If history teaches that civilisations can collapse from within, then the next logical question is how such decline begins. The fall of nations is rarely the result of a single event or sudden catastrophe. More often it arises from deeper cultural and philosophical changes that slowly reshape a society’s values, institutions, and worldview.
Ideas have consequences. The beliefs a civilisation holds about human nature, morality, truth, and the purpose of life ultimately shape its laws, education, culture, and politics. When those foundational beliefs change, the direction of the entire society can shift with them.
Over the past several centuries, Western civilisation has undergone profound intellectual and cultural transformations. Movements such as the Enlightenment, Darwinian evolution, Marxism, and modern secular humanism have deeply influenced how people understand the world and their place within it.
In this second part of our series, we explore the historical and philosophical developments that some commentators believe have contributed to the moral and cultural uncertainty visible in Western societies today.
How did we come to this?
There is a long and short answer to this vexing question. The long answer runs all the way from the ‘Enlightenment’ in 17th century Europe through Marxism and humanism, through the counter-culture of the 1960s, to the modern consumerist society.
The short answer is: from about World War I (1914–1918) on, Western society has embarked upon an historically dangerous social experiment to see what life is like when we reject God.
The normalisation and celebration of gender dysphoria; the epidemic of drug use and physical abuse in Western society; and record societal levels of depression and alienation, show that the results are now in.
For a society that so freely discarded the centuries-old virtues of duty, loyalty, hard work, and faith in God, the bill is now due. We, as a societal whole, sowed the seeds, and are now reaping our own destruction.
Solzhenitsyn’s Warning: We Have Forgotten God
Bill Muehlenberg writes:
One of the world’s greatest modern prophets, former communist and Soviet War hero (and later Russian gulag prisoner), Alexander Solzhenitsyn, exposed the industrial-scale slaughter and callous indifference to human life in the Soviet Union (USSR), the world’s first post-God society, in his seminal work, The Gulag Archipelago.
He has written passionately and eloquently on this theme and the reasons for the grisly tragedy that has become human history since the start of the 20th century. His assessment is simple and yet profound:
“It is because we have forgotten God. That is why all this is happening to us.”
“This moral, ethical, and societal decline,” Solzhenitsyn said, “is directly connected to our wide-scale rejection of God.” Historian Will Durant again offers this insight:
“There is no significant example in history, before our time, of a society successfully maintaining moral life without the aid of religion.”
What Happens When Faith Disappears?
Celebrated American-British poet and critic, T.S. Eliot (1888–1965), author of The Hollow Men and The Waste Land, essayed an important volume of articles in 1948 (Notes Towards the Definition of Culture) where he declared:
“If Christianity goes, the whole of our culture goes. Then you must start painfully again, and you cannot put on a new culture ready-made. You must wait for the grass to grow to feed the sheep to give the wool out of which your new coat will be made.”
“You must pass through many centuries of barbarism. We should not live to see the new culture, nor would our great-great-great-grand-children: and if we did, not one of us would be happy in it.”
His thesis: Throw out God and the work of “civilisation” becomes very difficult, if not impossible. Again, Will Durant agrees:
“From barbarism to civilization requires a century; from civilization to barbarism needs but a day.”
Darwin, Human Nature and the Modern World
Materialistic and anti-Christian, naturalist Charles Darwin’s opus, Origin of Species by Natural Selection or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle of Life (1859) created the myth that humans are simply the end of an evolutionary ladder, a hairless ape.
This work, with its central thesis of “survival of the fittest”, proved a rationale for some of the greatest atrocities of the late 19th and 20th centuries, from the desecration of tribal peoples who were considered to be anthropologically a lower level of sub-human, to lynchings in the Deep South, to Hitler’s holocaust through his belief in a Master Race.
Adolf Hitler’s belief in the superiority of the Aryan Master Race (“herrenvolk”), which he directly attributed to Darwinian theory, led to not just the industrial-scale slaughter of Jews, Slavs, and gypsies (“Untermensch”) but also eugenics: the killing of the disabled and handicapped.
Let’s not forget that champion of “reproductive rights” in the United States, racist Margaret Sanger who, in the early 1920’s, introduced this Darwinian ideology to America via abortion, the annual termination of millions of lives through killing the unborn.
At the 1977 March for Life, Jesse Jackson asked,
“What happens… to the moral fabric of a nation that accepts the aborting of the life of a baby without a pang of conscience?”
If we humans are in fact created by God in His image, and we now know how much super-intelligent physical work with atoms plus the immense care that this takes, we have to believe that He is more than a little unhappy with abortions.
How much of the destruction of His work will He tolerate?
The Power of Ideas
In Europe — during the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries — wars tragically cost the lives of several million people each century. But in our more “enlightened” 20th century, it was not the more sophisticated weapons that created the untimely deaths of well over 70 million people, but the ideologies driving them to war, including Darwinian theory, Marxism, and the teachings of Friedrich Nietzsche (“God is dead”).
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.” — Romans 12:21
Is Renewal Still Possible?
Throughout history, ideas have shaped nations as much as armies or economics. The philosophies that dominate an age influence how people understand morality, authority, responsibility, and the value of human life itself.
In the view of many historians and thinkers, the gradual removal of religious and moral foundations from Western society has played a significant role in the cultural uncertainty we see today. Whether one agrees with that assessment or not, the historical record demonstrates that civilisations are profoundly shaped by the ideas they embrace.
When societies abandon long-standing moral frameworks without replacing them with equally strong foundations, confusion and instability can follow. What begins as an intellectual shift can eventually reshape institutions, culture, and the moral character of a nation.
Yet history also shows that decline is not always irreversible. Civilisations have sometimes experienced renewal when people recognise the dangers they face and choose to rebuild the foundations of their society.
In the final part of this series, we will examine what individuals and communities can do when they believe their nation is at a crossroads.
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