What the world does not need is a westernization devoid of Christianity. Rather, the world needs a church committed to be the Church, as Chuck Colson often said, with Christians who self-consciously work to make the extraordinary truths of the Faith an integral part of everyday, ordinary living. Not just on Sunday mornings, but in our families, our jobs, our politics, and cultural work. Or, said differently, the world doesn’t need the West. It needs the Church.
In a recent video posted on X, a Muslim cleric declared that the days of the West are numbered. Not only would formerly Islamic lands like Spain and Rome soon be retaken for Islam, he said, but the entire world would eventually fall to Islamic military rule.
Predictions of Western humiliation are, of course, not new. To radical Islam, the West has always been the source of corruption and perversion infecting the rest of the world. This despite all that the West has given the world, from free markets to voting rights, universal education, liberty of conscience, among other things. In fact, by nearly every material measurement, societies that have embraced Western principles derived from Christian and Enlightenment ideas have fared better than those that have not. As many have noted, the flow of immigration between Western and non-Western nations trends strongly in one direction.
And yet, the West is in a profound identity crisis, to the delight of anti-West ideologues. From Pride parades each June to intellectual elites, including a sitting member of the U.S. Supreme Court, who claim to not know what a woman is, Western society is increasingly unhitching from the traditional beliefs and values that grounded its understanding of human dignity.