This weeks AP article
Have you read The Tiger Who Came to Tea – the well-known children’s book by Judith Kerr? It’s about a tiger who comes to visit little Sophie in her home, eats all her food and drinks everything. When Sophie’s father comes home and sees what has happened he take the whole family out for tea. That’s it. That’s the story. Are you suitably offended? Apparently you should be. Back in my home country of Scotland, a campaign group called Zero Tolerance, who have a worthy cause, (preventing domestic abuse), have done that cause no good at all. They have placed The Tiger Who Came to Tea on their list of questionable books.
Having done a ‘gender and diversity audit on 3,000 books placed in Scottish nurseries, they found that The Tiger Who Came to Tea is suspect because the tiger is male (not female or gender neutral) and reflects unrealistic and harmful stereotypes of family life. I find it somewhat amusing that they don’t apparently think the unrealistic part of the story is a tiger who rings the doorbell, sits at the dinner table and has tea and biscuits! No – the unrealistic part is being male! The notion that this children’s book is the cause of male domestic violence is about as believable as the Australian Anglicans report that complementarian theology is responsible for domestic violence amongst Anglicans!
This could of course just be another amusing tale of a woke world gone mad – but it’s not funny. This is not an isolated incident but rather indicative of the retreat from rationality that has gripped so many of our ruling class. The long march through the institutions is stretching its tentacles everywhere.
Take for example Sydney Opera House. I love the Opera House – because I love opera. And so, somewhat naively, I signed up to their newsletter. I say naively, because I thought Sydney Opera House newsletter might be about, well, opera. How wrong could I be?! I guess opera is tolerated – even though all the best ones were written by dead, white, European males. But Sydney Opera House is as woke as Sydney Book Festival. It’s all about climate change, racism, feminism, gender identity, poverty (ironic from the $200 per ticket people!) and even advocating the rights of ‘sex workers’. If it’s got a woke label, Sydney Opera house will be selling it.
There are some Christians who are in denial – either because they understandably don’t want to be associated with some right-wing extremists (everything is extreme in Twitterland!), or because the causes themselves seem ‘nice’. Surely every Christian would want to be anti-racist, care for the planet and for gender equality? But we don’t think. We just accept things at face value and so we don’t see where this has come from and where it all leads – including in the Church.
What we must grasp is that most (not all) of the major academic, cultural, political and business institutions have now been captured by a progressive ideology which is fundamentally at heart anti-Christian. It’s also anti-family, anti-democratic and anti-humanity. Our young people are being indoctrinated into this unthinking ideology by the media, the corporate world, sometimes the church, and of course the academy.
Speaking of which a student at the University of Sydney reported this from one of the lecturers (and this is but the tip of an iceberg of examples):
“If people cling so tenaciously to fossil fuels, it is because they secure cultural meaning and political subjectivity especially… It is no coincidence that white, conservative men – regardless of class – appear to be among the most vociferous climate deniers and leading fossil fuel proponents in the West… A feminist reading of fossil fuel system points to the emergence of a dangerous convergence between climate change, a threatened fossil fuel system, and an increasingly fragile Western hyper masculinity.”
For a moment substitute the word ‘white’ with ‘black’. How long do you think that lecturer would remain in employment? But this is the world today. Where it is perfectly acceptable for our young people to be taught that climate change is caused by ‘Western hyper masculinity’! It is irrational, unscientific psycho-babble. Dare to question it and you will soon find out just how ‘tolerant’ our ‘tolerant’ masters are!
Have you noticed – all these institutions and public bodies are largely funded by the tax payer and run by the elites. We pay these people to perpetuate this, at best laughable, and at worst dangerous, indoctrination. It’s like paying at a restaurant for a chef to give you food poisoning.
Again, far too many Christians just don’t see the danger. We too adopt the postures (whether of right or left doesn’t matter) of the culture wars. We don’t stop, take a step back and observe what is happening right under our eyes. Why does it matter?
