Explaining the riots: Violence for no discernable reason means a people have forgotten God

It seems to have come as quite a shock to many around the world that Britain, of all places, was recently home to rioting, looting and burning on the streets of some of its major cities.

A reporter with the New York Times, Ravi Somaiya, summed up the reaction of many Americans in an interview to a British radio station.

“Everyone is just very shocked,” he said. “I mean a couple of months ago Britain was Harry Potter and the Royal Wedding. Now it is phone-hacking and riots in the street. It’s quite a turnaround.”1 His comments betray a notion that many across the world still seem to have of Britain as a land where men stand up when a lady enters the room, where tea is supped from dainty fine bone china teacups on the impeccably mown lawns of country manors, and where restraint, manners and good old-fashioned British reserve abound. Jane Austen and the films spawned by her books clearly have a lot to answer for!

But as any observant visitor to Britain will have noticed, the genteel, reserved place that it is often reckoned to be, began fading away a long, long time ago. No longer a land of prevailing good manners, ladies and gentlemen, and stiff upper lips, Britain is now rather more characterized by its binge drinking, coarse oafishness and reckless hedonism. The riots would not have come as a shock to anyone who has seen the centre of the average British town on a typical Friday or Saturday night, and in many ways the only surprising thing is that this sort of violent mayhem has not been unleashed on this scale before. Nevertheless, we may well ask why it happened when it did.

The immediate cause of the trouble came after police shot and killed a man named Mark Duggan in Tottenham, North London, on August. It has been claimed that he was armed and that he was a member of one of North London’s notorious gangs, although both these allegations have been disputed. But whichever version turns out to be the truth, what we do know for sure is that in response to the shooting, some of Duggan’s relatives, together with a group of local residents, marched to Tottenham Police Station on August 6 to protest about the circumstances surrounding his death.

At first the protest seems to have been peaceful, but within hours it turned violent as some members of the crowd set fire to two police cars. Over the next few nights, the violence escalated, spreading firstly to various other parts of London, and then into other cities such as Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.

Although this is certainly not the first time that Britain has seen riots within its borders, what marks the latest disturbances out as unique is that there was no real social grievance being addressed. In the 1980s, for example, a number of race-related riots occurred across the country, and in that same decade, miners facing pit closures also took part in riots. And whilst rioting of any kind is not to be condoned, we can at least look at such disturbances and trace them back to some kind of motive.

But this time it was different. The recent disturbances could not be described as demonstrations or protests in any sense of those words. None of the rioters had placards, none of them shouted slogans, and none of them addressed grievances towards the police and the authorities. As people all over the world will have seen on their television screens, these were simply outbreaks of sheer anarchic violence, with young men and even some young women going on an orgy of rioting, smashing and burning simply for the fun of it. Rioting for kicks!

The disturbances have clearly marked a watershed in British internal affairs with many in the media and politics searching for explanations as to why they happened. The responses generally seem to fall into two camps.

On the one hand, there are those who carry on the pretence that Britain is mostly okay, but just needs a bit of tweaking here and there. This group is ably represented by the former Prime Minister, Tony Blair, who claimed in a newspaper article that, “Britain, as a whole, is not in the grip of some general ‘moral decline.”’2 He then went on to dredge up the usual leftist explanation of social inequality as one of the reasons for the riots: “I do think there are major issues underlying the anxieties reflected in disturbances and protests in many nations,” he said. “One is the growing disparity of incomes not only between poor and rich but between those at the top and the aspiring middle class.”3 Mr Blair, as ever, doesn’t quite get it.

Then there are those who at least seem to recognize that the problems go far deeper into the roots of British society, but whose beliefs will never bring them to the point where they would support the kinds of drastic measures needed. This group is well represented by the current British Prime Minister, David Cameron, who has done his best to sound particularly tough and conservative in the aftermath of the riots, talking about the need to “confront the slow-motion moral collapse that has taken place in parts of our country these past few generations,”4 but whose rhetoric falls flat when you find out what he really believes in.

For example, in a speech he gave a few days after the riots, he spoke about marriage, lamenting the fact that we “can’t say that marriage and commitment are good things—for fear of alienating single mothers”5; about families, saying that “if we want to have any hope of mending our broken society, family and parenting is where we’ve got to start”6; and about morality in general, stating that “…this was about behavior. People showing indifference to right and wrong. People with a twisted moral code.”7

All of which sounds pretty good to conservative Christians, that is until you realize that Mr. Cameron’s beliefs are exactly those that caused the “slow-motion moral collapse” that he now apparently laments. On marriage, his beliefs were summed up in a speech he gave to his party conference in 2006: “There’s something special about marriage,” he said. “It’s not about religion. It’s not about morality. It’s about commitment…And by the way, it means something

Do we really think that the nation where God’s name is continually taken in vain will prosper?

whether you’re a man and a woman, a woman and a woman or a man and another man. That’s why we were right to support civil partnerships, and I’m proud of that. Of course not every marriage lasts, and many couples are much better off apart.”8

His beliefs haven’t changed in the intervening time and his government recently launched a consultation on the issue of same-sex marriage. On families, this is the man whose government is pledged to “support the provision of free nursery care for pre-school children”9 and is obsessive about increasing female participation in the workplace—measures which go toward undermining rather than fostering family unity.

