Britain has been undergoing a cultural revolution in the last few years, just as we have in the United States. The revolutionaries have been attacking historical figures, judging them by today’s standards, and refusing to take a balanced approach; in other words, if one negative thing can be found about some historical figure, the statues are toppled and the buildings and colleges renamed.
It is a blatant attempt to divest Britons (and Americans) of their history; that is what Leftist revolutionaries always do, because a people with no history are much easier to manipulate and control. As George Orwell (who understood totalitarianism) said, “he who controls the past controls the future.”
The attack on Great Britain’s history is the culmination of the “the long march through the institutions,” which is the takeover, by cultural or Gramscian Marxists, of all of the meaningful institutions of Western Civilization, starting with the academy.
The irony is that the very institutions (the National Trust is one mentioned in the videos below) that were established to protect and preserve the cultural patrimony of Great Britain and the other nations of Western Civilization have been taken over and staffed by Leftists, who then use those institutions to attack Western Civilization (including, ironically, the far-seeing white males who established and endowed those same institutions). Their weapons are the various critical theories, most prominently critical race theory, which are the universal acid they use to dissolve their host societies.
This relates to our ongoing study of Revelation 11 because it is clear that not only is the atheistic revolutionary attack on Christendom, as described in Revelation 11, still the dominant world modality, it has increased in intensity, capturing the ruling elites in the English-speaking Protestant countries—Australia, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, and the United States—which for centuries had been the bulwark against the Left, starting with the Royal Navy’s check on revolutionary France and Napoleon, and continuing with the United States’ opposition to Soviet Communism.
Now a group in Great Britain called the New Culture Forum is pushing back against the cultural Marxists. They have produced a series of videos defending Britain’s history and culture.
In Episode one, it was noted that most of the freedoms and rights we took for granted in the West originated in Great Britain, including the idea, as expressed in Magna Carta, that the monarch must himself be subject to the laws of the land. Britain also gave the world parliamentary monarchy, the common law, the right to trial by jury, and other breakthroughs in democratic self-government.
Peter Whittle, the founder of the New Culture Forum and host of Episode 3, gives a list of the accomplishments of Great Britain and the British, noting that there is much to be proud of. But Whittle’s list was pitifully inadequate, so I have compiled my own more inclusive list (although it is very far from complete or comprehensive):
England’s great statesmen, military commanders, and rulers have included Steven Langton, Henry VIII, Oliver Cromwell, Elizabeth I, Francis Drake, Robert Walpole (first Prime Minister), Horatio Nelson, Arthur Wellesley (Duke of Wellington), Thomas Cochrane, Frederick North, Lord Castlereagh, Pitt the younger, William Wilberforce, Robert Peel (the prime minster who invented modern policing—hence “bobbies” or “peelers”), Charles George “Chinese” Gordon, Herbert Kitchener, David Lloyd George, Winston Churchill, Margaret Thatcher, William Gladstone, Benjamin Disraeli, T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia), David Stirling, Hugh Dowding (who won the Battle of Britain), Bernard Montgomery, and many others.
In religion, Britain gave us the epochal achievement of the King James Bible, and such remarkable churchmen and Christian pastors, scholars, writers and revivalists as Stephen Langton, William Tyndale, John Wycliffe, John Knox, Nicholas Ridley, Thomas Cranmer, John and Charles Wesley, George Whitefield, William Wilberforce, Samuel Wilberforce (son of William), William Carey, Andrew Fuller, Matthew Henry, William Booth (founder of the Salvation Army), Charles Spurgeon Hudson Taylor, and C.S. Lewis.
In science, Great Britain gave us perhaps the greatest scientist who ever lived in Isaac Newton, discoverer of the laws of gravity and the co-founder of calculus. Francis Bacon was the pioneer of the scientific method. Notable British naturalists include Robert Hooke, Mary Anning, Gideon Mantell, William Buckland, Richard Owen, Alfred Russel Wallace, William “strata” Smith, Charles Lyell (boo!) and Charles Darwin (hiss!), and Francis Crick. Notable British physicists include Lord Kelvin, James Joule, Stephen Hawking, Ernest Rutherford, James Chadwick, Roger Penrose, J.J. Thomsen, Paul Dirac, Henry Moseley. Notable mathematicians include Alan Turing, Charles Babbage, Tim Berners-Lee, George Boole, G.H. Hardy, and Alfred North Whitehead. Notable chemists include Robert Boyle (founder of the discipline) Michael Faraday, Rosalind Franklin, John Dalton, William Perkin, and Frederick Sanger.
In medicine, there was Alexander Fleming, the discoverer of Penicillin and Edward Jenner, who pioneered inoculation with the smallpox vaccine. Then there was James Parkinson, John Langdon Down, Thomas Addison, Thomas Sydenham, Charles Bell, and Thomas Hodgkin (okay, yes, I cherry-picked the ones with a disease named after them).
