Solidarity Of The Shattered
A reader in London sent a photo of his copy of Live Not By Lies. The release date is a week from today, but apparently Amazon.co.uk is already sending them out. I hope a copy finds its way into the hands of Kristie Higgs, a Christian in Bristol who is not prepared to live by lies the regime expects her to parrot, and is suffering for it. Excerpt:
A woman sacked from her job as a school assistant after flagging up concerns about the teaching of LGBTQ+ rights has told a tribunal it was her Christian duty to speak out to defend the “Bible truth”.
Kristie Higgs, 44, was dismissed for gross misconduct by the state secondary school where she worked in 2019 after sharing and commenting on social media posts about relationship education proposed for the primary school of one of her sons.
Higgs said her faith as a Christian meant she had no choice but to make her feelings known and told the tribunal in Bristol that she was shocked to be dismissed and frightened to go out because she worried that everyone in her small Gloucestershire town would know she had been sacked.
The mother of two shared and commented on Facebook posts in 2018 about the No Outsiders programme, an approach to diversity and inclusion for primary schools.
“I was concerned that a lot of parents all over the country and the world simply did not know what was going on,” Higgs said in a statement submitted to the employment tribunal in Bristol.
“As a Christian, I believe it is morally necessary to speak out in defence of the Bible truth when false and harmful doctrines are being promoted.”
An anonymous complaint was made to Farmor’s school in Fairford, where Higgs worked, and she was dismissed for gross misconduct.
Just like that. she shared her religious beliefs on Facebook — that she did not believe in same-sex marriage, nor in transgenderism — and lost her job. More:
Debbie Grennan, representing the school, suggested some of the language used in the messages Higgs shared was “extreme”.
“Do you believe that because of your religious views you can post anything you like, no matter how reactionary?” the barrister asked.
And this, my dears, is what it means to live in a post-Christian society.
Here are more important details, from a Higgs statement cited in a Christian Post story:
In late October 2018, mother of two, Mrs Higgs, who for seven years had worked at the school without any complaints, shared two posts on her private Facebook page, that made no mention of her employer, under her maiden name.
The first post encouraged friends and family to sign a petition challenging the government’s plans to introduce Relationships and Sex Education (RSE) to children in primary schools.
The post flagged that a government consultation on plans to make RSE mandatory for children as young as four was coming to a close, and asked its readers to sign a nationwide petition calling on the government to uphold the rights of parents to have children educated in line with their religious beliefs.
A similar petition was subsequently signed by over 115,000 people and was debated in parliament.
In the second post, Mrs Higgs shared an article from Judybeth.com on the rise of transgender ideology in children’s books in American schools and added her own comment: ‘This is happening in our primary schools now’.
The article critiqued the same LGBT ‘No Outsiders’ books promoting transgenderism to children that Mrs Higgs had discovered were being introduced in her son’s Church of England primary school.
Somebody wanted her punished so badly that they reported what was said on her private Facebook page, under her maiden name, to her employer, a state school, which sacked her merely for stating her opinion as a Christian.
Note well that the school where her child attends — the one for which a new LGBT educational initiative, including storybooks about trans children, is to be implemented — is a Church of England school. I doubt the old C of E will stand up for Kristie Higgs.
Here is a short video in which Higgs tells her story:
To my UK Christian readers, please, do whatever you can to support her. The UK nonprofit Christian Concern and its Christian Legal Centre are defending her case — they could use your help. I’m sure you understand that what’s happening to Kristie Higgs can happen to you. And even if it doesn’t, your children are being raised in a society that denies what we know to be true about who and what a human being is, and what marriage means. We cannot leave mums and dads like the Higgses, and their children, to face this alone. As I write in Live Not By Lies:
Scruton tells me, they were astonished to discover that the Czechs “were determined to cling to their cultural inheritance because they thought that it contained the truth, not just about their history, but the truth about their soul, about what they fundamentally are. That was the thing that the communists couldn’t take away.”
Scruton and his academic colleagues discovered that the Czech students were starving for knowledge, and not just theoretical knowledge. They wanted to learn so they could know how to live, especially under a dictatorship of lies. Along those lines, in Notes from Underground, his 2014 novel set in Czechoslovakia of the 1980s, Scruton’s protagonist, a young man named Jan, finds his way into Prague dissident circles. His guide tells him what to expect:
And he added that there would be special seminars from time to time, with visitors from the West, who would inform us of the latest scholarship, and help us to remember. “To remember what?” I asked. He looked at me long and hard. “To remember what we are.”
These seminars forged what Scruton, quoting Czech dissident Jan Patočka, described as “the solidarity of the shattered.” They were an act of responsibility by the old—those who still had their memories of what was real— toward the young. The formal institutions of Czech life—universities first among them—could no longer be trusted to tell the truth and to transmit the cultural memories that told Czechs who they were. But the task had to be done, or as Milan Hübl said, the Czech people would disappear.
The task in Britain has to be done — teaching the young what is real — or Christian Britain will disappear. The same is true in the United States, and in every country of what was once Christendom. They will shatter you, but don’t despair: there is solidarity among the shattered (and pre-shattered, if they know what’s good for them, because there will be no one left unshattered by the time this is over). #StandWithKristie
UPDATE: I should always remember to post this link to Eighth Day Books, which is exclusively handling autographed pre-orders of Live Not By Lies, in case you’d like one.