give thanks in all things; they love God under all circumstances; they hope in him at all times. In humbling themselves before God, in acknowledging their impotence and faultiness and constant need of his grace, and in disclaiming any form of self-righteousness or self-sufficiency, they find the integrity, honesty, poise, and calm which are dignity’s outward form. And from the happy knowledge of being God’s redeemed children, living by his forgiveness and secure in his love, they draw the incentive and the resources to be “steadfast, immovable, always abounding in the work of the Lord” (1 Corinthians 15:58, RSV), which is dignity and full realization.

 

It is a universal experience to feel and know when we observe such folk, poor and undistinguished as they may be, that we are witnessing true human dignity as we witness it nowhere else. Even though in the interests of secular humanist theory we may wish to deny this, our own consciences will convince us of it, as happened, it seems, to Herod in the presence of John the Baptist, and to Felix in the presence of Paul, and to Pilate in the presence of Jesus (see Mark 6:20; Acts 24:25; Matthew 27:11-18; John 18:33-19:12). Man’s lie is that our dignity forbids us to serve either God or our fellow humans, though it requires us to look for service from both – in other words, that our dignity justifies our egoism. God’s truth is that our dignity is only realised as we love and serve God for himself, and mankind for God’s sake, according to the two great commands in which Christ said that all the law and the prophets are summed up. The alternative is to demean and dehumanize ourselves by the sort of manipulative self-centeredness that rots the soul. The choice is ours. (p. 155-156)

I conclude with the chapter’s closing paragraph:

We have said enough to indicate what difference the Christian understanding of human dignity will make to our moral life. Acknowledging, preserving, and responding to the dignity of the other person, as God’s image bearer – summoned to wholeness and holiness in Christ – will always be one aspect of Christian decision-making. But this constant concern for man’s dignity will have no parallel where the Judeo-Christian frame of reference is left behind, and inevitably we shall then feel the draught. To be valued for oneself, as a person, is humanising, for it ennobles; but to be valued only as a hand, or a means, or a tool, or a cog and a wheel, or convenience to someone else is dehumanising – and it depresses. Christianity’s claim to be the true humanism is strengthened by the unique dignity that it finds in each individual. Secular humanism, though claiming vast wisdom and life-enhancing skills, actually diminishes the individual, who is left in old age without dignity (because his or her social usefulness is finished) and without hope (because there is nothing now to look forward to). Christianity compels us to humble ourselves before our Maker as the weak and foolish sinners that we are, constantly proclaiming him great and ourselves small. Therefore, since it seems that in every way Christianity forces us to put ourselves down, some, seeing no further, have revolted against it on this account. Yet Christianity reveals us to ourselves as the most precious and privileged of all God’s creatures, made in his image and redeemed by the precious blood of Christ, the incarnate Son. With this, moreover, Christianity sets before us Christ himself as our model of human nobility, our enabler as we seek to be like him, and our hope as we look beyond this glorious preparatory life on earth to one in heaven, which is yet more glorious and will never end. Let our readers judge which of the two positions does more to establish and uphold the dignity of man. (p. 162)

[1898 words]

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The second half of Hebrews 12:14 says that “without holiness no one will see the Lord.” That is not only a great shorthand definition of sanctification, but it also tells us how vitally important it is to every single one of us. We were saved not just to get to heaven one day, but to glorify and honour God in the here and now by becoming holy and more and more Christlike.

With 2000 years of thought and writing on this, one can find thousands of terrific quotes about sanctification. This is a tiny sample of some general remarks about sanctification. Future articles will deal with more specific matters concerning this topic.

These 30 quotes come from 21 writers, mainly Protestants, and mainly from recent sources. But some older quotes, along with some non-Protestant ones are found here as well.

