Samuel Clemens, better known as Mark Twain, wrote the following concerning reports that he was seriously ill and near death (it was his cousin): “The report of my death was an exaggeration.” A similar thing can be said about Western Civilization. It may be ill, but it’s not dead. The enemies of Western Civilization are on life support because they are using force to implement their ideology. This is a sign of illegitimacy, desperation, and failure to change people’s minds by reasoned discussion.
Consider what’s happening in Louisville, Kentucky:
An activist group is threatening Louisville business owners with possible repercussions if they fail to submit to their list of social justice-related demands. Phelix Crittenden, who is allegedly the “lead supply organizer for BLM Louisville chapter,” created a group called “Blacks Organizing Strategic Success [BOSS].”
The group’s demands include having a minimum of 23% Black staff and purchasing “a minimum of 23% inventory from Black retailers or make a recurring monthly donation of 1.5% of net sales to a local Black nonprofit or organization.”
Failure to comply will mean financial repercussions from BOSS that could shut down the non-complying business through boycott efforts and negative publicity “by launching negative reviews and social media posts about the businesses."
These types of actions are a microcosm of a larger problem brought on by attempting to affect culture via power. “In an anarcho-capitalist world of profit-seeking private armies, the result is the warlord society. Militarily successful private armies will always seek to establish their monopolistic rule by killing the competition, literally.” ((Gary North, “Resistance to Church Lockdowns: What About Romans 13?” (July 30, 2020).))
The main reason anti-Christian civilizationists survive and seem to thrive is that Christians have not engaged with and built a competing alternative culture. Moreover, many Christians don’t believe there can be a Christian civilization, so they send their children off to the local government school that is anti-Christian believing that facts are neutral and public education is free. Such thinking comes at a terrible cost since there is no such thing as “free.” There’s always a cost. Actions by Christians can change this problem by simple obedience to God’s law. If wolves in sheep clothing are a problem for the people of God, then what should we think of wolves who are admitted wolves?
It hasn’t always been this way. Winston Churchill, for example, saw the Battle of Britain as a struggle between the kingdom of light and the kingdom of darkness. “Upon this battle,” Churchill said on the 18th of June 1940, “depends the survival of Christian civilization.” ((Quoted in John Baillie, What is Christian Civilization? (London: Oxford University Press, 1945), 5.))
Christianity has always entered the world when it was deep in the stench of paganism and darkness. In the past, such conditions have brought out the best in the Christian worldview. Christianity infused the world with the light of the gospel and its call for the redemption of sinners and their sin-stained world. This vision of Christianity seems lost on many of today’s Christians.
Anti-Christians are killing off their future via abortion and choosing not to have children. Homosexuality and transgenderism (and all the other genderisms) are self-emasculating. When men and women are cutting off their genitals to identify as the opposite sex, we must ask whose civilization is coming to an end.
There are many Christians who will not participate in civilization-building efforts that include politics because they believe (or have been taught to believe) that politics is outside the realm of what constitutes a Christian worldview. “Politics is dirty,” “Jesus didn’t get mixed up in politics,” “Politics is about law, and Christianity is about grace,” “Government is not our savior; Jesus is,” “Jesus said that His kingdom is not of this world,” “The Christian’s only task is to preach the gospel, and so many more myths.” ((See my book Myths, Lies, and Half-Truths (Powder Springs, GA: American Vision Press, 2010).))
The thing of it is, a biblical worldview includes politics, the civil dimension of biblical government. The British poet and literary critic T. S. Eliot (1888–1965) makes the point better than I can:
Yet there is an aspect in which we can see a religion as the whole way of life of a people, from birth to the grave, from morning to night and even in sleep, and that way of life is also its culture…. It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe have—until recently—been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all our thought has significance. An individual European may not believe that the Christian Faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does, will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning…. If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. ((T.S. Eliot, Notes Towards the Definition of Culture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949), 29, 126.))
The entire Bible speaks about the subjects of governments and politics just like it speaks about everything else. Abraham Kuyper (1837–1920), Prime Minister of the Netherlands and Professor of Theology at the Free University of Amsterdam and editor of the daily newspaper The Standard, summarized this truth with these words: “[N]o single piece of our mental world is to be hermetically sealed off from the rest, and there is not a square inch in the whole domain of our human existence over which Christ, who is Sovereign over all, does not cry: “Mine!’” ((Abraham Kuyper, “Sphere Sovereignty” (1880) in James D. Bratt, ed., Abraham Kuyper: A Centennial Reader (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1998), 488.))
If holiness means “Thou Shalt not steal” for you and me, then it also means the same thing for you and me if we decide to become a civil official. Politics, actually “civil government,” is not morally neutral territory just like self-, family, and church governments are not morally neutral. If we follow the reasoning of some Christians, we can’t speak out against civil ministers when they violate their oath to uphold the Constitution and violate some biblical law, for example, the specific law against man-stealing (Ex. 21:16; 1 Tim. 1:10; Rev. 18:13). Should we remain silent and passive when a husband violates his marriage oath or a minister of the gospel who violates his ordination vows? Of course, we should not. There are procedures to deal with these violations. The same is true in the civil realm. It includes organizing people to oppose civil oath violators to remove them from office.
So, if thieves break into your home and burn it down, what should you do? What if they beat and rape your wife and steal all your stuff? If the chief of police and the mayor don’t do anything about it, are these non-involved Christians telling their fellow-Christians that they should not protest but just take the persecution “for righteousness’ sake”? Would he be considered “proud,” “pompous” and a “power monger” to rally his neighbors to vote the mayor out of office in the next election? According to God’s Word, the civil magistrate has the power of the sword (Rom. 13:1–4). Without limits on the civil minister’s authority and power, that sword can do a lot of harm to a lot of people.
I suppose as Christians like Corrie ten Boom (1893–1983) and her family were being dragged off to a concentration camp for helping Jews escape from the Nazis, their fellow-Christians should have told them, “This is what you get for not being willing to be oppressed and disenfranchised for righteousness’ sake. You should have made peace with the Nazis not protest against them. Persecution is the Christian’s lot in life.”
If Christians had been involved in civilization-building efforts, including civil governments decades before and understood the limits of unchallenged actions by those who work against a Christian civilization, Germany would never have had an Adolf Hitler. In 19th-century Germany, a distinction was made between the realm of public policy managed by the State and the domain of private morality under the province of the gospel. Religion was the sphere of the inner personal life, while things public came under the jurisdiction of the “worldly powers.” Redemption was fully the province of the church while the civil sphere was solely the province of the State. “Religion was a private matter that concerned itself with the personal and moral development of the individual. The external order—nature, scientific knowledge, statecraft—operated on the basis of its own internal logic and discernable laws.” ((Richard V. Pierard, “Why Did Protestants Welcome Hitler?,” Fides et Historia (North Newton, KS: The Conference on Faith and History), X:2 (Spring 1978), 13.))
It’s a travesty that many Christians hold similar views today. It doesn’t help that Millions of Christians believe it’s hopeless and that the remedy is something called “the rapture of the church” that will rescue Christians from responsibility. See my article “A Vote for Biden Will Hasten Jesus’ Return and His Second Coming.”