Author: Douglas Knight

The Christian teaching about God is the only defence against idolatry. Idolatry is excessive recognition of the wrong powers. When we give them too much acknowledgement, we become captive to them, we become servants of them, transmitting their claims and imposing their worship on those around us, and so spreading the pathology. Idolatry is the obstacle to our becoming free, willing, accountable and mature members of the human race. Christian worship frees us from illegitimate power claimants, and thus it takes us out of their power.

Where are you going to be when you die? When the moment of your death arrives, are you going to be sitting in front of your television screen? Are you going to be kneeling before the altar? Are you going to be in church, wrapped up in the worship of God in the presence of all generations of his saints? Are you going to be sedated and speechless before the shrilling puppet show, your life a reflection of the cartoons? Which set of characters are you to be counted among – celebs or saints? Which is for you, the true liturgy of God by which all creation is remade and redeemed, or the counterfeit liturgy within which all life is faked? Which liturgy is yours? Which liturgy do you belong to?

As long as we consume this media output we offer our homage to the founders our media empires. We inhabit the world of their construction. We live on the reservation created by media and entertainment industries, in the safari park they have erected around us, made happy by confinement within the paddock assigned to our age-group. We might as well erect a little bust of each other of them and put them in the place of honour above the television. Of course each television and each screen displays the images and idols that show us what we want to be, while the voices tell us what we want to hear. Just as the Romans kept figurines of generic ancestors in alcoves and cabinets, so we enjoy figurines that flicker and move across the screen which each of us keeps before us, or behind which each of us hides. There we are content to live an ersatz life, lived through the perpetual of human types, each Punch-and-Judy show keeping us fixated and secure. We might as well offer our media masters a pinch of incense and venerate them as our progenitors, as the creators of all the possible outcomes conceivable for us, and so as the Fates. Unless you pray to the God who made you and gives you a voice, that is.

What Christians have to say is seldom acceptable to the governing authorities as long as those authorities make the assumption that the rest of us are morally deficient. They regard us as lesser people, best dealt with en masse by large solutions. They do not easily regard us as persons who rightly demand person to person interaction and dignity. They grow complacent, patronising and arrogant, or to attempt to place themselves beyond challenge, to refuse to give an account of themselves, to conceal the truth.

The police not enforce the law against the criminal manifestations of the slave cult. But they do enforce silence on whoever points out the criminal manifestations of the cult. We can only reply that it is our duty as citizens to report crime to the police. We can only ask the police to uphold the law. We can remind them that they are officers of the law. We remind them that they are we are all equal under the law, that no one is above the law, that there is no special group that may not be criticised, challenged or offended. We can hold them accountable. We can stand outside police stations, Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) offices and courts as reminder to those who work there of the responsibility of public office, of the absolute nature of justice. Justice is impartial, we can say. There is an impartial judge, he is the source of law and arbiter between all men. We worship him, and to do so we defy all other powers.

The gospel proclaimed by the worship of the Church is a public event. It not only takes place in public and intends to be heard by the public but it creates the public that can hear it, and which can take part in it. Each church understands that it is speaking to its own community and nation, and that they can hear what this church is communicating to them. This worship gathers together and reconciles persons representative of different and hitherto antagonistic groups, bringing their enmity to an end. It demonstrates that the power that cuts persons and groups off from one another is itself overcome. It establishes that that human relationship cannot be broken or brought to an end by any power, not even by our mortality and death. Relationship between person and person may continue without limit, and thus the universe is open, and man is the creature of hope, directed towards his future.

So Christians ask, is twenty-first century Christian theology faithful to the teaching of the great Church? Would ancient or medieval Christians recognise us as fellow Christians?  Or would they say that we have turned from the faith towards some simulacrum of it? Would they charge us with robbing our own future generations to the point which our society is disintegrating and its culture disappearing before us? How could we reply? Lord, have mercy. What other reply could we make? Lord, have mercy.

Our government does not yet want to acknowledge that these are not random individual acts of criminality, but deliberate attacks on our law, political culture and our identity. Many working class people do see what all these individual attacks have in common and point out that they are not simply many individual incidents but a concerted attack on all of us. And this is of course what the representatives of the Slave Cult themselves are telling us, that each attack must be understood as part of a campaign and that they intend to replace our law with theirs. The greatest problem at the moment is that the media have so far failed to challenge the government account and ask whether it is mistaken. The greatest failure is always the failure to tell the truth, or to allow the conditions within which the truth can be heard in public

The problem of the British is only that they don’t not realise that this envy and rage are directed against them, and they do not take any steps to defend themselves. Our political culture and institutions seem incapable of recognising their opposite, or of recognising that they have enemies and must defend themselves against them. The institutions of our government, the judiciary in particular seem incapable of acknowledging that these insults and assaults may not be simply individual criminal acts, but political and ideological acts, directed against us as a society. Each attack attempts to weaken our society by detaching each individual from its protection, so that our society no longer identifies with any individual the savages set upon. Each attack on an individual is also an attack on our law and our national cohesion.

