Judeo-Christian civilization performed three great conquests for humanity: the idea of universal truth (hence, the development of science in the West), progress in history (which leads to improvements), and the sacred dignity of the human being (which made us the first civilization to abolish slavery and emancipate women). I believe that the results of these three conquests are in danger with the collapse of Christian civilization. We see the decline of universalism and even attacks on science. We see the rise of apocalyptic fears, in ecological activism, for example.

Once Christianity faced off with modernity, says Chantal Delsol, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
In his 2020 book, The Final Pagan Generation: Rome’s Unexpected Path to Christianity, Edward J. Watts details daily life at the end of an age. It was the early 300s, and the final pagan generation, he writes, “was born into a vast sacred infrastructure that had been built up over the past three millennia.” The gods were everywhere, woven into the language, commerce, daily rituals, and the very landscapes of every city and town. The gods were an omnipresent and accepted assumption. Many of the Roman elites no longer believed in the literal existence of these deities, but they were seen as necessary myths—a foundational part of the social order. Nobody could anticipate how swiftly everything would change.
Watts begins by describing a face-off in Alexandria in which pagans, enraged by the conversion of their ancient shrine into a church, rioted in the streets, killed and wounded several Christians, and barricaded themselves in their shuttered temple until the emperor promised them a pardon. When they left the Serapeum, the Christians tore it apart, triggering a wave of idol-smashing across Egypt in the weeks that followed. It was a watershed moment in which many pagans finally realized that their empire was being remade and that “Christian attacks could reach the most permanent and impressive elements of the urban religious infrastructure.” By the “final pagan generation,” Watts is referring to the last of the elite Romans, both pagan and Christian, “born into a world that simply could not imagine a Roman world dominated by a Christian majority.” None could grasp that they stood at the dawning of a new age and that all the old things were passing away.
Many now argue that we stand at a similar threshold today. In the West, we are at the end of 1,600 years of Christian civilization. The culture—and the foundational underlying assumptions—have all changed, and people have passed from Christendom into a new world.
The French philosopher, historian, and novelist Chantal Delsol believes that we are not simply becoming post-Christian; rather, we are re-paganizing. In her 2021 book, La Fin de la Chrétienté (The End of the Christian World), she observes that we have yet to fully understand what we are living through: nothing less than the death throes of a civilization that lasted 16 centuries. This slow-motion death began with the French Revolution, she argues, which—unlike the Dutch and American revolutions—produced the first civilization that did not rest on Christian assumptions. Once Christianity faced off with modernity, Delsol says, the handwriting was on the wall. And even though a handful of elites deluded themselves into believing in the future of atheism, most people need gods—and soon the old gods began to creep back in.
Our new society, in fact, still has ‘saints’ and ‘sinners.’ They have simply swapped places. Christians who condemn unbiblical sexual behavior are damned as ‘wicked’ for their intolerance, while the gilded homosexuals of our celebrity elites are instead celebrated for ‘being who they are.’ This change seems to have happened rather suddenly, facilitated by the fact that even those who no longer believe in Christianity have continued its cultural practices—even as the end of the age was approaching. When the end finally came, it seemed to happen overnight. In 2008, U.S. President Obama ran for office opposing same-sex marriage, but a mere decade and a half later, in 2022, most Democrats wouldn’t dare question the ritual mutilation of children in the name of transgenderism. And much like the pagans of the 4th century, Christians have simply been caught off-guard.
Unlike the majority of Christian intellectuals, however, Delsol does not believe that the collapse of Christianity will necessarily be accompanied by darkness and chaos. I would argue that this depends on how one defines “darkness and chaos.” For example, Delsol does not think abortion should be banned in a non-Christian society; but in my mind, any culture—whether explicitly Christian or not—returning to the infanticide practices of paganism is already living a dark, bloody nightmare filled with obliterated children.
The 4th century has lessons for us here as well. It was the Christian condemnation of abortion and infanticide that brought about a prohibition of these practices by Emperor Valentinian in 374 AD. Even a secular conception of human rights, however, ought to recognize that abortion is unjust to all those involved, above all the unborn human whose life is being ended. Indeed, one may reasonably argue that human beings possess human rights from the beginning of their lives, which science has incontrovertibly established begins at conception. You don’t need Christian eyes to read an embryology textbook or view an ultrasound.
