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The West is dying because we have rejected its foundations.

By now, you should have heard of the horrific murder of an 18-year-old student in the UK. A white Christian was viciously stabbed to death by a non-white non-Christian. But the police sided with the killer, ignoring the pleas of Henry Nowak as he bled to death on a cold, hard street.

The tragic tale was not just about two-tier policing and two-tiered justice, but a story that is playing itself out all throughout the West. As the Christian faith is being rejected, all hell is breaking out. The Christian faith and Western civilisation have long been interchangeable, but as the West rejects its own heritage, it is asking for, and getting, trouble – big time.

Secular Idealism, Identity Politics and the Banality of Evil

Three new articles are worth tying together here. The first two have to do with the Nowak murder and the end of the Christian West. The third piece looks at the bigger picture of why the West will NOT stand if we turn our backs on Christianity.

Let me share just the opening paragraphs of an article by Gavin Ashenden on “Henry Nowak and the limits of secular idealism”:

The tragedy of Henry Nowak raises a deeper question than guilt or innocence: what happens when a society abandons Christian anthropology and replaces it with a secular doctrine of human perfectibility? The shock of being told about the way in which Henry Nowak died, stabbed to death by a member of the Sikh community who combined murder with character assassination, leaves us wanting to hold somebody accountable and to blame them.

Obviously, his murderer is to blame. But that is not a sufficient solution because the police created such a gross injustice that we are shocked to our core at what this represents about what our society has become. It is also very tempting to blame the police. However difficult it is to control our sense of outrage and injustice, in the timeworn phrase, they too are casualties of a sort, for they were trained – in fact brainwashed – in the art of the new secular moral idealism that has replaced Christian philosophy and ethics. So our real enemy is not (just) the police, who committed this gross injustice because they were brainwashed by those who trained them, but rather the anti-Christian ethic that overcame Christian philosophy and culture.

Also writing recently, Laura Dodsworth spoke on “Henry Nowak, the police and the banality of evil”. She looks at Hannah Arendt’s famous remarks about the Nazi monster, and then goes into some of the familiar details of the Nowak case. She then goes on to say this:

I want to be careful here, because I mean this carefully. I don’t think those officers were bad people. I genuinely don’t. I feel sorry for them. Although I feel a great deal sorrier for Henry and his family. What I think — and what I find more disturbing — is that they are probably thoroughly ordinary people, caught inside a system that has trained them to process certain information before other information.

Put it this way. They arrived at a scene. One man was standing. He was claiming racial abuse. He was visibly from an ethnic minority. One man was lying on the ground. He was white. Did the categories do the thinking for the officers? It appears that Henry Nowak, bleeding on a gravel driveway, was not — in that moment — seen as an individual. People who have outsourced their moral judgement to an institution are the people Arendt was talking about.

While Arendt saw this as a political philosopher, CS Lewis identified something similar, as a theologian — the ‘Devil’s Strategy’. He warned that the devil rarely tempts you into evil directly, rather he relies on your intense dislike of one error to pull you into the opposite one. In this case, we might deduce that a fear of racism became an overcorrection that obscured individual accountability. And a commitment to protecting minorities cost a young man his life.

While Arendt drew on the incomparable horror of the Holocaust and Lewis was writing about Christian ethics, the observations are universal. When virtue is unmoored from a belief in the dignity of the human individual, it becomes its own kind of danger. Errors and tragedies will continue while human beings — complex, morally distinct, each carrying their own story and their own dignity — are sorted into categories and assigned a hierarchy of importance and credibility. Identity politics creates this trap at a civilisational scale.

The less important groups are the people Arendt termed the “superfluous people”. Once you have decided that some people’s lives are less important, or less believable, than others, you are already walking into very serious trouble. In this case, it appears obvious which character was the “superfluous” person.

And if you want further evidence that some groups of people matter more than others, notice how the people who dropped to their knees for the criminal George Floyd are emitting mealy-mouthed useless too-little-too-late statements, blaming “knife crime”.

Five Pillars of Christian Patriotism: The Only Path to Restoration

Finally, Todd Huizinga of Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Restoring the West project looks at the bigger picture of the good Christianity does for the world. He discusses the “Five Pillars of Christian Patriotism”, arguing that “Christians have a responsibility to bless the nation in which God has placed them, where they can make real contributions to peace, prosperity and restoration.”

Here is his entire piece:

Why this list matters: Christian Nationalism, progressivism’s bogeyman, exists more in the Left’s fevered imagination than in reality. What does exist, and is crucial to restoring the West, is Christian patriotism. We can learn much from the example of five great patriots who exhibited some of the essential characteristics of Christian engagement in public life.

1. Seek the Good of Your Country and Your Compatriots

In his second inaugural address, Abraham Lincoln exemplified patriotism’s fundamental priority: “…seek the welfare of the city where I have sent you…” (Jeremiah 29:7). Delivered in 1865, just weeks before the American Civil War’s end and 41 days before his own assassination, it speaks hard truths about human brutality. Yet, after four years of mutual slaughter in America’s bloodiest war, he calls for grace and kindness: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, …let us strive on to… achieve… just and lasting peace…”

2. Speak the Truth

In his essay “The Power of the Powerless” Soviet-bloc dissident Václav Havel describes how the great lie, forcing everyone to act in all spheres of life as if communist ideology were true, “works only as long as people…live within the lie.” Only “living within the truth” can overcome totalitarianism; political or military power alone is insufficient. Truth “tears apart [the lie that] holds…[the system] together.” Christian patriots must speak the truth against all injustice, regardless of the cost.

3. Speak in Love

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s non-violence in fighting racial segregation was much more than a strategy; it was done out of love for enemies. King maintained that “loving Your Enemies… is an absolute necessity for the survival of our civilization…. it is love that will save our world and civilization; love even for our enemies.” A model of Christian wisdom, King knew that “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that; …only love can [drive out hate].”

4. Respect the Human Dignity of Opponents

The Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn suffered unimaginable evil in the Soviet Gulag. Still, he humbly recognized the mixture of good and evil in every person: “…the line separating good and evil passes …through every human heart.” Even “hearts overwhelmed by evil” retain “one small bridgehead of good. And even in the best…, there remains … [a]… corner of evil.” This Christian view of the human person guides true patriots—respecting the dignity of our adversaries, and acknowledging our own sinfulness.

5. Remember that Politics Is Not the Last Word

A true patriot, in 1939 German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer returned to Germany from his safe haven in America. Associated with the “20 July” plot to assassinate Hitler, he was hanged just four weeks before Germany’s surrender. Bonhoeffer gave his life opposing an evil political regime, but he was not political. It was not politics, but the moral imperative to aid the persecuted—born of faithfulness to Christ—that moved Bonhoeffer to countenance violence against Hitler, despite his abiding commitment to non-violence.

THE BOTTOM LINE

Though not all believing Christians, these patriots were models of Christian public virtue. They lived and acted in faith, hope, and love in the political realm, seeking—at great personal cost—”the peace and prosperity” of their country and compatriots. This is love of country that transcends political and religious differences.

As Christianity goes, so goes the West. Expect to see many more cases like the Nowak one as we in the West turn our backs on what made us great.

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Republished with thanks to CultureWatch. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.