ALLIANCES

 

 

Political alliances are funny things.  While some of them are akin to lifelong marriages, many more seem to end in divorce.

            Thus the German states were Britain’s allies against Napoleon, only for the French to become Britain’s ally against the Germans.  The hostility of Britain and the United States towards Russia transformed into a mutual alliance against Hitler –  the sufferings of the Russian convoys a case in point – only to transmute again into the Cold War.  Osama bin Laden was once backed by America… Etc. 

 

Within modern Britain, it seems to me there is a triangle of forces: Secularism, Christianity and Islam.    And both of Christianity’s opponents in some sense need  it – or may need it  in the future: Islam for a united front of faith against religious scepticism; Secularism for defence of the western-European tradition against the ideological inroads of Islam.

 

Western complacency about Constantinople – it doesn’t need help; it’s always been there; it always will be – received a rude awakening when Islam breached the impregnable walls: with help from a European cannon maker.   So much for those who take the Church for granted.  I only hope that those who want to get rid of it altogether, and have been systematically expunging the Judeao-Christian tradition from every aspect of western life, know what they are doing.  I hope they are not sawing off the branch they are sitting on, or creating an opening for an alternative religion they would like even less. 

 

“Better the devil you know” is – hopefully – an inapposite way of designating the role of Christianity in British life. Better, perhaps, is the regret expressed – too late - by Hamlet towards Laertes:

That I have shot my arrow o’er the house

And hurt my brother.