In fact, the New Testament isn’t about our going to be with God; it’s about God coming to be with us. Tom Wright

The mission of the Church is not about preparing for Jesus to become king. It is implementing the fact that he has become king, even if that new kingship doesn’t look like the sort of thing people had been expecting. Tom Wright

Christianity tells people they can only be redeemed through Jesus dying for them on the cross. Secular ideologies tell them they can only be redeemed through scourging themselves—by renouncing progress and modernity through adopting net zero policies, abasing themselves for the sin of “white privilege,” or junking markers of the “patriarchy” such as traditional male characteristics of courage, competitiveness, and emotional restraint. Melanie Phillips

The reason the West is teetering is that its leaders—in politics, education, policing, business, the church—have chosen to go with the flow of civilizational decline, defeatism, and degradation pushed by a relatively small number of fanatical secular ideologues. Melanie Phillips

Liberal universalists similarly tell an upside-down story about Israel, trashing it as a rogue state breaking international law and willfully killing the innocent in a spirit of revenge. In fact, Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East, deeply committed to protecting life and liberty and upholding international law, and motivated in war only to defend the innocent against evil and the nation against annihilation. Melanie Phillips

The essential fuel for all this cultural energy is that Israel has a sense of purpose. Its people understand why the state exists and why it needs to exist—that it is the indispensable homeland of the Jewish people. It survives and thrives for one overwhelming reason: because it wants to. Melanie Phillips

Accordingly, instead of holding the line for objectivity and reason, the church allowed itself to be drawn ever deeper into moral and cultural relativism, leading to such absurdities as the archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, apologizing to the developing world for the spread of Christianity. Melanie Phillips

Religion provides the instruction manual for society. Constructing a moral framework for how individuals live, it establishes the principles that govern political choices. Its moral laws lay down the benchmarks for the temporal laws passed by parliaments. Since religion is timeless, its teachings are treated as sources of wisdom and ethical guidelines about how to act. It promotes civic values, builds social capital, and creates national character. Its normative influence binds people together. It is society’s cultural glue. Melanie Phillips

Human rights culture is steadily replacing the biblical codes that uphold reverence for human life, justice, and community obligations by a set of secular values tailored for a narcissistic and godless age. The result is a culture of human wrongs. Melanie Phillips

Anyone who identifies as part of a designated victim group is deemed to be beyond reproach. The only people who can ever be guilty are those deemed to be in power over such “victim” groups—men, the middle classes, white people, the sexually “hetero-normative.” In other words, mainstream society, whose principal crime is that it is mainstream and is therefore innately elitist, racist, exist, and oppressive towards any group considering itself to be disadvantaged by anything. Melanie Phillips