Among the various examples of alternative religious systems that have filled the vacuum left behind by the decline of Christianity, Delsol notes that even environmentalists have their liturgies and, in many ways, are engaged in a form of worship of Mother Earth. As Delsol noted in a 2021 essay:
We are at a stage where, in the vast field opened up by the erasure of Christianity, new beliefs waver and tremble. Disaffection with dogmas, or with a decreed and certain truth, brings about the triumph of morality. It stands alone in the world. We see philanthropy at work, a love for humanity directly inherited from the Gospel, but without the foundations. Late modernity takes up the Gospel, but strips it of all transcendence. …
[I]n pagan societies, religion and morality are separate: religion demands sacrifices and rites, while the rulers impose a morality. This is the situation we are in the process of rediscovering: our governing elite decrees morality, promotes laws to enforce them partly through insults and ostracism. Our morality is post-evangelical, but it is no longer tied to a religion. It dominates the television sets. It inhabits all the cinematography of the age. It rules in the schools and families. When something needs to be straightened out or given a new direction, it is the governing elite.
In short, Delsol writes: “We have returned to the typical situation of paganism: we have a state morality.” However, she does not believe attempts at cultural transformation by Christians will be successful. The die is cast and the wheels of ‘progress’ grind forward. Instead, she suggests, like the pagan communities that struggled to survive for centuries after the rise of Christianity, we have to find ways to live in this new society—as strangers in our homelands. Christians, says Delsol, must become witnesses to another way of living—salt and light, as the Scripture puts it. “The experience of our fathers brings us certainty,” she says. “Our business is not to produce societies where ‘the Gospel governs states’ but rather, to use the words of Saint-Exupery, to ‘walk very slowly towards a fountain.’” Recently, Delsol was kind enough to answer additional questions about her thesis.
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It is depressing to consider that feminist activists and gay and lesbian writers have frequently been fiercer in opposing this ideology than many Christians, perhaps because they are more accustomed to being counter-cultural dissidents. I am not saying this fight is lost. Not by any means. But if ordinary people do not refuse to participate in this mass delusion, then it will be. I’m not suggesting that ordinary people need to become activists. But if everyday acts of defiance do not become normal in short order, our collective cowardice will ensure that the transgender movement owns the culture for good.

As the post-Christian West convulses with a transgender culture war that is increasingly careening into violence, people still possessed of common sense constantly ask a single question: How did we go from gay “marriage” to the elimination of sex categories overnight?
There are many good answers to this question, of course—historical, cultural, philosophical, and even (or perhaps especially) theological. But the single most significant factor contributing to the wild success of the transgender movement’s cultural blitzkrieg is rarely mentioned: cowardice.
Transgender Dominance
It took decades for the gay rights movement to achieve political dominance. It took less than a decade for the transgender activists who surged behind them to succeed. As Vladimir Lenin once put it: “You probe with bayonets: if you find mush, you push. If you find steel, you withdraw.” The trans activists have found mostly mush, and I’m not merely referring to the mind of the American president. And so, they pushed, and here we are. Entire institutions have gone down like dominos.
Trans activists swiftly discovered how effective cry-bullying was, and how quickly people cave for fear of being called names. They realized that despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary, they can    blackmail their opponents by accusing them of pushing “transgender children”—a now-exploding category hitherto unknown in recorded history—to suicide. They insist that they are on the “right side of history” despite the fact that they have only a few years on their side and we have thousands on ours. The masses remained mostly mute.
There was confusion, yes. Chaos, certainly. But ultimately, it was the cowardice of millions that gave the gender ideologues the culture: the school boards that backed away from a fight and the medical institutions that swung the doors wide open to butchers and extremists. It was the fear of the parents who were cowed into silence while their consciences screamed. Worst of all are the many politicians who, despite claiming the mantle of conservative, have stood by while legions of children have followed activists into a lifetime of excruciating medicalization at the hands of malpractitioners.
