Fr Stephen Smuts

In Trash and Truth, writes Fr Dwight Longenecker:

Theodore Darymple writes here about modern trashy Britain. Litter, litter everywhere and nary a one to pick it up. The highways and byways of Britain, he says, are like one huge rubbish bin.

Darymple chronicles modern life with a jaundiced eye and is a critic of the left wing intelligentsia who have created an underclass of humanity who are dependent on the state, riddled with STDs, increasingly alcoholic and addicted, immoral and depraved. He’s a retired prison doctor. He’s worked with the people he writes about.

Lest we point the finger at our English cousins too much, America is going rapidly in the same direction. Why do people litter? Because they do not take personal responsibility for their actions. Why do they not take personal responsibility? Because they have been brought up to believe that the state will be their nanny. “I can throw litter. Somebody else employed by the local authority will pick it up.” Why does a person have this attitude? Because their mother taught it to them. I say “Mother” because chances are their father wasn’t on the scene at all.

Mother had a baby when she was fourteen because the state would provide her with an apartment, benefits, a weekly check (so she can buy ciggies and a lottery card) and all the goodies she needs for baby. There will be a social worker who drops by now and again to see that she’s okay and so she has another baby that the state will take care of for her. All this does is breed a dependent underclass who go on to have more kids who are also dependent on the state. Thus the great and cruel irony that Socialism creates poverty. It doesn’t cure it.

All of these are conclusions that Darymple would agree with. What he does not do is take the argument to the next level. Darymple’s an atheist who is sympathetic to the societal benefits of religion. However, the societal benefits of religion are not enough. The reason a person litters and does not take personal responsibility is that his mother didn’t teach him to, but behind that is the breakdown of the family, and behind that is a lack of personal sexual responsibility and behind that is a rejection of Christian morality and behind that is a rejection of Christian anthropology and behind that is a rejection of the notion that man is created in God’s image and behind that is a rejection of the creator himself.

Every argument is a theological argument. It’s simple: while I am not saying every atheist is a litterbug, it is true on a grand scale that disbelief in God leads to lack of personal responsibility which leads to trash. When a society (or an individual) departs from God and his truth eventually all you have is trash.

Litter in the streets is a sort of sacrament of this reality.

That’s why Our Lord’s image of Hell as ‘Gehenna’ is so apt. Gehenna was a huge landfill trash dump outside the city of Jerusalem. The sewers flowed into Gehenna. People dumped their garbage in Gehenna. Corpses of criminals were thrown there. It stank. It was fetid. The burning trash fires never went out. The maggots feasting on the garbage thrived and never died. This is where the trash was thrown and Our Lord (forgetting for a moment his ‘Gentle Jesus Meek and Mild persona’) says that’s what happens to the human trash: they get thrown out into Gehenna.

To deepen the horror further, in Old Testament times the same valley of Gehenna was where children who were the product of the orgiastic worship of Baal and Asherah were sacrificed to Moloch…a society following a religion that worships sex and treats their own children as trash.

So think about that next time you see some litter… (he said cheerfully!)