“My soul is like a house, small for you to enter, but I pray you to enlarge it. It is in ruins, but I ask you to remake it. It contains much that you will not be pleased to see: this I know and do not hide. But who is to rid it of these things? There is no one but you.” Augustine

“It is not merely a question of our being delivered from the law’s condemnation. Christ has delivered us from the law’s power, too. He died to start the process of sanctification and not merely to provide propitiation from wrath. . . . Justification and sanctification always go together, so that you cannot have one without the other. . . . According to Romans 8:3-4, sanctification is the very end for which God saved us.” James Montgomery Boice

“The moment we begin to feel satisfied that we are making some progress along the road of sanctification, it is all the more necessary to repent and confess that all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags. Yet the Christian life is not one of gloom, but of ever increasing joy in the Lord. God alone knows our good works; all we know is His good work.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer

“There is no higher compliment that can be paid to a Christian than to call him a godly person. He might be a conscientious parent, a zealous church worker, a dynamic spokesman for Christ, or a talented Christian leader; but none of these things matters if, at the same time, he is not a godly person.” Jerry Bridges

“Godliness is no optional spiritual luxury for a few quaint Christians of a bygone era or for some group of super-saints of today. It is both the privilege and duty of every Christian to pursue godliness, to train himself to be godly, to study diligently the practice of godliness.” Jerry Bridges

“In our day we seem to have magnified the love of God almost to the exclusion of the fear of God. Because of this preoccupation we are not honoring God and reverencing him as we should. We should magnify the love of God; but although we revel in his love and mercy, we must never lose sight of his majesty and his holiness.” Jerry Bridges

“Every element of our own self-reliance must be put to death by the power of God. The moment we recognize our complete weakness and our dependence upon Him will be the very moment that the Spirit of God will exhibit His power.” Oswald Chambers

“Sanctification is not my idea of what I want God to do for me; sanctification is God’s idea of what He wants to do for me.” Oswald Chambers

“We are personally responsible to put sin to death. It will not simply vanish on its own accord. . . . Yes the Spirit enables us. Without him we are powerless. But he never turns us into automatons. He never relieves us of the responsibility of living for the glory of Jesus Christ. Since he is holy in himself, he wants us to be holy in ourselves (but not by ourselves). And holy people do holy things – such as resisting and mortifying sin.” Sinclair Ferguson

“Sanctification is by no means a mystical experience in which holiness is ours effortlessly. God gives increase in holiness by engaging our minds, wills, emotions, and actions. We are involved in the process. That is why biblical teaching on sanctification appears in both the indicative (‘I the Lord sanctify you’) and the imperative (‘sanctify yourselves this day’).” Sinclair Ferguson

“When I know that Christ is the one real sacrifice for my sins, that His work on my behalf has been accepted by God, that He is my heavenly Intercessor – then His blood is the antidote to the poison in the voices that echo in my conscience, condemning me for my many failures. Indeed, Christ’s shed blood chokes them into silence!” Sinclair Ferguson

“Monastic spirituality concentrated on private disciplines, as if detaching oneself from ‘the world’ (i.e. society) might make one holier. Anabaptist piety was similar in that regard. However, Calvin thought of sanctification as a family affair. How could one learn loving humility, patience, wisdom, and forgiveness in isolation from others?” Michael Horton

“There is nothing destroyed by sanctification but that which would destroy us.” William Jenkyn

“When a man is getting better he understands more and more clearly the evil that is still left in him. When a man is getting worse he understands his own badness less and less. A moderately bad man knows he is not very good: a thoroughly bad man thinks he is all right. This is common sense, really. You understand sleep when you are awake, not while you are sleeping. You can see mistakes in arithmetic when your mind is working properly: while you are making them you cannot see them. You can understand the nature of drunkenness when you are sober, not when you are drunk. Good people know about both good and evil: bad people do not know about either.” C. S. Lewis

“We may be content to remain what we call ‘ordinary people’: but He is determined to carry out a quite different plan. To shrink back from that plan is not humility; it is laziness and cowardice. To submit to it is not conceit or megalomania; it is obedience.” C. S. Lewis

