Writing of Russia, a journalist I read recently, witnessing Revolution Day and the old veterans parading beneath their banners of Communism, described them as “Trying to believe in the god who failed.”
Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn [1918 – 2008], winner in 1970 of the Nobel Prize in Literature and a man who lived through the worst horrors of the Soviet experiment would have concurred wholeheartedly. His one line conclusion, after a life spent researching the history of the terrible fate that befell his nation was – “Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”
My great concern is that we, as a country, are well on the way to making the same fateful mistake. Of course these things do not happen overnight – but the trajectory of our society is without question towards banishing God from every aspect of public life, an unchallenged hate, mockery and vilification of Christians and Christian morality and an increasingly difficult atmosphere for the man or woman of faith. Witness the unbridled torrent of abuse and mockery directed recently at a politician who dared to be open about her Christian ethic. I have no doubt that both the Press and the Political Machine connived to destroy her.
But if God is no more – what or who will take his place? When there is no touchstone for morality, belief or behaviour – to whom do we turn for truth and direction? Will it be science, the government, the majority view, the press – or someone or something else? Try examining the former Soviet Union and seeing if these worked for them.
May the day never come when our children or our children’s children look back from a broken and tattered civilisation at our legacy to them as “the god who failed”.
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