Life does not happen overnight. It happens slowly, day by day — rising, working, raising children, laughing with friends, laying our heads down each night to do it all again. It is a slow and steady life that envelops us with family, friends, neighbors, and community.
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Yet we wake up one day to realize life has changed in ways we never noticed. A new road appears where an old one stood. New buildings replace the ones filled with memories. And suddenly we look around and realize the country we grew up in no longer stands — the way of life, culture, values, and beliefs that held it together for a thousand years no longer define it.
This is what is happening to Western civilization — a tradition of belief founded on God, the Bible, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, and the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
The values that define Western civilization, though never perfect and often forged through conflict, still represent the greatest wealth of freedom of thought and conviction for God, truth, goodness, and beauty ever to exist in world history: individual liberty and rights, traced to Locke, Mill, and Kant; the rule of law, rooted in Roman law and the Magna Carta; government by consent, drawn from Athenian democracy and Roman republicanism; reason and empirical inquiry, running from Greek philosophy through the Enlightenment; and a Judeo-Christian ethical inheritance holding that every soul has inherent worth.
Yet malignant forces now seek to devour the freedoms that created stable families, a biblical educational system, and a just rule of law.
Still, there remains a glimmer of hope in our children — the young ones who have not yet been tarnished by the lies of those who would rob them of a flourishing future. The fruits of the Spirit, described in Galatians 5:22–23, describe what a life guided by the Holy Spirit looks like: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-control. Paul closes that passage by noting that against such things there is no law — meaning a life bearing this fruit needs no external restraint, because it is already aligned with what the law was pointing toward all along.
That single line contains the whole argument. Every free society runs on two forces: internal character and external law. When people are formed — through family, faith, community, and education — to internalize honesty, self-restraint, and respect for others, a free society needs very little coercive law to hold together. The less internal restraint a people has, the more external control a government must impose to maintain order — and the less free that people ultimately becomes.
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Five institutions form the foundation of a civilization: religion, family, education, government/law, and economics. Alter or dismantle just one, and the society you know ceases to exist. Destroy the family, and you undermine the foundation that creates a civilization. Remove belief in God, and people live confused, empty lives. This is the same wisdom our Founding Fathers embedded into the nation’s architecture: rights that come from God, not government; law and order rooted in moral truth; free markets trusting individuals over the state; and a Constitution designed not to grant rights but to protect the ones God had already given. True liberty, as our founding generation understood it, is not doing whatever you want — it is the freedom to act rightly, living free under the law, guided by moral principles.
So how did we lose so much of this? The modern story might begin with Karl Marx, who in 1848 argued alongside Friedrich Engels that society is shaped by class struggle. Their ideas outlived them, laying groundwork for revolutions that reshaped the twentieth century. In America, Progressive-era reformers — most influentially the philosopher John Dewey — began dismantling the classical and biblical foundations of American schooling, replacing independent critical thought with social conformity. Decades later, the Frankfurt School, founded in Germany in 1923, developed what became known as critical theory; fleeing Nazi Germany in 1934, its scholars relocated to Columbia University and began reshaping American academic life around conflict, power, and systemic critique. Before Woodrow Wilson took office in 1913, American political speech was steeped in biblical language the average citizen recognized. After him, that pattern changed — a shift rhetoric scholars have documented in the broader secularization of American civic language. Decades later still, Critical Race Theory emerged as a further evolution of the same current — a lineage that scholars like Christopher Rufo have traced back to Herbert Marcuse in the 1960s and ‘70s.
But is it only about Marxist ideology and power-seeking reformers? Communism, after all, had little natural appeal to a people formed by Judeo-Christian values. It could only take root in soil that had already been prepared to receive it.
Things are seldom as they appear. What we think we are witnessing is often a conglomerate of far more nefarious action than meets the eye. Marxist progressives did not alone cause the sudden long goodbye of the pillars of our greatness, over a century or so — compliant Christians share the blame. They shrugged at behavior that once appalled but now appeals. They quenched the conviction of the Holy Spirit to live a life filled with the fruit of the Spirit. They stayed silent, and their complicity did its quiet work. Sin left unchecked does not announce itself; it accumulates. What we tolerate in silence, we eventually normalize in public. And so we ate the fruit of the tree of death, one slow and morsel-sized bite at a time — until we look up and see withered limbs, once ripe with life and energy, now dying on barren ground.
Regina Durante, Ph.D., is Educational Director of Classical Learning Center, Inc., a classical school in Allentown, Pennsylvania, and a former Assistant Professor of Government at Galveston College. A longtime homeschooling mother and member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, she is the author of Find God, Find Truth: A Biblical Worldview for Generation Z and Alpha (TBN Publications, 2026).
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