Woe is us!

Melanie Phillips:

Everywhere, a sense of apocalypse is in the air. The Arab world is in revolutionary ferment and bad men there are likely to be succeeded by even worse.  Iran is poised to unleash nuclear Armageddon. Israel, under repeated rocket attack from Gaza, is menaced by genocidal enemy armies on all sides except for the Mediterranean Sea. America, for so long the bulwark of western defences, is currently out of that game thanks to the Manchurian narcissist in the White House (look at this open distancing from the US by the west’s erstwhile ally, the King of Jordan, to grasp just what damage Obama has done to the free world).

The west is teetering on the edge of financial catastrophe; the EU is staggering about like a punch-drunk boxer on the brink of collapsing with a brain haemorrhage; and Britain’s Prime Minister, panicking under the pressure of events that cannot be scripted by his pollsters, is desperately tossing out banal policy soundbites of cosmic irrelevance to these global challenges like the brief sparks from a dud catherine wheel stuttering in the face of a tornado.

If ever there was a time for the religious guardians of western civilisation to stand as its rock-solid defenders through their conspicuous moral clarity, this is surely it. But unlike the churches in the US which are have served as the bulwark of western civilisation in the culture wars that have been playing out there for decades, the Church of England has long been on its knees appeasing the enemies of civilisation -- secularism, leftism and now also Islamism.

The real church needs to rise up and be counted!