There’s a lot of talk these days about saving America and defending the West, but few of our would-be defenders mention the one thing needed for our survival. This Thanksgiving it’s worth recalling what that thing is.
For many Americans, and increasingly Europeans, the answer is Christianity. No one has made the case more eloquently in this regard than British historian Tom Holland whose Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Made the World (2019) recounts “how Christianity has transformed not just the West, but the entire world.” Born of Holland’s own reckoning with his religious upbringing, the book argues that Western civilization—indeed, all of modernity—can’t be understood without the contribution of the Church. “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western civilization that it has come to be hidden from view,” Holland says. That’s why he, despite his private doubts, stakes the future of the West on a reckoning with its religious past.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali reinforced this argument more recently in a compelling essay entitled “Why I am Now a Christian” (2023) where the Muslim-turned-atheist defends her recent conversion with reference to two points: first, the threat facing the West from Russia, China, Islamism, and “wokeism” and the inability of atheism to motivate a sufficient response; second, her realization that life is “unenduring—indeed very nearly self-destructive” without some form of spiritual solace. “Atheism failed to answer a simple question: what is the meaning and purpose of life?” she writes. Now attending Anglican services with her husband, historian Niall Ferguson, Ali is “discover[ing] a little more…each Sunday” how to “manage the challenges of existence.”
Ferguson made his own contribution to the genre with Civilization: The West and the Rest (2012) where he also cites Christianity’s importance to Western identity; yet, like Holland and Ali, Ferguson prefers historical and cultural arguments over supernatural ones. In one revealing passage, after pointing out that Islamic civilization is built on the revelation of the Quran, he asks, “But what are the foundational texts of Western civilization, that can bolster our belief in the almost boundless power of the free individual human being?” Ferguson answers his question in a footnote, but strangely overlooks the foundational texts of his own religion. “If I just had to select a single volume as my Koran,” he writes, “it would be Shakespeare’s complete works.”
For Europeans confronted with an ascendant Islam, this utilitarian return to Christianity has become increasingly common. Even the renowned infidel Richard Dawkins has gone on record as a “cultural Christian” after seeing Ramadan lights hung in Oxford Street in place of Easter lights. Ecstatic that fewer and fewer Britons are entertaining the “God delusion,” Dawkins nevertheless sees the potential loss of “our cathedrals and our beautiful parish churches” as an unspeakable tragedy. “If I had to choose between Christianity and Islam, I’d choose Christianity every single time,” he told an interviewer, noting that “it would be truly dreadful if we substituted any alternative religion.”
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Americans are, on average, more pious than Europeans. But many of our leading conservatives don’t see Christianity as the answer to our predicament. In Why Liberalism Failed (2018), Patrick Deneen lauds pre-liberal Christian virtues—the “deep reservoirs of belief and commitment” he claims liberalism eroded—but sees renewed practices and institutions as more important for guaranteeing the future. “What we need today,” he concludes, “are practices fostered in local settings, focused on the creation of new and viable cultures, economics grounded in virtuosity within households, and the creation of civic polis life.”
In Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy (2018), Jonah Goldberg minimizes the importance of religion altogether, arguing contra Deneen that liberal democracy alone can save us. “There is no God,” he says, “at least not in this argument. I assert this not because I’m an atheist (I’m not), but because I don’t want God’s help for my case.” David Brooks, meanwhile, takes faith seriously but sees the real need as a renewal of “faith in the West.”
Donald Trump, for his part, puts his hope in the willpower of freedom-loving peoples. In one of the best speeches of his first term, he roused Polish crowds with his defense of Western civilization against terrorists and tyrants—a civilization whose people “have always formed the foundation of freedom and the cornerstone of our defense.” Only free peoples joined in an alliance of sovereign and independent nations can do the job. The defense of the West, Trump said,
ultimately rests not only on means but also on the will of its people to prevail and be successful and get what you have to have. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive. Do we have the confidence in our values to defend them at any cost?
Many Americans do see Christianity as the answer to our predicament, but spend their time obsessing over the secondary objects that will ensure its victory. Latin mass, ecclesial authority, Calvinism (or Arminianism), cathedrals and classical art, “Christendom,” worship styles, church programs, partisan politics—such things remain contentious among Jesus followers. Yet somehow, in all these strivings, we neglect the one thing necessary for revival. Indeed, we forget it’s not a thing but a person.
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No one saw the answer more clearly than our founder and great patriarch George Washington, whose Thanksgiving Proclamation of 1789 remains a seminal piece of Americana. Not yet sixty years old, still in the first year of his presidency, Washington had received a petition from Congress to announce a national day of thanksgiving, which he promptly did.
Penning the proclamation at his desk, the graying general reflected on the miraculous events that had brought him there. Standing at the helm of a free nation, his thoughts turned not to the Church (Anglican or otherwise), to the people he had liberated, or to the principles of the Constitution ratified eight months earlier. Instead, his mind turned in awe to the “great Lord and Ruler of Nations” who undeniably held history in the palm of his hand. “The lot is cast into the lap; but the whole disposing thereof is of the Lord,” Solomon had once observed. Six years after overcoming the world’s greatest empire, Washington agreed.
All nations are obliged to acknowledge God’s providence, obey his will, admit his blessings, and implore his protection. But the fledgling United States had special reason to be thankful given the “great and various favors which he hath been pleased to confer upon us.” Americans wanted God to grant wisdom to world leaders, peace to all nations, opportunities to promote religion and science, and as much prosperity for as many people as possible. But considering their many blessings, they first had to beg forgiveness for their individual and national sins, knowing that divine protection and favor are linked to repentance. Only society-wide submission to “that great and glorious Being, who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or that will be” was enough to guarantee America’s future—and no amount of laws or executive orders could replace that.
Christianity, liberalism, national sovereignty, and values-based alliances are vital to America’s future. But a country that forgets its God isn’t a country worth saving; indeed, it’s one that cannot be saved. The crisis of the West won’t be solved by a tradition, a liturgy, a curriculum, or a set of values that lie downstream from the real problem: a loss of faith not in our civilization but our civilization’s God—the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the supernatural Being and living personality who remains our only source of meaning and identity. Everything we love flows from him.
Politics are important, but can only take us so far. That’s why any plan to save America that doesn’t start with national repentance and thanksgiving before the God of our fathers is doomed to fail.
George Washington saw that and humbly responded. Will we?