Subtitle: “Why I Despise Modern Western Civilization and How It Has Become So Aberrant.”
In February 2022, I announced my intent to run for the United States Congress.
My life’s calling is talking with others about the Good News of God’s grace in the person and work of Yeshua, the Messiah (Jesus Christ). That grace is beautifully and sacredly portrayed in the Hebrew and Greek Scriptures.
Serving in Congress compared to teaching the Bible is like being a fisherman catching a carp or a tuna. Both can be eaten, but unlike the carp, the tuna is delicious, satisfying, and nutritional.
Serving in Congress may be necessary for a temporal national government, but sharing the Gospel of Jesus Christ is meaningful for all people eternally.
There’s no comparison.
So why did I choose to step aside for a season from regularly teaching the Bible on Sundays to run against a thirty-year Congressional incumbent who chairs the powerful Space, Science and Technology Committee, and has positioned himself strategically inside the political establishment of Washington D.C.?
I ran against the incumbant for Congress to try to stop the perpetual warmongering of the political elite who get comfortable with fighiing wars overseas.
In JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters, biographer James W. Douglas says the reason JFK ran for Congress in 1946 was “to prevent another war” (p. 5).
When JKF announced his candidacy on April 22, 1946, he said:
“What we do now will shape the history of civilization for many years to come. We have a weary world trying to bind the wounds of a fierce struggle. That is dire enough. What is infinitely far worse is that we have a world which unleashed the terrible powers of atomic energy. We have a world capable of destroying itself. The days which lie ahead are most difficult ones. Above all, day and night, with every ounce of ingenuity and industry we possess, we must work for peace. We must not have another war.” (Cited by Hellen O’Donnell, A Common Good: The Friendship of Robert F Kennedy and Kenneth P. O’Donnell, New York: William Morrow, 1998), p. 48).
In centuries past, countries built on the principles of Western Civilization championed societal freedom, individual liberty, and the common good of all.
Peace is for the common good. Wars bring harm to everyone. Western Civilization has always been about peace and the common good.
Western Civilization’s Desire for the Common Good
Ancient Athens, Greece, the Cradle of Western Civilization
Western Civilization has its roots in ancient Greece and Rome during the four centuries before the birth of Jesus Christ.
The term “Western Civilization” refers to the cultural, intellectual, and social developments that have occurred in Europe and the Western Hemisphere from the 5th Century B.C. present day. It is characterized by a strong basis of Natural Law and its rule in society, a rich cultural heritage, and unique political, social, and economic systems built on individual liberty.
Here are some summary observations about Western Civilization:
- Characteristics of Western Civilization − Western Civilization is characterized by a strong emphasis on individualism, reason, and the rule of law, as well as a rich cultural heritage and diverse intellectual traditions.
- Key Historical Periods of Western Civilization − Western Civilization has gone through several key historical periods such as Ancient Greece and Rome, the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution, the Enlightenment, and the Modern Era.
- The Geographical Scope of Western Civilization − Western Civilization has its roots in Europe, but it has also spread to North America and other parts of the Western Hemisphere through colonization and globalization.
- Key Cultural Achievements and Contributions − Cultural achievements such as the development of democracy, the concept of citizenship, the scientific method, the novel, and other literary forms, and the art of painting, sculpture, and architecture.
David Livingstone (1813-1873), the great Christian missionary from London, literally gave his life for the common good of the African people. Before he left his wife, children, and homeland of England to live and die among the people of Africa, David Livingstone became utterly convinced that there would be only one way to stop the worldwide slave trade of African people.
The principles of Western Civilization, according to David Livingstone, contained the answers for people being destroyed by economic, political, or individual serfdom.
Where did Livingston get this understanding that only the principles of Western Civilization bring about the common good of all peoples and nations?
At a public meeting on 1 June 1840, Dr. Livingstone heard Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton of The Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and for the Civilization of Africa offer a plan to resolve the problem of slave trading in Africa: open up the country to trade in other commodities that the inhabitants could produce or grow. As a leader of the antislavery movement, Buxton passionately believed in bringing the three Cs to the continent: Christianity, Commerce, and Civilization. It was a eureka moment for Livingstone: here was the way forward in Africa, to which he would devote the rest of his life.
Christianity, commerce, and civilization formed the axe that severed the root of slavery’s tree!
The three C’s are a concise summary of Western Civilization.
So what has happened to the principles of Western Civilization?
Modern Western Politicians and Perpetual Wars
No explanation is needed. Only genuine prayers for the people of Russia and Ukraine.
How has Western Civilization (Europe and the United States) moved from individual liberty to societal tyranny?
Why do Western politicians push for endless wars?
Why are our children and grandchildren falsely taught in colleges and universities that Western Civilization creates slavery instead of it ceasing slavery?
