Forty-five years ago, anti-communist dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn caused a stir at Harvard with a famous commencement speech deploring the decadence of the West. The rivalry of the Cold War was not as neat as it appeared, he said. The liberal West, by making man and his desire for material satisfaction the measure of all things, was becoming a spiritual desert not unlike the Communist world:
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The West had become cowardly and ruled over by “legalistic” elites without morality. The erstwhile master of the world was becoming the slave of its former colonies.

Solzhenitsyn’s oracular pronouncements ring even truer today. Western “scientists” fancy themselves miracle workers who are beyond reproach, and they are treated as such by intellectual elites and much of the population. Despite its uncontested material prosperity, the West is so enervated that many are captivated by the prospect of their own destruction. Western nations have welcomed the steady replacement of their peoples and cultures as “progress.” COVID, before it became hysteria, was an entertainment that filled many a void in people’s lives.
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If the world is spared fiery destruction, the alternative is to trudge aimlessly through an endless winter. Western leaders have become hectoring dictators, caught up in endless exhortation. Toward what goal? “Democracy,” they say. “Equity.”

What have been the fruits of these idols? Oppressive ennui, mediocrity, and evils that multiply faster than the human imagination can reckon. The political freedoms once associated with Anglo-American liberalism, such as free speech, are now an illusion, replaced by a purely libertine conception of “freedom.” The blasphemous worship of sexual exotics and racial minorities is enforced by the world’s most powerful government. What could be worse than world war, you ask: How about a 1,000-year-long celebration of sodomy?

Not since the days of the Roman Empire have Christians faced so fearsome and obdurate an enemy.