Consider, for a moment, how many of our middle-aged and elderly politicians would have reacted if they were told in the year 2000 that one day they would be championing the right of biological males to enter women’s bathrooms and changing rooms unimpeded, or that they would allow brawny male rapists into women’s prisons, or male athletes into women’s sporting events. Imagine how they would have responded if we told them that within two decades, they would call double mastectomies and castrations for healthy children a “human right.”
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Mutilated and broken, is not a bizarre paranoid fantasy. It is currently the lived experience of tens of thousands of families across the West—and likely far more than that. These stories are unfolding every day. These ideologies are not simply absurd abstractions pushed out by recently-invented university departments—they are the guiding principles of the very institutions we once assumed had the best interests of our children at heart.

As Mary Eberstadt noted in her 2016 book It’s Dangerous to Believe: Religious Freedom and Its Enemies, most people in orthodox Christian circles have, at some point, had a conversation about what they might do if their governments grow even more overtly hostile to Christian beliefs and practices. If you’re an American in a blue state, that might mean joining the growing conservative exodus to red states; if you’re a Canadian, that might involve deciding to move to the United States. If you believe that the American experiment has failed, you might—like Rod Dreher, author of The Benedict Option—decide to decamp to Hungary. I’ve been part of plenty of these discussions myself.
In the last few years, mainstream culture has become, in many ways, more tangibly dangerous. The complete colonization of our collective institutions by the transgender movement is one example. Many parents have reached out to me to describe the helplessness they experience when their children are introduced to gender ideology at school or online, decide to take irreversible cross-sex hormones or undergo sex-change surgeries—with nothing they can do to stop it. The educators, the medical professionals, the mental health experts—all stand in between desperate parents and their confused children. The pain they endure is cruel and unique—that of helplessly watching their children disintegrate before their eyes.
The Substack newsletter “Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans” regularly posts such stories, and a recent column titled “Eastern European Mom” caught my eye. It is written by an Eastern European immigrant to the United States who discovered that her 13-year-old daughter had gone through a “mental meltdown.” She was hospitalized and while in hospital stated that she was a boy. Her mother decided to do the only thing she could when she realized that every single institution supported a sex change for her daughter:
I subsequently learned that my daughter’s public middle school had socially transitioned her behind my back. Alarmed at this plot to take my child away, I immediately made plans to return to Eastern Europe. I located a school back home near my family for both of my children. I contacted the school director, explained the situation and was assured that they would not affirm and that they would work with me no matter what struggles my daughter has. So, I sent both kids to Eastern Europe to stay with family and I followed a few weeks later after making arrangements to work remotely.
When I returned to Eastern Europe, I opened up to my very large family about what had happened with my daughter. As opposed to many of the stories I’ve heard about with US families, where family members are quick to affirm regardless of what the parents see as being in the children’s best interest, my family was shocked.
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Not only do public school administrators demand that educators keep key, life-changing information about children from their parents—they’ll fire teachers who refuse to lie. 

(LifeSiteNews—Over the past several months, we’ve published several stories in this space on the common public-school practice of hiding information about children going through gender transition from parents. This practice of secrecy is standard across Canada’s public school system and much of the UK system; the New York Times published a journalistic essay admitting that this has become common across the United States, as well.  
The view of the transgender movement—that children need to be protected from their parents by ideologues posing as educators who assist them in changing their gender—has become the de facto regime in many countries.
In previous reporting, we’ve looked at the way these policies have impacted children and parents and examined how teachers participate in and facilitate the indoctrination of their students. A recent story, however, highlights the reality that teachers who may not want to participate in these policies also face great risks. In fact, California teacher Jessica Tapia, who has been a tenured physical education teacher at the Jurupa Valley High School for more than six years, has recently come under fire from students and staff over her views on gender ideology.  
Tapia is a Christian and has made posts on social media about gender ideology in the past. Students combed through her posts and sent them to school administrators claiming that they constituted “unsafe conduct,” earning Tapia a warning from the district.
