It is apparent that the waning of Western cultural influence is linked to a rejection of growth and expansion. There are many evidences of a "love of death" in the Western mindset. The forms it takes are varied--yet consistent. Abortion, euthanasia, suicide, volitionally childless couples, falling populations,aging populations, and families limiting children to one are all celebrations of a culture of death. Couple this with violent crime, and a culture of death seems to stalks the West.
It is apparent that European countries, the UK, the US, New Zealand and Australia cannot now arrest the downward spiral of declining populations, without making up the numbers by migration. Our secularist culture which long ago threw off the Christ as its king is bearing a fruit consistent with a love of death. As the Proverbs point out, "but he who fails to find me injures himself; all who hate me love death.” [Proverbs 8:36]
The Bible, however, proclaims that growth and development of God's Kingdom. "Be fruitful, and multiply, and fill the earth, and subdue it", is the first command God gave to Adam and Eve. [Genesis 1:28]. The prevailing view in the West has reached the point where it openly declaims this command as itself wicked and evil. As Douglas Kelly observes:
What an arrogant, obtuse culture we now live amidst! But for Christians the polarisation of the two diametrically opposed worldviews (secularist evolutionism versus Christendom) presents an unparalleled opportunity to proclaim God and His Christ.
This is an utterly different attitude from the pagan materialism of our declining Western society, which sees reproductive increase as a curse, rather than a blessing. Because of their departure from Biblical standards (which are based essentially on love of life, God first and one's neighbour next), the Western countries have for some decades experienced a decline in population (except where boosted by immigration from countries which do not see reproductive increase as a curse.)
This most basic denial of moral law--loving self rather than God and neighbor--is running an epidemic course in the world's richest societies. Its grim symptoms are evidenced in abortion and euthanasia. [Douglas Kelly, Creation and Change: Genesis 1.1--2.4 in the Light of Changing Scientific Paradigms (Fearn, Ross-shire: Mentor/Christian Focus Publications, 1997), p. 187.]
For most of the nineteenth century, the fruitful blessings of Christendom were claimed by non-Christian Deists and secularists. Glorying in the fallacy of false cause, they said that human progress and enlightenment was due to casting off the Christian God and Christ as King, and replacing them with the realm of Humanity. The explosion of economic wealth, knowledge, and social advancement came about, they said, from throwing off the shackles of Christendom's superstitions and replacing them with the light of Reason.
But a couple of world wars and a few calamities in the latter half of the twentieth century caused a tremor in the Force. Signs of deep angst began to emerge. The world was overpopulated, it was suggested. Environmental pollution would become the Great Plague and the end of civilisation, we were warned. Global warming would cook our goose. And so it rocked on. As Unbelief became more consistent, more aligned with the Death of God and the Reign of Man, Western civilisation began to wane. Its once flowering culture started to fade. It lost its dynamism and its fecundity. How many times have we seen this repeated in the history of mankind?
Only a return to the value Genesis gives to the increase of life, through the redeeming activity of the One through whom "all things were made, in whom is life . . . " (John 1:3,4) can bring healing to the educated and outwardly wealthy, but often dissatisfied and perishing multitudes of the Western world. [Ibid.]We believe that amidst the decline and fall of the Western Empire there will be many opportunities to proclaim once again the Kingdom of the One True Living God. May God bless these endeavours and extend His mercy to a stubborn and rebellious generation.
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