Again, what has happened to Western Civilization?
Why has the culture of the United States and Europe changed so drastically in the last few decades, departing so far from the principles of Christianity, commerce, and civilization?
Toynbee on Why I Dislike Western Civilization
Recently, I came across an essay in the archives of The New York Times by British historian Arnold Toynbee.
Toynbee wrote the essay twenty years after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
In the essay, Toynbee explains Western Civilization seemed to be on the verge of a first-strike nuclear attack against Russia.
Remember, Toynbee wrote the essay in 1964; sixty years ago. However, reading it today is like reading the headlines of this morning’s newspaper.
You may read Toynbee’s complete essay here.
Below, I highlight four reasons Western Civilization has collapsed since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963. These are the words of Professor Toynbee as articulated beautifully in his essay from 1964.
Four Reasons for the Collapse of Civilization
ARNOLD J. TOYNBEE’S WORDS
Reason #1 – Self-Complacent Sinfulness Characterized by Pride Rather than Christian Humility
I shiver and shake. Old-fashioned Christan humility, please come to my rescue. Please save me from contemporary post-Christian Western self-complacent sinfulness.
Reason #2 – Materialism and the Standardization of Spirituality which Leads to Religious Consumerism
I dislike the contemporary Western advertising business. It has made a fine art out of taking advantage of human silliness. It rams unwanted material goods down surfeited throats when two-thirds of all human beings now alive are in desperate need of the bare necessities of life. This is an ugly aspect of the affluent society; and, if I am told that advertising is the price of affluence, I reply, without hesitation, that affluence has been bought too dear. Another item in the price of affluence is the standardizaion of mass-produced goods and services. This is, in itself, a deplorable impoverishment of the material side of human culture, and it brings spiritual standardization (e.g. ‘religious consumerism’) with it, which is still worse.
Reason #3 – The Sexualization of Children in Western Cultures
Looking back into the past history of the West — a past which was still present when I was a child — I admire the 19th-century West’s success in postponing the age of sexual awakening, sexual experience, and sexual infatuation far beyond the age of physical puberty.
ALL human societes overcome death by creatng and maintaining, institutions that are handed on from one generation to another. Sex is a still more awkward feature of our biological inheritance than death, and our 19th-century Western society handled sex with relative success. By postponing the age of sexual awakening, it prolonged the length of the period of education. It is this, together with the 17th-century Western achievement of learning to think for oneself instead of taking tradition on trust, that accounts for the West’s preeminence in the world during the last few centuries.
Nineteenth-century Westerners condemned with justice the Hindu institutions of child marriage, and they deplored, also with justice, the spectacle of an intellectually promising Moslem boy being allowed to commit intellectual suicide by sexual indulgence at the age of puberty. The 20th-century West is now imitating the non-Western habit that the 19th-century West rightly—though perhaps self-righteously—condemned.
Our irrational contemporary Western impatience and our blind adulation of speed for speed’s sake are making havoc, today, of the education of our children. We force their growth as if they were chicks in a pullet factory. We drive them into a premature awareness of sex even before physical puberty has overtaken them. In fact, we deprive our children of the human right of having a childhood. This forcing of sex consciousness started in the United States; it has spread to Britain, who knows how many other Western countries this perverse system of miseducation is going to invade and demoralize?
OUR whole present policy in the upbringing of the young is paradoxical. While we are lowering the age of sexual awareness — and frequently the age of sexual experience, too — to a veritably Hindu degree, we are at the same time prolonging the length of education. We force our boys and girls to become sex-conscious at 12 or 13, and then we ask them to prolong their postgraduate studies until they are nearly 30. How are they to be expected to give their minds to education during those last 16 or 17 sex-haunted years?
We are proud of ourselves for providing secondary education, college education, and postgraduate education for everybody. But we shall be plowing the sands if we do not simultaneously revert to our grandparents’ practce of prolonging the age of sexual innocence. If we persist, in this vital matter, on our present Hindu course, our brand new would be institutions for higher education will become, in practice, little more than social clubs for sexual mating.
THIS relapse into precocious sexuality is one of the moral blemishes of contemporary Western civilization.
Reason #4 – The Splintering into Nationalism with Other Nations as the Enemy
One of its intellectual blemishes is its insistence on splitting up the universe into smaller and smaller splinters. It has split up the human race into a host of sovereign independent national states. It has split up knowledge and understanding into a host of separate watertight “disciplines.” I dislike nationalism and I dislike specialization, and both are characteristically Western aberrations.
As I said, Toynbee speaks for me when it comes to Western civilization. It may be collapsing right in front of our eyes.
However, the eternal Kingdom of Yeshua, the Savior of the world, will never end.
I may not run for Congress in 2024, but I will never stop teaching the Bible. In the end, the only hope for humanity is the Prince of Peace reigning in the heart of every human being.
