In this post-progressive era the West is entering the calls for a return to “Christian civilisation” has made a Lazarus level comeback into public conversation across Europe, America and the West generally. It is sung most loudly by what is loosely called the “new right” — a coalition of cultural conservatives, online polemicists, and ordinary citizens unnerved by immigration, moral drift, and the sense that their societies are slipping away from them. You hear it in speeches in Hungary, in the Twitter feeds of young American nationalists, five-hour podcasts, and Substack posts advocating this vision which even reach our sunny shores here at the southern tip of Africa.
As a Christian myself, the desire is understandable and, in my view, necessary. Our societies have grown weary and cynical, and the moral vocabulary of justice, charity, restraint and fidelity that Christianity offers could indeed steady the ship. As R.R. Reno notes in Return of the Strong Gods, decades of Western life have been shaped around what he calls the “weak gods” of openness and relativism. The new right’s sudden piety can be seen as a reaction to this emptiness, a longing for something solid, binding, and sacred. The tragedy is that what they invoke in Christianity they often avoid in practice.
I find myself unsettled by the shallowness of much of this talk. Many who champion the “Christian West” seem to imagine that Christianity is something that can be draped like a flag over the public square without much change to their own private lives. They want the cultural glow of Christendom without the cost of discipleship.
A Christian West requires Christian people. And Christian people, in turn, require personal repentance, discipline, and transformation. That is the hard work that most cultural Christians (as opposed to practicing Christians) of the new right appear unwilling to face or are unaware of its necessity.
I believe that part of the confusion comes from misunderstanding what Christianity has historically done to societies. We often talk as if the faith simply held Europe together like a glue, giving it shared rituals and symbols. And there is some truth in that but it is only half the story. Christianity has always been as disruptive as it is cohesive.
The early Christians scandalised Rome by elevating women, condemning infanticide, and refusing to worship Caesar. They destabilised ancient hierarchies by claiming that a slave could be spiritually equal to his master. Centuries later, Christian conviction fuelled abolitionists in Britain and America, and inspired the civil rights movement. Christianity has certainly built institutions, but it has also unsettled them. It comforts as much as it judges.
So when I hear politicians or commentators invoke Christianity as civilisational cement, I wonder if they know what they are asking for. Because the real Christianity does not flatter power, it interrogates it. It does not sanctify cultural memory, it often burns through it. To call for a Christian West is to invite a faith that, historically, has been willing to topple empires, unsettle traditions, and demand sacrifices no politician can guarantee. Are the new right truly ready for that or is that what they in fact mean?
Moreover, “Judeo-Christian values”, or just Christian values, are invoked when what is really being defended are Enlightenment liberal values: rights, freedoms, equality before the law. As Tom Holland argues in Dominion, even these secular commitments are inescapably Christian in origin, the product of a moral revolution that overturned the ancient world. Liberalism is Christianity’s offspring. By blurring the line, many in the new right end up defending liberalism in the classic sense but under a Christian brand without even realising it. Others intend on throwing out classical liberalism with the progressive bathwater because they no longer distinguish between the two. To them, liberalism is guilty by association — hopelessly entangled with rainbow flags and gender pronouns. But that is to forget that liberalism in its classic sense (free speech, limited government, the protection of conscience) was itself often the very framework that allowed Christianity to flourish in pluralistic societies. To discard it wholesale is not to restore Christian civilisation but to erode the very soil in which Christian faith can live alongside difference.
Values can be worn like a uniform, posted in a manifesto, or claimed in a tweet. Virtues cannot
Another source of muddle lies in confusing “Christian values” with virtues. Values are what politicians like to list: family, order, tradition, respect for authority. They sound Christian, but they are really cultural preferences. Virtues are to my mind more difficult: faith, hope, charity, humility, forgiveness. The things I as a sinner struggle with daily myself.
