Current Events – Family Council

Western Civilization is Worth Defending: Guest Column

Mar 2, 2026John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, Western Civilization

Marco Rubio has made a name, and a meme, for himself as the indispensable figure in the American government. Last week, the Secretary of State added to his reputation at the Munich Security Conference, offering a statesman-like defense of the West, emphasizing the historic and religious foundations shared by America and Europe. He also critiqued a false and misleading view of civilizational history.

The fall of the Soviet Union, Rubio said, led to the dangerous delusion,

that we had entered, ‘the end of history;’ that every nation would now be a liberal democracy; that the ties formed by trade and by commerce alone would now replace nationhood; that the rules-based global order—an overused term—would now replace the national interest; and that we would now live in a world without borders where everyone became a citizen of the world.

Here, Rubio referenced, without naming, political scientist Francis Fukuyama’s “End of History” thesis. Fukuyama adopted G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of “History,” as the record of inevitable human advancement from one age to the next.

Though Fukuyama’s view helps explain why progressive politicians constantly claim to be on “the right side of history,” Rubio soundly rejected such thinking as “a foolish idea that ignored both human nature and . . . the lessons of over 5,000 years of recorded human history.” Such thinking, Rubio added, “has cost us dearly.”

Like Winston Churchill’s 1941 appeal to the United States—where he rallied the New World to partner with the Old World amid World War II—Rubio grounded a similar call in our shared heritage:

The men who settled and built the nation of my birth arrived on our shores carrying the memories and the traditions and the Christian faith of their ancestors as a sacred inheritance, an unbreakable link between the old world and the new.

We are part of one civilization—Western civilization. We are bound to one another by the deepest bonds that nations could share, forged by centuries of shared history, Christian faith, culture, heritage, language, ancestry, and the sacrifices our forefathers made together for the common civilization to which we have fallen heir . . .

We want allies who are proud of their culture and of their heritage, who understand that we are heirs to the same great and noble civilization, and who, together with us, are willing and able to defend it.

Rubio’s speech appealed to a different understanding of civilizational history and stressed two key points. First, civilizations decline if they are not stewarded and protected. They must be protected from threats from within. Second, civilizations conflict with other civilizations that are built on alternative visions. Thus, they must be defended from threats from without.

In response to Rubio’s speech, Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) stated that Western culture has a “thin” foundation, and that culture itself is an “evolving thing that is a response to the conditions that we live in.” Instead, it is “material, class-based” interests which should prevail.

Ocasio-Cortez’s views of social Darwinism and neo-Marxism also adopt a Hegelian philosophy of “History.” All is explained by the economic class struggle between the oppressors and the oppressed. After stumbling around a good bit, the Congresswoman advocated a rehashed form of Critical Theory, which radically misunderstands human nature and historical facts. For quick reference to the terror, torture, famine, massacres, and atrocities that result when history and culture are reduced to class struggle, see The Black Book of Communism, published by Harvard University.

In contrast, Rubio spoke to why America was committed to defending Western Civilization. Because doing so was defending “a way of life” that provided more freedom and opportunity than any other civilization in history. While not perfect, Western civilization “. . . has every reason to be proud of its history,” Rubio said.

Even more, it is the choices we make, not blind historical trends, that will shape the future. According to Rubio, “our predecessors recognized that decline was a choice, and it was a choice they refused to make . . ..[W]e in America have no interest in being polite and orderly caretakers of the West’s managed decline.”

Christians should be the first to defend and promote what is good and worthy of preserving. We should also reject the delusion that blind historical forces canbring inevitable progress to the world. As Os Guinness and others articulated in the recent documentary Truth Rising, Western civilization is at a critical moment. How will we respond?

This Breakpoint was co-authored by Andrew Carico.

The Assassination of Charlie Kirk: Guest Column

Sep 19, 2025John StonestreetCulture, In MemoriamCurrent Events

*Above: Charlie Kirk speaks in Fayetteville, Arkansas. (File Photo: 2022)*

Unsurprisingly, on September 11, 2001, I wept. I also wept, unexpectedly, on September 11, 2011. Perhaps it was delayed grief, but mostly, it was a delayed realization. Sitting that Sunday morning with my young daughters, only 6, 4, and 2 at the time, it struck me how different their world was from the one I wanted for them.

The same sense struck this week, on September 10. The assassination of Charlie Kirk seems to mark a new era, a world no one wants but may very well be here. Calling the murder a “tragedy for all of us,” U.K. comedian and commentator Konstantin Kisin wrote:

I hope I’m wrong. But tonight feels like some sort of invisible line has been crossed that we didn’t even know was there. … [T]o murder a young father simply for doing debates and mobilising young people to vote for a party that represents half of America? This is something else.

Charlie’s death is a tragedy for his wife, his children and his family. I don’t pray often. I am praying for them tonight. But I fear his murder will be a tragedy for all of us in ways we will only understand as time unfolds.

I hope I’m wrong. I fear I’m not.

Kisin is not wrong about lines being crossed, though the Christian must not fear. We must, however, squarely face the sober realities of this moment.

Kirk’s murder followed another this week, in Charlotte, of a young woman from Ukraine riding a public train. Iryna Zarutska was stabbed by a man who should have been in prison or at least institutionalized, and she was then left to die by people too engrossed in their screens to notice or too jaded to care. Together, these atrocities reveal realities about our culture and how it has shaped those within it that many will find unthinkable. But we had better think about it anyway.