Judith Kerr, the author of The Tiger who Came to Tea, was German. She was a Jewish refugee from the Nazis. She watched them burn her father’s books for being too ‘unGerman’. In today’s Western democracies we are moving away from the basic principles of Western liberal democracies, founded upon Christianity.
As we do so we are moving into a world, where children’s books get burned; praying for conversion can get you jailed; denying that men can give birth can get you banned, and refusing to wear the woke symbol of the day can lose you your job. Does it matter? Yes! When the foundations are being destroyed what do you think the consequences will be? When the foundations are being destroyed, what can the righteous do? (Ps 11:3). We can look up. Remember that the Lord is on his heavenly throne. Cry out to him for mercy. And proclaim his name, word and glory. We don’t burn books. We write them.
Learning from Culture – ‘Bullies and Saints’ Review – Part 3 – AP
Really! That report says that “complementarian theology is responsible for domestic violence”! The stink is instead bad theology and devastingly poor application of theology. I’m reading John Dickson’s Bullies and Saints and finish every chapter thinking that the church is like a dog returing to its vomit; domestic violence being a modern case.
A very serious comment , but David , I had to smile , ” It’s like paying at a restaurant for a chef to give you food poisoning.” Crackin’ !!
“denying that men can give birth can get you banned”
Okay, I’m sure we’ll all have seen it but here it is again, from the Monty Python people:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sFBOQzSk14c
They certainly could not put that in a film today. That’s part of the problem with all these culture warriors; they’ve no sense of humour. So enjoy the clip while you can. Sooner or later You Tube will ban it because its transphobe, or something.
May I recommend the following book: “Under Siege” by Austen Ruse. Okay, the subtitle is “No better time to be a Catholic” but most of the contents would be of benefit to any Christians. (Incidentally, at one point in the book, Austen Ruse praises the co-operation between Catholics and Evangelicals on social issues. He also highlights things that Catholics can learn from Evangelicals.) The book examines what he calls the creation of a State Church, which imposes its dogmas and seeks out and punishes heretics. (One thing about the book is that it is written about the situation in the USA but most of it applies equally to other western countries.) In his final chapter he talks about what we can do. He divides this into three categories: ‘quiet and privately’, ‘flying the flag’ and ‘charging the sniper’s nest’. For most people it will be the first one. (Incidentally I think that David qualifies for ‘charging the sniper’s nest’.) We can act ‘quietly and privately’ by refusing to use the language of the culture warriors. So we should avoid using the terms ‘chair’ or ‘chairperson’ and instead refer to the chairman or chairwoman. Another way we can act ‘quietly and privately’ is by helping to fund those who are charging the sniper’s nest. He points out that the snipers are massively funded (Soros, Gates, Rockefeller Foundation, etc) whereas those on the other side have much less money to fund their campaigns. So after you have finished this, go and write a cheque to an organisation that actively resists the ant-Christian agenda.
Amen! Well said David. The reason so much of the so called professing church either signs up to this or ignores it as irrelevant, is because they are not “born again” so don’t have the Holy Ghost leading them into all truth, or convicting them of aspects against the Lord Jesus, His teaching & Gospel, and ‘the whole counsel of God’.
Amazingly, there are unsaved worldly people who do not profess to be Christians who can see through all this twaddle, and will even stand up & be counted & speak against it. Virtually all the professing visible church has so much of the world integrated into it, we should not be surprised to it falling into this apostasy & madness.
Keep standing on the Rock for His truth, dearly beloved brother in Christ.
David,
Maybe the non-Christians who are on the same side as us are the kind of people St Paul was referring to in Romans:
“For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of men who by their wickedness suppress the truth. For what can be known about God is plain to them, because God has shown it to them. Ever since the creation of the world his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity, has been clearly perceived in the things that have been made.” (Romans 1: 18-20) I am, of course referring to the ability of everyone to perceive “his invisible nature, namely, his eternal power and deity ….in the things that have been made” and not to those who incur God’s wrath. It’s what people are talking about when they talk about ‘the natural law’.
