In this episode of Family Matters, Simon sits down with Dr Gavin Ashenden – a UK writer, broadcaster, Substack contributor, former BBC presenter, one-time chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II. If that’s not enough, he was also involved with smuggling Bibles into the Eastern Bloc.
Gavin warns the West has a narrowing window to defend freedom of speech and conscience against forces he describes as anti-Christian.
He shares his own faith journey, recounting a near-death experience at age 19 that brought a sense of judgment, forgiveness, and lifelong responsibility to speak of God and protect people from sophisticated deception.
Speaking of the United Kingdom, Gavin argues the country is in deep civilizational decline, with authoritarian Islam and neo-Marxist “woke” ideology pressing into a hollowed-out culture where hedonism, relativism, fear, and power are replacing grace, redemption, and virtue.
He points to recent policing and protest incidents, hostility to Christian street preachers, the Luke Sammons case (a police offer who lost his job for questioning mandatory Islamic training), and campus intimidation.
Gavin points out that ‘woke’ spreads through institutions via propaganda and training schemes that identify and remove dissenters.
Simon and Gavin discuss how relativism has disarmed Christians, with many accepting there can be different trues and yet, once disarmed, opponents have imposed their own absolutes.
Gavin makes a key distinction between ‘true speech’ and mere free speech, warning how in the United Kingdom, state control is increasing over what people are allowed to think and say. Gavin argues only Christianity can form an antidote to the direction that the UK, and the West, are taking. He speaks of the Benedict Option (named after the late Pope Benedict XVI) and how small intentional Christian communities can restore balance and attract others. Gavin also shares about his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, stressing his appreciation of the Catholic Magisterium to provide the authoritative tradition to hand on truth, whereas he argues without it everything dissolves into opinion and power.
They also discuss the place of evil, and a conviction today’s cultural shifts are a strategic fraud that must be named. The struggles being faced are spiritual as well as political, with both Gavin and Simon critiquing how there has been retreat by many Christians from the public square but that what is needed is prayerful witness, cultural rebuilding, and the need for courageous, uncorrupted engagement in public life.
To read more of Gavin’s writing, videos, and views head to his Substack – The New English Catholic – at https://drgavinashenden.substack.com/ #familymatters #familyfirstnz