And on morality, whilst his comments may well be true, they lose somewhat of their authority when we grasp that this comes from the head of a government which, amongst many other dubious moral undertakings, has committed itself to providing £8.6 million ($13.5 million) to the abortion provider International Planned Parenthood Federation.10 Some of us might be forgiven for thinking that he should get the plank of “indifference to right and wrong” out of his own eye first before seeking to take the speck out of others’ eyes.

Of course there have been some notable social commentators who have hit some of the right notes, recognizing the part played by the welfare state, by no-fault divorce, by the abundance of latchkey kids and the moral sewage emanating from television screens, and calling for radical changes to the direction Britain is heading in. Yet there is still something missing in most of the post-riot analyses. Something fundamental to the whole thing. Alexander Solzhenitsyn once put it like this: “More than half a century ago, while I was still a child, I recall hearing a number of older people offer the following explanation for the great disasters that had befallen Russia: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened. Since then I have spent well-nigh fifty years working on the history of our Revolution. … But if I were asked today to formulate as concisely as possible the main cause of the ruinous Revolution that swallowed up some 60 million of our people, I could not put it more accurately than to repeat: Men have forgotten God; that’s why all this has happened.”11

For Russia, read Britain. Britain has forgotten God. That’s why all this has happened. In fact it has been forgetting God for the most part of the last hundred years, and the chickens, as they say, are coming home to roost. More than half a century of the state taking from those who work, to pay for those who could work but won’t; of the state subsidizing single motherhood and so doing away with the need for fathers; of the relentless drive to persuade women into abandoning full-time motherhood in favor of life behind a desk; of the near total collapse of the moral authority adults once had over children—all of this kind of thing was bound to lead to disaster and anarchy at some point. If you ignore what God’s Word says about the work ethic, about fatherhood, about motherhood, and about children, expect problems to show up on your doorstep sooner or later. The book of Proverbs succinctly sums up this type of judgment in the following way: “Therefore shall they eat of the fruit of their own way, and be filled with their own devices.” (Proverbs 1:31).

But aside from judgments that arise naturally and logically from certain actions, we must remember that God also brings judgments upon nations because their thoughts, words and actions in general are unrighteous. Do we really think that the nation where God’s name is continually taken in vain will prosper? Do we really think that the nation that sits back and allows hundreds of thousands of babies to be killed in the womb each year will escape God’s judgment? Do we really think that the nation that actively promotes all manner of sexual perversions will be let off? Scripture teaches us plainly that it is not so. Go read Deuteronomy 28 for a particularly sobering reminder of what happens to nations when they leave off from following God’s law. Or Psalm 12, which tells us that “The wicked walk on every side, when vileness is exalted among the sons of men” (Psalm 12:8). As for Isaiah 3, it almost seems to have been written for these days: “And I will give children (literally capricious ones) to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them. And the people shall be oppressed, every one by another, and every one by his neighbor: the child shall behave himself proudly against the ancient, and the base against the honorable.”

What happened in some of Britain’s cities in early August was not merely a one-off. This was a warning shot across the bow of a nation that has forgotten God. But it is not just a warning shot for Britain. We have seen similar scenes of chaos in Greece in recent months, and as the disastrous consequences of nations ignoring God’s laws in the way their economies are run become ever apparent, expect more of this sort of thing across Europe and across America.

There are two ways to answer this sort of thing. One is to trust in the government and let them sort out the problems, which means giving up more of your tax dollars and accepting more and more restrictions on liberty as a price well worth paying for the prevention of anarchy. This is happening even now in Britain where the government is already talking about giving the police powers to introduce night-time curfews to prevent trouble. And if stopping law-abiding citizens from walking down the street under the pretext of preventing trouble sounds suspiciously like the sort of thing that happens in third world banana republics, that’s because it is. The only things that will then be needed in order for Britain to take its place amongst such illustrious countries will be to axe the monarchy and to develop a technique for growing curved yellow fruit in a chilly, damp climate.

The other answer is repentance. Not just from the people who took part in the riots, but from the nation as a whole. For although these riots represent a judgment on the nation as a whole, not to mention a portent to the kinds of events which might soon become commonplace, there is mercy in them, too. God could justly wipe a nation like Britain off the map in an instant for its sins, yet He did not. Why? Because He is a merciful God. Because He prefers repentance to judgment. And because He still holds out the same hope to Britain, Europe, America and indeed the world that He once offered to Israel in the days of Solomon: “If My people, which are called by My name, shall humble themselves, and pray, and seek My face, and turn from their wicked ways; then will I hear from heaven, and will forgive their sin, and will heal their land” (2 Chronicles 7:14).

1. “England Riots,” BBC News, Olivia Lang. (bbc.co.uk/news/world-14471921)

2. “Blaming a moral decline for the riots makes good headlines but bad policy,” The Gaurdian, Tony Blair. (guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/20/tony-blair-riots-crime-family

3. Ibid.

4. David Cameron in a speech on 15th August 2011. (newstatesman.com/politics/2011/08/society-fight-work-rights)

5. Ibid.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. First speech as party leader. (britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech=151)

9. A Contract for Equalities (media.conservatives.s3.amazonaws.com/manifesto/cpmanifesto2010_equalities.pdf)

10. (services.parliament.uk/hansard/Commons/ByDate/20110321/writtenanswers/part014.html)See section 844.

11. “Godlessness, the First Step to the Gulag,” Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Templeton Prize Address, London, 10 May 1983 (roca.org/OA/36/36h.htm)

Rob Slane is the author of The God Reality: A critique of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion. A former atheist, Slane is now a member of Emmanuel Church in Salisbury, England, where he and his family live.