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Greg Sheridan argues Christianity isn’t just the West’s heritage — it’s its only hope. Bold, uncompromising faith built civilisation once. It can again.

It’s no secret that Christendom is gone.

Neither is the fact that what’s replaced this age is post-truth neo-paganism.

Attached isn’t just ignorance about the Bible, or dishonest revisionist denials about how Christianity made the West.

There’s a repaganised hostility towards Christianity in general, and it feeds on a perverted post-Christian hatred of Cultural Christendom’s hypocrisy.

Thus spoke The Australian’s foreign affairs writer, Greg Sheridan.

For all that was good and in spite of all that was bad about Christendom, he recently told the Australian Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) that “the West will need a very vibrant Christianity” if it is to survive.

For this to materialise, although increasingly marginalised, “Christians will need to learn to be a bold minority.”

Adding to this punchline worth underlining, Sheridan asserted that “he isn’t a Christian to save the West.”

He is a Christian because he knows the One who can save it.

The West Without Christianity Is a West in Decline

Sheridan effectively argued that while Christianity can exist without Western civilisation, Western civilisation cannot exist without Christianity.

“The West will [only] survive as a part of the revival of Christianity,” he declared.

Talking about his latest book, How Christians Can Succeed Today (2025), he told the IPA audience that he’s “always been a Christian, not always an outspoken one.”

That was until “about 10, maybe 15 years ago,” when Sheridan said he “realised Christianity was under attack.”

In its defence, he took on his first opponents, the New Atheists.

A group of Christian-hating smug intellectuals whose books, Sheridan said, “were a pile of junk.”

Taking on this new battle for truth was where the almost 50-year veteran Australian journalist broke his relatively comfortable public silence about his faith.

If that’s a surprise to many a reader familiar with his work at The Australian, note that three out of the nine books he’s written are about cherishing Christianity.

“I read the New Testament as a journalist, and I found that everything we can test historically in the New Testament is true.”

“All the old 19th-century scholarship which said the New Testament was baloney is in fact baloney.”

In other words, even though their murderous monstrosities are still alive, Nietzsche and Marx are dead. God isn’t.

Of course, we don’t believe, because science has caught up with the Bible, Sheridan clarified.

Scholarly evidence offering validation in an age of scepticism, though, is worth knowing.

Commenting on why he stepped up and risked ire from his own largely leftist legacy media tribe, Sheridan stated that he “had been given a microphone.”

“I ought to use it to defend my friends and to defend the truth.”

Politics, Sheridan remarked, is “going mad today, because society has substituted for true transcendent meaning with political identity.”

“Thinking and fighting in the battle for ideas are two qualities we lack in Australian politics.”

Now three books in, Sheridan said that without planning it, he’s ended up with a trilogy about the Trinity.

“Looking back at the books, I can see now that one was about God, one was about Jesus, and one was about the Holy Spirit working through the first Christians.”

“This was my attempt to save Western civilisation,” he added.

Sheridan is pushing back on “200 years of disenchantment.”

He wants Australians to be reenchanted by rediscovering the Biblical truism that God has a purpose for their lives.

“We in the West are not persecuted. We face a hostile culture,” Sheridan explained.

This in many ways resembles “the savage and vicious world of the Greco-Roman existence.”

The good news is that early Christians thrived in this very same hostile environment and would later lead the moral revolution that birthed Christendom.

Lessons From the Early Church

Tapping into the contents of his latest book, Sheridan told the IPA gathering that early Christians challenged the culture.

They challenged “gender selection abortion, like the abandonment or killing of newborn baby girls.”

The early Christians elevated human rights and drew clear red lines that they refused to cross.

Evidence for this includes Christians standing before Roman authorities saying — under threat of death — that “they would pray for Caeser, not pray to Caeser.”

Early Christians, Sheridan said, deserve our “attention today because they were deliberate, conscious, considered, and determined in what they did.”

This is how they succeeded.

“They made a cultural challenge to the culture they lived in. They used legal remedies wherever they could.

“They didn’t go out trying to become martyrs. They just tried to live decent lives and to be free to spread the Gospel.”

Christians, he argued, simply said, “No.”

These were people just like the seven Australian Rugby League players from Manly, who in 2022, refused to use their bodies to promote Pride.

“Everyone was against them when they did that,” Sheridan recalled.

“And they could have all lost their careers quite easily, but they said, ‘Well, you know, you can do whatever you like, but you’re not putting that LGBTQ+ jersey on us.’”

Like a metaphor for Western civilisation without Christianity, Manly’s Sea Eagles suspended the Christian men, went on to play games without them and lost every match.

“All of those men were vindicated, and they all went on to have good careers.”

It’s worth noting, Sheridan said, “the Rugby League has never done anything like that again.”

“Those men, like the early church, had a red line that they wouldn’t cross at potentially tremendous cost to themselves.”

A Creative Minority in a Post-Christian Age

The early Christians “were terrifically countercultural and they never tried to hide it.”

They were uncompromising. They lived out the deep mystery of Christianity, living out Biblical truth while embracing its paradoxes, Sheridan asserted.

As a third-century Roman eyewitness, Galen of Pergamon wrote,  “They don’t run away in plagues. They stay to help people. And they practice monogamy.”

They fought sometimes among themselves, yet braved those disagreements, not with avoidance, but by “dealing with the practical difficulties of life.”

“There is no reason to have an attitude of cultural despair.”

“Pagans are Christians in the making,” Sheridan determined while quoting C.S. Lewis.

If Christians are to be a minority, we need to be a bold minority.

The post-Christian “age” gives rise to a pre-Christian field ripe for revival.

No longer “living in a Christian society gives the Church the freedom to really be a creative minority,” Sheridan concluded.

This means “speaking into the mainstream culture about what is good for it.”

From here, Christians can “reclaim and revive the Christian elements of our institutions without feeling that we have to defend the status quo, because we no longer possess it.”

Here’s why Sheridan is right about the West not surviving Christianity’s exile.

De-Christianisation is directly linked to a doped-up, divorced, dysfunctional, disconnected, distracted, dumbed-down and dependent polis.

Christian objective morality liberates — that’s why most governments with a top-down heavy bureaucracy or centralised control of society hate it.

Without a bold and uncompromising Christianity, the West will fall.