From Covenant to Chaos: The Quiet Collapse of Christian Culture

How Western Culture was Won and Lost

The Canadian singer and former poet Leonard Cohen once offered a bleak forecast of the future. In his song “The Future,” he declared that everything would slide in all directions, obliterating moral and spiritual measures. “I’ve seen the future, brother. It is murder,” he rasped in that signature voice, all full of gravel and dark prophecy.

Even if Cohen approached these questions as something other than a traditional Christian, his words reflected an unsettling truth: the decay of Western civilization is here, and there’s an anxious whisper that something has gone terribly wrong.

The Sense of Disintegration

Cohen’s grim assessment finds another worldly echo in Jim Morrison’s dramatic plea, “Save us, Jesus, save us,” delivered towards the end of When The Music’s Over. These contradictory and secular “cries” capture a culture caught between rejecting its Christian roots and fearing the emptiness that follows the implicit rejection. A couple of generations that declared themselves free from moral or religious constraints now confront a shapeless sense of dread.

People are left asking… if we strip away the old foundations, what remains to guide us? How do we measure right and wrong when every former code is thrown in the Big Muddy?

The Tectonic Shift in Western Life

By the dawn of the twentieth century, a major theological shift had already occurred. Herman Bavinck, a very thoughtful Dutch theologian, looked at the period ahead and predicted “a gigantic conflict of spirits.” He saw faith and unbelief battling not over a single doctrine or tradition but over the entire structure of civilization. The rise of what he called “development” (evolutionism) was only part of a larger outlook: a scientific outlook that treats anything unmeasurable as irrelevant.

Bavinck described a world in which scientific method would be placed above all else, leaving no room for divine mystery or moral absolutes. Human beings would be explained solely by chemistry and biology; their souls reduced to a swirl of neurons.

Abraham Kuyper, another Dutch thinker and Bavinck’s mentor identified something earlier in a trend he called a “hopeless modern Buddhism,” a worldview that regards reality as a closed system devoid of any transcendent God.

Bavinck’s article in the Methodist Reporter (1901) is key to understanding where we are today. The article, “Creation or Development,” whose main theme is that the center of moral and spiritual gravity shifted from an eternal point outside ourselves to the unstable ground of autonomous human subjectivity as posited by Immanuel Kant. Here are a few sample quotes to illustrate why Bavinck nailed it:

“Unless we are mistaken in our interpretation of the signs of the times, the twen¬tieth century, upon which we have just entered,’ is to witness a gigantic conflict of spirits.”

In the early 1900s, a war was on the horizon, and Bavinck knew it. But it was not the Great War (World War I) Bavinck saw though it was in view. He saw something bigger, much bigger. Bavinck saw a war that would make all future wars tiny by comparison. He saw a Worldview War that would affect not only all future conflicts but life itself.

“Faith and unbelief says Goethe, is the deepest theme of the history of the world. This it has been in the centuries that lie behind us. This it was in the one which we just closed and abandoned to the past. And this it will be above all things else and in an entirely special sense in the twentieth century.”

Bavinck foresaw that the struggle between faith and unbelief would take on a distinct character in the emerging century. With unsettling clarity, he recognized that the impending battle would be more all-encompassing than any previously fought in the history of Christianity. Yet, nearly a century later, most Christians remain astonishingly oblivious to the scope of this conflict. While Bavinck had the foresight to anticipate it, many of us have failed to grasp its full extent, even in hindsight.

Mark his words well:

“This conflict is no longer confined to one or another article of our Christian confession, to the authority of Scripture or tradition, to justification or election; and not even any longer to the Deity of Christ or the personality of the Holy Spirit. But in the spiritual conflict which is now waging in every part of the civi¬lized world, the points at issue more and more are the principles of Christianity itself and the very fundamentals of all religion and of all morality. This conflict extends the whole length of the line. More serious and fiercer than ever before the conflict is between the old and the new world-view.”

