I put off writing this for a while, for all sorts of reasons, much of which boiled down to feeling immensely depressed and despondent about it all. That, however, is faithless. The virtue of Christian hope is all about not giving in, about keeping on keeping on – and yes, I’m re-reading Lord of the Rings at the moment, which has that as a major theme. So, for what it’s worth, here is my take, it’s not very cheery, but when I despair I remember that it is to God that we look for salvation, and that we put not our trust in princes.

The rioting and lawlessness that followed the foul attack in Southport must be dealt with by the law, without fear or favour. On the King’s Peace does civilisation depend. Thus far I agree with Starmer, but no further. Most especially the absurd disproportion on display between the sentences given to angry working class white people, and those given to other categories, has become darkly comic. Starmer has quite clearly chosen a side against the white working classes – and, I guess following a government briefing, Mr Welby has done the same. Such things are catastrophic, and the consequences are going to be grim.

Attention has been paid to the rumours that the attacker was Islamic, which led to the attack on the Mosque, and all the consequent disorder. So there has been a crackdown on bad speech, not just incitement, but all that might be considered ‘legal but harmful’ – watch what you post says Big Brother. What this ignores is that the bad speech, the rumour, was simply a match tossed upon kindling soaked in petrol. If it hadn’t been this event and this story then it would have been another one. The firm hand of the law managed to suppress the disorder this time, but it will not always be able to do so. Indeed, the success of that suppression, and the manner in which that suppression was carried out, has added more fuel to the pile. The eventual conflagration will be more severe. In the end something will give.

Our elite supports an ideology of multiculturalism, what I, as a short-hand, tend to call the secular. The secular mindset is premised on the superiority of the WEIRD understanding of the world, within which religious belief is something that can provide all sorts of interesting colour to life, but is not of practical consequence, and best conducted in private. Secularism is in fact intensely Protestant (I might write more about that at some point – the Protestant Grammar of Wokery) and one of the most harmful elements of the secular approach is the way it is unconscious of its own theological premises and biases. After all, every world-view worthy of the name contains theological premises and biases, the point is only to uncover them and bring them into the light to see if they are good, true or beautiful, or simply to be discarded.

So our public order is structured on the dismissal of the validity of religious belief, most especially Christian belief. You can believe what you like so long as you keep it to yourself, and in the meantime the public square will support the values of tolerance, diversity and equality driven principally (this often goes unmentioned) by the need to feed more human fuel into the great maw of Mammon (industrial capitalism). Religious belief is inefficient…

Which leads to our present challenge, and the choice that will inevitably have to be made, publicly, clearly and committedly: do we preserve the freedoms and tolerances that have been granted to those hitherto treated poorly (most especially women and sexual minorities, but also ethnic and religious minorities), or do we tacitly sacrifice those freedoms and tolerances in order to appease one particular religious group? How does multiculturalism cope with a constituency that radically rejects multiculturalism? Secularism, sadly, lacks the philosophical – spiritual! – resources to cope with such a question. It is a vehicle that has been running on empty for some time, and the engine has started to sputter.

As I touched on before, this is the tragedy of the modern left. Cultural conflict is not supposed to happen in a multicultural society, we’re all supposed to just get along. Yet where there are egregious offences committed by one group against another, and where, not only are the criminal group protected by the state, but those crying out against the crimes are themselves criminalised, and oppressed, and victimised even further by the people that are meant to protect them (protect everyone) – this is not the path to peace.

One of the most heartbreaking stories I have read about the child rape gangs was of one father who went to the local police station to raise the alarm, because he was concerned about his daughter, and who was rejected by the police for being a racist. The Jay report put such truths in language accessible to (acceptable to) the authorities, but it is the specific and individual stories that need to be felt in order for what happened at the hotel in Rotherham to be understood.

Secularism cannot cope with this. Multi-cultural ideology is a cruel fiction that abolishes the possibility of peace and friendship across cultural divides. Violence inevitably follows.

Which brings me to scapegoating. The particular cultural conflict that Starmer et al are trying to suppress is a distinctive of the problems that we face in our country in our time. The underlying dark dynamics however are of much more ancient and universal character. When a society is stressed – and so many of our left-behind communities have been dealing with decades of increasing stress – and when that society starts to break down within itself, so that there is conflict with the society, then that society will eventually find a scapegoat. The scapegoat will be blamed and the previous tensions will be consumed in an orgy of newly created unity against that scapegoat. At which point that scapegoat will be purged from the group, either by expulsion or by elimination.

Now that Starmer has committed himself against a path of reconciliation (with Welby, ironically, in tow) the only question is: who will be the scapegoat?

A brief interjection: for nearly twenty years now I’ve been warning about this in sermons, and I’ve assumed that it will be the Islamic community, and I’ve said that the Christian community has to be ready to protect the Muslims (mosques and curry houses and so on) but one reflection from the last few weeks has been that I could have gotten this wrong. There is actually a group that is much smaller in number than the Muslim community, and which is much more widely resented and despised – and that is the ‘new elite’ political class itself. It’s possible that what we are headed towards is less a National Socialist scapegoating of a religious minority than a Revolutionary period of Great Fear and guillotines.

What I know is that there is an immense depth of sheer rage in the country, with insults being piled upon injuries by our clueless political class. We are in an immensely precarious position. There will be an inciting incident. Perhaps it will be something nakedly evil but essentially random like the Southport attack, but more likely it will be an Islamic terror attack, along the lines of all the ones before. Then the scapegoating will start, and the devilish mobs will whip themselves up with self-righteous fury, and shouts of ‘Crucify’ will fill the air, and only the Prince of this World will regard the outcome with joy.

This is what I have begun to think of as Starmergeddon. It is the logical end-point of the mainstream mentality of this country, it is what happens when God is abandoned: violence, disorder, hatred, the collapse of all human fellowship and friendship. I don’t know what it would take to shake the elite out of their mind-set. For when the first tremors are seen – as in Southport – then the secular view is not yet shaken in its certainties. For these are bad people doing bad things, have we not always said as much? Aren’t they revolting? And the elite continue, convinced of their rectitude. How bad might it have to become before they recognise the unsustainability of their path? How many mosques will be burned, how many asylum seekers will be lynched, just what would it take to bring them to a better acquaintance with reality? How big must the catastrophe be? Is it even possible for them to ask ‘are we the baddies?’

In my book I talked about the ‘accumulating crises of our time’ – well, the crises are now starting to crescendo. Ecological overshoot, resource wars, migrant flows, ethnic strife, economic stagnation if not collapse… such are trends that have been in place for so long that we have become accustomed to them, yet ‘if something cannot go on forever then it won’t’. I believe that in so many areas we have now reached the ‘won’t’! I do rather suspect that Peak Oil is going to knock loudly on the door and say hello too.

Which is why I have been feeling so despairing. Cassandra mode, however, is not a fit state for a Christian to occupy. Yet this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope…

God is not mocked. Reality is one of the names of God, and we are driving head first at great speed into the brick wall of reality, on so many fronts. I cannot help but think that the revival of a religious sensibility, which is the only element that might enable us to navigate the furies effectively, has already started. There are enough people, and their number is growing, who see that the tools we used to create these problems are not the ones which will enable us to solve the problems. Deep down we know the truth, and the truth is a person.

Moses only really started to make headway when the court magicians could not keep up with the signs of YHWH. I look for the day when our court magicians run out of words; that is when the divine speech will be heard: “If my people, who are called by my name, will humble themselves and pray and seek my face and turn from their wicked ways, then I will hear from heaven, and I will forgive their sin and will heal their land.”