Keep the Faith

On 1 July 2009, The Australian published an article by Giles Auty, called ‘The Left is Killing Religion’. The original article can be found HERE. In this article, Auty discussed a talk he gave for the annual St Edmund Campion lecture, which was titled ‘Are we truly evolving? Reflections of the life of an Elizabethan saint’.

He starts off by saying that in Elizabeth England, Catholic priests struggled to keep the faith alive. And then makes this comparison:

“Now, instead of finding itself persecuted by Elizabethan spies, informers and hangmen, Catholicism finds itself under severe assault from the self-righteous, politically correct social engineers of Britain's political Left.”

Although he says this has not happened yet in Australia, he worries that it may not be far away. He also makes the point that Christianity is being ‘treated with increasing contempt’.

It is an interesting comparison. We like to think of ourselves as progressing. Well, some of us do. I personally have a problem with the word ‘progress’, but I’ll leave that for another day. We are getting better and better all the time – supposedly. We are getting smarter and learning more and throwing away the superstitions of the past.

But this has all been done before. Some people may find it hard to see the similarities between Elizabethan England and today’s postmodern world. I mean, Elizabethan England was completely different, wasn’t it? They were still holding onto old religious superstitions. Today’s world wants to get rid of them.

But see, the Protestants in Elizabethan England also thought they were getting rid of old superstitions. They might still have believed in God. But they thought they were doing something new, something that go rid of the useless traditional religion, something that was more progressive. And Catholicism, so they thought, was just a religion that had passed its used by date.

And now we have the postmodernists who are trying to make a secular society. They say this is in the name of progress. They’re not progressive. They’re in fact, regressive. They’ve gone back to a time when people tried to remove all traces of a religion they disagreed with. It failed then. And it will fail again. Because people of faith aren’t that progressive either. They’ll go back to doing what they have done many times before.

Because just as the world continues to bring forth people who want to suppress religion (in either one or all forms), so too does the world continue to bring forth people who are willing to fight and even to die for it. People are not just going to sit back and let faith quietly slip away from the world. Even if all traces of religion were removed from public life, people will still be there, behind the scenes, hiding if they must, risking their life if they must, fighting to keep the faith alive.