“Until about 25 years ago, educated liberals in Europe and North America barely thought about religion. They were sure, as Voltaire and H.G. Wells and many others had been, that Christianity, and religious belief itself, lay on the verge of extinction. Another generation or two and it would disappear.
Sept. 11, 2001, rattled that view. The terrorist attacks clarified the difference between, to borrow Roger Scruton's phrase, the West and the rest -- "the West" signifying a collection of nations shaped, from late antiquity to the present, by the Jewish and Christian religions.
The clarification wasn't instant. Pundits for a time spoke of the need for Islamic nations to "moderate" in the way that Christian nations supposedly had, and the so-called New Atheists found notoriety by categorizing Islamist violence as expressions of the religious impulse itself.
But these lines of thought avoided the truth made plain by 9/11. To put that truth in its negative form: The world's least Christianized societies are also the least open and tolerant -- in short, the least liberal. Think of the moral pickle this way: If any one of the New Atheists were made to list 10 nations in which he would agree to live permanently, there's a good chance all 10 would bear the indelible marks of Christian belief and practice.
The pre-1960s understanding of the West as irreversibly Christian has slowly re-emerged. I've noted elsewhere in these pages the succession of formerly atheist or agnostic intellectuals who in recent years have surprised their audiences by acknowledging Western societies' ancient and continuing dependence on Christian concepts and values. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, in his address last weekend to the Munich Security Conference, forced the West's diplomatic elite to ponder that dependence.
Mr. Rubio contended that the West can counter "the forces of civilizational erasure" only by reinforcing the natural kinship between the U.S. and Europe. That friendship, though strengthened by economic ties, is rooted in metaphysics. We are connected, Mr. Rubio said, "not just economically, not just militarily.
We are connected spiritually and we are connected culturally." European settlers "arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance."
I have to think Mr. Rubio or one of his speechwriters has read G.K. Chesterton's "The Everlasting Man." In a chapter titled "The War of the Gods and Demons," Chesterton mocks the idea that soldiers in a war fight for "abstract" economic or geopolitical advantages. He is thinking of H.G. Wells's "materialist" view of history.
Soldiers fight, Chesterton says, because their cause is bound up with their affections for their family and fealty to their God.
No soldier, writes Chesterton, says to himself in battle: "My leg is nearly dropping off, but I shall go on till it drops; for after all I shall enjoy all the advantages of my government obtaining a warm-water port in the Gulf of Finland."
Just so, Mr. Rubio: "The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions. Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation. Armies fight for a way of life."
Behind much of what Mr. Rubio said in Munich lies his belief that the U.S. and Europe have a common adversary in the Chinese Communist Party. Those of us who hoped that China's economic ties with the West would impel its leaders to abandon their predecessors' totalitarian dreams didn't anticipate the perverse uses to which an aggressively antireligious regime can put economic markets. We failed to appreciate the degree to which the two great biblical faiths, with their elevation of honesty and industry and censure of theft, enabled capital economies to develop in the 17th century. We forgot that Judeo-Christian principles aren't shared equally around the globe.
Most American liberals and some conservatives, still beholden to a credulous belief in a philosophically "neutral" public square, find talk of America as a "Christian nation" terrifying. Writers in the New York Times refer to "Christian nationalism" the way John Birchers in the 1950s talked about communists.
Their fear is amiss. Even America's moral pathologies are distorted outworkings of biblical principles. The belief that a man can become a woman was born of a Christian reluctance to deal harshly with the confused and vulnerable, even as that delusion runs afoul of a more concrete biblical assertion: "Male and female created he them."
America, as Mr. Rubio rightly says, was created by Christian settlers. Its Constitution and laws are biblical in spirit. Its politics is, and always has been, a perennial dispute over which Christian principles apply to what issues and in what ways.
As for the Munich speech, Mr. Rubio earned a standing ovation from European notables. Their approval of the secretary's words had mainly to do with his declarations of American friendship. But perhaps even they understand that the Christian moral outlook is the world in which we live and move and have our being.” [1]
1. Unruly Republic: Christianity Isn't Dead in the West. Swaim, Barton. Wall Street Journal, Eastern edition; New York, N.Y.. 19 Feb 2026: A13.
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