In language, Great Britain gave us English itself, which is now the global language. In poetry and theatre, the greats include William Shakespeare, Christopher Marlowe, Andrew Marvel, Robert Herrick, Richard Lovelace, John Dryden, William Wordsworth, John Keats, John Milton, Perce Bushe Shelley, William Blake, John Donne, Geoffrey Chaucer, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Robert Burns, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Lord Tennyson, A. E. Houseman, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Dylan Thomas, and Matthew Arnold.
In literature, the standouts include Jonathan Swift, Daniel DeFoe, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Emily and Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austen, George Orwell, E.M. Forster, Joseph Conrad, Thomas Hardy, Henry Fielding, Samuel Butler, William Makepeace Thackery, P.G. Wodehouse, Anthony Trollope, Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, Graham Greene, and Evelyn Waugh.
The greatest British composers include Henry Purcell, William Byrd, Thomas Tallis, George Frederick Handel, who wrote the immortal “Messiah” and Zadok the Priest (and Nathan the Prophet anointed Solomon king), which was played at the recent anointing of King Charles (born in Germany, Handel was an Englishman by choice), Gustav Holst, Edward Elgar, William Walton, Benjamin Britten, Ralph Vaughn Williams, and the film scorer John Barry.
Britain’s great historians include Bede, Geoffrey of Monmouth, Edward Gibbon, H.G. Wells, David Hume, Lord Acton, Fredrick William Maitland, Thomas Babbington Macauley, Thomas Arnold, Arnold Toynbee, William Whewell, James George Frazer, Robert Conquest, Steven Runciman, G. M. Trevelyan, Hugh Trevor-Roper, Paul Johnson, Dan Jones, Max Hastings, Antony Beevor, Martin Gilbert, Niall Ferguson, and Andrew Roberts.
We have yet to mention that England started the industrial revolution in her “dark satanic mills,” and produced such advances as Henry Bessemer’s method for making steel out of pig iron, the first commercial telegraph, and the power loom, which revolutionized the textile industry. Meanwhile, John Walker invented a safe, inexpensive and reliable fire-starter, the match. It is also interesting (in that Britons are infamous for having bad teeth) that Britain gave the world the first mass-produced toothbrush.
The industrial revolution that began in Britain in the late 18th Century (convention says 1760) spread to America in the 19th Century and eventually to the rest of the West. Just within the past 30 years, largely because the United States has outsourced about a $1 trillion/year worth of its manufacturing to east Asia, and much of its products-support call centers to India (which learned English thanks to having been a British colony), almost the entire world has gone from agricultural subsistence (at best) to great wealth, even for many of the common people. The bottom line is that thanks to Britain’s industrial revolution of 260 years ago, the entire world is far wealthier than it has ever been.
Not only did Britain make the world wealthy, she also pioneered the theory of wealth. The science of economics was founded by a Scottish moral philosopher named Adam Smith. The seminal work in the field was Smith’s, “An Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations,” first published in 1776, which explained how and why free markets work. Other notable British economists of the classical and neo-classical schools include John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, Robert Malthus, and Alfred Marshall. (Sadly, just as Britain produced some very famous naturalists, e.g., Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin, who argued for a doctrine of natural history contrary to truths revealed in God’s word, Britain also produced some famous men I would call anti-economists, most notably John Maynard Keynes, who argued that if the government will just spend enough money, we can all get rich.)
Britain not only began the process of making the world rich, she did much to make it fun and entertaining. In popular culture, Charles Dickens created “Ebenezer Scrooge,” the main character in “A Christmas Carol” and thereby became the man who invented Christmas; J.M. Barrie created Peter Pan, Mary Shelley was the creator of Frankenstein and his monster; Lewis Carroll was the author of Alice in Wonderland, Arthur Conan Doyle created the immortal Sherlock Holmes and thereby essentially invented the whole genre of detective fiction (the most successful practitioner of which was an English lady, Agatha Christie, whose 66 novels and 14 short story collections have sold an estimated 2 billion copies); the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson became famous for Treasure Island, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and A Child’s Garden of Verses; H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine, The Island of Doctor Moreau, The Invisible Man, and War of the Worlds, and, with France’s Jules Verne, invented the genre of science fiction; the great Christian apologist C.S. Lewis wrote the Chronicles of Narnia, and his friend J.R.R. Tolkien created the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings, with their own language and an imaginary world unlike any other. With Lewis, Tolkien essentially invented the genre of fantasy fiction.
