Bruce Logan
Bruce was the original director of the Maxim Institute and is a current member of the Family First board. He is now busy on his third novel. You can purchase his second novel The Reluctant Assassin on Amazon under the pseudonym Alexander Logan.
Many people, maybe most people in the media won’t care what an 81-year-old has to say about the roots of freedom in a democracy. And that is the problem; the failure to see the necessary connection between tradition, wisdom and freedom.
Every young journalist in New Zealand should carefully read Tom Holland’s recent and ambitious historical commentary “Dominion; the Making of the Western Mind”. They would discover the inestimable debt they owe to the Jewish and Christian Scriptures. They would learn from the agnostic Holland that the West cannot be understood outside its Biblical foundation. They might discover why “in a West often doubtful of religion’s claims, so many of its instincts remain–for good or ill–thoroughly Christian. It is–to coin a phrase–the greatest story ever told.”
The young journalist might discover, or at least be prepared to consider, that the universal message of the Christian gospel has been recallibrated into a disconnected and incoherent human rights theory which would retain and enforce the universality it has rejected.
Holland reminds us that the West is unique in its “visceral and momentous suspicion that God is closer to the weak than to the mighty, to the poor than to the rich. Any beggar, any criminal, might be Christ. ‘So the last will be first and the first last.”’
Holland points out that many of the human rights we hold to be self-evident, the equality of men with women, justice for the weak, freedom of religious belief and expression as well as free speech, are not self-evident at all. They are entirely biblical and are reinforced specifically from the life and teachings of Christ.
It would be gratifying to think that a deeper knowledge of our roots might restore some kind of equilibrium to the New Zealand media because it is being increasingly unbalanced by a usurping wokeness.
Having lost belief in their own history, journalists are easily tempted by the chronological snobbery of the post-truth age. “We’re in the 21st century for goodness sake.” It has become very difficult to have a balanced debate in mainstream media on multiculturalism, human rights, climate change, transgenderism, same-sex marriage. Indeed, New Zealand is probably the worst country in the English-speaking world to have such a debate. Whatever happened to the fourth estate’s declared objectivity?
The media appears to take for granted a progressive (more accurately de-Christianising) consensus on what is right and what is wrong. For example, it is not self-evidently true that the individual man or woman has his or her own intrinsic dignity. The progressive mind might believe that everyone should be equal under the law but it has no foundation for thinking so; it is enthralled by the political subjectivism of contemporary ideology. The personal story assumes an authority above that fortuitous blend of tradition, accumulated knowledge and reason. The media no longer has the capacity to be the conscience of society; it has become the instrument of woke.
The Progressive de-Christianisers ridicule Christian history from the very perspective of the Christian morality they think out of date. Advocates of same-sex marriage and transgenderism reject Christian teaching but embrace a vision of monogamous marriage that has its origin in the same rejected teaching. Even the right for women to consent in sexual matters has its origin in their shared dignity with men.
Pro-choice abortion activists who argue for the right of women to control their bodies do so on the basis of the Christian explanation of human dignity. Feminists claim a common dignity with men but deny the authority of having been created in God’s image.
Presumably, in the alleged search for social justice, a point will be reached when we arrive at the promised Utopia and will hardly need government anymore. However, democracy is not “like a train that you get off once it has reached its destination”. We will not be met by peace, joy and freedom.
Having rejected the redemptive concept of sin and forgiveness it must be replaced by an incoherent mix of victimhood and belief in essential human goodness. When everything is a social construction, equality cannot be the consequence. Instead, we will breed a virtue-signalling elite more hypocritical than the one rejected. Dissenters by their very nature must be evil, fit only for the rubbish dump.
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