“A man who has his eye on his future state of glorification will spend his time in preparing himself for it.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“Indeed is it not the case that in this matter of sanctification our tendency is always to start with ourselves, instead of starting with God? I have got this sin that is worrying me and always getting me down, this sin that defeats me, and my tendency is to say, ‘What can be done about this sin, this problem of mine. How can I get rid of this thing? How can I get peace?’ I start with myself and my problem, and as certainly as I do that when I am considering this doctrine of sanctification, I am sure, in some shape or form, to end by regarding God as merely an agency who is there to help me solve my problems. And this is a totally unscriptural approach to the almighty ever blessed God.” Martyn Lloyd-Jones

“Christian discipleship is not the process of getting in by grace and then becoming less and less dependent on grace. It is, rather, becoming more dependent on grace. The engine of healthy sanctification (increase in holiness) is increasing awareness of justification (declaration of acquittal). Our growth does not fuel our status, our status fuels our growth.” Dane Ortlund

“He leads none to heaven but whom He sanctifies on the earth. This living Head will not admit of dead members.” John Owen

“Sanctification has a double aspect. Its positive side is vivification, the growing and maturing of the new man; its negative side is mortification, the weakening and killing of the old man.” J. I. Packer

“Make no mistake upon this point, dear reader, we beg you: if your heart is yet unsanctified, you are still unsaved; and if you pant not after personal holiness, then you are without any real desire for God’s salvation.” A. W. Pink

“Many appear to think that, once converted, they have little more to attend to, and that a state of salvation is a kind of easy chair, in which they may just sit still, lie back and be happy… Such persons lose sight of the many direct injunctions to increase, to grow, to abound more and more, to add to our faith, and the like; and in this little-doing condition, this sitting-still state of mind, I never marvel that they miss assurance.” J. C. Ryle

“In justification the word to be addressed to man is believe — only believe; in sanctification the word must be ‘watch, pray, and fight’.” J. C. Ryle

“If there is no sanctification, it means that there never was any justification.” R. C. Sproul

“You are not mature if you have a high esteem of yourself. He who boasts in himself is but a babe in Christ, if indeed he be in Christ at all. Young Christians may think much of themselves. Growing Christians think themselves nothing. Mature Christians know that they are less than nothing. The more holy we are, the more we mourn our infirmities, and the humbler is our estimate of ourselves.” Charles Spurgeon

“Sanctification grows out of faith in Jesus Christ. Remember holiness is a flower, not a root; it is not sanctification that saves, but salvation that sanctifies.” Charles Spurgeon

“To be in Christ — that is redemption; but for Christ to be in you — that is sanctification!” Major W. Ian Thomas

“All things as they move toward God are beautiful, and they are ugly as they move away from Him.” A. W. Tozer,

“The doctrine of justification by faith is one of the most majestic and comforting doctrines in the Scriptures, but it never appears alone in the life of the Christian. The work of progressive sanctification, a grace of equal beauty, always accompanies it.” Paul Washer

“What Paul understands by holiness or sanctification (is) the learning in the present of the habits which anticipate the ultimate future.” N. T. Wright

[1700 words]

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Millions of words have been written about socialism. Worse yet, millions of lives have been sacrificed to the delusions of socialism and Marxism. While there are so many great quotes to choose from on this topic, the following brief quotes make for a nice sample.

“Socialism means slavery.” Lord Acton

“The worst form of inequality is to try to make unequal things equal.” Aristotle

“When the law is used to take from some and give to others, it ceases to protect liberty and becomes an instrument of plunder. That is not justice, it is legal plunder.” Frédéric Bastiat

“The man who is not a socialist at 20 has no heart, but if he is still a socialist at 40 he has no head.” Aristide Briand

“Consider the following progression:
1. On a dark street, a man draws a knife and demands my money for drugs.
2. Instead of demanding my money for drugs, he demands it for the Church.
3. Instead of being alone, he is with a bishop of the Church who act as bagman.
4. Instead of drawing a knife, he produces a policeman who says I must do as he says.
5. Instead of meeting me on the street, he mails me his demand as an official agent of the government.
If the first is theft, it is difficult to see why the other four are not also theft. Expropriation is wrong not because its causes are wrong, but because it is a violation of the Eighth Commandment: Thou shalt not steal.” J. Budziszewski

