Riots in England: Spiritual Collapse and a Prediction Tragically Fulfilled

Thirty-two years ago Josh McDowell addressed students at Campus Crusade for Christ’s Institute for Biblical Studies with a sobering message. Obviously humans have been inflicting violence on one another for as long as we’ve been around, but Josh had a prediction to add to that shared knowledge: that the nature of that violence was about to change. Based on the Western world’s departure from belief in transcendent love and virtue, based in knowledge of the living God, Josh warned the students to expect violence to become more senseless and random than it has ever been before.

I thought about Josh’s prediction when Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold committed their horrifying murders at Columbine High, and again when the Oklahoma City Federal Building was bombed. The shootings at Virginia Tech brought the same prediction to mind once again. Now, though, it appears it is really coming true. Witness these statements out of England:

From CNN:

Prime Minister David Cameron blames the riots that shook Britain over the past 10 days on a “slow-motion moral collapse … in parts of our country,” he said Monday.

Cameron listed problems including “Irresponsibility. Selfishness. Behaving as if your choices have no consequences. Children without fathers. Schools without discipline. Reward without effort. Crime without punishment. Rights without responsibilities. Communities without control,” in a speech in his constituency in Oxfordshire.

And from Max Hastings in the Daily Mail (with thanks to Chuck Colson):

A few weeks after the U.S. city of Detroit was ravaged by 1967 race riots in which 43 people died, I was shown around the wrecked areas by a black reporter named Joe Strickland.

He said: ‘Don’t you believe all that stuff people here are giving media folk about how sorry they are about what happened. When they talk to each other, they say: “It was a great fire, man!” ’

I am sure that is what many of the young rioters, black and white, who have burned and looted in England through the past few shocking nights think today.

It was fun. It made life interesting. It got people to notice them. As a girl looter told a BBC reporter, it showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like’.

If you live a normal life of absolute futility, which we can assume most of this week’s rioters do, excitement of any kind is welcome. The people who wrecked swathes of property, burned vehicles and terrorised communities have no moral compass to make them susceptible to guilt or shame….

Their behaviour on the streets resembled that of the polar bear which attacked a Norwegian tourist camp last week. They were doing what came naturally and, unlike the bear, no one even shot them for it.

A former London police chief spoke a few years ago about the ‘feral children’ on his patch — another way of describing the same reality.

These are but a few of multiple descriptions and explanations offered for Britain’s riots. Of course there was more: economic hardship, broken families and (in the PM’s words) “children without fathers” (something to be noted with respect to gay “marriage” arguments, by the way), and obviously the police event that triggered it in Tottenham. Yet it seems to me that Josh was tragically right. This is directly traceable to the spiritual climate of the country.

What is it, after all, that makes people act like feral beasts? No, let me ask that a different way. For generations we have been inundated with the message that we are beasts; that we are products of the same mindless material processes that produced the Norwegian polar bear. So the question is, whatever has it been that has kept us from acting like feral beasts?

The Christian’s answer is that it is the image of God within all humans, by which we know that we are more than animals, and by which we understand there is right and wrong. I am not saying it is belief in God that keeps us from acting like beasts; I am saying it is the reality of who we are as God’s unique creation, whether we believe it or not. Still belief plays a part in it: for after we’ve hammered ourselves repeatedly enough with the message that we are but beasts, it becomes harder and harder to remember we’re not really supposed to believe it’s true.

And then there is the loss of moral constraint. “It was fun. It was interesting… It showed ‘the rich’ and the police that ‘we can do what we like.'” So if we like driving our car into a crowd and killing three people, then that might just be the fun and interesting thing to do. Though we are created in God’s image and know right and wrong, we have a demonstrated propensity to set that aside when other drives and desires compete with it. Historically those competing desires have involved things like intense greed, jealousy, outrage, and the like. Our sense of decency and right has been strong enough that it has taken something exceptionally powerful to override it and bring us to the point of burning, killing, and looting. It seems that bar has been dropped now, and all it takes to get us over it is boredom.

Britain’s Prime Minister described parts of his country as having experienced slow-motion moral collapse. He hit it on the head when he spoke of “behaving as if your choices have no consequences.” I wonder if he sees the spiritual connection. Our culture repeatedly tells us there is no God and therefore no consequences for evil choices as long as you don’t get caught (and sometimes even if you do). Say that often enough, and soon it becomes one more thing we’re going to find hard not to believe.

So on those three counts—the message that we are but animals, the lifting of moral constraint, and the denial of consequences—these riots can be traced to spiritual causes. Josh was right. I am not happy that he was, and neither is he. The solution he presented then remains the right one, though inadequately applied: a genuine spiritual revolution, turning our nations back to knowledge of God and to life in Christ.

I close with a note to those who see spiritual solutions as insufficiently scientific. Predictions fulfilled are the ground on which theories are confirmed. Josh presented these students with a theory and a prediction to go with it. The prediction has come tragically true in Littleton, in Charlottesville, in Oklahoma City, and in multiple English cities. If you value science as you say you do, don’t set this theory aside too quickly.

You may also like...

10 Responses

  1. Nick Matzke says:

    Hmm. So on your theory, before the recent event where culture became godless, history should be free of riots and mass murder. Please give some evidence for this.

  2. Tom Gilson says:

    Please give some evidence that you understood what I was talking about.

  3. Crude says:

    I don’t see what the problem here is, Tom.

    Those “riots” as you call them were nothing but evidence of the spread of secular values, and the fulfillment of secular desires.

    “I want a TV.” is a secular desire.
    “If I want a TV and I can smash a window and take it, that’s permissible.” is a secular value.
    “If I can get away with breaking the law when I feel like it, then there’s no reason not to break the law when I feel like it.” is another secular value.

    Admit it. You’re just upset at such a powerful display of secular values. 😉

  4. SteveK says:

    Dr. Coyne, is that you? 😉

    Tom said:

    I am not saying it is belief in God that keeps us from acting like beasts; I am saying it is the reality of who we are as God’s unique creation, whether we believe it or not. Still belief plays a part in it: for after we’ve hammered ourselves repeatedly enough with the message that we are but beasts, it becomes harder and harder to remember we’re not really supposed to believe it’s true.

  5. I’m not convinced that the London riots are anything really new or more depraved than what we’ve witnessed before in our history. They are evidence, however, that we’re not evolving to any kind of Star Trek-style secular kumbaya. Maranatha.

  6. SteveK says:

    Tom said: If you value science as you say you do, don’t set this theory aside too quickly.

    And from the link in comment #8, we find another that we ought not brush aside too quickly.

    For too long, people have thought that what they do in their private lives has no effect on the public consciousness, but clearly it does.

  7. An interesting perspective on the recent riots in England. Without any constraint on human behavior, life would be in the words of Thomas Hobbes – “nasty, brutish and short”. If we dismiss objective moral absolutes that transcend society, there is no restraint – it’s then every man for himself.

    Thanks for sharing your thoughts.