Sadly, when one now thinks of Great Britain in the context of religion, it’s thought of as one of those places where Christianity has more or less died. Perhaps those swarms of Muslim immigrants from Pakistan are still religious, perhaps some of the Polish Roman Catholics are still religious, but native Britons generally aren’t.
Despite the magnificent cathedrals, stunningly gorgeous churches, and long history of the Anglo-Saxon people fighting for their faith against invaders, whether the pagan Danes and Norsemen or the Catholic fleet of the Spanish Armada, the native British seem to have largely given up on Christianity and let it rot and decline in a land where it used to be universally believed in.
Well, though few notable figures lamented that decline in the True Faith or otherwise stood up to its decline in their homeland (though some, namely CS Lewis and JRR Tolkein did), there is one big name figure in British politics that at least tried to warn against such a decline. That would be the recently departed queen, Queen Elizabeth II. Watch her do so here:
That video, the Queen’s first televised Christmas Message, is incredible. In it, rather than going along with the forces of atheism that swept across Western Europe after it exhausted itself in the mass bloodletting of the two World Wars, Elizabeth stood up for Christianity, saying:
“It is inevitable that I should seem a rather remote figure to many of you. A successor to the Kings and Queens of history; someone whose face may be familiar in newspapers and films but who never really touches your personal lives. But now at least for a few minutes I welcome you to the peace of my own home.
“That it is possible for some of you to see me today is just another example of the speed at which things are changing all around us. Because of these changes I am not surprised that many people feel lost and unable to decide what to hold on to and what to discard. How to take advantage of the new life without losing the best of the old.
“But it is not the new inventions which are the difficulty. The trouble is caused by unthinking people who carelessly throw away ageless ideals as if they were old and outworn machinery.”
Concluding, she then warned that such people “would have religion thrown aside, morality in personal and public life made meaningless, honesty counted as foolishness and self-interest set up in place of self-restraint.”
Such seems like exactly what happened. Tossing the baby out with the bathwater, the once proudly protestant Brits gave up on their religion and the once-proud island empire has turned into a shamefully small, atheistic imitation of its former self. Would only it had listened to the dearly departed Queen’s message!
But, alas, it did not. And so now the Brits are a pale imitation of what they otherwise could be.
By: TheAmericanTribune.com, editor of TheAmericanTribune.com. Follow me on Facebook and Subscribe to My Email List