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I recently received a letter from the Coalition For Marriage (C4M) saying that a top barrister has said that despite receiving “abuse and threats” she will not step down from a legal case defending traditional marriage.
Dinah Rose QC, and also President of Magdalen College, Oxford, is representing the Government of the Cayman Islands as it seeks to uphold the definition of marriage as being only between one man and one woman. LGBT activists have claimed that because of this case, Dinah Rose is unfit to be President of Magdalen, Oxford.

A few days earlier, I received a letter from the Christian Institute about more LGBT activists’. They were calling on the Northern Ireland Education Authority to get rid of a board member, the former DUP minister, Nelson McCausland. And why? Answer: because he shared an article about a homosexual man’s Christian conversion. This account was published on The Gospel Coalition website and was the testimony of Becket Cook, a former Hollywood set designer, who lived a homosexual lifestyle until he encountered Jesus. So his critics accused Mr McCausland of promoting “conversion therapy practices”, although nowhere in Cook’s interview does Cook mention having undergone any such therapy. He even says that attempting to force someone to change their sexuality should not happen.

Enclosed with this letter I also received an A5 double-sided leaflet headed, Banning Conversion Therapy or Banning the Gospel? I quote from it:

Jesus told the women caught in adultery to ‘go and sin no more’. But saying the same thing to a practising homosexual could mean breaking a planned new conversion therapy law.

Then, under the heading Activists Target Bible-Teaching Churches you read this:

Leading supporters of the ban [on conversion therapy] see it as a way to attack biblical teaching that sex is for marriage. Liberal clergy want the criminal law to settle their theological disputes with evangelicals and others who hold to historic Christian teaching. If they get their way, preaching repentance could, in some circumstances, become a crime.

But who are behind this campaign? One well-known Baptist pastor and he says a ban must cover pastoral care of those with same-sex attraction, not just gender disphoria. Also he says informal prayer and sermons that do not affirm LGBT identities are damaging and require Government intervention, alleging these are ‘safeguarding’ issues. Then he claims that failing to embrace pro-LGBT theology will lead to, I quote, “a crop of high-profile prosecutions” against churches. Also, there is a female member of the Church of England’s General Synod who sits on the Government’s LGBT Advisory Panel. She too claims church prayer ministry is conversion therapy and she attacks churches for teaching that homosexual behaviour is “sinful”. Her organization in July 2020 proposed the following as law, that:

…any form of counselling or persuading someone to change their sexual orientation or behaviour so as to conform with a heteronormative lifestyle, or their gender identity should be illegal, no matter the reason, religious or otherwise – whatever the person’s age.

All this is shocking. Much of this is based on lies and half-truths. Dr Peter May, a distinguished general practitioner and author, argues such bans would be seriously unethical, denying basic human rights – freedom of conscience, freedom of religion, and freedom to choose your treatment – while condemning people to live a lifestyle they want to leave. He argues that the therapies that should be banned were employed when homosexual sex was still illegal, but were discontinued over 50 years ago. These were aversion therapies, using drugs, enemas, electrical shock treatments and also even brain surgery. All these, however, were administered by the medical profession not clergy or counsellors.

What are now wanted to be banned, of course, are talking therapies. But as for them “causing harm”, it is a simple fact that a person seeking help in counselling already has a high risk of harm that cannot be attributed to the therapy. Dr May says (I quote):

homosexuality itself runs a high risk of harm. It is strongly associated with mental illness, alcoholism, drug addictions and a greatly increased risk of catching STDs, which may have life-long, even fatal consequences. These are all good reasons for wanting to move away from homosexual behaviour and culture. Yes, counselling can also be stressful, which is true for treating any addictive behaviour.A further deception that campaigners spread, repeating it like a mantra, is that homosexuality “is not an illness and therefore cannot be cured”. Both these terms are deliberately misleading.Bereavement, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorders and relational difficulties are not ‘illnesses’ that can be ‘cured’. They are, however, stressful conditions for which counselling is often effective in resolving. Does counselling ever lead to change in a person’s sexual orientation? Yes, though not always or even often, but there is a growing number of people around the world, who now happily identify themselves as being ‘Ex-Gay’.

So says Peter May. Well, is such talking-therapy ethical? Absolutely Yes!
Listen to the BACP (The British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy)’s code of practice:

The overall aim of counselling is to provide an opportunity for the client to work towards living in a way he or she experiences as more satisfying and resourceful.

This problem is not limited to America and Europe. I’ve learnt from the Australian Associated Press recently that after a 12 hour debate in Victoria a bill was passed that (I quote):

will outlaw practices that seek to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation or gender identity. Those found to have engaged in conversion practices that result in serious injury will face penalties of up to 10 years’ jail of up to $10.000 in fines. This includes ‘carrying out a religious practice, including but not limited to, a prayer-based practice, a deliverance practice or an exorcism.’

I’ve laboured just three issues, involving a distinguished Oxford academic lawyer, a politician, and a shocking movement to ban thoughtful and careful divine help to sinful and suffering people. I could have told you of so much more. But why? Let me remind you of those words of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in his prophetic 1983 Templeton Address in London when he said this:

More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”Since then I have spent well-nigh 50 years working on the history of our Revolution ….But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.

And Solzhenitsyn goes on:

Yet we have grown used to this kind of world; we even feel at home in it. … Dostoevsky warned that ‘great events could come upon us and catch us intellectually unprepared’ …And present-day Europe, seemingly so unlike the Russia of 1913, is today on the verge of the same collapse, for all that it has been reached by a different route.”

I was reminded of Solzhenitsyn’s speech when I read Rod Dreher’s new Book, Live not by Lies, which are words of exhortation from Solzhenitsyn.
And, also, his book’s introduction begins with another quote from Solzhenitsyn:

There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.

