Thousands of people have gathered from around the world in London this week, united by a common concern around existential threats to the West and a sense of urgency to reverse the course of decline.
Many delegates at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference are Christian - or at least sympathetic to Christianity, and are conscious of both its foundational role in the development of the West and the part it can play in charting a new path.
Indeed the roster includes many Christians - Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Carl Trueman, Rod Dreher, Eric Metaxas, Os Guinness, Kate Forbes, Danny Kruger and Miriam Cates among others. Not surprisingly, Christianity, God and faith were mentioned frequently throughout the first day of proceedings.
Outside, a group of protesters gathered with placards branding the conference “fascist”. Inside, delegates pressed on with identifying the factors behind the “decades of deconstruction” that have led Western societies to where they are today, and laying the groundwork for the “reconstruction” they believe needs to happen to restore freedom and flourishing.
Hirsi Ali, a conservative thinker who grew up under Islam and Communism in Somalia before later seeking asylum in the Netherlands, said it was “shocking” to see Western nations embrace these belief systems, warning that her own experience had been “fear”, “propaganda”, forced religion, and no individual freedom.
She warned that Islamists and communists are attempting to “deconstruct” Western institutions and that if they succeed, Western nations will come to resemble the country she fled. Instead, Hirsi Ali argued, the West must “reconstruct” its institutions by resisting Islamism and reasserting the “pillars” that traditionally distinguished it from others: critical thinking, individual responsibility and personal accountability.
“I would say to all of these institutions: do not give in to the demands of Islamists. Confront them with the question: why are you here? If Sharia law is so fantastic, why are so many Muslims moving to the infidel West?” she said.
Hirsi Ali said it was very easy for Westerners who “breathe liberty” to fall into “this delusional state believing that there is some utopia out there”. This false notion must be confronted, she asserted.
“There is this idealist, romantic story that if only communism was done one more time, this time differently, it’s going to yield something else. It will not. It’s going to yield the exact same thing as it yields everywhere from Mogadishu to Caracas to the Soviet Union - lots of debt, starvation and hunger," she said.
"There is no alternative to what the Christian Western civilisation has built.
“What you see in the deconstruction period is always censorship, self-censorship, political correctness, the pretence that there are other systems and other ways of doing things and other worlds are better than what you already have.”
While she acknowledged that too much individualism can lead to narcissism and selfishness, she contended that the “Christian story” and “Western civilisational story” offer “the remedy for that”, although this is being undermined by attempts to brand the achievements of Western civilization as “white supremacist”.
“We were checked by biblical truths … some form of accountability was built into every institution. And what we did was remove these layers of accountability by labelling them white supremacist structures that had to go,” she said.
She pointed to Britain’s grooming gangs scandal as an example of what can happen when institutional accountability breaks down, arguing that this has damaged the West’s moral authority.
“Young women in Britain have been abused by groups and somehow we let it happen. It is not possible now for any Western European leader to go to any part of the third world and lecture them about human rights with atrocities like that taking place here,” she said.
Trueman, a theologian and author of Crisis of Confidence, said the West was in “chaotic times” and that many of its current ills could be traced back to the emergence of a “psychologised”, “sexualised” and “politicised” sense of self.
Much was made of the need to support marriage and strong families during the first day’s sessions and Trueman also touched on the subject, saying that the modern aversion to marriage was down to its being recast as “oppressive”.
In his view, though, the current “chaos” that now surrounds marriage has far more to do with the advent of no-fault divorce than the introduction of gay marriage.
“No-fault divorce says that the binding nature of marriage depends on the two persons involved meeting each other’s emotional needs. Once that ceases to be the case the marriage can be dissolved. That turns marriage into a sentimental bond with therapeutic value. And it also, incidentally, turns children into collateral damage,” he said.
Freedom of speech, once considered a “virtue” that distinguished democratic nations from the likes of the Soviet Union and China, has also come under “immense” pressure.
“Today, anyone holding a view that hurts somebody’s feelings is considered to have committed an act of violence,” he said.
It has reached such an extent that “even your body must not stand in the way of your feelings”, thus giving rise to transgenderism.
Elsewhere he warned that once freedom of speech comes under pressure as it has in the West, freedom of religion is sure to be next.
“What has been the primary means of enforcing sexual taboos? Religion - in the West specifically Christianity,” he said.
“To tell somebody that their sexual behaviour is wrong is to commit an act of violence against them because it is to call into question their inner feelings.”
GB News co-owner Sir Paul Marshall echoed the calls for a new era of “reconstruction” in the West, telling the ANC conference that the assault on Western civilisation has reached the point of “just plain destruction”, driven by ideologies like critical race theory, gender theory, extreme net zero policies, and a pervasive sense of “victimhood” among other things.
“They gave us DEI - division, entitlement and indoctrination,” he said, adding, “We need to recover confidence in our civilisation and defend it from parasitic and progressive follies.”
Turning to “radical progressivism”, he said it took some good ideas from the classical liberal tradition “but robs them of their moorings in faith, responsibility, and above all common sense”. In the end, it “seeks to break down traditional structures like the family, the Church and the nation in the name of individualism”.
“As a result, a creed which sees itself as positive and constructive ends up being the engine of destruction,” he said.
Sir Paul went on, “Most progressives have also forgotten God, or at the very least, they don't do God. The traditions of Christian socialism, working class Methodism, nonconformism, have all been lost.”
As a result progressives do not understand religion, nor the differences between religion, he said, and instead they embrace cultural relativism, open borders, and are ashamed of their own history.
Sir Paul warned that when societies avoid speaking uncomfortable truths, they risk losing their moral direction and coherence.
“When a society stops telling the truth because it might be hurtful or because it might be unpopular, then that society will soon lose its north star. It will lose its soul,” he said.
The conference also heard from Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch who described herself as a “cultural Christian” while admitting that her grandfather who was a church minister would be “so upset about how few times I actually go to church”. Nonetheless, she said it was important that Britain cares for the institutions that helped make the country great “whether it's the Church, army [or] monarchy”.
“If we don’t look after these things, they will go away,” she said.
