An Update on the War for Western Civilization

During Memorial Day Week, I often share the heroic story of my Uncle Dick who was shot down in a bombing raid during World War II. To me, he will always be “The Bravest Boehme” and his story is worth remembering.

My uncle fought for an entire culture–what history calls Western Civilization. That war still rages today.

Here’s an important update on the war for Western Civilization.

The War for Western Civilization

Francis Schaeffer taught us we all hold assumptions or presuppositions that form our perspective on life (worldview).

Recently, Jay Grimstead, founder of the Coalition on Revival, encouraged me to re-read Schaeffer’s prophetic Christian Manifesto written in 1981–just three years before his death. His words remain prescient today as we face the need (Schaeffer says duty) of visible protest or civil disobedience against fascist tendencies.

I will quote his Christian Manifesto liberally in this article.

Dr. Schaeffer believed that understanding our times begins with the “ultimate Reality of God” as revealed in the Bible. Scripture also reveals we are at war with satanic forces on earth as God offers salvation to fallen human beings and the devil attempts to destroy us. Our Providential God (who cares for and directs human history) will ultimately win that war through King Jesus, the expansion of His Kingdom and the work of the Holy Spirit on earth.

Another assumption I hold–based on the historical record–is that God’s plan of salvation has moved primarily in a westward direction for the past 2000 years.

Here’s the essential idea. Asia stands out as the continent of origins. All life and religions began there. Europe was chosen by God as the continent of development–of philosophy, law, government, the arts, and a biblical culture based on faith. And God has used America as the continent of propagation (explosion) of the Good News over the past two hundred years.

In the biblical worldview, you can’t understand geopolitics, world wars, or other major developments without factoring in God’s Providence, spiritual warfare and world evangelism.

Which brings us to Western Civilization.

The term refers to the many cultures of European heritage that share common cultural ideas, philosophical foundations, and ancestral beliefs. These cultures all have a similar heritage, which has been important in the development of each.

Western Civilization combined Greek philosophy (reason), Roman law and order (government) and biblical faith into a potent engine of cultural advancement. According to Andrew Roberts in “Why We Must Teach Western Civilization” (April 30, 2020 – National Review):

“The legacy of Western culture, in terms of both its sheer quality and its quantity, is unsurpassed in human history. Western civilization [gave to the world] both republican and democratic governments, philosophy, history, medicine, poetry and drama.”

It also created other cultural values such as faith in God, private and public virtue, a reasonable basis for science, free enterprise economics and hope for the future.

Roberts is quick to point out the numerous achievements of other cultures, but rightly concludes: “Yet even the very greatest achievements and physical creations of those other civilizations simply cannot compare to what the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian Western Civilization has produced.”

He says: “A truly West-less world would be a neo-Darwinian free-for-all in which every state merely grabbed what it could, a return to the world Hobbes wrote about in Leviathan. ” 

In other words, a fascist mess. 

Indian thinker Vishal Mangalwadi argues that biblical truth was the key factor that ignited the growth and dominance of Western Civilization. His seminal work, The Book That Made Your World: How The Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, is a must read for those working for transformation in their own nations.

Here’s a quick primer on what happened.

Over hundreds of years, biblical faith grew during the Pax Romana until nearly half of the empire became followers of Jesus. During the Middle Ages, biblical principles of law, justice, education, charity, and many other disciplines blossomed in Europe–creating the world’s first Christian civilization. When faith became corrupted over time, its ideals were renewed via the Reformation and Renaissance.

It eventually arrived in the New World where Francis Schaeffer says, “The Founding Fathers knew what they were doing. In the words of John Witherspoon, they gave us a “republic that must either preserve its virtue or lose its liberty.”

American exceptionalism brought Western Civilization to its zenith by creating the world’s first Bible-based republic with both its blessings and responsibilities. For the last 100 years, the United States has been the economic engine and protector of freedom globally as well as the leading nation in world evangelism.

As I describe in Chapter Eleven of my River of God book, biblical worldview proponents now fight a “Western Theater” war against satanically inspired non-believers who want to kill the momentum of world evangelism by destroying Western Civilization.

Europe has drifted away from the fight and America remains the last major battlefield.

Once again, the Vandals are at the gates.

Francis Schaeffer believed the war between atheism (he called it humanism) and biblical faith was comprehensive in scope: 

“Religion touches all of thought and all of life. And these two religions, Christianity and humanism, stand over against each other as totalities.”

“Christianity is the truth about all reality. Humanism is the placing of Man at the center of all things. We have been utterly foolish in our concentration of bits and pieces, and in our complete failure to face the total worldview that is rooted in a false view of reality.”

“Humanism always leads to chaos. It then naturally leads to some form of totalitarianism to control the chaos…It is an exclusivist closed system which shuts out all contending views.”

 “Most fundamentally, our culture, society, government and law are in the condition they are in not because of a conspiracy, but because the Church has forsaken its duty to be the salt of the culture.”

Exactly.

A satanic inspired march of non-belief launched two world wars and now permeates every aspect of western life to try and stop the advance of global salvation. Yes, the Church continues to explode in the global South and East (the theme of my Fourth Wave book), but the West–and America in particular–remains the critical driver.

I (among others) believe that the fall of Western Civilization will either signal the beginning of the End Times or usher in at least one hundred years of darkness in human history.

Forty years ago, at the beginning of the Reagan Revolution, Francis Schaeffer admonished:  

“A unique window is open at this moment in the United States…It is our task to use the open window to try to change [our country’s] direction at this late hour…We must roll back the results of the total worldview…There will not be a return to the old liberalism…my guess is that there will be some elite form of totalitarianism.”

God used many people, prayer movements, world evangelism advances, and a “Morning in America” presidency to retard the satanic onslaught a generation ago.

Now we are fighting a pandemic and a growing totalitarian spirit in academia, the media, the Democratic Party and other leaders to weaken and extinguish the West.

Though Donald Trump emerged as an unlikely hero in 2016, his policies of appointing constitutionalist judges, supporting religious liberty, faith in free enterprise, and most recently forcing the CDC to acknowledge the “essential services of the churches,” makes him an important figure in the renewal of American life and thus, the West.

We may not get another “open window” if he is not re-elected in November.

And the Church’s response—to bring revival to the nation and world–will be the greatest key to save Western Civilization from its own cultural suicide.