US Vice President JD Vance may have been right to warn Europe against retreating from Christian values during his speech at the Munich Security Conference. But parts of his message should also concern us, says Tony Wilson
European leaders are collectively shaking their heads, trying to come to terms with a new realpolitik after JD Vance addressed the Munich Security Conference last week.
Vance criticised Europe for turning its back on traditional values of free speech and democracy.
The Chairman, Christoph Heusgen, clearly upset by Vance’s speech, broke down in tears.
When Vance turned his attention to the UK, he referenced the questioning by police of people engaged in silent prayer in the vicinity of abortion clinics. This, he said, was an example of a worrying crackdown on free speech.
Many would agree, but when Vance offered European leaders advice on electoral propriety, incredulity followed. Vance was chastising Romania for annulling the results of an election where a far-right pro-Russian, Calin Georgescu, had apparently won (Ukraine’s Constitutional Court ruled there had been significant interference from Russia to boost his chances). Whatever the details, Vance has conveniently forgotten his own administration in the US still denies the legitimacy of the 2020 election in the US.
Vance can bemoan “totalitarianism” all he likes, but again, he and Trump have been very effective at shutting down voices that oppose their agenda. European media may well have a liberal bias that does not reflect the views of the majority, but there is more than one way to control and dominate the ideas that gain currency. Trump and Vance are experts at shouting down stories they dislike as fake news. Like war planes that throw out thousands of metal foil strips to confuse the enemy radar, Trump can disrupt the channels of civilised discourse with a deluge of exaggerated claims, fakery and baseless accusations.
Collectively, we used to agree on the facts but debate the implications. Now, we live in a Trumpian world of ‘alternative facts’ which is simply an Orwellian euphemism for lies.
Reasonable Christians who share a moderate, centrist politics are left in a state of confused anxiety. On the one hand, the liberal media that Trump so readily mocks, have consistently undermined the faith we profess. More than this, they have allowed an extreme form of liberal fascism to gain traction – so much so that a few prominent secular commentators, atheists and feminists have broken ranks to stand alongside Christians in their concerns over gender politics. A few years ago we would not have imagined a coalition of Richard Dawkins, Germaine Greer and the academic lesbian philosopher, Kathleen Stock would be on the same page as evangelical Christians expressing concerns over transgenderism.
But most Christians also want nothing to do with nationalist politics and abhor their isolationist and barely-hidden racist undertones.
The news that the Trump administration is calling on the Romanian government to return the passports of Tristan and Andrew Tate can only be described as bizarre international interference in judicial affairs. There is no legitimate US interest in this particular legal case centred on charges of people trafficking and sexual exploitation, leaving me to draw the conclusion that ‘strong’ men with social media heft is the real draw. If the Tate brothers are shown, by due legal process, to be guilty of the crimes for which they are charged, then it would be a travesty of justice to release them – regardless of the number of likes they get for their posts. Christians must stand against the rise of ‘strong-man’ politics, even when stories about the oppression of values that we hold to be important are weaponised by the far-right.
We should be thankful that voices as kind and irenic as the historians Tom Holland and Larry Siedentrop have reminded us that liberal individualism was birthed from the Christian worldview. Holland, in his book Dominion, argues that human rights, the rule of law, healthcare, education and care for the poor emerge from the Christian worldview over two millennia of development across Europe. There was nothing inevitable about this nor is it a nailed-on certainty that such attitudes will prevail.
The extreme outworking of this liberal culture is busily sawing off the branch we all sit on – let’s not fall into the jaws of the far-right wolf waiting under the tree.
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