[Stengapsept]

Dear Andrea, Dear Athanasia,

I suspect most of us will think that Athanasia's words are worth a great deal more than 2 cents; indeed, they deserve a great deal of thought, and if put on a plaque in every government office that deals with children, they might help a little.

It is rather concerning that in the UK at least, the government and some of the media are attacking the UNICEF report as 'out of date' and 'biased against the economically successful'. I know just enough about the UN to be aware that there may well be some biases in the report, but one only has to read a newspaper or walk the streets to get a real sense that, in essentials, the report is on to something.

Nor is it just children who suffer; all of us do.

What has happened in the west is in danger of happening everywhere through globalisation, and the current model of 'development' is designed to ensure that it does. Everywhere, as a capitalist economic system has grown, and has brought considerable economic benefits and well as political freedoms with it (so please no one read this as some sort of anti-capitalist diatribe), secularisation has come in its wake.

For some time, during the process, the emerging secular society is able to rely on the moral norms laid down by the religion which it is busy superseding; indeed, there are even pockets of 'revivalism' which help reinforce those old norms. But, as time passes, secularists try to dismantle more and more of those norms by resort of moral relativism, arguing that there is not absolute truth and everything is relative.

This is no doubt good fun in the university common room, but out there on the streets it filters down in a vulgarised form as the notion that 'I've got my rights' and no one should interfere with my desire to do what I want. This is reinforced by the general message from society that life is about earning lots of money and getting lots of 'things'. If you happen to live somewhere where your education won't let you, the temptation to get these 'things' by other means can be overwhelming.

And where are the Churches in all of this?

Well, in the UK, my old Church, the Anglicans, like the Roman Catholics and some of the other Churches, do their best to help, but mainly as arms of the secular state. Church Schools no longer have a Christian ethos (indeed it is banned as 'non inclusive'), or stress those values Athanasia mentions; and so another generation grow up with no real exposure to them.

In the UK the media is entirely secular, and any attempt to get a toe hold for any religion is met with howls of anguish and clips from US T.V. showing Jimmy Swaggart or whoever, overacting to a degree that makes most UK Christians think that if that is what religious T.V. is about, better not go there then.

As a society we offer few incentives for men or women to stay at home with their children, and in the UK, house prices are so high that a young family will need both parents in the work place just to put a roof over their head. As a society we no longer seem to place a public value on motherhood - or, indeed, fatherhood.

Christianity offers, as it always has, the place where we can all find a model for good living, as well as salvation. How do we connect that to this society in which we live?

In Christ,

John