Britain’s Spiritual Inversion

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Britain’s Spiritual Inversion

The British government embraces pagans, and continues to marginalize voices of reason and hope.

If you like to dance around stones and worship thunder, you should think about moving to Britain.

Last month, the Charity Commission recognized druidism as an official religion. Druids in Britain, of which there are about 10,000, can now claim tax exemptions and have access to other valuable “rights.” For instance, druids in prison may now take twigs, or magic wands, into their cells, and can request time off work to worship the sun.

Many are concerned that this decision will crack the door open for Britain’s growing number of witches, warlocks and wizards to seek legitimacy from the Charity Commission.

According to the Pagan Federation, which defends and promotes the interests of witches, druids and other “followers of polytheistic or pantheistic nature-worshiping” groups, there are now 300,000 pagans in Britain. Pagans are in every strata of society too, as one pagan recently admitted: We are “civil servants, teachers, housewives, accountants, university lecturers, farmers, bakers, child-minders, historians … sailors, gardeners, call-center workers, office cleaners and dancers and shop workers.”

They’ve even infiltrated the British military, which has roughly 100 pagans and a further 30 witches. Britain is also reported to have 500 pagan policemen. Thanks to the hard work of the Pagan Police Association, these officers can even take time off work to practice pagan rituals, which include setting out food for the dead, concocting potions and casting spells and worshiping the sun god.

Crazy, isn’t it? As one infuriated officer put it: “What has it come to when a cop gets time off so he can sit about making spells or dance around the place drinking honey beer with a wand in his hand?”

There are a number of reasons for this pagan renaissance. These include the cultural and media-driven infatuation with the occult, as well as paganism’s devotion to nature worship, which gives it special appeal to the swelling tide of liberal environmentalists. But there is another reason paganism is thriving: It receives tremendous moral, political and legislative support from the British government, as well as the British Broadcasting Corporation (bbc).

Consider the recently released 300-page “diversity handbook.” Produced by the Metropolitan Police Service, the handbook provides police officers with guidelines for when they come into contact with various religions. The manual gives special attention to pagans, telling officers to avoid touching a witch’s Book of Shadows (book of spells) or her athame (dagger). Additionally, officers are told not to be alarmed if they knock on the door of a home and see a person naked and blindfolded with his or her hands bound. “This is in accordance with ritual and has the full consent of the participant,” the officers are assured.

The manual also informs police officers about pagan festivals, such as the Beltane Bash, when pagans walk around in public donning their athames, which can be as long as swords, as a “visible symbol of their pagan faith.”

As Britain’s politically correct government increasingly gives legal and political cover to pagans, the bbc has emerged as its number-one sponsor in the media. On Halloween, or as it’s called by pagans, “Samhain,” the bbc gushed for hours over the various pagan ceremonies and festivals underway throughout the country. “We’ll be continuing with our coverage through the day, watching the celebration of the most important festival of the pagan year,” promised Robert Piggnott, the bbc’s religious affairs correspondent.

During its coverage, the bbc included interviews with druid leaders, as well as witches from a coven in Dorset. The witches, who spoke about casting spells and worshiping inanimate objects, were praised by the bbc as figureheads of a “reinvented religion.” On its website, the bbc has a page devoted to paganism, or as the Telegraph’s Damian Thompson put it more specifically, “devoted to its propaganda.” While the bbc’s website lauds the virtues of paganism and actively promotes it as a mainstream religion—noting that “public pagan ceremonies such as druid rituals and pagan marriages (handfastings) or funerals take place as a matter of routine”—not a word is mentioned about paganism’s links to Satanism, or its historic connection to Aryanism.

Beyond the increased coverage and legitimacy being given to pagans, critics are furious at the moral and spiritual equivalence being made between Christianity and paganism. “The bbc downplays Christianity and up-plays paganism, which is unreflective of British society,” remarked Mike Judge, spokesman for the Christian Institution. “It creates an atmosphere where it’s OK to marginalize Christians.”

Andrea Williams, director of the Christian Legal Center, is similarly frustrated. “It’s not always healthy to represent such beliefs as paganism as mainstream,” she warns. “It’s vital that our national broadcaster remembers our great Christian heritage and all the precepts that come from it that are good for the nation.”

When druidism was recognized as a religion last month, Melanie Phillips weighed in on the discussion. “Elevating them to the same status as Christianity is but the latest example of how the bedrock creed of this country is being undermined,” she wrote (emphasis mine). Worse still, the equating of paganism and Christianity is an attack on religion itself. As Phillips explained, “This is because druidry is simply not a religion.” To be classified as a religion, argued Phillips, an organization must have an “established structure of traditions, beliefs, literature and laws” and, above all, “share a belief in a supernatural deity (or more than one) that governs the universe.” By definition, paganism simply is not a religion.

By packaging and selling the weird and perverted practices of druids and witches as a religion, the British government and the bbc undermine Britain’s own Christian heritage!

The utter ridiculousness of this spiritual inversion is more profound when considered in the context of the government’s longstanding, often overbearing control of Christian organizations in Britain. Take the marginalization of Herbert Armstrong and his radio broadcast The World Tomorrow in the 1960s.

British citizens were introduced to Mr. Armstrong in January 1953, when The World Tomorrow began airing late at night once a week. In his 30-minute program, Mr. Armstrong primarily discussed global trends and world events in the context of Bible prophecy. When the radio program aired, the response from the British public was overwhelming. “Letters are pouring in by the hundreds!” Mr. Armstrong wrote in March 1954. “British leaders tell me the effect of The World Tomorrow on Britain is almost beyond belief!”

At the time, broadcasting laws made it impossible for the program to be broadcast from Britain, so The World Tomorrow was being beamed into Britain from Luxembourg. Cognizant that he had a largely untapped audience, Mr. Armstrong kept seeking new paths into Britain. In 1965, he took to the high seas, and the The World Tomorrow aired in Britain via radio stations broadcasting from ships off the British coast. Within a few months, The World Tomorrow was on radio across Britain twice a day, seven days a week.

Again, the response was terrific—but it didn’t last.

Within a few months, the government was saying that the radio broadcasts were illegal, and had branded the ships from which they were broadcast as “pirates.” Together with the bbc, which operates with the sanction and support of the government, the British government engaged in a campaign to rid the nation’s airwaves of Mr. Armstrong’s voice. First, exclusive radio licenses were given to the bbc, giving it a broadcasting monopoly. Next, legislation designed specifically to prevent The World Tomorrow airing in Britain was put before Parliament. In August 1967, the Marine Broadcasting Offenses Act was put into effect, making it illegal for Mr. Armstrong’s popular radio program to air in Britain.

“We had to go off the air in Britain—totally!” lamented Mr. Armstrong in September 1967. “It is really a terrible blow to the very work of God in Britain.” Thousands wrote in sharing their anger and frustration. These people “received facts, information, knowledge that is not available anywhere else,” Mr. Armstrong wrote. “It gave them daily inspiration, encouragement, faith and spiritual help” (co-worker letter, Sept. 28, 1967).

Now it was gone—all thanks to the British government and the bbc.

Today, this same legislation (which was updated in 1981) and a host of stringent conditions continue to make it nearly impossible for programs like The World Tomorrow to air on British radio or television.

Meanwhile, Britain’s 10,000 druids can now claim tax exemption, witches are treated with kid gloves and the bbc produces long segments lauding the virtues of paganism!