If you are not familiar with Eugene Terekhin’s substack, you should be. He publishes invariably interesting short articles daily. Last week, one in particular caught my eye. It posed the question, “why do nations rise and fall?” and used the archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe to frame his answer.

Ancient History

When I taught World Civ I, I used to talk about Göbekli Tepe. It’s a massive site discovered in Turkey that consists of huge, decorated, T-shaped, upright stones arranged in circles. The site is clearly a temple, and remarkably it predates the development of agriculture. Theoretically, hunter-gatherer societies could not produce the surplus resources to divert the manpower to create something like this, yet here it is. And although Terekhin doesn’t mention it, the story is even more complex than just the creation of the site, and there is evidence of other, older sites in the area.

Terekhin’s argument is that it was the stone age encounter with the Transcendent—in other words, divine revelation—that moved them to build a temple. Then, economies and nations developed from there. Chuck Colson used to be fond of saying that the cult (i.e. religion) is the foundation of culture; Terekhin argues that it is also the foundation of the nation. In other words, a divinely given vision is the thing that creates nations, and the loss of this vision is what leads to their collapse.

Vision and Nations

Leaving aside the question of the divine origin of the vision (a topic to which I plan to return in a later post), Terekhin’s point about the vision being fundamental to the nation is critical. Once the vision is lost, once people no longer believe in it, the nation is doomed. Terekhin points to Rome as an example. I would add France before the Revolution as another prime example. It is always an element of civilizational collapse as well.

(I made a similar point in Why You Think the Way You Do—a nation depends on shared values, without which it pulls itself apart.)

The Collapse of the Vision

I have been thinking a great deal about the process of national and civilizational collapse lately as I have been looking at the world, particularly in Europe. From this side of the pond, it has long seemed obvious that the technocratic class that runs the EU despises the Western tradition, or in other words, European culture itself.

Europe long ago abandoned the medieval Christian tradition that laid so much of the foundation for the success of Western civilization in favor of the “Enlightenment.” Now, the Enlightenment project with its emphasis on liberty (itself borrowed capital from Christianity) has run its course. All that’s left is what sociologist Philip Rieff calls an anti-culture, bent on destroying the Western tradition but without a positive vision for what will replace it.

Civilizational Suicide

How else do you explain canceling elections and banning candidates in the name of “saving democracy” and silencing and imprisoning critics in the name of “saving free speech?” How else do you explain attempts to ban populist and nationalist parties, or when they win, to find ways to keep them out of power or even vote with them as is happening with the AfD in Germany? It’s all a power play to reinforce the technocrats’ power, which serves no positive purpose but to destroy the last vestiges of Europe.

How else do you explain immigration policies that favor Muslim immigrants who openly despise Western values and the countries that they move to and vow to implement Sharia when they are in power? How do you explain why, in Britain, they get free housing and all sorts of government support denied to native British people? How else do you explain the government imposing harsher criminal penalties on natives than on immigrants and insisting the major problem is “Islamophobia?” How else do you explain people being sentenced for the crime of telling the truth about rape gangs?

The Populist Response

Europe, or at least the technocrats that run the EU in Brussels, has lost the vision that made European culture. Many of the people still have it, and Italy and much of Eastern Europe are showing commitments to the vision of Western Civilization. But with mass migration and a hostile bureaucracy running the transnational government, it isn’t clear at all that the people in most of the other countries of Western Europe will be able to save their nations and cultures. Some are even predicting civil wars and partitions of countries between Islamic and native regions in the near future.

America has many of the same problems, particularly coming from the progressive wing of the Democratic Party, but fortunately we are not as far down the road as Europe and our different political system may be robust enough for the popular level preservation of the nation’s vision to survive.

Can Christianity Save Us? A Word of Warning

Some people are looking for a Christian revival to save Western Civilization. They correctly realize that Christianity is the bedrock on which the West was built. And in fact we are seeing a surprising return of young people to traditional churches. In France this Lent, churches featuring the Latin Mass were packed for Ash Wednesday, for example.

But if we look for Christianity to save the West, we are making a deadly error.

We must never attempt to use Jesus and the Gospel to serve another end. That is the fundamental heresy of the Prosperity Gospel. God will not be used for our purposes. We must seek Him for Himself, not for any benefits that we get in this world from him.

Where people are starting to come to church because they are looking for something, because they recognize that the world only offers a dead end, we should rejoice. But where people are urging a return to Christianity to counter Islam and Wokism and as a means to save the West, we need to beware.

God has not promised Western Civilization will last. In fact, we know it won’t. As C.S. Lewis reminds us, since we are beings that will last into eternity: “Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat.” If or when the West falls, we know that God has something prepared to replace it in his own timing, most likely from Africa or elsewhere in the Global South.

Our purpose as Christians is not primarily to preserve our nation nor our civilization, though nations are good things that God has instituted. Our purpose is to advance God’s Kingdom, which as it turns out may be the best way to preserve our nation and civilization.