Christianity: The Bedrock of Western Civilisation, By Peter West
In the heart of Western civilisation lies a paradox: as churches empty and secularism rises, the cultural imprint of Christianity remains indelible, shaping the values, institutions, and identity of nations from London to Canberra. Christianity is not merely a private faith or a collection of rituals, it is the lifeblood of a civilisation, a way of collective and individual existence that has defined the West for centuries. To dismiss it as a relic or reduce it to a personal belief is to misunderstand its role as the cornerstone of our moral, political, and social order. Cultural Christianity is not an optional heritage; it is the essence of what makes the West distinct, and its erosion threatens the coherence of our societies in an age of existential challenges.
The West's historical arc is inseparable from Christianity. From the fall of Rome to the Renaissance, from the Magna Carta to modern human rights, Christian principles, rooted in the dignity of the individual, the sanctity of life, and the pursuit of justice, have shaped our legal systems, art, and governance. Historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, argues persuasively that even secular ideals like universal human rights and equality before the law, are direct descendants of Christian theology. The concept of a person as inherently valuable, regardless of status, stems from the Christian notion of all being equal in the eyes of God. This underpins everything from democratic institutions to the welfare state, even if their modern forms wear a secular mask.
Yet, as Sebastian Milbank notes in his August 2025 Artillery Row piece, the tide of faith is receding, leaving Western politics adrift. In Britain, the godlessness of leaders like Kemi Badenoch, an avowed atheist since her teens, reflects a broader trend: political parties once anchored in Christian traditions, Anglicanism for Tories, Methodism or Catholicism for Labour, are now metaphysically unmoored. The Conservative Party, once animated by Thatcher's Victorian piety, now attracts careerists and rationalists who value economic textbooks over moral vision. Labour's secularised creed of social justice, lacks the depth of its religious roots, faltering in a post-industrial age. This spiritual vacuum has consequences: without Christianity's ethical guardrails, we see dystopian outcomes, teenagers undergoing irreversible surgeries, euthanasia of the mentally ill, and abortion up to birth, all justified under a hollowed-out secular morality.
Cultural Christianity is more than nostalgia; it's a framework for identity and belonging. As Milbank observes, the West's confidence in secular progress, peaking in the economic boom of the late 20th century, has crumbled. Stagnating innovation, declining birth rates, and soaring housing costs, expose the limits of a post-Christian order. Even tech moguls like Peter Thiel, once heralds of a technocratic future, now advocate a return to Christian values, recognising that scientific advances alone cannot sustain a civilisation. The rise of populists like Nigel Farage, who champion the UK's Christian character despite personal ambivalence, underscores a growing anxiety: without Christianity, who are we? This question becomes urgent as mass migration and global rivals like China and Russia challenge Western cohesion.
The cultural role of Christianity is most evident when confronted by the "other." The rise of Islam and non-European migration forces the West to define itself, revealing how deeply Christian its instincts remain. Concepts like charity, forgiveness, and community, central to Western identity, are Christian in origin, even if secularised. Yet, as Milbank warns, a purely identitarian "cultural Christianity" risks becoming a hollow nationalism, lacking the universal ethic that makes Christianity more than a tribal badge. Conversely, Left-leaning Christians who weaponise faith against conservative efforts to preserve heritage,ignore the cultural framework that sustains their values. Christianity is neither just a creed nor a flag, it's a lived civilisation, a way of life that integrates belief, ethics, and community.
This lived reality is why Christianity remains essential. It offers a moral coherence that secular ideologies, whether neoliberalism's market worship or progressivism's self-loathing cosmopolitanism, cannot replicate. The West's elites, often hostile to their own heritage, have created a crisis of identity, leaving societies unable to define citizenship or control borders. Christianity provides the tools to navigate these challenges: a universal ethic that welcomes newcomers while setting boundaries, fostering integration without erasing identity. Churches, as Milbank notes, are already seeing a "quiet revival" among young people seeking meaning in a fractured world. They offer the infrastructure to cultivate a new elite, one grounded in faith, capable of renewing politics with purpose.
The alternative is grim. Without Christianity's anchoring influence, the West risks drifting into a storm of extremism, cultural fragmentation, and vulnerability to authoritarian rivals. Australia, like Britain, faces these pressures: its Christian heritage, from the rule of law to its ethos of "fair go," is under strain from unchecked migration and elite-driven secularism. Cultural Christianity is not about imposing dogma but about recognising that our civilisation's strength lies in its Christian roots. To abandon them is to risk losing not just our past but our future. As a way of life, Christianity offers the West a path to renewal, a chance to reclaim its soul before the storm engulfs us, and the darkest of nights, falls.
https://thecritic.co.uk/christianity-is-a-culture/
Christianity is a culture
Christianity is not just a private faith, nor a set of traditions, but a way of individual and collective life
By
Is Christianity a dead force in British politics? The top of Westminster politics is as godless as it ever has been, a fact driven home by Kemi Badenoch's revelation that she has been an atheist since she was a teenager. Where once British political parties mirrored a country at prayer (Anglicanism and the Tories, Liberals and non-conformists, Labour and Catholicism/Methodism) today they are as metaphysically confused as the nation they represent. Labour has long secularised its religious roots into a secular creed — though this too is wearing thin in a post industrial age — but for the Tories the loss of faith has proved a more existential challenge.