“Those of us who study the papers and the parliamentary speeches with proper attention must have by this time a fairly precise idea of the nature of the evil of Socialism. It is a remote Utopian dream impossible of fulfilment and also an overwhelming practical danger that threatens us at every moment.” G. K. Chesterton

“What’s worthwhile to point out, first and last, is that Socialism is a tyranny; that it is inevitably, even avowedly and almost justifiably, a tyranny. It’s the pretense that government can prevent all injustice by being directly responsible for practically anything that happens.” G. K. Chesterton

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.” Winston Churchill

“I reject as impracticable the insane Socialist idea that we could have a system whereby the whole national production of the country, with all its infinite ramifications, should be organized and directed by a permanent official, however able, from some central office. The idea is not only impossible, but unthinkable. If it was even attempted it would produce a most terrible shrinkage and destruction of productive energy.” Winston Churchill

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.” Winston Churchill

“Democracy and socialism have nothing in common but one word: equality. But notice the difference: while democracy seeks equality in liberty, socialism seeks equality in restraint and servitude.” Alexis de Tocqueville

“There is nothing in socialism that a little age or a little money will not cure.” Will Durant

“The best way of doing good to the poor, is not making them easy in poverty, but leading or driving them out of it.” Benjamin Franklin

“If socialists understood economics they wouldn’t be socialists.” Friedrich Hayek

“I was guilty of judging capitalism by its operations and socialism by its hopes and aspirations; capitalism by its works and socialism by its literature.” Sidney Hook

“In practice, socialism didn’t work. But socialism could never have worked because it is based on false premises about human psychology and society, and gross ignorance of human economy.” David Horowitz

“People start to yawn when you warn them about a move toward socialism. It seems abstract. But if you discuss the issues that arise from high taxes, oppressive regulation, seizure of private property, and dictating of individual behavior, people understand them, and they reject them.” Charlie Kirk

“Socialism is the religion people get when they lose their religion.” Richard John Neuhaus

“The reason this country continues its drift toward socialism and big nanny government is because too many people vote in the expectation of getting something for nothing, not because they have a concern for what is good for the country.” Lyn Nofziger

“Socialism is simply Communism for people without the testosterone to man the barricades.” Gary North

“Yet it is as a kind of religion that socialists most often justify their beliefs. Seldom do they claim that the superiority of socialism lies in its works, its practicality, its proven fruits. Nearly always they justify it in terms of its vision . . . Quite commonly, socialists are prepared to admit that democratic capitalism is more productive, more efficient, and far less vicious in practice than socialist theory would lead one to expect; in short, it works better. They rest the case for socialism on its supposed moral superiority over democratic capitalism.” Michael Novak

“There is no virtue in compulsory government charity, and there is no virtue in advocating it. A politician who portrays himself as ‘caring’ and ‘sensitive’ because he wants to expand the government’s charitable programs is merely saying that he’s willing to try to do good with other people’s money. Well, who isn’t? And a voter who takes pride in supporting such programs is telling us that he’ll do good with his own money — if a gun is held to his head.” P. J. O’Rourke

“Socialism borrows the compassionate aims of Christianity while rejecting its insistence that kindness not be coerced or forced.” John Piper

“Socialism spends the money that capitalism creates.” Dennis Prager

“There is no difference between communism and socialism, except in the means of achieving the same ultimate end: communism proposes to enslave men by force, socialism – by vote. It is merely the difference between murder and suicide.” Ayn Rand

“A socialist is someone who has read Lenin and Marx. An anti-socialist is someone who understands Lenin and Marx.” Ronald Reagan

“Socialism only works in two places: Heaven – where they don’t need it and hell – where they already have it.”  Ronald Reagan

“Free people are different people, so they earn different incomes. Our talents and abilities are not identical. We don’t all work as hard. And even if we all were made equal in wealth tonight, we’d be unequal in the morning because some of us would spend it and some of us would save it. To make us economically equal, bureaucrats with guns would have to force us to be what we aren’t.” Lawrence Reed

“It is a common misconception that socialism is about helping poor people. Actually, what socialism does is create poor people, and keep them poor. And that’s not by accident. Under capitalism, rich people become powerful. But under socialism, powerful people become rich.” Glenn Reynolds

