Atheist streamer Asmongold has said aloud what should be obvious to every heir of Western civilisation: a society is better when its laws, customs, and morals are shaped by Christianity rather than any competing religion or secular ideology.
Speaking during a recent livestream to his 4.6 million followers, Asmongold said:
“I want to live in a Christian country. That’s right. I don’t want to mandate Christianity, I don’t want to make people have to be Christian, but I want to have the laws and the culture and the predominant religion of the country to be Christianity...
I am an atheist, but I recognise and enjoy the privilege of the Christian culture that I grew up in, and I don’t want my country to change from the way it was when I grew up.”
Asmongold’s point is that Christianity has produced a civilisation worth preserving, but you cannot preserve that civilisation without preserving the Christianity that fundamentally shaped it.
This is a fact that many Westerners have sadly forgotten. They continue to enjoy the peace, prosperity, liberty, stability, and social trust inherited from centuries of Christian influence while denying, or even attacking, the very faith that produced those blessings.
They want the fruit while severing the tree from its roots.
In truth, Western civilisation didn’t emerge by accident or in a vacuum. It’s the product of more than fifteen centuries of Christianity shaping the European people—their laws, institutions, customs, culture, and sense of justice.
Ideas that are now taken for granted—human dignity, the equality of people before the law, the sanctity of life, the value of charity, limits on political power, and the concept of mercy and justice—did not inevitably emerge with the passing of time. They were cultivated within a Christian worldview amongst a people with a singular commitment to Christ.
The Gospel does more than convert individuals to the Christian faith. Over generations, it transforms families, communities, and nations. It disciplines passions, restrains power, dignifies ordinary people, encourages personal responsibility, and establishes moral standards that make ordered liberties possible. The cumulative effect is a civilisation unlike any the world has previously known.
This is why the poet and cultural critic T.S. Eliot warned that Christianity cannot be removed without eventually destroying the civilisation it created:
Writing in The Idea of a Christian Society (1940), Eliot observed:
“It is in Christianity that our arts have developed; it is in Christianity that the laws of Europe—until recently—have been rooted. It is against a background of Christianity that all of our thought has significance.
“An individual European may not believe that the Christian faith is true, and yet what he says, and makes, and does will all spring out of his heritage of Christian culture and depend upon that culture for its meaning...
“I do not believe that culture of Europe could survive the complete disappearance of the Christian faith... If Christianity goes, the whole culture goes.”
Eliot understood that cultures cannot indefinitely preserve the achievements of Christianity after abandoning the faith that produced them. A civilisation may continue living on inherited capital for a time, but no inheritance lasts forever.
The nineteenth-century abolitionist James Russell Lowell expressed the same truth:
“Show me a place on the face of the earth ten miles square where a man may provide for his children in decency and comfort, where infancy is protected, where age is venerated, where womanhood is honoured, and where human life is held in due regard, and I will show you a place where the Gospel of Christ has gone and laid the foundation.”
Of course, Christianity does not spread by the sword of violence, but by the sword of the Spirit—the Word of God. This is because genuine faith cannot be coerced. However, we cannot overlook this undeniable historical reality: societies formed by Christianity have consistently produced the freest, most prosperous, and most humane civilisations the world has known.
It’s no coincidence that the Western world began to unravel soon after it departed from the very foundation that shaped it: the Christian faith. We have two paths before us: Christ or chaos. The rejection of Christ is the root cause of the West’s decay, and there is no solution that is not explicitly Christian.
Looks like Asomgold has been reading Prothean Institute Civilisational Architecture series!
This is the conclusion of papers 1 and 2 of the series.