BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

Henry of Huntingdon tells the story of King Canute who set his throne by the sea shore and commanded the incoming tide to halt and not to wet his feet and robes:

Continuing to rise as usual [the tide] dashed over his feet and legs without respect to his royal person. Then the king leapt backwards, saying: ‘Let all men know how empty and worthless is the power of kings, for there is none worthy of the name, but He whom heaven, earth, and sea obey by eternal laws.’ He then hung his gold crown on a crucifix, and never wore it again to the honour of God the almighty King

Since then, the Canute story has been misinterpreted more times than its Truth has been told. Proverbial reference in modern politics or journalism usually casts the story in terms of Canute’s hubris by his attempting to stop the tide.

The reality is that the misinterpretation is more useful, and therefore used more regularly, to highlight criticisms. The noble version is dull for its selflessness and there are plenty of examples from History of more devout people than Canute making sacrifices for some higher good – for Truth, in the pursuit of saving others’ lives, or for comrades in the heat of battle.

In 2023 it seems that the sea that wet Canute has risen. As Effie Deans noted yesterday in the pages of this magazine, as ever so articulately:

The West has returned to theocracy, not in the sense that religious belief is enforced, but in the sense that what results from the absence of religious belief is enforced. The collapse of Christianity left a vacuum of virtue.

The writer going as ‘Capel Lofft’ or the ‘Tory Socialist’ specialises in this matter. He laments the decline of Christianity beautifully on his weblog here. It was summarised by him in his latest post as:

The Church is now presided over by a group of liberal-deist bishop-vandals who are literally destroying the oldest continuous social and religious institution in England (except possibly the monarchy), the parish. One need not rehearse the usual statistics about secularisation and decline in Church attendance as they are only too depressingly familiar.

Certainly there are those who scramble to fill the vacuum. Whether they do so knowingly or unknowingly is not easily determinable. There are the eco-preachers, the self-help gurus, the Islamists, the Wokeists, the football chat show hosts, the Twitterers, the YouTubers and the pop stars.

Of course, they are all false prophets, unworthy kings. Even the intelligent ones, like Jordan Peterson, leave a feeling of great disappointment when they discuss religious questions – I have witnessed more impressive religious insight in both GCSE Religious Studies lessons and an ICU ward.

Using the misinterpretation of the Canute story, it is intriguing to see certain institutions now attempting to take up the role of moral arbiter in lieu of a powerful church failing. This week the BBC continues to try its very best to down incel-guru Andrew Tate because he more than most flies in the face of BBC ideas of virtue. The BBC fails principally because with every article it publishes – akin to Trump with every lawsuit thrown at him – they are inflating Tate rather than diminishing him.

Tate is a ‘dangerous role model’ who most Brits have either never heard of or have seen through already. The pornographer’s trough in which he has chosen to pig around is impossible to wash off from the leather in his Bugatti or the thongs on his numerous goddesses. The BBC cannot hold back the sea of male testosterone out there, let alone handhold the army of virgin male gamers from the virtual to the carnal. Such lads do not watch the BBC or visit its website, except perhaps to catch up on football scores. All the BBC can hope to achieve by going after Tate so vehemently is collecting virtue from women and metrosexual eunuchs – those who were always likely to still keep up with their licence fee direct debits in the first place. Unlike the proselytising Church (of old, at least), the BBC is merely preaching to the converted.

The recent Linehan deplatforming, the rise of Kathleen Stock, the court victory for Harry Miller against Humberside Police for his limerick tweet, the rather tragic story of Edward Little – there is no point trying to destroy those who have a valid right to free speech, however unvirtuous their utterings may seem to you. The genuinely virtuous should be defended and applauded. If the protagonists are rapists, perjurers or murderers, then hopefully they will be jailed. If they are actual race-baiters, they will be charged or perhaps earn a seat on The Jeremy Vine Show.

In our interconnected, super-quick world someone somewhere pushes anything always.

Whereas the Church could draw upon a selfless Jesus for inspiration and a detailed moral framework – and even the Church, through a succession of misinterpreting and weak humans, descended into witch hunts and the current blancmange – these new determiners of what should be allowed or not are lightweights. Hope Not Hate has fewer years’ hinterland than even the Gestapo, Cheka or Stasi. The Bible has an answer for just about everything and continues to trump Marx, Luxemburg and Gramsci. Two thousand years of the Christian Church inputting social cement into the populace cannot be easily replaced, not even by Ehrlichian fear-mongering about ‘global boiling’.

Today’s virtue-signallers’ attempts at plugging the vacuum of virtue – of halting or fashioning the word and thought tsunami – by ‘fact-checking’, cancelling, lawfare or demise-by-article, all seem to portray the Canute misinterpretation.

They should be drawing lessons from Huntingdon’s ‘empty and worthless’ version instead.

Dominic Wightman is Editor of Country Squire Magazine.