Whilst Thatcher had a powerful, almost Victorian religious faith driving her vision of personal responsibility, in which charity and mutual aid was imagined to take the place of welfarism, this moral vision is distinctly lacking in her successors. Cameron attempted it, but his weak character and intermittent faith saw the "big society" come to nothing. Indeed, secularism is not a problem of political vision alone, but also imposes limits to even the most inspired policy. Thatcher's attack on the big state didn't lead to the return of Victorian-style civil society because the culture had shifted. She might have been a pious and patriotic leader, but she was ruling in the age of the yuppie, and the faith that her successors imbibed from her was more Friedman than St Francis.
In the intervening decades, the Tory party has become an extraordinarily amoral force in British politics. It primarily attracts apolitical careerists and rationalistic young spods who want to run the country off the back of an economics textbook. Badenoch's interview reflected this as much as any theological point, with a telling moment in which she got a fellow student expelled for cheating in an exam. Cheating might be wrong, but most of us intuit that betrayal is a more fundamental wrong than sneaking your notes into a test. And Badenoch's raison d'etre was more telling still: she had worked hard, she was top of her class, and she resented anyone taking the easy path. What do Tories believe in? Themselves, mainly.
It's becoming increasingly apparent that the receding of the tide of faith is unmooring the old political parties from their own traditions, and leaving godless politicians floundering in its wake, gasping for a lost coherence. In fact, religion has only become a more urgent question as we leave the comfortable shallows of the 80s and 90s, where faith was broadly present but weak and marginalised.
Perhaps the most significant detail of Badenoch's interview was the fact that she felt the need to reassure viewers that she is a "cultural Christian". Christianity has receded sufficiently that society can look upon it as a whole, like planet earth observed from an orbiting rocket. The success of books like Holland's Dominion and Omrani's God is an Englishman reflect a newfound anxiety over identity, belonging and tradition. The short-lived confidence of a secularising West in the latter half of the 20th century, at a time of massive economic and technological progress, has foundered. Tech entrepreneurs like Peter Thiel openly speculate that scientific advances have slowed, and advocate for the return of Christian faith.
We are waking up to just how dystopian post-Christian politics is proving
Recovering from the Promethean excesses of neoconservatism and neoliberalism, we are waking up to just how dystopian post-Christian politics is proving. The decline of Christian ethics has seen teenagers surgically altered by doctors, the euthanisation of the mentally ill, and the legalisation of abortion up to birth. Sex and relationships have been digitised and marketised through sites like Tinder and OnlyFans. Marriage and birthrates have declined to dangerous levels. Growth has stalled and house prices rocketed upwards, public and private debt is increasing.
Even as Western culture is tottering, global rivals in Moscow and Beijing have taken the initiative, as Russia marches westwards and China wages ceaseless economic warfare. The most insidious challenge of all is mass migration, compounding the West's identity crisis still further. Unable, as I've noted before, to define who we are, we are unable to limit or define citizenship, control our borders, or deport illegal immigrants.
Cultural Christianity takes on a crucial role in this context — as we come to observe Christianity not merely as a discreet creed, but a civilisation and a way of life, we start to realise that we are Christians in spite of ourselves, and helplessly dependent on the fruits of a faith we now lack. An implicit Christianity fuels alarm at the rise of Islam, or the growth of non-European migration. Faced with the cultural other, we are forced to confront who we actually are, and rediscover our traditions.
Strikingly, Nigel Farage, hardly a pious Christian himself, has been loud and insistent in defending the Christian character of the United Kingdom. In this he is imitating not just the rhetoric of Trump or the US religious right, but a growing European populism which mobilises a largely secular population behind a Christian national identity.
But is this enough? The West has faced many crises and always before there has been intellectual renewal and renaissance in their wake. But the usual sources of new ideas and ways of life — our intellectual and cultural elites and institutions — are also the origin of our problems. The typical artist, academic or author of today is loyal to a creed of civilisational self-loathing and rootless cosmopolitanism. The idea of a cultural Christianity is, in Oakshottian fashion, more an instinct than an idea, and yet Christian culture itself is founded on an idea, not an instinct. The newfound significance of Christianity needs an intellectual and artistic elite to put flesh on its bones and add colour to its monochrome identitarian palette.
At present, discussions around cultural Christianity devolve into the relative merits of Christian culture versus Christian faith, and if one can have one without the other. Often, leftwing Christians opportunistically weaponise their faith against conservatives who want to preserve our culture and heritage, even as secular conservatives trivialise religion into an identity. But the deeper and more complex reality is that Christianity is a way of life and civilisation, a heavenly kingdom and not just a point of view. This should lead us to reject both its recruitment as a secular identity and as an individual belief system. Instead, we must look to Christianity as a uniquely political and ethical creed, one that is lived out as much as it is professed. Seen this way, in properly universalistic fashion, we can see that there is a role for everyone, even those who do not believe, or who have a different faith, in a culture and nation founded on Christianity.
In the face of self-hating secular elites and nationalistic identitarians, there is a clear role for Christians themselves to act as a via media. Christian churches, as the "quiet revival" suggests, are already starting to attract a newly thoughtful and curious generation of young people. Churches still have the inherited infrastructure and ideas to train and mobilise a new Christian elite, and Christianity offers both a variety and a coherence that can bring meaning to our politics without imposing a deadening homogeneity. By defining ourselves as a Christian country and civilisation, we can start to navigate the complex questions of citizenship and belonging, setting bounds, genuinely integrating new members of our society, and excluding those who break the rules or are hostile to our way of life.
The alternative is not a happy one. Absent the ethical guardrails, deep sense of purpose and living connection to our ancestors provided by Christianity, British political culture is adrift in an increasingly stormy ocean, vulnerable to mindless passions, extremist ideas and rapacious enemies. In the final analysis, Christianity is a culture, and one we cannot do without."
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