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A sign for our times: a Christian MP delivers a speech to the House of Commons. The chamber is almost deserted. You would get the immediate impression that this speech was a matter of no importance. The MP does not appear to be a man worth listening to. At least, there is no one taking the trouble to listen to him. Of the 650 MPs, only three or four are there. Perhaps he is a political hack, or an incoherent, rambling eccentric—tolerated as an MP but ignored and sidelined by all mainstream politicians?
You would be wrong. Very wrong. He is Danny Kruger: highly respected, intelligent, ethical, moral—and Christian. And that may help explain why he was shunned in the chamber.
Yet while his fellow parliamentarians ignored him, the world did not. His speech may have attracted three colleagues in person, but it has been viewed 3.7 million times on his X page and shared over 10,000 times.
He began by reminding his (worldwide) audience that the debating chamber used to be a chapel:
“The old Chamber of the House of Commons, on which this space was modelled after the great fire of 1834, was St Stephen’s Chapel—formerly a royal church. It was given by the heirs of Henry VIII to Parliament to serve as its debating Chamber. Madam Deputy Speaker, your Chair stands on the altar steps. The Table with the Dispatch Boxes is where the lectern stood.”
There is something poignant—and perhaps containing, if not a touch of blasphemy, then of desecration—in the Speaker’s chair replacing an altar. It sets a precedent for the crushing of the integrity of the Church by the state.
But the desecration Danny Kruger wanted to speak about was not that of a Catholic chapel, but the moral desecration of the body politic (though they are, of course, not unconnected).
He had been at the forefront of leading the opposition to the ‘death bills’ this infamous summer has witnessed:
“Last month, in the space of three days in one infamous week, this House authorised the killing of unborn children—of nine-month-old babies—and it passed a Bill to allow the killing of the elderly and disabled. I describe those laws in those stark terms not to provoke further controversy, but because those are the facts. We gave our consent to the greatest crime: the killing of the weak and most defenceless human beings. It was a great sin.”
The House of Commons is not used to the concept of sin. It may not even understand the concept. But it contains overtones, of course, of missing a target with the consequence of corruption.
Kruger drew a line connecting the abhorrence of the legislation with the moral chaos and denigration of the national Church and the nation itself:
“It is no surprise that both the Church and the country itself are in a bad way, divided, internally confused and badly led. The Church is riven by deep disputes over doctrine and governance, and is literally leaderless, with even the process of choosing the next Archbishop of Canterbury unclear, confused and contended. The country itself reflects that—unclear in its doctrines and its governance, profoundly precarious, chronically exposed to threats from without and within. It is at risk economically, culturally, socially and, I would say, morally.”
As many of us have been saying, but with almost no recognition in the public square, he warned that the vacuum left by a broken national Church and the absence of Christian belief in either Parliament or public life has left us exposed:
“Ugly and aggressive new threats are now arising, because we have found that in the absence of the Christian God, we do not have pluralism and tolerance, with everyone being nice to each other in a godless world. All politics is religious, and in abandoning one religion we simply create a space for others to move into as the dominant faiths. There are two religions moving into the space from which Christianity has been ejected.”
All this is indisputable and bravely said, since almost no one else in Parliament has dared to say it.
We must salute Danny Kruger, and both publicise and honour him. He offers us a brave, courageous and direct analysis of the quicksand we are in. But his prognosis cannot be left unexamined, because it is in part mistaken, and so may not help us find a way out. Although there are elements in his overall argument that are clearly correct, from a Catholic perspective he introduces flaws in his proposed remedy:
“…A wind is blowing, a storm is coming and when it hits, we are going to learn if our house is built on rock or on sand, but we have been here before.
The reformers of the 11th and the 16th centuries, Puritans in the 17th century, the Evangelicals in the 19th century all brought this country back from the edge—from idolatry, error or just plain indifference, and from all the social and political crises that indifference to Christianity brought about—and they each in their generation restored this country to itself.”