According to media reports, students who opposed her views on gender ideology launched a coordinated campaign and began monitoring her online statements and occasionally commenting. She was permitted to return to work after her first warning, but the reprieve did not last long.  
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In a society where women often need to return to work shortly after birth, where it is far cheaper to procure an abortion than to give birth in a hospital, and where many of the current policies penalize childbirth and childbearing and incentivize abortion, we believe that creative policy-making can bring about relief for many mothers and families.

As the pro-life movement enters a post-Roe era after Dobbs, the anti-abortion movement is revaluating, looking ahead, and strategizing about ways to reduce abortion through a variety of policies—not only on the supply side, but on the demand side as well. Marvin Olasky, a veteran pro-life scholar, recently wrote about ways pro-lifers can reduce the demand for abortion. Catherine Glenn Foster of Americans United for Life and Kristen Day of the beleaguered Democrats for Life co-authored an essay calling on legislators to “make birth free.” And last week, a joint statement titled “Building a Post-Roe Future” was released with hundreds of signatories—including Foster and Day.
The statement, which I worked on with pro-life activist Eric Scheidler, ethicist Charlie Camosy, and apologist Josh Brahm, notes that while protecting the human rights of the unborn is essential, there is much more that we can do. “We are pro-life conservatives, moderates, and liberals united in our conviction that every human life has value—including the lives of both the unborn and that child’s mother,” the statement reads. “We believe that our society should prioritize the needs of both, and that ultimately this can only be achieved by significant changes in public policy.”
Of course, the pro-life movement has always recognized the importance of supporting women facing unplanned pregnancies, donating untold millions of dollars to thousands of crisis pregnancy centers and other organizations to assist mothers and children. But in a post-Roe landscape, the non-profit network will simply not be enough. Some states have already acknowledged this. When Texas passed new abortion restrictions, it also committed $100 million to the Alternatives to Abortion program, which offers everything from diapers to job training.
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Andrew Tate, a creature of the sexual revolution who advocates masculinity without virtue, strength without tenderness, and casual cruelty by right of conquest. His popularity is an indication that in our pornified, post-Christian society, this particular path has proven attractive to legions of confused young men. These men desire, as men always have, to be heroes—but in a society that has left them with no guidelines or pathways for achieving true heroism, many cling to the false promises of Andrew Tate. 

Over the past year, thirty-six-year-old Andrew Tate has become a cultural phenomenon. On social media, the former British kickboxer-turned-influencer is one of the most famous men in the world, with over eleven billion views on TikTok alone. Tate is the personification of various internet subcultures, combining the critiques of the anti-feminist “manosphere” and the alt-right with the posture of a pickup artist. A self-described pimp who has stated he believes sexual fidelity is only for women, he made his millions running porn sites. He now uses social media to accrue legions of young male fans and monetize them by running online programs such as Hustler University, which sells tips on how to pick up women and get rich quick. His popularity grew when several social media platforms decided to simultaneously de-platform him, landing him interviews with everyone from Tucker Carlson to Piers Morgan.
On December 29, Romanian authorities arrested Tate and his brother at his Bucharest mansion on charges of human trafficking. Six women have accused Andrew Tate (and other suspects) of running a “lover-boy” scheme in which they persuaded women they wanted a relationship but then forced them to perform in pornographic videos. He remains in jail without bail on charges of rape and sex trafficking.
Tate’s status as an international internet celebrity makes this more than a local crime story. It is crucial to understand why he is wildly popular among men today. Tate made his money by turning his romantic partners into “camgirls” and selling their bodies to viewers online. On a now-deleted section of his website that pitches his tactics to other men, Tate wrote:
I’ve been running a webcam studio for nearly a decade, I’ve had over 75 girls work for me, and my business model is different than 99% of webcam studio owners. Over 50% of my employees were actually my girlfriend at the time and, of all my girlfriends, NONE were in the adult entertainment industry before they met me. . . .
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Some will grow out of identifying as “non-binary,” and will be able to do so far less painfully than a child who underwent sex change surgeries or took puberty blockers. But the underlying worldview — that I can be whoever I say I am and society is morally (and perhaps legally) obligated to positively affirm my delusions —are here to stay.

