The West’s most remarkable inheritance is not merely its wealth or its power, but a habit of conscience—a civilisation formed by the unsettling conviction that even its own achievements must answer to a higher, divine standard. No constitution or declaration can substitute for this notion.

From 2016, the ‘Rhodes Must Fall’ campaign called for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at Oriel College, University of Oxford. Rhodes was seen by his detractors as a symbol of the worst outcomes of Western civilization—a racist imperialist who gave his life to extracting the wealth from southern Africa, and yet continues to be applauded as a great philanthropist and imperial visionary. Not only was he seen as prejudiced and greedy, but he was also applauded for it. The statue was finally not removed despite the wishes of the governing body of the college—but for reasons of cost and heritage rather than ideological preference.

The Rhodes controversy is a symptom of contemporary debates about the legacy of Western civilisation. For several decades, the tendency amongst the academics of the great universities of the West has been to view ‘the West’ not as the bearer of universal ideals but as a hegemonic project bound up with oppression—Rhodes being an embodiment of that purpose.

This view has been shaped by various postcolonial thinkers such as Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, and Dipesh Chakrabarty. More recently, Walter D. Mignolo has argued that the project of Western modernity has been inseparable from colonial domination and proposes “decolonial” ways of thinking and being in response.^[1] Their arguments have helped inspire contemporary calls to “decolonise” the university curriculum and rethink, or replace, the authority of the Western canon.

The assessment of Christianity’s role in Western civilisation is likewise scathing. The liberal and post-modern readings of the history of the West see moral enlightenment as coming not because of Christianity but in the move away from it. The less Christian we’ve become, in other words, the more just and equitable we’ve also become.

The Christian missionary movement is seen as a useful tool of extractive colonialism, rendering docile the peoples from whom resources were stolen. Missionaries were present, too, because they believed that not all religions are true and that not all moral systems were equal—a view that is now held to be repugnant by the critics of Western civilisation.

Latterly, there’s been a reaction from more conservative quarters by writers like the historian Niall Ferguson that challenges the dominant narrative and attempts to foreground the great achievements of Western civilisation, such as medicine, property rights, and the Protestant work ethic. Writers like Douglas Murray and Jordan Peterson agree with the progressive critics of the West that it rests on a Judaeo-Christian moral foundation, which is being undermined by postmodernism and identity politics. The disagreement lies in whether that is a good thing or not. Journalist and commentator Victor David Hanson likewise argues that the West has been brought to the brink of collapse by the undermining of the institutions that have sustained its civic ideals.

These thinkers see ‘the West’ as under relentless attack from a combination of large bureaucratic government and the elitist intellectuals who dominate the universities and the mainstream media. This has unleashed a kind of loathing for the institutions and traditions that would ordinarily provide (in philosopher Charles Taylor’s expression) a ‘social imaginary’—a vision of what the society aspires to be. The idea of ‘the West’ must therefore be defended so that civilisational confidence can be restored. Christianity—or at least ‘Judaeo-Christian values’—is crucial to this restoration project, because it is held to generate the principles that have shaped the culture in the first place. This defence of Western civilisation desperately needs Christianity to give it some kind of substance—even when the proponents of that defence are only vaguely or hesitantly Christian themselves.

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