Until He reigns throughout the world, I’ll do all I can to help Western politicians hold the line of peace and cease the desire for perpetual wars.
It’s the least I can do to uphold the once-cherished principles of Western Civilization.
Preach on Brother, preach on!
Wade,
I just noticed the 12 lines that are printed o pages 1 and 2 are duplicated on page 6.
I think ‘the Western world’ as extending into the Eastern Hemisphere in the way that Churchill described the ‘British Empire’ in his most famous speech, this:
” we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.”
For me, Churchill’s words ‘then our Empire beyond the seas’ provides a look at what today is the free nations of Australia, New Zealand, etc. . . . . . where there are free elections and people have a VOICE in the control of their governments,
as opposed to a country like Russia which has an autocratic dictator who has attacked even the maternity hospitals of Ukraine in his goal of re-establishing the old Soviet empire with him as its ‘savior’.
Russia never was a part of the West. Today those who have inherited the Western ways understand ‘democracy’ in the old way, not the new use of the word by the right, no. Our Greek and Roman antecedents found their way into Britain which also inherited input from the Norse, from Anglo-Saxon invaders, from the invasion of Normandy in 1066 . . . all down to King John facing off with his earls who demanded that there be ‘limits’ on the king’s powers to rule and that the people had ‘rights’ as seen in the ancient document of Britain: the Magna Carta . . . the USA inherited much from the kind of thinking seen in ‘the Magna Carta’, yes.
I see Russia as a rogue state now. It has nukes and threatens ‘the West’, yes. But we are NOT held hostage to Russia, nor is the Ukraine, as Putin has shown his hand in his brutality to civilians, even extending to the murders of maternity hospital patients . . .
Western civilization lives on in the US Constitution, in the rule of law, and in the hearts of people in THIS NATION who understand, without any difficulty, that any leader that says our fallen troops are ‘losers’ does not deserve to lead our nation and never did. Some values are sacro-sanct, carved into the tombs of our war dead, the ground soaked with their blood.. No petty wanabe autocrat can put our war dead down, ever. That such a man would ‘take over’ our nation would be an ‘end’ of western civilization as I have known it.
Rex,
Thank you for the correction on the PDF. It wasn’t easy to take the archived newspaper article and create the full PDF. I’ll correct that soon!
Christiane,
Possibly. However, what I find fascinating is the former President was accused as a “war monger,” but during his tenure, there was peace with North Korea, Russia, and no troop deaths. Now, we seem to be on the verge of WWIII and giving nearly a trillion dollars to war in Europe. The world is indeed upsidedown.
Excellent article, Wade. Powerful and full of thought. We certainly have enough ‘ammunition’ to know exactly what we should be praying for…and against. I continue to say…’Even so, come Lord Jesus!’ So much work to be done for the kingdom, both on our knees and fighting for whatever semblance of normal there still remains.
Wade, I was writing thinking about my niece, a Navy nurse who served on all our war fronts over the last fifteen to twenty years, and who wrote home from seeing the suffering and deaths of our sons and daughters, this:
‘there are no words’
She saw and she heard and I know what she went through seared her to the very soul, the pain of loss . . . . not of ‘losers’, but of brave young people who served their country HONORABLY.
That someone can be called ‘the anointed of God’ who has belittled our wounded and dead soldiers is KNOWN. . .
Yes, I agree, the world will not cave to Putin or his threats, no. Not even the threat of nuclear conflict. WWIII may come, but our country belongs to honorable free people who cannot be bribed by a dictator into cowering and abandoning our allies, this is true.
We are at risk, certainly, for a nuclear attack from Russia.
Also, my godmother of blessed memory descended from Ukrainian immigrants who came to this country because they were being starved by the Russians in those days long ago. . . .
Sources, Wade. We consult different sources and have different opinions, but I know that it matters that we do not lose our honor to a threat from a dictator. Churchill knew this in his day. Britain paid the price until we came to help them as a ally.
Freedom from autocrats costs the lives of many, yes. But it is in our DNA as Americans to stand up to tyrants, not praise them. We may see things differently or simply from different perspectives, but I will always value your help for those who had no voice to defend themselves against abuse. That kind of support cost you much, I know.
Wade,
I like what you said about our former President.
This morning, a guy stopped by and wanted to buy our 40-foot-high slide. The last person down numbered 709. The 20-year-old girl’s comment was:
“Lord don’t let me curse!”
Old story: Our Dad, Dave Ray, was a Chaplain in World War II. After a battle, he made it a practice to visit the First Aid Station. One time, Medics told him they could not prevent a soldier from bleeding to death. Dad laid down on the ground next to him.
He told Dad, “Yesterday, I thought I’d be killed. I asked Jesus to save me, and He stepped into my heart. I was so happy I thought I’d live forever. Don’t know why I was hit today, but tell my mother I’ll meet her in heaven.”