The Tiger who Came for Tea is really about the mother’s excuse for not having the father’s dinner ready when he comes home from work. There’s nothing to eat in the house, forcing him to take them out for dinner.
In the politically incorrect tale, the tiger was said to have drunk “all daddy’s beer”, I recall, embarrassed. I distinctly remember being amused at the gendered satire, but at the same time (unnecessarily, I now realise) concerned, at the comical stereotyping, in the form of what I took to be the assertion of the male parent of the household’s assumed ownership and patriarchal control of the entire stock of beer in the family home which the tiger visited. For surely drinking beer is a hallmark of truly liberated mummies, I reasoned (I am now ashamed to admit).
Is that line of the text, I wonder, the seed of contemporary woke doubt as to the soundness of the otherwise innocuous fable that has now reached fruition? If so, I repent of my politically correct thought when reading the story to my first four children, lest it contributed to the present fashion for non-natural families without a daddy at all (or without a mummy for that matter), or with more than the only-one daddy that is natural, to whatever extent these regrettable modern trends are attributable to this unfortunate slip of Judith Kerr’s pen, and the shameful thought it introduced into my mind, a hundred bedtimes.
If that line isn’t the line that awoke the desire to cancel Ms Kerr, then I wonder what else it was, albeit not (to my shame) with sufficient curiosity to be arsed to click on the links and to do web searches in order to find out.
I only wish I could have read The Tiger Who Came To Tea to the youngest of my 5 children at bedtime, as I did to his half-siblings countless times. Alas, I have been prevented from doing so, due to punishment meted out to me by the state far more cruel than any which David is likely to suffer, for my early opposition to doctrines which David has recently started to oppose too, less enthusiastically, suffering somewhat less severe injustice in retaliation.
I wonder if Judith Kerr is aware of this perfect storm, in a tiny teacup of her making, and what she thinks of it?
Since tigers, or at least one fictitious tiger in particular, are on-topic, perhaps I can be permitted to finish with a link to a recent tweet of mine, much-liked and retweeted, about a certain metaphorical tiger, not as surprisingly safe as the somewhat gluttonous one in the story:
https://twitter.com/John_Allman/status/1385809502428147714
The said tweet reads:
“Those who still aspire to be gender critical without embracing so-called transphobia, are trying not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. Even when bitten, they do not see yet that what they mistake for a baby is in fact a fast-growing, always-hungry tiger-cub in disguise.”
I am starting to suspect that the wokeistanis who rail against “patriarchy” and “male privilege” are simply bitter that, unlike in romantic films, no wealthy or privileged man has ever shown any interest in them. I also suspect that those who rail against the traditional nuclear family are simply bitter at their own failure or unwillingness to start one of their own during their fertile years.
Wokeistanis seem to be far more interested in destroying what others have rather than giving of their own things to help others. While socialism may claim to be all about making sure everyone gets a fair share, i.e. “everyone gets at least as much as me”, in reality it seems to be more a case of “nobody gets more than me”.
Can the Church sometimes give secular lunacy a good run for its money? CBRUK have been commenting on abortion centres lying cheek by jowl with churches across the UK. Churches are sometimes more wound up about sex not resulting in mass murder or genocide. Is abortion the real ‘abomination’?
Is it any wonder? Society will look to ground what is does in something, even if it’s simply virtue signalling and popularism. It really is school playground behaviour where there is an absence of objective values and truth. The most vocal or dominant calls the shots as fear grips any who would step out of line, fearful or rejection or vilification.
The very thing accused of Christianity, secularism does to the core. Manipulates, intimates and dominates, but Christ does none of those. Remove light, you’ll have darkness, people literally cannot see. Remove God, you won’t have neutral ground, Satan will have a field day. Using manipulation, intimidation to offer a counterfeit of truth.
So let your light shine, darkness cannot remain in light.