I’ve spent years trying to balance an interest in healthy eating with a chocolate addiction – my greatest weakness. But the fascination with food and health has come much to the fore in recent times – in trying to help my family both with psychological issues and with physical ill-health.

Dietary adjustment

My daughter has several auto-immune conditions that we have to manage – one of which is alopecia. What happens in an auto-immune disease is that the body attacks itself – with alopecia, it is the hair follicles. The first time she had this, as a toddler, prayer seems to have been what healed her, but it returned a few years ago.

Prayer led me in a different way this time around – to the roots of the problem: artificial additives. With a gluten-free diet, which she needs to follow, we relied somewhat on additive-laden ready prepared food for her, as some things are genuinely tricky to cook without the benefits of gluten in wheat. It’s not until you study the packaging that it becomes clear just how many chemicals are added to these products. And then we realised that one of her daily medications had, in more recent years, been packed full of artificial sweeteners.

To cut a long story short, with a lot of effort, including learning to bake gluten-free bread, nearly all additives are now cut out of her diet – and her hair is returning in full. The rest of the family have made similar adjustments – and I have seen an improvement in my own health too. It turns out that a diet based on the foods that God designed for us to eat is best for our optimum health. Not a coincidence, I sense.

Opting for substitutes

What’s the spiritual significance of this? It is symbolic, I find, of the decline of the Christian West.

For many a century, the Bible has been the cornerstone of our civilisation, particularly in the UK and US. Mistakes have been made, some of them occasionally catastrophic or seriously lamentable, but at the core, there was a belief in the laws of God. As well as most people abiding by the Bible’s rules for life, many of our country’s laws are built on biblical principles. This underscored much of both the prosperity and the influence of the Christian West. I have outlined elsewhere why this is.

But for a long time now, instead of the Word of God, as a nation we have been making do with poor substitutes and copies – just like fast food. Honesty and truth have been traded for lies and fake news. A progressive gospel has replaced the good news of Jesus. A sense of entitlement has replaced hard work and responsibility. Life now matters less than convenience and choice. 

Instead of the marriage and fidelity of one man and one woman – which made a huge difference in the lives of women in particular, giving them a dignity that was not awarded them in the majority of pre-Christian societies – we have a sexual free-for-all, in which how you feel is considered to be the most important factor in any relationship. This has inevitably led to a serious diminishing of family life, so that more and more children are growing up without the stability of a family. This has had a catastrophic effect on mental health and wellbeing, which of course plays out also in damaged adults.

Other seemingly less significant areas have been affected too. The proliferation of litter and dog poo on our streets shows the lack of responsibility that many feel for caring for their own communities – it is just one further outward sign of a degenerative culture. Biblical principles underline the responsibility that we all bear for one another – but we have failed to read and apply them.

And the general decline in our nation’s moral and spiritual health has now turned into an auto-immune disease, as sections of society attack each other on Twitter and social media. The whole trans debate has got to be the worst of these, though divisions on Brexit became so much more polarising than they ever should have been. We have been attacking ourselves, and severely weakening our country in the process. Of course, this hasn’t occurred entirely by accident. There has long been an agenda to undermine the Judeo-Christian heritage of the West.

10-point plan to destruction

First, the integrity of the Bible itself was undermined, as since Darwin, the concept that God created the world has been rubbished, evolution now being taught as fact in our schools.
In 1948, a strategy was formed by the theosophist Alice Bailey – with a 10-point plan to wrench society from its biblical roots:

1. Remove God and prayer from the education system
2. Reduce parental authority over children
3. Destroy the Judaeo-Christian family structure
4. Promote free sex and legalise abortion
5. Undermine marriage through easy and legal divorce
6. Create the concept of alternative lifestyles
7. Debase art and allow it to run wild
8. Utilise mass media to promote the new mindset
9. Create an interfaith movement
10. Ensure governments frame all the above in law and ensure the formal Church endorses those changes.¹

There can be no doubt that the enemies of Christianity have succeeded in this. It has been made easier for them as many church leaders have for decades abandoned the authority of the Bible in favour of a progressive gospel. But now we are reaping the results in a multitude of ways.

True source of strength

One of the reasons that Putin felt emboldened to attack Ukraine was his perception of the weakness of the West. And this was in part due to this very infighting of the gender wars here. He indeed made a speech highlighting that very fact. (Not to mention our previous foreign policy mistakes, and, at times, crimes, where biblical morals were side-lined – think Guantanamo Bay.)

Yet, even whilst disease ridden, the West still has some strength. But this is only going to weaken further and fade to naught without the true source of strength it needs, the biblical foundation that we once had, and trust in God.

As I found, an auto-immune disease can, in some cases, be reversed or improved with the uncontaminated food that we were created to eat. As pressures build, as food becomes scarce, as social disorder breaks out – will we finally realise the errors of our ways, and turn instead to feed on Jesus, the true Word of God, who so clearly shows us the true and living way?

Notes
¹ See Steve Maltz, Into the Lion’s Den