Not for the first time, Anthony Browne in the Times ventures where no-one else has yet dared to tread, in pointing out the dangers that lie in admitting Turkey into the EU. The issue is whether Europe is a Christian civilisation or not. Browne rightly takes the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, to task for suggesting that it is not:

'Jack Straw, the Foreign Secretary, gave his full support to Turkey this week, and insisted that proving that the EU was not a “Christian club” would help to resolve the “clash of civilisations”, and win the war against terrorism. Such pandering to Western Christian guilt has silenced many critics of Turkey’s membership. The clash of civilisations argument has come to dominate all others since September 11, 2001: al-Qaeda is now to be allowed to decide which countries can join the EU. But even Britain’s new Muslim ally in the War on Terror, Muammar Gaddafi, recently advised of the dangers of admitting Turkey. He referred to it as “a Trojan horse and warned the West of rising Islamic radicalism on its streets. Europe is already far from a Christian club — there are 15 million Muslims in the EU, more than the population of most individual member countries. Macedonia and Bosnia both have large Muslim populations, and are all already destined to join the EU along with Islamic Albania. It is not Christian intolerance of Muslims that is driving the “clash of civilisations”, but Muslim intolerance of Christians and Jews. While mosques proliferate throughout the European Union, all churches — and even the sale of Christmas cards — are banned in terrorist-exporting Saudi Arabia. In Germany and France, politicians argue that they ought to learn how to integrate their existing Islamic minorities successfully before opening their borders to Turkey. The recent storm over allowing 1.5 million Eastern European Roma the right to live in Britain is likely to seem trivial when British tabloids realise that the Government is planning to open the door to Turkey’s 70 million Muslims.'

At the heart of this, as Browne suggests, is the gradual willed eclipse of Christianity in Europe. This is all part of the great culture war that is now under way within the west between, on the one hand, defenders of the nation state based on a particular culture and tradition and, on the other, proponents of the idea of transnational values and institutions. The latter view, which is dominant among the political and intellectual elites of Europe and is gaining ground even in the US, holds that human rights are secular, not Christian, and can therefore form the basis of a universal culture to which non-Christian nations can subscribe.

But this is based on a crucial error. While non-Christian nations can indeed subscribe to human rights -- and it is to be hoped that they do -- fundamental human rights (as opposed to the politically correct doctrines being laid down by European institutions) are emphatically not secular. They are based on the precepts originally laid down by Judaism and embellished and developed by Protestantism -- that individual behaviour must be constrained by moral laws, and that all human beings are equal in the image of God. Take this Judeo-Christian God away, and equality disappears too.

The secular 'human rights' promulgated by eponymous lawyers and government ministers are actually nothing of the kind. They are instead an attempt to destroy this liberal and democratic heritage and replace it by a secular inquisition that takes self-governnment away from peoples and deprives them of the expression of their individual culture. It is deeply, profoundly, terrifyingly anti-democratic. The effects, already in evidence, will be to drive out Christianity from the public sphere and replace it by a 'secular' moral vacuum -- ripe for colonisation by Islam, which will correctly perceive this to be a doctrine of decadence for a culture intent on committing social suicide.

In other words, if liberal values and democracy are to be defended, their Christian roots have to be vigorously defended, upheld and reasserted. But with the Church itself well on the way to dhimmitude -- just watch how many bishops stand up to support George Carey -- what hope is there of any real resistance to the Savanorolas of secularism who are busy consigning our heritage to the flames?