Britain Is Turning Its Back On Western Civilization

A recent news article about Britain’s National Health Service managed, in a few lines, to capture just how dire the situation is in that country and how divorced from reality its political leadership has become.

The article was about guidance the NHS published recently, “extolling the benefits of first-cousin marriage despite the increased risk of birth defects.” Defying both modern science and the traditions of western civilization, the NHS England’s Genomics Education Programme seemed to endorse incest, saying first-cousin marriage is linked to “stronger extended family support systems and economic advantages.”

It’s also linked to an increased risk of heritable genetic conditions like sickle cell disease and cystic fibrosis, but that’s apparently not as important to the NHS as justifying the practice of cousin marriage among its Pakistani Muslim immigrant population.

Indeed, the only reason the NHS is even talking about cousin marriage is because the practice is rampant among the country’s Muslim immigrants. Unwilling to push back against this for fear of being accused of racism, the British government is instead publishing documents with lines like this, from the NHS guidance: “Genetic counselling, awareness-raising initiatives and public health campaigns are all important tools to help families make informed decisions without stigmatising certain communities and cultural traditions.”

It’s hard to imagine any other issue that so completely encapsulates what’s gone wrong in Britain, or illustrates how thoroughly the country’s ruling elites have turned their back not only  on their native population but on western civilization itself. After all, the prohibition on cousin marriage was one of the early achievements of Christendom that enabled the rise of western civilization in Europe.

In the sixth and seventh centuries, amid the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west, the Catholic Church began pushing back on the practice of cousin marriage, or consanguinity, among the pagan peoples of Europe, where it was common among the Anglo-Saxons and other groups. Pope Gregory the Great banned cousin marriage outright shortly after he became pope in 590 A.D., and in time the Catholic Church’s prohibition became the cultural norm across the entire continent.

In his best-selling 2020 book, The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, Joseph Henrich argues that one of the effects of Christianity making consanguinity taboo in Europe was to break down the insularity of the various tribes and peoples which had settled in the lands of the former Roman Empire. Close-knit family clans, caught in cycles of ruinous internecine warfare, were forced to marry their sons and daughters to families outside their bloodlines. This had the effect of enlarging the clans and creating wider networks of mutual trust and kinship that fostered peace among newly-converted Christian peoples.

In other words, banning cousin marriage was arguably one of the foundations of western civilization, imposed by Christendom on the erstwhile pagan peoples of Europe, for the sake of peace and social cohesion. That cousin marriage should now reappear in a rapidly de-Christianizing Britain, along with political pandering to its unassimilated Muslim population, is a testament to how thoroughly modern Britain’s leaders have betrayed their own civilization — and how unwilling they are to assert it over and against the foreign cultural practices of Muslim immigrants.

Of course, the NHS guidance also accurately notes that cousin marriage has been legal in the U.K., albeit rare, since the early 1500s — a change that was made specifically so that King Henry VIII could marry Catherine Howard, his ex-wife’s cousin. Yet that bit of history only serves to reinforce the point. Henry VIII laid waste to much of England’s cultural and religious tradition. He looted the monasteries, consolidated the power of the state, introduced foreign customs, and viciously persecuted the country’s Catholic majority.

Britain’s leaders today are arguably following in Henry VIII’s footsteps. They introduce and favor foreign cultural practices, extend the power of the state over the traditional rights and liberties of the people, and persecute the native British population for dissenting from the forced transformation of their country.

Then as now, the cowardice and betrayal of Britain’s rulers is appalling. The NHS says it doesn’t want to stigmatize “certain communities and cultural traditions,” by discouraging cousin marriage. Instead of facing up to the massive problem that it has created by importing a foreign population whose cultural and religious practices are incompatible with British society and western civilization, Britain’s corrupt governing class is instead trying to transform British society by turning the clock back on western civilization itself.

One of the forms that effort is taking is, incredibly, official praise for incest from the NHS. As all of this plays out in Britain, it will take worse forms yet.

John Daniel Davidson is a senior editor at The Federalist. His writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, the Claremont Review of Books, The New York Post, and elsewhere. He is the author of Pagan America: the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come. Follow him on Twitter, @johnddavidson.