I suppose I had better get on with writing this blog; it has been festering away for a week or two. I expect it will irritate quite a lot of people because it is a bit of a Peter Hitchens.

Now that the dust and flames are settling after the August riots, the various pundits are waxing lyrical on the underlying causes which precipitated the dreadful violence and criminality. The politicians are all blaming each other’s policies. Sociologists, educationalists and Uncle Tom Cobley and all are all rabbiting on about “marginalised youth” and “gang culture”, but what has shocked us deeply has been the uncomfortable fact that many of the looters were from perfectly normal backgrounds, and not just from ‘dysfunctional’ families.

But there is a huge elephant-in-the-room which all but a few are carefully ignoring. This is that over the last few decades secular society has decided to trash our historic Judeo-Christian cultural roots, and in my view has put nothing of value in its place despite claims to the contrary. Whether or not one believes in the key tenets of Christianity, its principles have underpinned our society for centuries.

Remember the Ten Commandments? Don’t steal, don’t murder, don’t be envious, respect your parents et al. Rather pertinent stuff in view of what has happened! And, perhaps more controversially, love your neighbour as yourself (i.e. don’t loot and burn his shop), love your enemy (i.e. don’t try to stab him), do good to those who treat you badly and don’t store up for yourself riches on earth (looters and bankers please note)! It will be the meek who inherit the earth not the arrogant, and if you want to be shown some mercy then perhaps you should be more merciful yourself.

“Oh no,” I hear you say. “We are about to be subjected to pious, self-righteous, we-told-you-so, finger-wagging, anti-Dawkins, God-squad sermonising!” Well you would be wrong, or at least only partly right, because the finger-wagging is in quite another direction which may surprise you. Let me explain (and it is time to get medical).

Over 40 years ago I was a fresh-faced, rather naive medical student. On my first medical firm we were asked to take a history from a young man who had reactive arthritis, or as we called it then Reiter’s Syndrome. His had been triggered by a sexually transmitted disease, gonorrhoea I think. The point at issue was that he was an ordinand and theological student at a well-known London theology college and by his own admission was deeply promiscuous with both sexes. While we waited for the consultant to turn up he entertained us with an account of a filthy ancient Greek play which he and his fellow students were producing. He appeared totally unabashed at the moral issues associated with his medical predicament.

My fellow students in the firm, most of whom were not particularly religious, expressed deep surprise that this guy was being considered for ordination into the Anglican Church since his life-style seemed so at variance with his purported creed.

As a young Christian this encounter had a profound effect on me. I subsequently came to learn from various sources that he was part of a deeply rooted culture at this college among a significant number of the students (although obviously I am not suggesting that all were like that). Morality was relative, and largely conformed to the cultural norms of the sixties. Interestingly I heard a senior Anglican cleric on the radio a year or so ago admitting (without embarrassment) that he had been part of that culture where they gave each other women’s names like Mavis and Edith. This would be pathetically funny if it was not so tragic.

Both the New Testament and the GMC tell me not to judge and I do not know what became of the patient. However I know that many of these students went on to become clergy in the Anglican Church, some achieving very senior positions.

But, as is always the case, behaviour follows belief and the rot had started long before this. Regarding their ministry as a career rather than a calling they replaced sound Christian teaching with liberal theology and relativistic morality. The clear evidence is that this stuff destroys belief and empties churches. At the end of his brilliant essay written in the fifties, Fern Seeds and Elephants C.S. Lewis, perhaps the greatest modern apologist for the Christian faith, states: “Once the layman was anxious to hide the fact that he believed so much less than the vicar; now he tends to hide the fact that he believes so much more.”

Apologies if this offends committed Anglicans, but the other historic denominations fare little better. Paedophilia, cruelty and the cover-up have badly damaged the reputation of the Roman Catholic Church. Methodism, once a vibrant break-away movement from the dead religious institutionalism of the eighteenth century, has also sunk under the mire of wishy-washy liberal theology and relativism. Is it any wonder that their congregations are fast vanishing? Of course there are traditional churches which are shining lights amid the encircling gloom (I have greatly benefited from some of these), but relatively few and their numbers are falling.

This does not mean that the church is dying out in the UK, quite the contrary. It has merely largely moved outside the institutional, and many of these independent churches are thriving and growing. But their voice is now rarely heard or listened to as modern secularism, at least for the present, holds sway.

The rioters were not so much immoral as amoral. Where the institutional churches have failed, in my view modern secularism has also failed to provide any alternative moral framework for raising young people. If you hack away at the roots of a tree the leaves will soon start to wither and fall, the branches will break and ultimately the tree will crash to the ground. I believe we are seeing this being worked out on the streets today and for the present there seems to be little we can do to stop it!