So why was Dreher writing? He tells us. He, along with many, believed the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 meant Totalitarianism and the Police State had gone, never to menace humanity again. For democracy and capitalism had won the day - not tyranny and Marxist socialism. But then in 2015 (twenty–six years later) he received a phone call from an anxious stranger. Dreher writes:

The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the US, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the US today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia. [But] what prompted her concern?

Answer:

news reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria, whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater for a same-sex wedding. So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time. Meanwhile liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.”

Then Dreher reports that the Doctor next told him he had heard his parents’ warning about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. But he was now in America - the land of liberty. However, he had posed the question – “What if his parents were right?” And so Dreher decided to apply himself also to that question – and the result? His new book, Live not by Lies with the subtitle a manual for Christian dissidents. For those who haven’t yet read it, I’ll just say this about it. In the book Dreher writes of lessons learnt from those who had lived pre-1989 the wrong side of the Iron Curtain. And the consequence is that the book is a warning to the West of a “soft” totalitarianism that is creeping up on it. And it is so subtle for being “soft”. It is unlikely to turn into a “hard” version involving an armed revolution. For it achieves it goals, under a guise of gentleness and concern for the marginalized like the same-sex attracted and the transgendered – such a tiny fraction of the population.

Also, the ideals of such a “soft” totalitarianism will be enforced not by Secret Police but, more benignly, by elites who control education and the media (the knowledge class) and by large corporations (not least) in Silicon Valley in California, who control the internet. So, one way or another, our private lives and beliefs will be controlled, if there is no counter action. It will not just be those public aspects of our lives that Governments rightly control. But our private and personal lives. And the name for that is total-itarianism – Governments controlling both our public and our private lives.

However! Christian believers must not be pessimistic, for God is working his purposes out as year succeeds to year. Nevertheless, we must be realistic. For Dreher is not to be dismissed with this book. As one reviewer perceptively writes:

The cold shoulder that Dreher regularly experiences, including from top-notch Evangelical and Catholic scholars, may be among the most telling signals that he is correct [now] in observing that Western culture (including many Christians) no longer has the inner resilience or fortitude to resist the barbarians who – as Alasdair MacIntyre has rightly insisted – have made their way inside the gates and are ready to impose their totalitarian regime upon us all.”

The cold-shoulder refers to his previously much read book, the Benedict Option which advocates for Christians something of a retreat to regroup. I have yet to be persuaded. To quote Russell Moore, “I am more missionary than monastery.” But to respond to this current situation that I am persuaded he rightly analyses, we need properly first to define “totalitarianism” and how it works. Sociologically, the late Peter Berger argues that totalitarianism is best understood as a form of Fundamentalism. And Fundamentalism has now come to mean (after its pre-First World War biblical beginnings), four things.

One, Fundamentalism is a reaction against a threat to a religious or secular community that embodies beliefs and practices (doctrines and ethics) and it reacts when these beliefs and practices are under threat.

Two, Fundamentalism is to be distinguished from Traditionalism. Traditionalism particularly relates to beliefs and practices that you are born into and taken for granted. And the fundamentalist can share those traditionalist beliefs and practices but reacts when those beliefs and practices are no longer taken for granted..

So, three, Fundamentalism often is an attempt to restore the taken-for-grantedness of a tradition that is failing or in danger. This is often because the Traditionalist with the same beliefs and practices is perceived by the Fundamentalist as too relaxed.

And, four, Fundamentalism, at state level, has to be distinguished from Authoritarianism. The authoritarian state simply does not tolerate political opposition, but leaves people alone more or less, so long as they go along with the regime. So you could say Hitler and Stalin were totalitarian; in the present Putin and Assad are authoritarian.

And also, and importantly, the Fundamentalist project comes in two versions. The first version is where fundamentalists attempt to take over an entire society and impose their creed on it. They want to make the fundamentalist creed the taken for granted reality for everyone in that society. The second version is where Fundamentalists don’t impose their creed on everyone. In fact they give up on the mainstream and try to establish the taken-for-grantedness of their creed within a much smaller community such as the Amish in America and the Strict Jewish Community in Gateshead in the North East or those Christian communities that impressed Rod Dreher, as reported in the Benedict Option. So theorizes Peter Berger. And it is helpful for understanding where we are at, in the 21st century. But how does that relate to Dreher’s warning of totalitarianism?

Well, Peter Berger was famous for another analysis of the second half of the 20th century. Previously it had been axiomatic with many that the age of science was giving way to secularism and the end of religion. But, in reality, Berger discovered that modernity was not resulting in secularism but in pluralism. He is famous for what is now a classic, A Rumour of Angels in 1969, and more recently, The Desecularization of the World – resurgent religion and world politics.

So the theologically and socially liberal 1960s and 70s, gave way to the more traditionalist 1980s when, with Mrs Thatcher in 10 Downing Street, she had as her Chief Press Officer and also her Head of the Policy Unit committed and theologically literate Evangelical Christians. And then there was Billy Graham’s Mission England in 1984. And, very significantly Clause 28 was passed in 1988 in Parliament saying that:

a local authority shall not intentionally promote homosexuality or publish material with the intention of promoting homosexuality” or “promote the teaching in any maintained school of the acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.

And that had been preceded in 1987 by the “Higton Debate” in the General Synod, in which, after much national publicity, the Bishop’s orthodox motion on sexual relationships was carried by a huge majority and which is currently the law in the Church of England. It is now a recognized fact that the introduction of Section 28 served to galvanise the disparate British Gay groups into action. And that galvanizing in this country is the root whose fruit is a 21st century dangerous Fundamentalist movement. For it is seeking to bring us back, in a more and more totalitarian way, to the theological and social liberalism that was always an under-current in the 20th century.