August 24, 2008
Chris Strevel

All is not quiet on the western front. In fact, the west no longer has a front. Whether one surveys the once-proud citadel of western culture or the battlefield outside the gates, the scene is bleak. Short of a miracle of biblical proportions, I do not think there will be a dawn.

Consider that since the year 1865, the United States Constitution has been a museum relic in the only modern nation that had anything approaching an almost self-conscious, Christian foundation. I lament this not because the Constitution was explicitly Christian, but because it at least represented an attempt at the rule of law, of restricted government, and of confidence in transcendent, divine law and objective truth. The men who wrote and signed this document were not secularists; they were a mixed bunch, yet many Christian leaders signed on with the belief that the specifically delegated powers of the federal government would always be checked by Christian states, counties, and men. When the final embers of the fires of northern commercialism, atheism, and federalism died out in the razed South, the last cinder of divine law-based, “Give me liberty or give me death,” “Give ‘em the cold steel boys” worldview and courage died with it. Anyone who thinks that the United States since that time has been the land of the free and the home of the brave needs to stop reading government history books, listening to the patriotic drivel daily spewed by the neo-conservatives, and hiding his head in the sand of wishful thinking. Since 1865, the United States has been a corporation more than it has been anything else, and you and I are its citizen-slaves. What we have witnessed over the last century and a half is the consolidation of all power into the federal government, the unabashed enthronement of corporate interests, banking powers, and militarism on an unprecedented scale. No medieval European king ever had pretensions of power and control as our present system of American secular imperialism.

It is not just in this nation, however, that the front is bleak. Europe as we knew it is disappearing. Belgium now has a Muslim majority in its government. Within twenty to thirty years, the demographics of Europe will result in a non-European (white, Anglo-Saxon, pseudo-Protestant) majority. The Muslim call to prayer is soon to be sounded publicly three times daily in Oxford, England, the whitest and most British city in England. The Archbishop of Canterbury recently said that Muslims in Britain should be ruled by Islamic law. Europe, according to honest men, will soon be Eurabia for the very simple reason that the European birthrate is now below replacement level. The Muslim birth rate is five to six times above replacement level. Do the math. The only western nation that has a bare replacement birth rate is the United States, at 2.1. No other nation is even close.

It is not, however, simply birth rates and demographics that signals a defining cultural change. We are witnessing a worldview collapse – not of biblical Christianity – but of secularism. I have never considered Islam much of a threat. Secularism is the threat, for Islam has several ingredients of cultural expansion and victory that secularism, whether American or European, does not currently have. First, it is animated by an eschatology of victory. This is evidenced not only by its jihadist rhetoric, but also by its practice. I will choose just one: it makes babies. While the west was screaming about the overpopulation myth, passing out condoms by the truckload to school aged children, and celebrating sexual liberation for adolescents and sodomites, Muslim families were having babies. Each of the aforementioned western hobby horses are evidence of cultural disease: fear, despair, and recklessness produced by rebellion. So, if the Muslims do nothing but breed, the now secular west cannot survive. The Muslim triumph is not due to a compelling religious system, for it is not. According to the recently converted (to Christianity) son of a high-ranking leader of Hamas, most Muslims have no idea of their religion’s leading tenets other than the external practices enforced by their teachers. It is not because Islam is militarily superior to Western forces, for it is not. It is because the Islamic worldview is superior to secularism. It has faith in the future, in conquest, in victory.

Second, it does not give its enemies any quarter. Put in western terms, Islam violently rejects multiculturalism. There is something you and I must understand clearly about multiculturalism that far transcends the annoying pundits of political-correctness. Multiculturalism is the white-flag of cultural surrender. A culture that embraces multiculturalism and its sewage runoff of radical relativism, anything-goes-morality, and universal tolerance has publicly admitted, “We have no answers. We no longer believe in our history, our way of life, our moral standards, our people. We deny absolute truth. Live for the moment. Embrace everything.” Islam detests this sort of thinking; the west has celebrated it. We are embarrassed by our race; any form of pride in western accomplishment, in our peoples, and or in our history is vilified as racism and Eurocentrism. By embracing this philosophy, we have handed our culture to the Muslims. They believe in absolutes, albeit twisted ones. They believe in their race, their culture, and their history. Because they embrace their past, they have a future. They are not afraid to die in the present. Our culture, however, has the stench of fear. We are committing genocide against ourselves.

The rabbit hole is deeper. In our self-delusion, we think that the rest of the world wants to die with us. When our leaders justify military intervention all over the world, always against lesser opponents of course, they claim that they are extending the American way of life. Much of the rest of the world does not want the American way of life, for the simple reason that it wants to survive. It does not want its university professors apologizing for the past and writing text books on 19th century Caribbean lesbian literature (in which, by the way, several prestigious American universities offer classes even though there are only one or two known examples of such literature). It does not want to embrace philosophical pragmatism. It does not want to accept moral relativism. It does not want to commit cultural suicide. We, however, have already opened the vein. And in our utter hubris, we think the whole world will want to do the same, that it will follow our lead in welcoming the new world order dominated by entertainment, corporate interests, and amorality. It does not. It will watch us die and pray that the cancer is contained.

