Prophetic Perspective on The West – Ben Shapiro

I have kept a personal diary since 1972. A year ago I turned it into an autobiography called One Small Life: Revival Adventures From My Fifty Year Journal. While writing and arranging the book, it seemed like an interesting idea to make a “Life Calendar” of the most important events and decisions I’d made over a lifetime.

The purpose was to remember God’s goodness and guidance. 

On August 28, 1973 (fifty-one years ago today), at the age 20, I got a glimpse of God’s calling. I listed it this way: “Ezekiel 1:3 – I must speak God’s prophetic message – 1973.”

There are many prophetic voices in our world who have blessed my life and honed the message. Here’s an important perspective on Western Civilization that I want you to ponder.  

Prophetic Perspective on The West – Ben Shapiro

I’m preparing for surgery September 12 (a fundoplication). It will lay me up for a few weeks, but hopefully help correct a chronic throat/vocal inflammation that I’ve experienced for over thirty years. It’s been my thorn in the flesh (2 Corinthians 12).

I had surgery 26 years ago to correct it, but apparently the procedure became “undone.” (“Woe is me for I am undone.”)

Just kidding. It’s a great blessing to live in the age of modern medicine where many sicknesses or physical problems can be either cured or moderated. Most people in times past did not have that option.

So, I’m grateful.

But the burden remains for the coming U.S. elections (which direction will we go as a nation?) and what has happened to Western Civilization. America stood as a beacon of light for freedom and world evangelization for over two hundred years. Now we are becoming a tragic example of what happens to nations when they turn away from God and his wise principles for living.

Western Civilization has blessed the globe more than other in history. But now it might be facing extinction.

Ben Shapiro ranks as a one of my favorite young speaker/writer/prophetic voices of the 21st century. Ben is Jewish, and has catapulted into public view as a well-known political pundit, syndicated columnist, lawyer, and New York Times bestselling author.

I have rarely read a better analogy of what is taking place in the Western World than what he shares in the following article. Ponder it and follow through in your prayers, evangelism, discipleship, and acts of societal renewal. 

It’s time to grow a new field of beautiful “flowers” in the nations of the West.

The Cut Flowers Civilization

Ben Shapiro

This week, famed British atheist Richard Dawkins explained that he was a “cultural Christian.”

Praising civilization in the United Kingdom, Dawkins stated:

I do think that we are culturally a Christian country. I call myself a cultural Christian. I’m not a believer. But there is a distinction between being a believing Christian and being a cultural Christian. And so, you know, I love hymns and Christmas carols, and I sort of feel at home in the Christian ethos. I feel that we are a Christian country in that sense.

Dawkins went on to praise Christianity as a “fundamentally decent religion in a way that I think Islam is not.”

Dawkins’ case for Christianity—a case made on the basis of utility—is nothing new. It was made long ago by Voltaire, an acidic critic of the church who famously averred, “If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”

But the problem with the utilitarian case for religious belief is that it doesn’t animate religious believers. It is simply impossible to build a civilization on the basis of Judeo-Christian foundations while making the active case as to why those foundations ought to be dissolved.

In fact, Western civilization has doomed itself so long as it fails to reconnect to its religious roots. Philosopher Will Herberg wrote:

The moral principles of Western civilization are, in fact, all derived from the tradition rooted in Scripture and have vital meaning only in the context of that tradition. … Cut flowers retain their original beauty and fragrance, but only so long as they retain the vitality that they have drawn from their now severed roots; after that is exhausted, they wither and die. So with freedom, brotherhood, justice and personal dignity—the values that form the moral foundation of our civilization. Without the life-giving power of the faith out of which they have sprung, they possess neither meaning nor vitality.

We are a cut flowers civilization.

And eventually, cut flowers die.

That has never been more obvious than [last spring], when the Biden administration decided to honor the newly invented Transgender Day of Visibility on Easter Sunday. Gender ideology is a symptom of our society’s reversion to gnostic paganism, in which unseen, chaotic forces buffet us about, and in which nature is directly opposed to the freedom of our disembodied essences.

It is no wonder that gender ideology is opposed by every mainstream traditional religion.

Yet claiming that this magical holiday could not be moved, the White House issued a variety of statements in celebration of radical gender ideology, including a deeply insulting statement from the president of the United States citing the book of Genesis to the effect that transgender people are “made in the image of God”—ignoring the last half of the biblical verse, which reads, “male and female he made them.”

What better time than Easter, the holiest day in the Christian calendar, to pay homage to an entirely new religion?

Richard Dawkins is obviously correct that a civilization rooted in church is better than a civilization rooted in an alternative set of values. But in reality, the churches cannot be empty; they must be full. The cathedrals that mean Britain to Dawkins must ring with the sounds of hymns in order to maintain their holiness and their importance; otherwise, they are merely beautiful examples of old architecture, remnants of a dead civilization preserved in stone.

But our civilization must live. And that means more than cultural Christianity. It means reengaging with the source of our values—the Scriptures that educated our fathers and grandfathers.

***

I can’t think of a better analogy for the West than a bouquet of cut flowers. They are beautiful for a time, but without being rooted into good soil, they fade and die. Jesus used that same example in the Parable of the Sower (Matthew 13). 

Jarrett Stepman warns that the dying West is becoming an easy prey for tyranny:

Western Europe is fast headed toward tyranny and that certainly serves as a dire warning. As thankful as I am for the First Amendment, it remains what founder James Madison called a “parchment barrier” to repression only as strong as the people and institutions willing to defend and maintain it. 

The Constitution may buy us time, but the ultimate marriage of American-style wokeness with European-style censorship would mean the end of liberty in the West if it isn’t derailed.

We must give our lives to renewing the “soil” with prayer, evangelism, holiness, virtue, wisdom, vision, and compassion for people–that came from the West’s founding book, the Bible.

It’s happening in many places–the most recent the “awakening” at Ohio State University where past and present football players led thousands of incoming students in worship and many to faith in Jesus and public baptism.

This renewal of our civilizational soil is the key to our survival and thriving in the 21st century.

Everywhere in the Western World. 

Many prophetic voices are sounding the alarm. 

(Next week: How a Nation Commits Suicide.)