Why is Western Civilization in Crisis?

         Without a doubt, Western culture is in crisis. Peder Zane has compiled a list of ongoing catastrophes in American culture. There is a significant rise in reckless behavior. Americans spent $66 billion gambling last year. In the last five years alcohol related driving deaths are up 18%. Alcohol related deaths are up 30%. People report being more anxious and depressed. Young women reporting mental health issues have risen 131% in the last ten years. The marriage rate is down and the birth rate is collapsing. The Pentagon has been unable to reach its recruitment goals; so, of course, it has addressed the problem by lowering its standards. Millions of able-bodied American men have dropped out of the workforce, choosing unemployment instead. Incarceration rates are up dramatically. In the last forty years the number of women behind bars has increased by 475%.

You can add to Zane’s list a host of other social pathologies. The transgender insanity is a full attack on women and women’s sports but is supported at the highest levels of the federal government. So is gender transition surgery for children. Crime is out of control and young men in America’s cities are in greater danger than if they were soldiers in Afghanistan.

You can add your own list of evidences of cultural decline. In this video I want to answer the question, “Why is this happening?” In my next video I want to answer the question, “What does the future hold for Western civilization?”

Why is Western culture in crisis?

1.   The abandonment of the God of historic Christianity. Belief in the God of the Bible has provided every blessing we enjoy. Religious, political, economic, scientific, technological. All of them. Abandoning Him leads to the destruction of everything good in our lives. Paul charted this for us in Romans 1. Beginning in verse 18 he says men have turned against God even though they know He exists. But they do not thank or honor Him. Then they imagine themselves as too good for God, and then Paul states what should be the new motto for Western universities, “Thinking themselves wise they became fools instead.” Then they spiral down into all kinds of madness which is exactly what we see in the world today. In a society controlled by Christianity people end up being blessed. In a society controlled by the Progressive/Left people end up in concentration camps.

2.   Which brings us to number two. The religion of the Progressive Left is a powerful force for destruction. Among our nation’s elite the Christian faith has been replaced by a new quasi-Marxist cult. Its goal is the destruction of our culture as we have known it. It’s no secret. It’s their intention, publicly declared for all to see and hear. Mark Dooley says it well: “[The Progressives] are the enemies of civilisation, of life, and love; [they] have no culture. If anything, their aim is not only to destroy the great cultural and spiritual achievements of the West, but to lay waste to anything that transcends the diabolical and obscene.”

3.   The third reason for the crisis: as well as converting to Marxism our cultural elite are repaganizing. You see this in their all-out attack on historic Christianity. You see it in the collapse of sexual ethics. They have abandoned the Christian doctrine of personal responsibility and replaced it with a cult of victimhood. Western nations are expanding access to euthanasia; state-assisted suicide. The worship of God has been replaced with the worship of nature.

4.   The fourth cause of the crisis: The academic community. It is the chief arm of the Progressive Left and more and more is committed to the destruction of Western culture. It is anti-God, anti-Christian, specifically hostile to our civilization, and hostile to personal freedom.

5.   The biggest sign of the decline of our culture is demography. People have stopped having children. Almost every nation in the developed world has a birth rate that would not replace its present population. In the United States women are having 20% fewer children than needed to replace our population. This is an enormous crisis yet the birth rate continues to fall. 

6.   We see an all-out war on the family. One of the first things pagans have always done is devalue children.  People in the LBGQT movement by definition cannot reproduce. It is a sterile culture of death. And yet it has become the chief cause celebre’ for our elite. We see the war on the family worldwide with the mass slaughter of the female unborn. Upwards of 200 million of them have been aborted or killed through abortion or infanticide; simply because they were female.

7.   We see the redefining of human beings as creatures with absolute autonomy and no limits, but also with no intrinsic meaning. Carl Trueman calls this the return of nihilism. A culture in which values do not exist.

Western culture has external enemies but in my view the threat is overwhelmingly from within. Admittedly, we see the rise of Islam, and a minority of Muslims seek to overthrow our culture, but only a tiny fraction of them are literally at war with us. Most Muslims would like to get on with the normal things of life, not blow themselves up trying to change our culture.

China is on the march but has enormous internal problems—economic and demographic—and I question how much damage they can do.

We see the threat of terrorism, but though it generates headlines it has little effect on civilization. 

We have recently seen how a pandemic can wound our culture but it is a storm we can weather and life returns to pretty much the normal it was before. They greatest threat the pandemic posed was government intervention in the lives of its citizens.

There is the specter of nuclear war which is potentially catastrophic but has not yet materialized.

If you go online and google the question, What is causing the decline of the West, the most common answer given is income inequality. But for the life of me I don’t see this as having any importance at all. Whether or not incomes are becoming more unequal—and there is fierce debate about this—the fact is that everyone in the West is getting richer. Which is why 10 million people in the last three years have illegally entered the United States, and millions more will continue to try. If we were plagued by inequality this would not be happening.

Yes, our world has problems. But our God is sovereign over all. In my next video I will share why I am confident about the future of Western civilization.

May our God, Who rules the nations, bless you this day in a mighty way.

More:

J. Peder Zane assembles evidence for America and the West’s collapse: https://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2024/03/25/the_canaries_in_americas_coal_mine_150695.html

The Muslim population of Europe: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/11/29/5-facts-about-the-muslim-population-in-europe/

More: Holland’s lecture raising the three possibilities for the future: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cDa4vpkNKeQ&t=0s

Mark Dooley argues that we aren’t really in a culture war but fighting an enemy who wants to do nothing but destroy: https://europeanconservative.com/articles/essay/the-religion-of-antichrist/

Victor Davis Hanson provides another list of evidences that Western culture is collapsing: https://amgreatness.com/2024/01/08/a-culture-in-collapse/

Marco Rubio on the new religions of the West: https://www.compactmag.com/article/against-progressive-pseudo-religion/

What is the Muslim population of Europe?: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2017/11/29/5-facts-about-the-muslim-population-in-europe/

Madeline Kearns, The West’s Suicide Wish: https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/10/the-wests-suicide-wish/

Carl Trueman; ours is an age without values; it is nihilistic: https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2024/03/nihilismin-nazi-germany-and-today