(LifeSiteNews) — Earlier this month, I noted in this space that LGBT activists have so effectively taken over the curriculum of Canadian public schools that students were now being encouraged to choose different gender identities — including fresh new categories such as “non-binary,” which almost nobody had heard of until very recently
Our school system is not simply providing information about new “gender identities” — it is actively encouraging and facilitating children to push boundaries and question their sex.
Indeed, the effectiveness of this indoctrination is creating a massive spike in children identifying as anything but themselves everywhere it has been implemented—even liberal comedian Bill Maher, long-time supporter of the LGBT agenda, noted the trend: “If this spike in trans children is all biological, why is it regional? Either Ohio is shaming them or California is creating them.”
The last few years have seen the trend escalate. A report by The Post Millennial, for example, highlights new data from Seattle Public Schools shows an 853% spike in students identifying as non-binary over only three years. In 2019, 53 out of 55,417 students identified as “non-binary.” In the 2022-2023 school year, that number was up to 505, including three children in preschool, 16 in kindergarten, 89 in grades 1-5, 125 in middle school and 272 in high school.
It is obvious to any reasonable person that a child of four or five years old identifying as “non-binary” has very little to do with the child’s identity, which he or she cannot even conceptualize at that age.
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Children who have been ruined by transgender ideology are coming forward and speaking “their truth” on every platform available to them, and their stories are heartbreaking. And photos of children who have undergone transition surgery…are horrifying to people even when those posting them are doing so positively.

(LifeSiteNews)—It is no surprise that progressives are amping up efforts to cancel Matt Walsh, the Daily Wire podcast host and activist taking on the gender ideologues. His investigation into the Vanderbilt University Medical Center’s practice of “transitioning” children—which included video of one doctor noting that the surgeries are “huge money makers”—triggered Tennessee lawmakers to call for an investigation. This has resulted in an announcement by Vanderbilt that it will be halting all “sex change” surgeries for underage patients while reviewing their processes.
When the U.K.’s Tavistock clinic did this, the independent investigation found that children were being “transitioned” hastily—and a class-action lawsuit with up to 1,000 families participating was close behind.
There were plenty of commentators—even on the conservative side—who scoffed at the idea that a bare-knuckle brawler like Matt Walsh (and the Daily Wire) could produce reportage that could create change. But there is a direct line between Walsh’s reporting and activism and a major hospital putting a hold on mutilating children. This is undeniably huge. Walsh, like the rest of us, isn’t perfect. But his activism against the gender ideologues has been undeniably effective, and he gets results where others have failed.
Meanwhile, the Daily Wire is also showcasing how to relentlessly expose a movement that has been operating with impunity—and the consent of institutional elites—and to the permanent detriment of tens of thousands of children. I suspect that coverage from non-mainstream outlets has assisted in driving these stories to the surface. Consider this recent story from Reuters, for example, that exposes the fact that the manufacturers of puberty-blocking drugs such as Endo International plc and AbbVie Inc have refused to conduct safety trials despite their products being prescribed to children:
Left-wing news outlet Reuters published data on Thursday about the rising number of children and adolescents adopting a transgender identity and seeking medical interventions. Among the shocking revelations is that between 2017 to 2021, 17,683 of the 121,882 children ages 6 to 17 diagnosed with gender dysphoria received puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones. Despite such widespread adoption for the drug’s off-label use, the drug’s manufacturers refuse to conduct safety trials for their use in treating gender dysphoria in adolescents.
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As parents push back, school boards are being forced to buckle. The lesson here is simply: To change the culture, we must engage it. That means voting in local elections. It means going to school board meetings. It means not remaining silent when these things are happening in our communities. Because when parents to speak up—when they do insist on change—we see change happening, from Arkansas to the United Kingdom. Be encouraged—and get active.

With a seemingly constant firehose of bad news, it is genuinely important to mark our cultural victories. It is true that the LGBT movement has both infiltrated and taken control of the public school system, from the contents of the curriculum to the celebration of “Pride Month.” But it is also true that the growing parental rights movement has created an effective backlash and is steadily accruing victories.