Values can be worn like a uniform, posted in a manifesto, or claimed in a tweet. Virtues cannot. They require discipline, practice, and usually some humiliation along the way. You can declare your support for “traditional family values” in a sentence but living faithfully inside a marriage for forty years is something else altogether. As Thomas Aquinas wrote, religion itself is a habit of virtue, inclining the will to give God what He deserves. That’s a far cry from the superficial view of Christianity as a kind of cultural garnish, something you can wave about without any transformation of the will.
And here cultural Christianity collapses into performance. It seems that the new right wants the social outcomes they associate with a Christian past — stable families, strong communities, disciplined children — without the spiritual discipline that produces them. They prefer to keep the aesthetic of Christianity while avoiding its moral demands. But there is no shortcut. If you want a Christian culture, you need Christian people cultivating Christian virtues in the unglamorous daily grind of life. This is why cultural Christianity so often prefers performance to practice. It’s the old joke about certain denominations: double the liturgy, half the guilt. That may make for a more comfortable Sunday morning, but it’s not the stuff of civilisational renewal.
In my own country South Africa the irony for Westerners is sharper still. Unlike Europe, where Christianity is broadly entwined with ethnicity and national memory, here the faith belongs to no single group. Christianity is the dominant religion in South Africa, with an estimated 85.3 per cent of the population professing to be Christian. Millions of black South Africans practise their faith with devotion, filling churches every Sunday, often with a vibrancy and conviction long since drained from Europe’s cathedrals.
If the champions of the “Christian West” were serious about Christianity, they would look not to Brussels or Berlin but to Boipatong or Bloemfontein on a Sunday morning, where congregations sing with a fervour most Lutherans in Germany would find bewildering. Yet for some reason I doubt many of the new right’s advocates would feel at home there.
Christianity is relentlessly personal before it is cultural or political
This brings me to the most uncomfortable point, one Jesus Christ himself insisted on — Christianity is relentlessly personal before it is cultural or political. It reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s well-known advice to clean your room before you try to change the world. Christianity has long taught a harsher version of the same principle to “first take the plank out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother’s eye.” Before complaining about your Muslim neighbour’s unmade bed perhaps make your own.
Much of the rhetoric about the “Christian West” is a way of skipping this uncomfortable stage. It allows a man to demand Christian order from society while ignoring the disorder of his own life. He can rail about his neighbour’s mosque while neglecting to open his own Bible.
Politics asks others to change. But Christianity, properly lived, asks you to change first.
If there is to be a renewal of Christian civilisation, it cannot begin in parliament or on social media. It must begin in the hidden places of life: in marriages, in friendships, in communities, in prayer. These things are not glamorous. They do not trend on social media. They cannot be enacted by decree. But they are what makes a society recognisably Christian. Anything else is merely performance.
And so I suspect much of the call for a return to the Christian West is, in truth, performative politics. It is a way of cloaking or, seen charitably, rebranding valid concerns about unbridled immigration, valid scepticism about progressivism and warning about the West’s moral drift.
I therefore understand the hunger for moral clarity in our confused age. Progressivism has frayed the West and other countries like South Africa into chaos. Here, its Marxist cousin ideologies promised liberation but delivered corruption, patronage, and collapsing institutions. Under the banner of “transformation” South Africa has seen schools decay, hospitals rot, and power stations literally fall apart, while ordinary citizens are left more vulnerable than before. The dream of utopia has hardened into a daily struggle for electricity, safety, and basic competence.
Christianity does offer a balance, restraining power and tempering freedom with responsibility. But at its core it is a personal covenant, a surrender of the will, a daily turning away from self toward God and neighbour. It asks men and women to change not just their politics but their hearts. And it does so relentlessly.
That is why I remain sceptical of the new right’s sudden piety. I do not doubt that some are sincere. But sincerity is measured not by rhetoric but by fruit. The test of a Christian society is not in how loudly it invokes the word “Christian,” but in how faithfully its people live out the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