Zarutska’s killer is a terrible example of the mental and social brokenness that permeates modern life. The bystanders who did not come to her defense or to her aid are, like the social media commenters and media personalities who callously commented on Kirk’s assassination, examples of the rabid and pervasive dehumanization that infects the Western world.

In a recent Breakpoint commentary, released prior to the atrocities of this week, Abdu Murray argued that this “post-truth world that elevates feelings and preferences above facts and truth has collapsed the distinction between a person’s ideas and their identity. And so, the social erasure of cancel culture has calcified into something darker.” That something darker, he argued, is “assassination culture.” He continued, “Unmoored from that objective standard for human value, we have made gods of ourselves and therefore justify eradicating any who dare to have other gods before us.”

This is precisely what Os Guinness warned of in the new film Truth Rising, that the West is squandering a unique heritage. A civilization built upon the ideal of human dignity, with a mixed and troubled history of working out that ideal, has now replaced it with something else. But racialized, sexualized, and politicized conceptions of human dignity only produce victims.

George Orwell is often credited as saying, “In a time of deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.” Charlie Kirk was a committed truth teller, with a remarkable gift for exposing and answering deceit. And yet, as he did this, he treated the deceived with the dignity they had as image bearers of their Creator, recognizing that they too were victims of their own bad ideas.

There is a cost to telling the truth. Our Lord has told us to count this cost. If Kisin is indeed correct, that cost is higher than we have imagined. This is indeed a civilizational moment. It is to this moment that we have been called as His people. As His people, we know that this moment is not some fatalistic inevitability, nor does it determine or define the Story of which we are part.

In a video circulating on social media, Charlie is asked why he went on campuses to talk with and try to persuade those who disagree with him. Charlie responded, “Because when people stop talking, that’s when violence happens.” It was a prophetic moment, but Kirk also demonstrated that we need not accept that. He showed that the conversation can be had; that it must be had. He showed that the truth still wins hearts and minds, and that lies can be opposed. And that it can all be done with a big smile.

It takes courage to tell the truth and to, as Paul wrote, “regard no one from a worldly point of view.” As Murray wrote, only the “ancient biblical truth about what it means to be human can heal our contemporary malady.”

It can be healed. This is not wishful thinking. This is the hope Christ secured for us all. As the banner on the Turning Point USA website proclaims, Charlie Kirk has been “received into the merciful arms of our loving Savior, who suffered and died for Charlie.”

Outsourcing Discernment in An Age of Mass Information: Guest Column

Oct 14, 2024John StonestreetCurrent EventsCurrent Events, News

Elon Musk recently found himself fighting the government of Brazil after his X social media platform was briefly banned there. Ironically, the censorship was marketed as a defense of democracy, i.e. the government “graciously” stepping in to save the people and the voting process from harmful disinformation.

Of course, claims of disinformation is a common tactic often employed by the powerful to silence critics. Once limits are placed on what can be written and spoken, many other liberties are at risk. Indeed, there are real dangers of an unchecked flood of information, too. In the introduction to Amusing Ourselves to Death, Neil Postman described this tension by comparing Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s 1984:

Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance.

In the end, the explosion of information everywhere, all the time, has made us believe everything and nothing at all.

And our reputation precedes us. There’s been understandable concern about Russian interference in the last few U.S. Elections, but their strategy reveals as much about us as it does them. Imagine a group of operatives from Moscow planning and scheming how to dismantle America, and finally one of them announces, “I’ve got it! Memes! We’ll use memes to interfere with their democracy.”

Of course, it’s far more serious and strategic than that. In fact, it’s even more troubling how the interference from our international enemies resembles so closely the behavior of social media giants like Facebook and legacy media outlets. Shutting down conversations they don’t like and highlighting narratives they do is not the free exchange of information.

Over 30 years ago in First Things, C. John Sommerville wrote an article entitled “Why the News Makes Us Dumb.” His answer was that the very idea of “news,” as the name suggests, prioritizes novelty. To stay in business, the media “have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context.”

If we read philosophy, history, science, theology—regularly—we would be able to make much better sense of the day’s events. But we don’t. We’re too busy to manage anything but the News.

Sommerville wrote this before the internet was much of a thing and social media even existed. At the time, he was complaining about archaic things called “newspapers,” but his concerns proved prophetic. If people were “too busy to manage” one daily news reading back then, how can we possibly make sense of news firing at us all the time and from every direction now? The answer is, we don’t. In fact, many don’t even try. We prefer our “news” pre-digested and delivered to our feeds. In other words, we have outsourced the hard work of discernment to others.

Two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media, especially Facebook. Nearly three-quarters of X users rely on that platform for news. When Americans say they rely on “multiple sources,” they typically mean multiple social media sites, not a combination of traditional media and social media sites, or sources from multiple perspectives.

If Americans weren’t regularly reading “philosophy, history, science, theology” in 1991, it’s even worse today. In 1990, 16% of Americans hadn’t read a single book in the previous year. In 2015, it was 27%. Last year, it was 65%. Most of what was read isn’t helpful anyway. According to USA Today, between 1993 and 2013, the best seller lists were dominated by self-help and young-adult fiction. Today, people are mostly just reading their phones.

In Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman presciently warned of a “vast descent into triviality.” Christians, because they believe that Christ is the truth and the Word, should always prioritize discernment, but especially in the information age. Otherwise, we risk being tools in somebody else’s arsenal.