The Immorality of Contemporary Liberality
By the Archbishop of Selsey

The assassination of Charlie Kirk, and the grotesque spectacle of rejoicing which followed it, exposes the moral bankruptcy of our age. A young father was slain before the eyes of his wife and children, and those who claim the mantle of tolerance and compassion mocked his widow and sneered at his orphaned children. What calls itself liberalism today has betrayed its own name. It betrays the immorality of contemporary liberality.

The hollow promises of liberalism
We are told that liberalism stands for equality, dignity, and justice. Yet its record is one of betrayal. In Britain, Parliament has stripped the unborn of all legal personhood, calling this progress. In Scotland, ministers denounce the Church’s moral teaching as “harmful” even as they preside over grotesque scandals of waste and mismanagement. In Westminster, MPs have enriched themselves by placing relatives on public payrolls and by exploiting insider access for private gain.

In the United States, legislators who speak of defending democracy profit from privileged stock trades. The Biden family’s financial dealings with foreign powers continue to cast a shadow over the White House. In Europe, Members of Parliament were found to have accepted bribes from regimes notorious for human rights abuses, even as they lecture the world on transparency. These are not isolated failings; they are the fruit of a system rotting from within.

Liberalism has become a mask: a language of compassion that conceals cruelty, a rhetoric of justice that cloaks corruption, a show of equality that disguises domination.

Freedom without truth is slavery
The problem, however, is deeper than politics. By rejecting God, liberalism has enthroned the self as absolute. Freedom has been redefined as license, and truth reduced to opinion. Thus abortion is celebrated as healthcare, euthanasia as dignity, and the dismantling of family life as equality.

Scripture tells us that “where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.” Without the Spirit, there is no liberty—only slavery to vice, ideology, and sin. What our age parades as compassion is in fact cruelty; what it trumpets as progress is regression into barbarism.

St Augustine warned that a society without justice is nothing but a band of robbers. True freedom, he taught, is not the indulgence of passion but the service of God. Our civilisation, built on self-love to the contempt of God, has become enslaved. This is the earthly city, crumbling under the weight of its own corruption.

The culture of death unmasked
The murder of Charlie Kirk, mocked by those intoxicated with ideology, is one symptom of a broader sickness. It belongs to the same culture that sacrifices children at the altar of choice, abandons the elderly to “assisted dying,” strips innocence from the young in the name of inclusivity, and dismantles faith and family in pursuit of a false equality. This is the culture of death unmasked, and it is the logical fruit of a civilisation that has severed liberty from truth.

The Kingship of Christ
The only remedy is not a return to some imagined golden age of liberalism, but the recognition of the Kingship of Christ. When Christ is denied, tyranny follows; when He is acknowledged, true liberty and peace are possible. We must recover this vision if civilisation is to be saved. Not a politics of corruption and hypocrisy, but a politics of truth and charity. Not a false freedom that enslaves, but the true freedom of the children of God.

A warning and a hope
The immorality of contemporary liberality stands exposed. It cannot renew civilisation, for it has rejected the Author of civilisation. Yet there is hope. The City of God endures, built on the love of God even to the contempt of self. Christ remains King, and His truth cannot be silenced.

I grieve with Charlie Kirk’s family and commend his soul to the mercy of God. But I also warn our nations: if you persist in false liberality, you will reap corruption and death. Only by returning to God’s eternal law, only by bowing to the Kingship of Christ, will civilisation be renewed. For only His City will triumph, and only His truth sets men free.

✠ Jerome Lloyd
Titular Archbishop of Selsey