An Army telegram saying her son was killed in action broke his mother’s heart. Added grief was believing her son was not a Christian. After Dad wrote, she replied: “You’ll never know how much your letter meant to us!”
REX RAY, I have loved this story and I believe you cannot tell it too often. There is something about the NEED of a parent to ‘know’ that they will see their beloved child again in the Kingdom of Our Lord, safe from all harm. Your good father knew this and wrote that letter!
Such a blessing to the parents of that dying soldier, such an act of mercy!
I wrote something once about early Christian parents, this:
“. . . there are moments in existence when the only thing that ‘makes sense’ is the image of the Crucifix. And I don’t know how that works, but it does in that place where we ‘have no words’. That is a lonely place. . . . or it would be without the Crucifix.
I forget the source of these words: “Jesus did not come to explain away suffering or to remove it. He came to fill it with His Presence”
Is that why some have said that our grief is ‘holy to God’?
?
The Presence of the Comforter in our midst allows us to grieve but give us a ‘peacefulness’ as sanctuary for a place to rest for a while. That alone speaks to me personally as some evidence for the existence of the hope that we share as Christian people.
That is ‘how it was’ for the first Christians who converted when. for the first time, they were given ‘hope’ that they would be able to see their beloved dead again in the Resurrection on the Day of the Lord. A favorite ‘icon’ of the first Christians was the image of Our Lord as ‘The Good Shepherd’ carrying a lost lamb safely home. This image was often placed over the tombs of their children by the first Christians . . . . it is an image that still speaks to all Christians today as it has never lost ‘meaning’ to the grieving who are so in need of the gift of the Comforter’s care, the fire of Divine Love which brings wounded hearts ‘the Peace of Christ that is beyond all understanding’.”
REX RAY,
that you share your good father’s story is also a blessing and a teaching for others, and I can’t think of a better way for you to honor your father’ memory. 🙂
CHRISTIANE,
You said, “I can’t think of a better way for you to honor your father’s memory.”
I’ve said through the years to over a thousand people: “Would you like to read my father’s World War II stories?”
It’s four pages long, and the last page tells of him trying to see President LBJ to be appointed a Chaplin in Vietnam. (Remember he was in World War I.) The Secret Service told him. “Listen old man, go home or we’re putting you in jail.”
REX RAY,
no wonder LBJ is not your favorite past-POTUS . . . . and that is aside from the conspiracy theory that LBJ was complicit in planning the death of JFK
nobody ‘liked’ LBJ – he was a pompous sort of man even in the best of times, very self-important
If your father had been permitted to serve in Viet Nam, perhaps he might have counseled my poor cousins on the death of their son Jack . . . he died so young, and his poor mother was broken by her loss . . . . eventually Jack’s sister married and had a little boy she named ‘Jack’ after her dead brother and Jack’s mother found the birth of that little one to be healing . . .
God is merciful.
I’m sure your father would have served above and beyond the call of ‘duty’, as he served a higher Lord also. 🙂
LBJ ? I would leave him to the judgment of God, only God can truly know the hearts of all mankind.
CHRISTIANE,
This is a true story:
The Three Stooges by Rex Ray
One Saturday, a long time ago, three of us decided to enter a spear fishing contest’ at a large ‘swamp lake’ in Louisiana about two hundred miles from Fort Worth, Texas where we worked at General Dynamics. We had our spear guns and got scuba gear and three tanks of air each from their sport department. We went in my station wagon pulling a boat I’d made that’d go about 30 miles/hour. The front was covered with plywood and the steering wheel was behind that. We paid our entry fee and spent the night in the station wagon. (Shortest guy got the front seat.)
To identify the Stooges”, Rex is Moe, and the others are Larry and Curly. They decided the river dam, 5 miles away, would have the largest fish. Outside the river channel was shallow and trees had rotted off even with the water.
Will wait until machine lets me tell more.
Am already picturing ‘allegators feasting on stooges’, REX RAY.
Louisiana? Swamp land? shallow water? trees rotted?
YEP . . . . Gator country, you betcha !
Machine won’t let me write.
!
REX RAY,
I hate it when it does that !
But I figure I’ve done something to bring it on (or in the case of the machine, turn it off) 🙂
Be peaceful. Re-word your story . . . . try again. I’d love to know how you all survived those ‘gators. 🙂
c.
On the topic of the ‘collapse of Western Civilization’ (a code phrase in the culture wars, sadly),
has anyone heard of the coming proposed ‘re-structuring of the US Government by a plan proposed in the Heritage Foundation called: the 2025 Project
apparently ‘checks and balances’ is now ‘out’ among the extreme right wing, or am I mistaken about this???
Machine won’t let me tell end of story.