Yesterday, I featured a post with perspectives from the Revd Dr Peter Mullen on the State’s persecution of Christians in Britain.

Dr Mullen currently serves as Rector of St Michael’s Cornhill and at St Sepulchre-without-Newgate in the City of London. (At St Michael’s the Book of Common Prayer is used in every service.)  He also serves as Chaplain to six Livery Companies of the City of London and has written for several publications, including the Wall Street Journal. As such, I am very sorry to read that he will be retiring when he turns 70 on January 11, 2012. Dr Mullen’s pastoral leadership and guidance will be sorely missed by many.

Whether Mullen maintains his columns in the Daily Mail and Telegraph, I don’t know. However, I have enjoyed reading his columns, which were kindly brought to my attention only recently.

What follows is a speech that Mullen gave to UKIP — the UK Independence Party — in Chichester on March 24, 2010. A substantial part of it concerns Islam in the world, specifically throughout European history. If you are unfamiliar with this aspect of history, I would highly recommend that you read Mullen’s brief précis which covers what you will need to know going forward.

For the purposes of this post, his views on Europe and the European Union may be of interest (emphases mine):

My Lord, ladies and gentlemen, it is a privilege and a delight for me to have the opportunity to address supporters of the only party with the character and will to rouse our country to face the existential dangers which threaten us. I must begin by saying that, although I am Rector of St Michael’s, Cornhill, I am speaking for myself this evening and my words will in no respect present the views of the Church. The hierarchy will surely be rather relieved to hear this!

Before we can overcome the problems we must, of course, understand precisely what these problems are. Again, UKIP seems to me to be the only party with the wit to identify these great dangers and to explain their nature without woolliness or that cowardly evasiveness based on the deadly euphemisms of political correctness. Twelve years ago, when totalitarian regimes were falling in the east – falling faster even than today’s Conservative party in the opinion polls – the distinguished poet and administrator C.H.Sisson said to me, “It is a pity that, just when the tyrannical bureaucracies of Eastern Europe are collapsing, we are so keen to construct something very like them in the West”. He was talking, of course, about the burgeoning of authoritarian power in the EU.

At this point I must insert a disclaimer. I am not anti-European. So often our party is sneered at as being full of little Englanders, but I am sure most of us are not such backwoodsmen. I love the Europe of Montaigne, Pascal and Immanuel Kant, of Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven; of Goethe, Schiller, Rembrandt; the Europe in which the great philosophical theologians Aquinas and Anselm felt at home in monasteries and universities that were truly international and fraternal. I am talking about European culture and civilisation which, for fifteen hundred years and more, has been one of the greatest achievements of human endeavour.

They try to sell us the EU as if it were this European heritage. It isn’t! The EU is the opposite of civilisation. The EU is the enemy of Europe. It represents Europe in its decadence and its death throes. Whenever a civilisation is in decline, it does what the EU is doing today. Instead of creativity and bold involvement with the world, it turns inwards upon itself and becomes obsessed with its own structures. It begins to despise its own history and tradition and so, instead of being confident in its historic culture, it becomes paranoid and nit-picking, setting up what are called ‘systems’ and ‘structures’ – in T.S.Eliot’s phrase …”dreaming of systems so perfect that no-one will need to be good”. We are dying because the elites which control us actually hate what we have achieved, all the good things we have fought for over the centuries.

But, of course, the systems it invents are not perfect. The labyrinthine, Kafkaesque nightmare of EU procedures is one monstrous lie. And upon this lie, all other lies are constructed like some modern version of the Tower of Babel. The lie that people of Europe have democracy, when actually we are all dominated by the diktats of a corrupt and self-serving elite. The lie that we shall have a say in governance of our continent, when actually all the plebiscites and referenda which go against the wishes of the lying elite are cancelled or re-jigged until they produce the required result. The lie that the business of the super-state is being conducted efficiently and honestly when, in reality, it is a continental bureaucracy run on a system of bribes, with proper accounts neither produced nor audited for decades. The lie propagated by the bureaucratic elite that European culture and values will be preserved – while what they are really up to is fixing immigration policy on a model which will create a Europe essentially Muslim within a generation …

Meanwhile, you can tell that Doomsday is just around the corner when the drowsy sophisticates at The Spectator use an editorial to speak of “western Christian nations”. And to urge, “We must defend our own traditions and our own religion”. There are only two possible comments on this: there are no western Christian nations – not in Europe anyhow – and consequently we have no Christian traditions. The reality is as follows:

Devout Muslims in Britain desire to promote their own moral and religious standards among us. We say, “It’s kind of you, but actually we have our own standards”.

And the Muslim asks, “What are they?”

And we reply: “Take a look for yourself. Practical atheism in our schools…where teachers are bound to teach that any god is as good as any other – or none. Anarchy in personal and sexual morality, as any coupling between any two (or more) pieces of flesh is celebrated. A brief, furtive exchange between (or among) strangers, without either commitment or affection, ascribed the same value as Christian marriage. The consequent near-abolition of marriage and family. What were once mortal sins are now only lifestyle choices.

Abortion used as a form of contraception and amounting to 200,000 every year. A mass media which sexualises young children. Casual fornication taught to junior school children as part of the “diversity” agenda. But what is the difference between “diversity” and perversity?” A debauched customer culture of mingled celebs, Big Brother – who would have thought Orwell so right and yet so wrong? – cocaine, heroin, a government that declares a “war on drugs” and the hands out knighthoods to drug-crazed rock stars. Clubbing, TV nuts’n’sluts shows wall-to-wall, and hyper-shopping.

All this uneasily hitched to a totalitarianism and bullying political correctness which everywhere seeks to curtail our natural freedoms – from foxhunting to smoking, from the sorts of games allowed in the playground to what’s written on packets of sweeties. And – have you noticed? – we have complete freedom of speech – only you’re not allowed to say anything. Yes, we say, Britain has standards all right …

The decadent godlessness we now inhabit is generally agreed to have begun with the permissiveness of the 1960s when we sang “All you need is love” and let it all hang out, debauching our institutions in the process. There is some truth in this and certainly the 1960s was the decade in which the Church of England effectually resigned – throwing out the real Bible and the real Prayer Book and replacing them with unspeakable modern parodies which obscured the fact of sin and so rendered all promises of redemption worthless.

Sin is not something mystical and so old fashioned you couldn’t believe it: it is just the old religious word for a constant human characteristic – that we have a capacity to foul things up, to act against our own best interests. If anyone doubts that the notion of progress is just plain stupid, let them look at Nazi Germany, Soviet Russia, Vietnam, Rwanda, Sudan, Somalia – take your pick from the repertoire of genocides. The mass media loves to derogate the middle ages and everything in the past as medieval, but there were many more slaughtered in the wars and genocides of the 20th century than in all the previous centuries put together.

In reality, we face not one enemy but two: militant Islam is the alien peril; valueless secularism is the decadence within.

I am not here to ram religion down your throat … but I will say this: what has befallen us is our being persuaded that we can ditch traditional English Christianity and the traditional English values which are part of it, and yet everything else – all the good things – will stay the same. They will not. Throw away our Judeao-Christian inheritance and the lot goes with it. Every intellectual standard of excellence. Every moral imperative. All etiquette, politeness, chivalry. Well, you only have to take a walk through the streets of our towns and cities to see that this has happened already …

Tomorrow: Peter Mullen on Occupy London