Saturday, July 8, 2017

A New Utopianism?

A new and intolerant utopianism seeks to drive the remaining traces of Christianity from the laws and constitutions of Europe and North America.  This time, it does so mainly in the cause of personal liberation, born in the 1960s cultural revolution, and now inflamed into special rage by any suggestion that the sexual urge should be restrained by moral limits or that it should have any necessary connection with procreation.  This utopianism relies for human goodness on doctrines of human rights derived from human desires and — like all such codes — full of conflicts between the differing rights of different groups.  These must then be policed by an ever more powerful state.  A new elite, wealthy and comfortable beyond the fantasies of any previous generation, abandons penal codes (especially against the possession of narcotics) and abolishes marital fidelity so as to license its own comfortable, padded indulgence, and it therefore permits the same freedoms to the poor, who suffer far more from this dangerous liberty than do the rich.  Inevitably, it is the Christian churches who are the last strongholds of resistance to their change.

Peter Hitchens, The Rage Against God, pg.213

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