To destroy something totally you need to undermine its foundations. When the foundations are gone the rest of the structure falls.

According to Lenin, who should know, destruction requires two elements: a small group of vanguard thinkers who are convinced they know better than everyone else, and a much larger group of fellow travellers who don’t really understand the vanguard’s endgame, the people Lenin termed ‘useful idiots’. This is the situation we face in the West today, the destruction of society as we know it.

Christians should be especially aware of this. The family, which constitutes the foundational social structure of the West, is built around a specifically Christian understanding of life, as I hope to show in Part 3. 

The Vanguard Thinker

A representative figure of the New Left is Sophie Lewis. A feminist theorist and darling of the far-left intelligentsia, she has an interest in “queer communism” and has written widely on the dangers of the nuclear family and how it should be abolished. Her works include Abolish the Family: A Manifesto for Care and Liberation and Full Surrogacy Now: Feminism Against Family.

Destruction requires two elements: a small group of vanguard thinkers who are convinced they know better than everyone else, and a much larger group of fellow travellers who don’t really understand the vanguard’s endgame.

Lewis considers parental love to be no more than “a shitty contract pretending to be biological necessity”. She thinks that the family “frankly, sucks. It genders, nationalises and races us. It norms us for productive work. It makes us believe we are ‘individuals’.” For the far-left intelligentsia, knowing there are two distinct genders, having a defined nationality, racial identity, and gainful employment, and especially believing that we are individuals, are all bad things.

Lewis’s proposals are not only dangerous but sinister. She talks of “children’s liberation”: the child must be freed from the parent’s “fascist obsession” with “the innocent, de-sexualised, fertile child”. Children should be made aware of the multiplicity of sexual practices available. In the left-wing utopia the nuclear family is abolished, nobody has a job, and children will be available for sex. If you don’t go along with this, Lewis considers you a fascist.

We may think her opinions absurd but Lewis is no marginal figure: her ideas are influential and are seen emerging all over our culture. In the UK University of London professor Michele Barrett, and Mary McIntosh, “a sociologist whose work on gender and sexuality shaped a generation”, wrote The Anti-Social Family. In this, they present a vision of complete nihilism, boldly stating, “We hope that by now it will be clear that we would put nothing in the place of the family.”

Recent Attacks of the UK’s Useful Idiots

Yet many are helping the intellectuals in their radical pursuit, with schools becoming key players. Mrs Izzy Montague is suing Heavers Farm primary school in Croydon, south London, after being informed that her four-year-old son could not opt out of a Pride parade. Mrs Montague contacted the school, and also wrote a lengthy letter, asking for her son be excused due to the “public display of adherence to views which she did not accept” Mrs Montague said: “I wasn’t even trying to stop the Pride event. I just wanted my child to receive an education, rather than indoctrination.” The school refused to consider her request.

Mrs Montague attended a meeting with Susan Papas, the headteacher. Also present was the headteacher’s daughter wearing a T-shirt with the slogan: “Why be racist, sexist, homophobic or transphobic when you could just be quiet?” Other parents claimed the school was forcing a “very aggressive LGBT agenda on to their children”, all aged under 12, in a manner that abused their parental rights.

Parents – the new enemy

Guardian columnist Owen Jones considers parents’ “failure to affirm” the new sexual identity of their transgender children as a form of child abuse. If parents do not take their child’s word at face value when they call themselves trans, but would prefer to wait and see whether the child persists in their new identity, he writes them off as child abusers. He thinks that “the real major threat to children isn’t from predatory LGBTQ+ people. It’s parents who refuse to accept their kids for who they are.” Jones sees the loving care of concerned parents as a danger.

Guided by government and National Lottery funded charities such as Stonewall and Mermaids, many schools have come to share the activists’ view that parents are a problem for transgender children. In their determination to be better parents than the actual parents, it is not unknown for schools to allow children to change their gender at school without their parents’ knowledge. Teachers may even use two names for a child, a given name when talking with the parents and a new name in the classroom.

Many schools have come to share the activists’ view that parents are a problem for transgender children

Gender activists see all parents as a problem. They object to parents questioning them about what children are taught concerning gender identity in school sex and relationships classes. Despite the UK government’s promises to make the curriculum more transparent, parents still report being prevented from seeing the materials that schools use. Meanwhile, parents who protest against drag queens reading stories to small children are branded ‘far right’ and ‘conspiracy theorists’.

The attempt to replace the family with the state is nowhere clearer than in Scotland. The SNP’s (now scrapped) Named Person Scheme would have appointed a state-approved ‘guardian’ for every child in Scotland under the age of 18. In the opinion of leading human rights expert Aidan O’Neill KC the proposal “appears to be predicated on the idea that the proper primary relationship that children will have for their well-being and development, nurturing and education is with the State rather than within their families and with their parents”.

The SNP government has issued 70 pages of ‘guidance’ titled Supporting transgender young people in schools. Among the recommendations is advice that primary schools which can have pupils as young as four should be prepared to accept a request from pupils to change their gender, including their name, without the consent or even knowledge of parents or guardians.

It is not alarmist to suggest that the activities of the useful idiots in power will fracture the relationship between parents and children and undermine the family and thus society as a whole.

The Rev Campbell-Jack is a former minister in the Church of Scotland, and blogs at A Grain of Sand