Earlier this month, for example, the Rice Lake School Board passed a policy mandating that parents must be made aware of any student who changes their name as part of “transitioning” genders. Over the past several years, we’ve seen many examples of schools assisting children in “social transitioning” (or worse) without telling the parents. The rationale for this has been the insistence of LGBT activists that parents pose a danger to their children, and that these changes should be hidden from them.
In fact, several transgender activists actually protested the board meeting, saying that the policy was “discriminatory” and that it made students unsafe. Parents pushing for the policy stated that it was essential for them to know what is going on with their children. “Parents have to be informed of or grant permission to literally anything else,” one noted at the meeting.
Parents also scored a victory in Conway, Arkansas, where the school board approved policies that trans activists predictably oppose.
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 Carl Trueman offers some powerful advice in the aforementioned essay, including being deeply rooted in doctrine and Scripture; rejecting the postmodern worship practices that have come with our “childish age”; and putting “our own lives in perspective…before God.” We must work to defend our communities and shape the minds of our children while also seeking to love our neighbours. Canada is post-Christian, but Christians in Canada are thus far facing social and political marginalization rather than persecution. There will be a cost for Christian beliefs in the coming years, both social and financial. We should use this time to prepare for what may come–and what is likely to come.

Canada’s federal government is overtly hostile to orthodox Christians. Prime Minister Justin Trudeau has consistently accused those of holding Christian views on issues like abortion and sexuality of being fundamentally unCanadian; he has sought to deny government funding to summer jobs programs that will not overtly affirm his views on these issues; he has insisted that those who share the views of the vast majority of people throughout Canada’s history are hateful and bigoted. But when 68 churches were damaged or burned down in 2021 with a collective shrug and late-coming, muted protest from Canada’s progressives, it became glaringly obvious: apathy towards and disbelief in the religion of Canada’s founding has become overt hostility. Polling shows that an increasing number of Canadians believe that Christianity is damaging for society.
I have thought for some time that intolerance towards Christians in Canada is likely to grow. The vicious protests of the Toronto Public Library in 2019 were a wakeup call—activists raged outside the library for hours and even called for violence because an event featuring a pro-abortion, pro-gay feminist speaker named Megan Murphy had been allowed to proceed. Murphy agreed with progressives on everything—except for the idea that biological men identifying as women should be allowed into female-only spaces. For that, the mob bayed for her head. If they hate her that much, I wrote at the time, can you imagine how much they hate us? And furthermore: What stands between that mob and what they want? Our federal politicians? Provincial legislators? The courts?
The answer, of course, is almost nobody. Canada’s Conservatives, with a few notable exceptions, are eager to prove their loyalty to the LGBT movement and are unlikely to be reliable allies. (The “freedom candidate” Pierre Poilievre is a reliable vote for everything the LGBT movement asks for, including the “conversion therapy ban” that effectively bans some pastoral and parental conversations.) Canada’s media only pays attention to Christians when conflict with the LGBT movement or abortion industry erupts; post-Christian mainliners like Michael Coren are paid to write the same tired columns over and over again insisting that Christianity is akshually supportive of the sexual revolution and that 2,000 years of Christian teaching have gotten it all wrong.
Considering the fact that there are very few Canadians who still participate in religious worship and the overt hostility of those who control Canada’s institutions, what are the coming years likely to bring?
In a recent essay for First Things, Carl Trueman—one of our post-Christian era’s most trenchant observers–noted that Christian churches “face an unprecedented challenge” due to “the collapse of the broad moral vision that made them coherent entities.” The churches which have thus far escaped the wrath of the secular progressive elites, he noted, are those who have burned a pinch of incense (or, in many cases, several handfuls) and attempted to reconcile themselves to the new moral order by suddenly discovering that Christianity permits and endorses what it had previously called morally abominable.
It is important to note that we are just entering the post-Christian age—things are likely to get a lot worse. Trueman predicts that the chasm between the post-Christian churches and those that cling to Christian orthodoxies on life and sexuality is going to grow:
I would anticipate that within five years we will witness a significant disruption across all major representatives of the Christian faith.
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