Bavinck saw this dark force emanating from a new, fundamental spirit, an all-embracing, world-impacting god-less presupposition:

“For man has undertaken the gigantic effort of interpreting the whole world, and all things that are therein, in their origin, essence, and end, what is called purely and strictly scientifically, that is, without God, without any invisible, supernatural, spiritual element, and sim¬ply and alone from the pure data of matter and force.”

Devastating, right? A world where all that is, objective and subjective, is a pile of person-less data. Sounds like hell on earth. But listen, before we say all is lost, let’s look at the history of this country. Only then can we see what we had and what we lost.

Lost Roots of a Christian Nation

It can be startling to realize how decisively Christian the American founding once was. State constitutions that required officeholders to believe in the divine inspiration of the Old and New Testaments, or demanded religious worship on the Sabbath, appear unthinkable now. These historical documents, far from imposing a theocracy, simply reflected a near-universal assumption that Christianity was a shared cornerstone of public life.

The caution here is not to overlook the sins of the past. They’ve indeed been chronicled. I’m simply saying that the cultural consensus of earlier centuries acknowledged a transcendent reference point, a sense that the nation answered to a higher law. Today, that very real history has been buried by public schools and universities, making it easy for modern critics to label even the mildest public reference to religion as an affront to freedom.

Turning Inward and Losing Ground

If there was once broad agreement that Christianity shaped the public order, how did the West drift so far from that anchor? One explanation lies in the intense focus on individual spiritual experience that emerged during the First and Second Great Awakenings. Though many people found vital personal faith in these movements, the overall impact on Christian life was often to turn the faith inward.

As fervent revivalism flourished, the sense that Christianity must shape society at large gradually weakened. The faith grew individualized and privatized, aimed at heart-felt experiences and conversion stories rather than at nurturing a culture in covenant with God. An “are you saved” form of evangelism dominated the church scene, sometimes overshadowing the call to broader obedience in the arts, economics, and any form of governance.

From Covenant to the Self

For centuries, Christianity had been understood in more corporate or covenantal terms. When a ruler converted, entire tribes or nations moved toward Christian life, and public institutions naturally reflected that faith. With the Awakenings, especially the Second Great Awakening, salvation became more of an introspective search for an authentic experience… something deeply personal but often disconnected from the patterns and institutions of shared life.

The Christian faith, now centered on individual conversion, was less likely to offer a robust challenge to new worldviews such as scientism or egalitarianism, which cut us loose from moral absolutes. In many cases, believers found themselves suspecting each other’s introspective sincerity instead of uniting in a vision that shaped laws, education, and social structures.

Reclaiming a Holistic Vision

In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, this legacy has played out in fierce debates over public displays of religion. Today, even hinting at Christianity can provoke alligator tears of intolerance, as if faith must be banished from every civic sphere. Yet to those who look back on older… and sometimes more coherent… foundations, it is clear that public life inevitably rests on some set of commonly held convictions about the nature of reality as well as what’s right and what’s wrong.

Bottom Line: The question is not whether a society will have a moral vision but which vision it will place at the center of everything else. I’m talking about bones and a spiritual spinal cord.

Bavinck’s warning that the twentieth century would be a “gigantic conflict of spirits” has come true. Scientific discovery brought extraordinary advances, yet the deeper question of moral direction remained suspended. Science, so-called, continues to tell us what’s best and what we can and cannot do. Science, however, does not tell us how it arrived at what’s best for us.

But like the lost sheep that we are, we let “technology” tell us how we should then live.

Perhaps the lesson in Cohen’s haunting message is that when a civilization discards the foundations that once gave it life and its very meaning, it does not drift into some neutral space. It often tumbles into seizures and confusion, longing for a moral compass but unsure where to find one.

If there is a path to getting back where we belong, it may lie in the rediscovery that the Christian faith is not merely a private emotional experience. It’s not even a semi-private experience you share with your youth pastor or your accountability partner. Nope. Christianity contains a living truth that has the power to shape entire communities.

Think about it. Almost all of our Founders knew this. They knew Christianity called for a comprehensive worldview, and they acted in terms of it. That, my friend, is how we inherited this wonderful country. It’s also how we can get it back.

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