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By Lee Duigon
October 10, 2013
NewsWithViews.com

It’s bad enough when Christian parents send their children to public schools to be “educated” by anti-Christian kooks and bigots. But when they hit their own spiritual, emotional, or psychological potholes, very often they send themselves to anti-Christian kooks and bigots.

A reader in England, who works in the National Health Service, informs me that mental health authorities over there are subtly trying to have religious belief declared a mental disorder—because they think it is. Whenever there’s abuse or violence, says my informant, the authorities make a point of publicly identifying the perpetrators as religious believers.

Most of this, I’m told, is going on under the table: it’s not something they want to be seen doing. But I think a story that surfaced in the British media early this year hints that they have already taken the first baby-steps toward formally and officially marginalizing religion—by which, of course, we mean the Christian religion only.

As their first target, they’ve chosen persons who identify themselves as “spiritual, but without religion”—what we in America call “New Age wackos.”

“NHS Choices” (http://www.nhs.uk), an online publication of the government’s National Health Service, reported in January on an article that had appeared in The Daily Mail, later in The Telegraph. Based on a study done by University College, London, “Spirituality ‘link’ to mental illness,” we are told that “People with ‘spiritual views,’ but not conventional religious beliefs, had higher rates of drug use. ‘Spiritual people are more likely to be mentally ill,’ the Daily Mail reports.”

Well, we already knew that, didn’t we? Deepak Chopra isn’t going to save your soul, much less keep your head on straight.

Then there’s the British “entertainment” media. Like ours in America, they always portray Christianity and Christians, especially clergy and church officials, in the worst possible light.

I recently saw on youtube an episode of “Midsomer Murders,” one of the most popular TV shows in the world, which, when it comes to spewing anti-Christian bile, takes the cake. Calling the religion that preaches eternal life through faith in Jesus Christ a “death cult,” the episode depicted every single Christian in it as either a pervert, a hypocrite, a fool, or a criminal, or some miserable combination thereof. They went so far as to have one of the characters, an adulterous and mean-spirited churchwarden, say, when asked if she objected to a pair of unrepentant sodomites serving as the vicar and the curate of her church, that “homophobia” is a “sin” that God will judge harshly. She must have found that in a Bible no one else has ever seen. Another character, a cop, said, “Why don’t they just burn everyone? That’s what they do in the Bible.”

Hate and ignorance: perfect together.

There’s a 2008 article in The Psychiatric Bulletin, featured in its publication, The Psychiatrist, entitled, "Religion and mental health: what should psychiatrists do?." Here we learn that “Studies of psychiatrists in the U.K., Canada and the USA suggest that there remains widespread prejudice against religion,” starting with Freud and others in the 19th century. In the UK, “92% [of psychiatrists] believed that religion and mental illness were connected… and 42% believed that religiousness could learn to mental illness…” Oddly, “61% believed that it could protect against mental illness.”

A 2004 study found that 54% of psychiatrists in Canada “reported belief in God compared with 71% of their patients,” while a 2007 study of U.S. psychiatrists found that 65% of them believe in God, compared to 77% of their patients. So it appears that American and Canadian shrinks are far behind their British colleagues in the anti-Christian sweepstakes.

Why should we care what happens in Britain?

If, as John Donne said, “no man is an island,” then it’s surely true that no nation is an island, either (even if, geographically, Britain really is an island). As the culture rots from within the Mother Country, the rot may well spread into the former colonies.

Think of it: England, the birthplace of St. Patrick, cradle of saints, home of King Arthur, has become the hotbed of a war against the Christian faith.

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With what do they propose to replace it? With faith in Big Government, Big Science, socialism, Global Warming, and all the rest. Compared to that, faith in Deepak Chopra almost seems profound.

Here in the USA and Canada, it seems that if you need a psychiatrist, and you’re willing to shop around a little, you can still find one who believes in God and won’t think you’re crazy if you do, too.

But as the shadow lengthens and the darkness deepens over Britain, don’t expect the light to linger here forever.

There are a lot of people working very hard to make it dark in the United States and Canada. And the rest of us must work just as hard to stop them.