It Can Be Done

The Real Heroes of the Inner City

High unemployment in many areas, the rise of drug-related crime, extensive vandalism and anti-social behaviour, street crime, and the problems of the police in dealing with race and juvenile crime, have produced a bleak picture of the breakdown of modern society. The underlying social problems are the breakdown of the traditional family, and the support mechanisms that it provided, coupled with the attempt to erode the moral principles that underlay traditional social thinking. For half a century governments have sought to improve the obvious social problems, but have failed to examine the underlying causes of the malaise. Governments, anxious, in a pluralist society, not to offer any special position to the Church, traditionally the main supplier of support, have also ignored the voices of the Jews, Muslims, and Hindus.

It Can Be Done shows that the only answer is to reinstate the traditional partnership between church and state, both nationally and at the local level, because the church has a locally based organisation that the state lacks, and a moral framework that offers the order that society needs. Through a series of case studies from different regions, demonstrating the effectiveness of the grass-roots organisation of the church and the moral authority that provides, it becomes clear how church and state working together can help to forge a new understanding of the oldest social institution of all – the family. The author offers an understanding of and the means to a solution to the problems that afflict modern societies. His book is an important landmark in the battle for the salvation of the soul of the pluralist nation.