In more recent popular culture, Ian Fleming created James Bond and thereby all but invented the spy-novel genre of books and movies (the James Bond films alone have earned $7 billion in worldwide box office). The British bands of the 1960s, led by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, revolutionized “rock ‘n roll” (which was invented in America). the Sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clark helped take science fiction far beyond where H.G. Wells and Jules Verne had left it. In cinema, a spate of British-born actors, including Charlie Chaplin, Charles Laughton, Laurence Olivier, Ralph Richarson, John Gielgud, Vivien Leigh, Jean Simmons, Deborah Kerr, Olivia de Havilland, Joane Fontaine, Audrey Hepburn, Cary Grant, David Niven, Peter Sellers, Alec Guiness, Richard Burton, Peter O’Toole, Albert Finney, Michael Cain, Ben Kinglsey, Oliver Reed, Richard Harris, Vanessa Redgrave, Jacqueline Bisset, Rex Harrison, Sean Connery, Robert Shaw, Roger Moore, Jack Hawkins, Ian Holm, Hugh Grant, Elizabeth Hurley, and Anthony Hopkins, gave the Hollywood motion picture industry a touch of class. The dean of American comedians, Bob Hope, was born in England. Andrew Lloyd Webber, the musical theater impresario known for Cats, Evita, The Phantom of the Opera, and many others gave Broadway and global musical theatre a shot in the arm. Lastly, J.K. Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series has sold 500 million books, becoming a multi-billion-dollar publishing and motion picture enterprise, with the movies earning over $7 billion.
Reviewing this list of names and accomplishments, it is clear that Great Britain has gifted the world with astonishing greatness, out of all proportion to the size of this small island kingdom. The only greater nation is Britain’s offspring, the United States, to which she bequeathed her language, culture, and concepts of the common law and self-government through elected representatives. America’s main innovations were to increase freedom by disestablishing religion and guaranteeing free exercise for all denominations, and to increase equality by jettisoning the vestiges of Britain’s rigid class system, dispensing with an hereditary monarchy and outlawing titles of nobility.
In America, the Marxist attack is focused like a laser beam on race; critical race theory is the weapon of choice for overthrowing the U.S. But since Great Britain never had (in her homeland) the issues with slavery and race that America has had, the Marxist avenue of attack against Britain is her empire. This is deemed to be her unforgivable sin, for which she merits the utter destruction the Left have planned for her.
But was the British Empire really that bad? One of the men interviewed extensively in Episode 3, Nigel Biggar, has written a book purporting to be a moral reckoning on Britain’s empire that, if not exactly defending the Empire, has sought to bring reason and balance to a moral assessment of it. Biggar, who is a theologian by training and is retired from a career in the Church of England, notes that while there was slavery in the empire from around 1650 to 1800, when the moral tide turned and the great Christian statesman William Wilberforce finally won his long battle to convince parliament to outlaw the slave trade, no one did more than Great Britain to stamp it out. A squadron of Royal Navy ships was stationed off the central African coast to catch slave ships and free their cargo. Gordon, the famous Christian soldier, single-handedly ended the slave trade in Sudan, before the Muslim messiah, the “Mahdi,” re-instituted it.
The ultimate moral success of the British imperial project is demonstrated by the fact that in most cases Britain peacefully surrendered its imperial conquests (compare with France’s brutal struggle to hang onto Indochina and Algeria) and bequeathed to them her system of law, education, transportation, and parliamentary self-government. And these places have typically fared much better, as independent nations in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries, than their neighbors that were never under British rule. That’s just a fact obvious to anyone who has done much traveling.
Britons should be as unapologetic about their empire as Mark Steyn, who noted the light touch that Britain typically brought to imperial governance:
“The British accomplished much with little; at the height of empire, an insignificant number of Anglo-Celts controlled the entire Indian subcontinent. A confident culture can dominate far larger numbers of people, as England did for much of modern history.”
Mark Steyn’s bottom line on the British Empire is that England’s “language, culture, and law have been the single greatest force for good in this world.” An exaggeration—I would argue that Bible Christianity has been the greatest force for good—but Steyn’s view has a strong kernel of truth.
Episode Four, hosted by Emma Webb, is the most substantive of the videos, and the only one that notes that the cultural revolution ongoing in recent years is a direct lineal descendant of the French Revolution:
“In the 1790s, an anti-Christian mob almost destroyed Notre Dame Cathedral. The French Revolutionaries decapitated statues as well as people, and they didn’t care very much if the statues were the biblical kings of Judah rather than the kings of France.”
And did those feet in ancient time,
Walk upon England’s mountains green:
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England’s pleasant pastures seen!
And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?
Bring me my bow of burning gold:
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold:
Bring me my Chariot of Fire!
I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land. —William Blake
Blake’s poem was set to music by Hubert Parry. Although Britain has several patriotic songs, including “Rule Britannia,” “Land of Hope and Glory” (set to Elgar’s “Pomp and Circumstance”), and the national anthem is “God save the King” or “the Queen,” as the case may (and since 1837, given the very lengthy reigns of Victoria (64 years) and Elizabeth II (70 years), it has been “Queen” 72% of the time), “Jerusalem” remains Britain’s favorite patriotic hymn. (For the Welsh, it is perhaps “Men of Harlech”)