Why the Conflation of the West and Christianity is Wrong

Christians should be fighting for the truth of Christianity, not for the claim it will save our societies from decline

As a Christian, I am naturally concerned by changes going on across the West in which values that are clearly and unequivocally Christian are beginning to be undone as the West continues to dechristianise. In many countries, assisted dying bills or discussions of legalising abortion up to term for any reason threaten our entire way of seeing the intrinsic value of human life by deifying choice based on a thin veneer of belief in the authentic self that seems worryingly incongruous with what we obviously know to be true about our own contingency. ‘The West’ is increasingly shaped by a cognitive dissonance in which our values are drifting all over the place, and since we hold no organised or coherent beliefs they seem to be blown by winds that seem unpredictable and arbitrary. For those who do hold beliefs, it is an uncertain and a troubling time.

Along with this, other things are going on that are less to do with ideas and values and more to do with measurable changes. Economic stagnation, cost of living crises, problems with health services, global wars, climate change: there are a lot of reasons why people are inclined to not feel pessimistic about the state of the world. Our politics seems to be in a spiral of decline, social media drives polarisation and encourages increasingly toxic discourse such that basic corporate problem solving seems hamstrung by our inability to talk across dividing lines.

These are naturally times when conservative rhetoric feels increasingly appealing, even comforting. Decline must be answered by a going back to whatever our “values” were that gave us the prosperity, freedom and flourishing that we used to have but we don’t have anymore. The result is a conflation of the first set of problems, that of the changes in our moral values, with the second set of problems, general societal decline. The result is an increasingly conservative attitude to Christianity that begins to argue that just maybe, it’s actually Christianity that is responsible for the economic flourishing of our societies, and if we return to “Judeo-Christian values” then everything can be as it was.

While it may seem a little silly to argue that post-war economic prosperity in the liberal capitalist West during an era in which Christianity was gradually abandoned can somehow be claimed to be the result of latent Christianity, that is the implication made not as indirectly as you might like. The phrase “Judeo-Christian values” is now ubiquitous parlance among the political right, used by everyone from Nigel Farage to Elon Musk, the latter who said that Christianity is the West’s “immune system.” Jordan Peterson has made the entire theme of his conservative ARC conference speeches the direct claim that the flourishing of Western societies is the result of the “foundational principles” of the bible, or the bible as he interprets it. Ayaan Hirsi Ali continues to argue that Christianity is the West, she claims that freedom of speech and conscience “is the product of centuries of debate within Jewish and Christian communities. It was these debates that advanced science and reason, diminished cruelty, suppressed superstitions, and built institutions to order and protect life, while guaranteeing freedom to as many people as possible.” We need Christianity to protect us, she claims, against our “menacing foes.”