He is right about the renewal of the 11th and 12th centuries. The Catholic Normans in particular devoted up to twenty-five percent of their economic output to building churches and cathedrals to the glory of God. The Catholic monastic foundations and their expansions laid the foundations for the development of free education, including the birth of the universities, hospitals and hospices.
What happened, however, in the sixteenth century was not an act of renewal. In Catholic terms, it was a desecration, not a reformation. It was an act of totalitarian statecraft that forcibly took over the churches, killed those who resisted, decimated the monasteries, stole their money and redistributed their lands to political allies. It began the process of sidelining the Church from its social responsibilities and conscience in order to displace it and initiate a state takeover.
The increasingly determined Protestant and Puritan ambition for state domination culminated in civil war and the execution of the king. This triumph of state over Church can be argued to have laid a constitutional foundation for the subsequent neutering of Christianity—now captured by the Establishment, and supine and impotent in the face of state ambition.
During the 18th century, the grassroots attempt at an evangelical revival under the Wesleys was (literally) locked out of the parish churches. The establishment closed it down. During the 19th century, the stirrings of a high-church sacramental revival ended with clergy being sent to prison for expressing their longing for a lost and illegal sacramental catholicity.
There were, however, achievements in the 19th century. The freeing of the slaves was a unique and extraordinary achievement, as were many of the social reforms relating to prisons and poverty. But the principle of the state controlling the Church was never challenged. In fact, worse than that, when the Church of England tried to give itself an improved national prayer book in 1928, the state refused and banned it.
The slow descent into heterodoxy and political captivity of Protestantism continued its trajectory until today. And tragically, Danny Kruger—the bravest and most articulate Christian in an increasingly totalitarian Parliament—finds himself constrained in his prognosis by the very evangelicalism that inspired him to make his courageous stand and witness in the first place.
The weakness in his call to Christians to renew the state, hold back Islam, and resist and defeat neo-paganism, is that evangelicals cannot easily agree on either doctrinal or ethical goals. Their history is one of perpetual fracture. Each man reads the Bible in his (or her) own way.
The only coherent opposition remains the Catholic Church. It has the weight of the magisterium defining its doctrine, ethics and practice. Who were the majority of protestors outside abortion clinics? Who were the Christians that refused the slippery slope of the sexual revolution by rejecting contraception (surrendered by the Anglicans as early as the Lambeth Conference in 1930)? Who are the Christians who resolutely refuse the secular compromise with gay marriage? In the main, they are Catholics.
Undoubtedly, the evangelicals can be looked to with respect and affection for their passionate love of Jesus. But they are less reliable when it comes to a plethora of differentiated interpretations of authoritative Gospel texts.
What is required is a synthesis of evangelical passion and ecclesial (Catholic) muscle.
What Danny Kruger has achieved is an analysis of our spiritual corruption as a society—and his analysis reached millions. He has described with breathtaking clarity the onslaught of an alien monotheism rooted in violence and a wholly unacceptable authoritarianism, fusing the political and religious inextricably and terrifyingly together—and the resurgence of an incoherent, instinctive and superstitious paganism, infused with political utopianism, careless with the most fragile and vulnerable human beings in society, whom it treats as disposable.
What is required now is for the many observant Christians left in the country to wake up, shake off the secular myopia and programming that has imprisoned them in impotent, quiescent relativism, and take the religious, philosophical and political fight to the two predatory challengers that are fighting over the slumbering, drugged and supine body of Christendom.
Our ecumenism should be that of the crusade: the invigorating determination to resist aggressors for the love of Jesus and the sake of the Gospel—confident in our God, our faith, our Church, our ethics, and our responsibility to our forefathers and our children. But for this, we require two things: to wake up and to invigorate the Catholic Church.
We can thank Danny Kruger for helping initiate the first task.
He has issued a clarion cry. The chamber of the House of Commons was symbolically empty and vacant. But the internet has carried his warning into millions of souls and homes.
The second challenge, once we have heard it, is up to us.
