‘Humpty Dumpty sat on a wall.
Humpty Dumpty had a great fall.
All the king’s horses and all the king’s men
couldn’t put Humpty together again ‘
***
On the 17th of January 2026, in the Weekend Australian newspaper, the columnist Henty Ergas co-authored an excellent article with the title ‘The hard-earned lessons we have now unlearned’.
Some relevant quotes from that article are-
‘The crisis that has confronted Australian society since October 7, 2023, . . . . cuts to the heart of the assumptions underpinning Australia’s democratic order’. . . . Central to that order is an expectation of self-restraint, ensuring that we treat one another with mutual respect . . . and the conviction that, however searing our differences, they do not cleave the country into warring camps’.
That expectation is ‘the hard-earned product of our history’ aculture that ‘has now been dramatically eroded, if not altogether shredded’.
The article makes many excellent and relevant points, but for all that I respectfully suggest that, like virtually all the media and political analysis I have seen, it misses the point. It does this by not adequately answering the question ‘Why?’. Why do we have this, what former British Prime Minister David Cameron described as, ‘slow motion moral trainwreck’.
The answer to the ‘Why’ question is because western society has fallen unto a Cesspit of Spiritual and Moral bankruptcy as described in this quote from George Orwell-
‘For two hundred years we had sawed and sawed and sawed at the branch we were sitting on. And in the end, much more suddenly than anyone had foreseen, our efforts were rewarded, and down we came. But unfortunately, there had been a little mistake: The thing at the bottom was not a bed of roses after all; it was a cesspool full of barbed wire . . .It appears that an amputation of the soul isn’t just a simple surgical job, like having your appendix out. The wound has a tendency to go septic.’
George Orwell 1940
The answer to the ‘Why’ question, an answer our politicians and most media will not touch with a barge pole, is that ‘we have sawed off the branch we were sitting on’. Namely the Biblical world view that founded and shaped western society for centuries, stabilized the ‘Democratic Order’ and was the source of so many blessings. For example, by providing the womb for the development of modern science and medicine, inspiring large numbers of ‘help’ organizations (some listed by Ergas but many more), schools, universities, hospitals etc. as well as encouraging a society that promoted ‘loving your neighbour’ and‘looking after the interest of others’ (sounds a lot like ‘Mateship’!) and ‘one humanity’ rather than a splintered Humpty of Tribes.
The Democratic order described by Ergas where there is ‘self-restraint’, where people ‘treat one another with mutual respect’, and where ‘however searing our differences, they do not cleave the country into warring camps’, otherwise known as Tribes, is actually a Bible-shaped society described in the previous paragraph.
However, the Australian community has increasingly banished God from the public square, education and homes, and with him, the Judeo-Christian BIOS (built in operating system).
***
Evil, a vile manifestation of which we saw at Bondi, cannot be eliminated. Certainly not by the band aids of more laws (Gun or otherwise), more bans, more policing of thoughts and words, for fundamentally it is a spiritual entity. However, it can be constrained (as it once was) by that now rejected operating system that largely shaped and influenced society for centuries. That rejection has created Orwell’s Cesspit, a spiritual-moral Vacuum which, as is always the case with vacuums, seeks to be filled with something.
That Vacuum, wonderfully aided and turbocharged by a brainless, tribalizing Multiculturalism, historical ignorance and biblical illiteracy, has been filled with the smorgasbord of alien and mutually incompatible, sometimes poisonously so, religions, ideologies and world views which have produced Orwell’s ‘Cesspool of barbed wire’ in which society now wallows.
The nation is now feeling the ‘briars’ of that Cesspool tearing it apart, and finally waking up to the disaster it has brought on itself. Evidence of this is the increasing call for a return to ‘Australian’ values. There appears to be little understanding that those values are basically Judeo-Christian values emanating from the now despised world view that dare not speak its name, that is the one shaped by the Bible.
One of the greatest ironies in history is the prescient prediction of the consequences of God’s ejection by, the most unlikely of all people, the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche of ‘God is Dead’ notoriety. The supreme irony is that Nietzsche was an Atheist! Yet he understood, what so many do not today, that –
‘Christianity is a system, a whole view of things thought out together. By breaking one main concept out of it, the faith in God, one breaks the whole’ and ‘one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet’.
21st century society has removed God, not understanding that it is this, not the lack of laws or bans, that is the primary reason for the descent into the Cesspool of spiritual and moral bankruptcy.
What we see from the response to the ‘Crisis’ in western society, highlighted by the atrocity of the recent Bondi massacre, by the political class, much of the media and opinion leaders generally, is some attempt to return to ‘Australian’ values, however, as Karl Faase has said-
‘to rebuild western civilization, we need to go back to what made western civilization such a powerful force for good and prosperity and that is the Judeo-Christian world view. . . . yet many want the values without Saviour.’
‘Hate speech’, ‘Hate preachers’, the graffitiing of synagogues, antisemitism generally, destruction of colonial monuments etc., rampant youth crime and so on are symptoms of the problem, not the problem itself and any attempt to deal with them solely by political/secular means is futile. Such an attempt misses the point which is that the Vacuum filled with a spiritual/moral bankruptcy is the inevitable consequence that flows from the rejection of the Evil-constraining Biblical world view that for the most part shaped society.
To put it another way, all the ‘King’s men’, that is the secular politicians, rulers and authorities, can’t put the Judeo-Christian Humpty of western civilization together again.
***
The article I referred to at the beginning contains many good points. However, it represents what is a widespread failing because of one point. The lengthy article at no point mentions Christianity, God or Christ, the absence of which is the very reason for the Crisis in Australian society.
If Christianity in Australia continues its chronic and decades long decline so that it becomes just one religion in a Kaleidoscope of many incompatible others, as it is well on the way to doing, then those ‘Australian’ values will not return. For as the journalist Greg Sheridan has said,
‘The West cannot survive without a re-energised belief in Christianity’
Such an energised activity is the only antidote to the socio-spiritual Stygian darkness and cultural insanity falling over the land.
Ultimately, the only agency which has the potential to empty the ‘Cesspit’ is the body of Christ the Church. Tragically however, the Church we see has become like a ‘Cinderella with Amnesia’ (Michael Griffiths) losing interest in its Jesus-given disciple-making mandate. Indeed, as C.S Lewis puts into the mouth of Screwtape (Satan’s chief demon)–
‘Our greatest ally is the church, not the one spread out through time and space, terrible as an army with banners, but the church building on the corner, the club that goes through confusing rituals, having forgotten that it exists to build God’s Kingdom’.
***
It is Sunday afternoon as I write this and many reading it will have attended a church service today. However, in how many of those services was there any exhortation to the zealous, disciple-making energetic, and probably costly, activity without which the West is lost.
The answer will be – very, very few. yet without a rapid and large increase in new Disciples of Jesus, the Cesspit of Spiritual and Moral Bankruptcy will not be cleansed from a society that has had its Christian Soul amputated.
Of course, the thesis put here will be met with loud scoffing and laughter by those holding the levers of political and social influence today. However, as One Man found out around two thousand years ago, that (and more) is the price you pay for Truth.
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