The Roots of the West, its Decline, and its Possible Renewal

Dec 8, 2017 by

by Bill Muehlenberg, CultureWatch:

A topic as broad as the one suggested by my title is of course far too much to do justice to in a short article. But I can highlight a few brief themes here. And let me try to tie in a few recent specifics (such as the war on marriage) with the overall bigger picture

I have written often about the death of the West, and about how civilisations die. As I have repeatedly noted, it takes a long time to build a culture or civilisation, but their collapse can happen relatively quickly. We are now seeing this being played out in the West.

Much of the West is the direct result of the Judeo-Christian worldview. Of course other earlier influences would include ancient Greece and Rome, and more recently, things such as the Enlightenment. But to speak of Western civilisation is by and large to speak of Christian civilisation.

However as should be apparent to all, those religious roots of the West have been eroded, undermined and outright rejected by many, if not most, Westerners. Now the West is living on the borrowed spiritual capital of days long gone by. That cannot last much longer.

A building deprived of its foundation is living on borrowed time, and that is true of cultures and civilisations as well. While the collapse may take some time to reach its final and inevitable result, we are certainly nearing the tail end of the West’s decline.

And daily we see this at work. As I type this, the federal lower house is putting its finishing touches on a bill which signals the death of marriage in Australia. Not to be outdone, one politician from the so-called conservative party just proposed to his male lover from the floor of Parliament.

While some might get warm, fuzzy feelings over this, anyone with even a remote understanding of history and culture will see this for the utterly unique, novel and radical step that it really is. This is just mind-boggling in the extreme, as is the spectacle of these politicians stumbling over themselves to remove any religious protections for the millions of no voters.

Read here

 

Related Posts

Tags

Share This