Western civilization is undergoing an existential crisis that had its origins several decades ago and that threatens its own survival.  The trigger for this crisis is a war between the secularist and Christian values of the Judeo-Christian culture.  The former treats religion as the “opium of the masses” and its teachings as “bourgeois values” — while the latter looks to God as the Creator of all ethical principles and moral values. 

Some may question the presence of this crisis given the high number of Jews, Protestants, and Catholics in Western societies.  But the malaise is not caused by the faithful, but by the guiding principles of a society that has left no room for God. 

The good attributes of Western civilization are under serious attack lately – the inalienable rights, the sanctity of human life, representative government, freedom of speech and religion, and equal opportunities for its citizens.  We should fight to keep these by all means necessary. 

But the attack is coming from a society that has divorced the spiritual values and placed the material world in a pedestal.

The late Russian human-rights dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn explained the rise of communism in his country as follow: “The subtle poisons of secularism permeated the educated classes in the course of the 19th century and opened the path to Marxism. By the time of the Revolution, faith had virtually disappeared in Russian educated circles.”

To preserve the traditions of the United States for current and future generations, we have to identify first the multiple ideologies that have robbed the Nation’s of its democratic health.

a) The “progress” ideology argues that men and women are innately good, and evolution by itself will free them of evil.  No religion, no God is necessary for this transformative process because it’s automatic. Death is the ultimate goal for the majority of its citizens in their struggle to bring about the perfect human being in the future.

This delusional ideology is what the communist regime in Cuba embraced by demanding the sacrifices of present generations to develop the perfect man and the perfect woman in the long run.  The failure of this goal is evident in the fact that after sixty-three years of empty slogans like “patria o muerte” (“fatherland or death”), the majority of young Cubans voted with their feet by emigrating to the United States because they got fed up with the rising inflation, severe food and drug shortages, and frequent power outages in Cuba.  

This idea of progress by a future generation is unachievable because it offers no hope for present and past generations.  And it is bogus as well as a goal for future generations because perfection is unattainable for any human being because of its sinful nature. Only the Creator holds a monopoly on perfection.

Leaving progress in the hands of laws of nature is dangerous because it ignores humans’ responsibility for their actions.  Doing good or bad deeds are triggered by the will and the heart.  And good deeds will only be made possible when the will is synchronized with the moral laws of the Judeo-Christian culture.

Followers of this ideology advocate that wars are an anomaly of the evolutionary process of nature.  But the fact that we’ve had two world wars in the last century and multiple confrontations in the 21st century proves that the world is moving from civilization to savagery – and not the other way around!

b) The second ideology is the “one that makes science supreme.”  According to its practitioners, to know is to measure.  Therefore, there is no room for values, for religion, for God, for tradition, for authority because these are unmeasurable.

The British naturalist Charles Darwin’s evolution theory that humans evolved as a species from monkeys became more popular than the theory that men and women were created in the image of God.  But if humans have no more value than anything else in nature, then they can be treated as a “thing” in the service of the Communist Party or the government.   Looking at the governments in North Korea, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Russia, and China, this is exactly what has happened – citizens are but a mere cog to make the Communist Party immortal!   

Science’s true purpose is to lift humanity towards God by providing a means to its betterment.  But by denying science of any morality, how will we be able to tell what’s good from what’s evil? By using science as his ally, Putin used sophisticated weapons to subjugate vast parts of Ukraine.  Without a morality standard at our disposal, it’s impossible to differentiate Putin’s bad deeds from heads of state who are trying to defend freedom and human rights elsewhere in the world. 

c) Next comes the “relativism” ideology.  This is the “it depends” ideology – the one that tells its followers that there is no distinction between right and wrong, and everything goes back to one’s point of view. Thus, all values are relative – if they are convenient, they are embraced; if they are a hindrance, they are ignored. Tolerance becomes the preferred word since it is translated into indifference to truth and error. Belief in God as an absolute is forbidden and substituted by a utility standard. Since it could not deal with religion and morality, this ideology took the easy way out by making them irrelevant.

But here is the conundrum: if there is no right or wrong with this ideology – how could anyone judge democracy vis a vis totalitarianism?

Similarly, this ideology is where you find the a-la-carte Catholics agreeing to give the holy sacrament of Communion to politicians who while bragging of their Catholic faith endorse abortion legislation.  Their credo is “let’s go along, to get along” – while willingly ignoring the God-given’s commandment of “Thou shall not kill.”

This ideology is an affront to all those Americans who gave the ultimate sacrifice in battlefields for defending absolute rights like freedom, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness.

d) Next in line is the “materialism” ideology.  This group asserts that humankind lacks a soul and that there is no life after death.  In other words, there is but one life to live, and you might as well enjoy it to the fullest while you can.  This cohort excels in buying as many goods and properties as their wallets allow, doing as many fun activities as possible, and not sacrificing  for anything or anybody.  They have not learned from the Beatles’s song that money can’t buy you love.

These are the Americans who relocate their factories from the United States and move them to Communist China because there are no labor unions and the employees’ salaries are much lower.  They remain insensitive to the havoc that they cause American families by taking away their livelihoods in order to maximize their profits by tapping a $1.4B Chinese marketplace.  They only care about themselves, and their egotism reigns supreme over their patriotism.

It is wrong to assume that an education will lead one to always do the right thing without any restraints from religion.  It always helps to remind ourselves that men and women do not sin because they are ignorant, but because they are perverse.  The elites from Ivy League universities do not hold the keys to sainthood.  Far from it! Education tied together with a perverse will leads to hell on earth.

Humans by their very nature have the capacity to commit evil when they don’t uphold the moral standards of the Judeo-Christian traditions.  Let’s not fool ourselves! Evil has always prevailed in the world. While slavery was a stain on the world civilization, so is the killing of unborn babies a crime against humanity.  The latter is still the same old evil but with a modern label.  To save the Western civilization and to restore the sense of balance and happiness to modern men and women, what is needed is a return to the proper meaning of freedom: to do what we ought to do rather than what we want to do with no restraints.  And this freedom is grounded in the moral code derived from the Judeo-Christian traditions that call for moral restraint, spiritual discipline, and denial of evil. To win this war, we must push aside all the secular nonsense that the elites have propagated in the fake-news media outlets and in the schools and universities.