The Church has stood here for twenty centuries. For two thousand years it has read and sung from the same bible, and it has told the societies that have listened to it the same thing. It has consistently given the same witness through all that time. What is the result? Our Western society have the highest account of what it is human being, the greatest estimation of the dignity of every human, the highest valuation of freedom in human history. The Christians have stood here giving their unchanged witness and as the result is that our European societies have taken off into an unparalleled security and prosperity. The constant slow drip-drip of this Christian witness has percolated through these societies over generations and the result is that they now take human dignity from granted. They now understand and cannot imagine a world – the world of their own forbears – in which this is not understood. Over these hundreds of years this Christian witness took these societies from savagery to civility. The greatest achievement of the technological achievement that supports billions of people, many millions of them at a standard of living not experienced by any earlier generation. This is the result of Christian witness patiently and consistently given to our society by all the Christians before us. This is what we owe to them.
This Christian witness has percolated through these societies over generations and the result is that they now take human dignity from granted. They now understand and cannot imagine a world – the world of their own forbears – in which this is not understood. Indeed they deny that there is such a world, or that there are societies which do not agree with them about human dignity, who have a much more hierarchical and unequal understanding of human dignity. Foolishly they deny all evidence that human dignity is not valued and is actively destroyed by the cult that hates Christianity and hates the secularity and modernity to which it has given rise. This cult hates the modern world and is determined to destroy it, and it will succeed until we understand that only Christianity can give us our dignity and civility back again.