“The immorality or absurdity of Socialist doctrines are patent. But one difficulty in arguing with professed Socialists, both sinister and merely dreamy, is that they invariably suffer from great looseness of thought; for if they did not keep their faith nebulous, it would at once become abhorrent in the eyes of any upright and sensible man.” Teddy Roosevelt

“While I would not argue that capitalism as an economic system is inherently more Christian than socialism … it does seem to me that capitalism is more dependent on Christianity than socialism is. For in order for capitalism to work — in order for it to produce a good and a stable society — the traditional Christian virtues are essential.” Antonin Scalia

“The transformation of charity into legal entitlement has produced donors without love and recipients without gratitude.” Antonin Scalia

“The problem with capitalism is capitalists. The problem with socialism is socialism.” Willi Schlamm

“The great intellectual advantage of socialism is obvious. Through its ability to align itself with ideals that everyone can recognise, socialism has been able to perpetuate the belief in its moral purity, despite crime upon crime committed in its name. That a socialist revolution may cost millions of lives, that it may involve the wilful murder of an entire class, the destruction of a culture, the elimination of learning and the desecration of art, will leave not the slightest stigma on the doctrines with which it glorifies its actions.” Roger Scruton

“Socialism violates at least three of the Ten Commandments: It turns government into God, it legalizes thievery and it elevates covetousness. Discussions of income inequality, after all, aren’t about prosperity but about petty spite. Why should you care how much money I make, so long as you are happy?” Ben Shapiro

“Socialism states that you owe me something simply because I exist. Capitalism, by contrast, results in a sort of reality-forced altruism: I may not want to help you, I may dislike you, but if I don’t give you a product or service you want, I will starve. Voluntary exchange is more moral than forced redistribution.” Ben Shapiro

“A socialist is somebody who doesn’t have anything, and is ready to divide it up equally among everybody.” George Bernard Shaw

“Socialism always attacks three basic social institutions: religion, the family, and private property. Religion, because it offers a rival authority to the state; the family, because it means a rival loyalty to the state; and property, because it means material independence of the state.” Joseph Sobran

“The history of the 20th century is full of examples of countries that set out to redistribute wealth and ended up redistributing poverty.” Thomas Sowell

“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it. Even countries that were once more prosperous than their neighbors have found themselves much poorer than their neighbors after just one generation of socialistic policies.” Thomas Sowell

“What do you call it when someone steals someone else’s money secretly? Theft. What do you call it when someone takes someone else’s money openly by force? Robbery. What do you call it when a politician takes someone else’s money in taxes and gives it to someone who is more likely to vote for him? Social Justice.” Thomas Sowell

“America is now a land that rewards failure – at the personal, corporate, and state level. If you reward it, you get more of it. If you reward it as lavishly as the federal government does, you’ll get the Radio City Christmas Special of Failure, on ice and with full supporting orchestra. The problem is that, in abolishing failure, you abolish the possibility of success, and guarantee only a huge sucking statist swamp.” Mark Steyn

“No theory of government was ever given a fairer test or more prolonged experiment in a democratic country than democratic socialism received in Britain. Yet it was a miserable failure in every aspect.” Margaret Thatcher

“For the socialist, each new discovery revealed a ‘problem’ for which the repression of human activity by the state was the only ‘solution’.” Margaret Thatcher

“Socialists have always spent much of their time seeking new titles for their beliefs, because the old versions so quickly become outdated and discredited.” Margaret Thatcher

“The worst enemy of socialism is not capitalism. It is reality.” Margaret Thatcher

“Tyranny is the political corollary of socialism, as representative government is the political corollary of the market economy.” Ludwig von Mises

“Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.” Ludwig von Mises

“The act of reaching into one’s own pockets to help a fellow man in need is praiseworthy and laudable. Reaching into someone else’s pocket is despicable and worthy of condemnation.” Walter Williams

“Many who claim to love Jesus with their theology hate the poor with their economics.” Douglas Wilson

[1965 words]

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