Great Britain’s Evangelical Legacy

Great Britain is, in fact, still a religious country in so much as it defines itself.
The Church of England is a state sponsored and supported entity, the official state
church as endowed by the constitution of the English state. Yes, this may be an
historical relic, but one that has been universally rejected elsewhere and is almost
unheard of in other modern democracies. In so much it is not a beacon of
enlightened religious values and can never be such until it sheds itself of this past.
It is this country, founded on religious freedom forbidding state sponsorship
of any religion that SHOULD be our beacon of enlightenment. The dreadful wave of
evangelical zeal that now imprisons the American zeitgeist is a relic of Victorian
England's zealous Zionism. Just listen to the hymns of the official state church. The
lyrics are scary. When the English, like a feisty bulldog, found the sermons of these
roving evangelical Zionist preachers were becoming a little too radical for the staid
Church of England they rejected and rid themselves of the creatures they spawned.
Where do you think they immigrated? You'll find that at the turn of the century and
especially with WW1 this religious zealotry died out in Britain only to rear its ugly
head here, to our shame and detriment.
An egregious example of this insane rhetoric is "My Utmost for His Highest"
by Oswald Chambers which was read daily by George H. Bush as well as many
modern evangelicals. It sounds like communist dialectic with the "party" replaced
with "god". It's a collection of sermons he gave while an isolated vicar of a Scottish
Presbyterian boy's school. Then he was exposed to the real world of WW1 in which
he died from peritonitis after refusing to be treated before wounded soldiers. What
the publishers don't tell you is that during his time in the gritty realities of war he
found true enlightenment and wrote many letters vigorously repudiated these
sermons. After his death in an Egyptian military hospital his wife cashed in by
having them published knowing his final wish was to see them destroyed. So very
typically Christian of her.

T.A. Kiehl©2016