How Christianity Can Save the West| National Catholic Register

LONDON — The crucial importance of faith — and especially the Christian faith — in saving Western civilization from its widely perceived decay formed a significant part of a major international gathering that has just concluded in London. 

Even though Christianity, or religion in general, was not clearly advertised in the conference program, many speakers at the Feb. 17-19 Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference underlined its significance in reestablishing and strengthening the foundations of Western civilization. Some also observed that as the culture continues to decline, people — especially the young — are thirsting for the truth, beauty and goodness of the Catholic faith.

Featuring an impressive lineup of prominent speakers such as Jordan Peterson, Bishop Robert Barron, and Speaker Mike Johnson of the U.S. House of Representatives, along with 4,000 thought leaders, business executives, policymakers and cultural influencers, the conference was primarily about — as one newspaper editor described it — “a global meeting to halt the perceived decline in Western culture.” Much of its focus was therefore on political and economic development. 

But even prominent attendees known to struggle with faith gave a nod to its importance in the discussions. “We’ve kind of forgotten that what underpins everything is our Judeo-Christian culture, and that’s where we need to start,” Nigel Farage, leader of Britain’s increasingly popular Reform Party, told the audience to applause. “And if we recognize that, and if we value that, then I think everything comes from that.”

Somali-born Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution who recently converted to Christianity from Islam, stressed how much nation states “need Christian morality” and observed that in Europe, “Christianity remains, despite secularization.” 

Christian principles are the “crucial operating system of society,” she said. “Without it, the apps don’t work” and nations have “no moral compass.” She went on to reference various verses from the Bible to show how our concepts of justice, the rule of law and human dignity have their origins in Holy Scripture. 

Os Guinness, a visiting fellow at the Brookings Institution, explained how secular humanism and the Enlightenment’s attempt to replace faith with reason had failed. “They tried to replace God, but they produced a series of quasi religions,” he said. “Take Marxism. It begins by claiming that all criticism begins with the criticism of religion, and it ends as a religion which stifles all criticism.”

‘Exile and Return’

The secular world talks about “decline and fall,” Guinness said, but for Christians, it’s about “exile and return.” When people “disobey the ways of the Lord and don’t live as he calls us to live — it produces chaos and displacement, and finally exile. But if people return to him, he returns to them and restores their fortunes. […] So even in periods of deep decline, which we are experiencing now, we have the hope of return if we return to the Lord properly.” 

But the Brookings fellow stressed such a return will only be “true and effective” if it is “understood to be true” and enough citizens have “an ultimate loyalty to what they see as ultimate reality.” They must have the “music” of the Gospel within themselves, Guinness said, but he said he detected a “growing symphony” among a “creative minority.” 

He concluded: “May all of us who understand these things be part of that creative minority who, in this crucial moment in civilization in the West, will truly make a difference.”

Speaking as part of a panel discussion, Amy Orr-Ewing, an honorary lecturer in divinity at the University of Aberdeen, also noted a spiritual thirst in the West, particularly among younger generations. She cited studies showing that Generation Z (people born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s) “are much more likely to be spiritual and open to the idea of God than their parents.”

Orr-Ewing noted how much the ARC conference had focused on a key truth that has “sustained our civilization”: that man is “created in the image of God.” She underlined how this truth gives man “an extraordinary dignity and value” to a generation that “has been raised being told your identity is dependent on yourself, generated yourself.” 

“What a contrast to view yourself and other human beings as sacred image bearers of a living God whom we can have connection with,” she said, and to recognize the reality of “grace and a second chance, the possibility of forgiveness.” 

Speaking on the same panel, Orthodox author Rod Dreher reminded the audience of a point Pope Benedict XVI stressed: that the “best arguments for Christianity at this time are not the proposition of arguments,” as “that’s made for an age of reason.” Rather, Dreher said, the focus should be on how these principles are “embodied materially in art, in music,” as well as in “goodness, radical goodness and the holiness of the saints.” 

“These things speak to the heart, and the heart can’t deny them,” he said. “Once you accept this into your heart, it opens a mind for these propositions.” Dreher, author of Living in Wonder: Finding Mystery and Meaning in a Secular Age, believes Western civilization will not recover unless “we become re-enchanted” and seek a form of Christianity that is “more mystical,” that values this “direct perception of the Holy Spirit, holiness and a transcendence.”

This was the second ARC conference, and the number of attendees has almost tripled since the first meeting in autumn 2023.

Bishop Barron

Bishop Barron spoke at both gatherings. In his address this year, he stressed that “there can be no real economic and political development without some reference to the summum bonum, to the highest good. You can’t tell the story of Western civilization without reference to God.”

Acknowledging God, he continued, provides a crucial sense of judgment and prevents the deification of political leaders or arrangements. Belief in God also inspires greater achievements in justice, beauty, science and truth, and a “holy longing” acts as a motivator, pushing humanity toward continuous improvement. “A very keen and lively sense of God spurs you on, upward, upward,” said Bishop Barron. 

The human soul, he said, has a natural inclination towards the infinite, with the mind seeking truth, the will seeking good, and the soul desiring beauty in their unconditioned forms — in other words, God. But frustration of this innate desire leads to cultural and societal stagnation. He used Dante’s image of Satan stuck in ice as a metaphor and the story of Elijah and the priests of Baal to illustrate the dangers of making worldly things absolute, leading to self-destructive behaviors. 

True faith, on the other hand, unleashes the human spirit, he said.

Bishop Barron recalled Pope St. John Paul II’s visit to Soviet-ruled Poland in 1979 when the people began to chant, “We want God! We want God!” Bishop Barron said he sees the same yearning today, “especially in young people in the West” because “they’re sensing that’s the key — not only to their personal flourishing, but to the flourishing of our society.” 

Speaking to the Register, Bishop Barron said he believed the priority for Western civilization ought to be to “recover the moral sense, the sense of the transcendent, to sort of reenchant our society, this flattened-out secularism, this scientific rationalism. 

“All of that,” he said, “has been deadly.” 

“We have a generation that’s been, I think, suffocating from this sort of secularism,” he continued, adding that is why it is important to revive “a reenchanted universe, a sense of God, of the sacred, of the divine,” which he believes “does lead to a healthier and more just society.”

Commenting on the virtues of such a conference, Catholic attendee Charles Coulombe said he believed “it could well be the beginning of something positive.”

“People will come here and learn things and hear things that they wouldn’t have heard otherwise, and that may well push them in the right direction,” said Coulombe, development consultant at the International Theological Institute in Trumau, Austria.

As Catholics, he said, “we have to respond with a reaffirmation of what it is we are supposed to be in the first place. If we don’t do that, it’s worse than simply a danger to own souls, although it is that. It is basically falling short of the Great Commission. I think a thing like this shows the need for, and the hunger for, what we have.”

National Catholic Register