The Church is an assembly of people, each different from the other, so it is a plurality of voices. This assembly is given to each particular location in order to proclaim the gospel to the community in that place. That these many different voices agree and speak with one accord, and that all these different churches of different times and places give the same witness, is itself evidence of the authority of the gospel, the power of God and the truth that he, and no other, is Lord.

The Church teaches that the whole company of heaven, some of whom are the patriarchs, prophets and apostles portrayed in Scripture, are heard and even glimpsed in its worship. This heavenly company makes itself heard through the worship in the voices that make up each local congregation. It gives us the speech of Jesus Christ to his listeners, both disciples and adversaries, and it relays the speech of Abraham, Moses, David, Isaiah and all the patriarchs and prophets as they reply with their worship to Christ. In church the singing voices of our neighbours are amplifications of the voices of the patriarchs, prophets and apostles alerting us to the arrival of the Lord among us.

The Christian doctrine of God derives from the service of Christian worship. In this worship Christians gather to distinguish publicly the true God from the false gods, to thank the true God and to defy and deride all other gods. Christians proclaim and chant in public, in every town centre that You alone are the holy one, you alone are the Lord, you alone are the most high, Jesus Christ, with the Holy Spirit in the glory of God the Father. They perform this service for the benefit of the surrounding community; all those who hear this worship may understand which gods are false and are owed nothing, and which God is true and truly for us.

There are a multitude of powers. When these powers act beyond their authority and remain out of control, they are gods – and demons – to whomever falls under their influence. To worship the God of Jesus Christ is simultaneously not to worship any other gods. It is to realise that there are other claimants and so there are plenty of powers making claims on us, and so claiming semi-divine status over us; when they do so they are false gods. But Christian theology that takes its mandate from the worship of the whole Christian people must distinguish the true God from false gods and the powers of our age. These gods exert a power over us, and so we have to concede that we are captive to them until we are free of them.

The Christianity of recent decades has ignored one central question. It asks whether we believe in God. It does not ask which God we believe in? Which gods are our gods? Which powers are we committed to? Of course we cannot remember surrendering to any gods, but this is only because it happens too slowly and subtly for us to notice that this is what is happening. Of course we may refer to them as powers, forces or fundamental principles rather than as gods. Christians assume that we do acknowledge and defer to gods, and we have to name them and question whether they are worth our worship. We do not agree that moderns are atheist as they claim. They have their own gods, but their cult conceals this from them. They tell themselves that they are the master, and that each self is the centre of the world; that all things exist to please them, and that they can be anything they want to be. But they live in a perpetual battlefield of the gods, in which every power and every spirit competes with every other, and they are competing for us. They want what we have. They want power over us. They want us to be theirs. It is up to us to learn from Christian worship how to identify, give names to and defend ourselves from these powers.

This is a time of transition, the centralisers always tell us. They tell us that they are increasing our chance of democratic decision-making, but to do so, they have to make some changes which they must take for us. Power will soon be returned to you, they claim. This transition, this state of emergency, is just temporary. The changes are unilaterally foisted on us because we do not speak up and protest, and each failure to speak up makes them stronger and us weaker. The centralisers don’t want feisty, independent people. They want malleable, easily-directed people. So it is never a good idea to ‘see what our leaders decide for us’. Those in positions of authority who tell us this, are telling us that we have no authority of our own. We do. They may not deny it. We have authority. They have no authority to tell us that we have no authority. This authority was given to us in our baptism, when we were made Christians, and as Christians, we first come to share in the priestly, prophetic and kingly office of Christ. Parishes can be amalgamated only because the people in each parish have got out of the habit of saying morning and evening prayer. There is no one at the altar rail in the mornings in these churches, no one performing their public office as Christians, so the churches are not being used, and occasional services apart, are effectively closed. The lights are off and no one can see where they are going. The church is stumbling around in the dark and, as a consequence, our society is stumbling around in the dark. The darkness grow with the huge amount of artificial lighting emitted by every building and every electronic device. Only the Christian hunched over bible and then singing and praying before the altar lit by one candle can see where we are all going. Those who do not pray to God, of course, unwittingly direct prayers to other forces which are only too ready hear and take advantage. Those who appeal to anyone other than God are surrendering themselves to forces without pity.