Bible readers take note: the image of a ‘cornerstone’ to faith and life is well-known. Melanie Phillips’ new book offers a sophisticated analysis of the virus that is attacking the religious, moral and cultural foundation of Western societies and thoughtfully proposes an antidote. This book will make you sit up and take note.
Phillips states that the religious substructure of life in Britain and other Western nations have been, and is being eroded. One result of this erosion of ‘religion’ is the severing of family relationships with evidence suggesting casual relations and cohabitation break down more often and more easily than marriages, resulting in a significant rise in fatherlessness.
To Phillips, unless the West adopts key components of Jewish survival especially the veneration for truth, it will not survive. Antisemitism is deeply rooted in Islamic theology. Islamists aim to destroy the Jews as a way through to destroying the West. Phillips’s readiness to engage in this highly sensitive and complex issue is to her credit, as a majority of authors, politicians and media pundits shy away from it.
Although Phillips’ book addresses different themes, it is eminently readable. Segues at the end of each chapter draw the reader on. THE BUILDER’S STONE is strong historically with important insights into key differences between classical Greek and Jewish ethics, why the European Enlightenment was proactively hostile to religion, and why the French philosopher Voltaire believed that the Jews were ‘the most detestable people on earth’.
Phillips touches on the tough issues like the ineptitude of successive UK governments to handle Islamism at regional and national levels, and why conservatives are so slow to conserve religious mores, and into the painful, internal issue of why some secular Jews are socially anti-Jewish. She portrays a hopeless, divided, rudderless West.
Phillips devotes the last chapter to remedies.She writes that it its up to the silent majority who have been appalled by what has been happening but remain silent.
Why is needed is-
1. To establish a ‘coalition of the willing’, like-minded people at large scale events to express solidarity in concern snd aspiration.
2. To urge Jewish people to address the erosion of faith, confidence and coherence within their own ranks. Leaders have a key role, in guiding their communities to resist demonising Israel and collaborate with Christians and others to confront religious persecution and institutionalised slavery inside and outside the West.
3. Oppose identity politics, victim culture and intersectionality. Anyone who intimidates others in universities and administrators who deny incitement and intimidation should be dismissed or face funding cuts.
4. Faith is ‘good for people’ as it is more plausible and reliable.
5. Christianity needs to repudiate Christian Supercessionism, ie that in God’s plan of salvation replace Judaism, as well as anti-zionist Christian theology as it intentionally or unintentionally perpetuates antisemitic ideas or ideologies.
6.That ‘doing not dogma’ replace preoccupation with death and the afterlife when the focus should be in this world and this life.
7. The author is very clear: Churches should make distinctions between truth and falsehood, victim and victimisers, freedom and slavery.
8. To repudiate the self-interested ‘victim culture’ in which duty and responsibility give way to greed self-pity and indulgent egocentrism.
The cost of inertia and inaction going forward, is overwhelming but optimistically Phillips’ book encourages the faint-hearted to try, and even more, it’s encouragement to be part of the solution.
Melanie Phillips is a fearless critic of the moral snd intellectual bankruptcy of Western elites. She is the most visible embodiment of what I would call a post-Holocaust Jewish conscience in the English-speaking world.
She is a British journalist, broadcaster and author living in Jerusalem. Her weekly column in the Times of London has been fodder for the Guardian, Observer, Sunday Times and Daily Mail. Her best selling book LONDONISTAN about British establishment’s capitulation to Islamist aggression was followed by a string of best sellers.
THE BUILDER’S STONE is a wise, impassioned and informed at the current situation in the West and how things need to be turned around.