Third, Islam believes that religion is the key to cultural life. It is true that secular Muslims no longer believe this, but this is because they have plucked the apple of western consumerism and moral tolerance from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thus cursing themselves with the cancer of secularism. Consistent Islam, however, understands that religious faith is the motivation for cultural expansion and that secularism produces cultural stagnation and ennui. The west believed in the necessity of religious faith as the foundation of culture for over a millennium, which is the reason we had the strength to resist and contain Islam, not to mention produce cultural works of beauty, scientific prowess, and civil liberty unprecedented in the history of the world. It was the Christian faith that gave life to former barbarians, begot Rembrandt, Bach and Wagner, Bacon, Farraday, and Einstein, Washington, Jefferson, and Henry. No other culture has produced such men. We are not producing them today. Why? No religion. Specifically, no Christian religion.

This is really the issue today. It is not Islam. It is not oil reserves. It is not a weak dollar. The economic issues get all the press because we assume that the only fundamental issues in life are monetary. They are not fundamental issues; they are symptomatic issues. The west will die, if it does, because it abandoned its foundation of faith in the triune God. We cannot resist Islam because even non-Christian religion will beat non-religion every time. Secularism is a death philosophy, a death morality, a cultural expression of the loss of faith in everything beyond the immediate, personal pleasure, and individual meaning. No culture in the history of the world has survived this cancer, however strong its military, broad-based its economy, or arrogant its pretensions.

We, defenders of the historic Christian faith, find ourselves at an important crossroads. We are not approaching them; we are standing in them. As personally challenging and painful as it may be, I will be thankful if the west dies, for it will mean the exposure of secularism in all its hideousness. But, if the Christian church can give a consistent and clarion witness in this hour, all will not be lost. We must claim our past and know our history. We must consistently expose the peril of secularism, that it is cultural Russian roulette without an empty chamber in the pistol. And, most importantly, this is the hour when the true sons of the west, those who understand the relationship between Christ and culture, Christ and meaning, Christ and survival, must band together and make a last stand for all that is good, noble, and true, cultural fruits of our corporate faith in the living God, in objective truth, and ultimate meaning. His is the only banner of survival, for he alone frees men from inner slavery to sin so that they can look tyrants and false religions alike in the face and proclaim that there is another King, one Jesus. Every knee must bow before him or face extinction – personal, familial, and cultural.

Whatever happens to the west, the church will move forward. I pray it is with more wisdom than we are currently showing. We have too closely aligned ourselves with the city of man, which now has its clearest expression in the American system of secularism. I scoff at the attempts of Rick Warren and his evangelical pals to find a friend in this catastrophe. What has Jerusalem to do with Athens, Christ with Satan, the Christian faith with secularism? Nothing. Forget finding common ground. Push the antithesis until the other side cries “uncle.” The fight will not last long, for philosophies without worldview guns and ammunition soon give up the fight. Do not sit at the table with them, pretending that silly questions to men equally committed to secularism will yield substantive differences and a clear-cut choice. When two thieves enter my house, I do not care if one carries a pistol and the other a shotgun. I shoot them both as quickly as possible. But then again, the church has lost the will to fight. It has bought into secularism – with its believe anything you want, worship however you please, follow any spiritual principle that satisfies your version of “Christianity.”

Reducing everything to its most fundamental level, the bedrock of all other issues, the death of the west is really the death of a truncated form of Christianity that has reached its nadir. Since the ascension of Jesus Christ and the universalization of his kingdom, it is his church that produces a culture. Contrary to modern assessments that completely ignore this dynamic and, therefore, preclude accurate conclusions, the culture is a reflection of the church, not the other way around. Yet, the other way around is exactly what has happened in the United States: materialism, relativism, cowardice, unwillingness to forsake the culture’s respect if standing for Jesus Christ demands it, and, for evangelical leaders, losing an invitation to the White House. What we do not realize is that the world does not want our approval, acceptance, critique, or advice. It uses us when it is convenient to further religious purposes. Thus, when the Democratic Party holds its national convention next week and hosts various seminars on “faith-based issues,” this is not a sign of revival but that it has learned from the Republicans how to use the church to suit its own purposes. And thus, as in John’s apocalyptic vision, we are obscenely mounted on the beast, its whore, its vehicle to further global secularism, all with the approval of Jesus.

I refuse to fornicate with the beast. The beast is an enemy. With one hand on the Bible and another robbing the poor, perverting justice, and accepting corporate bribes, the beast must be slain. This is our sole function at the present time – not to endorse candidates running for chief executive of the city of man, find common ground with unbelief, or naively think we can play their game and gain our objectives. We have a sword, and it must be unsheathed. We have our knees, and they must be worn out in submission to our King and prayer for him to ride forth in defense of the meek. We have our pulpits, and they must be used to sift the true daughters of Zion from pretenders. If men are driven away from the truth as it is in Jesus, then it is because they never embraced it. And this is a good thing. While the wheat and chaff will never be finally separated until the end, they are progressively sifted in history by Jesus Christ’s gospel scythe and do sometimes become more self-conscious before major contests.

If the west dies, you will not, believer, provided you are on the victorious side, and there is only one. It is the side of the King of kings and Lord of lords. The calm before the storm is over and the winds of revolution are blowing. American secularism and Islam are on the same side; both are advocates of the city of man. Fight for neither. Fight only for the cross of our blessed Savior, who, after allowing these worldviews and cultures to burn themselves into oblivion, will continue to build his church victorious over the gates of hell. Teach and love your children. Forsake religious associations that are mere fronts for secularism in the name of Jesus and prosperity. Seek the King’s grace to persevere, think clearly about the issues of our day, and live courageously. Remember: the best contribution you can make toward the erection of a truly Christian culture is life-wide devotion to Jesus Christ. We are standing in the crossroads. I pray we choose the correct path.