Western liberals killed God — and they call it progress.
They’ve replaced religion with politics and purpose with performance. Identity has become the altar, tweets are sacred texts, influencers our prophets, and disagreement a form of heresy.
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This is a guest essay written by Lucy Tabrizi, who writes about politics, philosophy, religion, ethics, and history.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Every civilisation tells itself a story.
The West’s used to begin with Genesis and end with Judgment. Today, it starts with liberation and ends with therapy.
We’re told we’re freer than ever — freed from kings, gods, and rigid norms. But tilt your head, and it starts to look less like liberty and more like drift: spiritual, moral, civilisational.
We like to imagine this drift is benign, a gentle unmooring. But history rarely turns a page without blood. More often, it’s soaked in it. The last great civilisational shift — from the age of empires to modern nation-states — claimed tens of millions of lives. We forget how violent progress can be.
Like most children of liberal democracies, I was raised on a steady diet of progress. I believed in rights, in reason, in the arc of history bending toward justice. But the arc is starting to look more like a circle. And lately, I’ve begun to suspect that what we’re living through isn’t progress at all, but something closer to collapse.
This suspicion sharpens whenever I wander into Substack’s pro-Palestinian corner for some “light reading” — a ritual that reliably leaves me questioning Western civilisation, the future of our children, and my own sanity. It’s not masochism. It’s intellectual hygiene, a small act of resistance in a society that is rapidly fracturing, polarising, and retreating into ever-shrinking echo chambers.
I picked up the habit from English philosopher and political economist John Stuart Mill, who in “On Liberty” (1859) wrote: “He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”
The great thinkers of the past didn’t just refine their arguments; they studied their opponents’ views, often more intensely. For Mill, that was the foundation of intellectual rigour.
I don’t engage with opposing views just to sharpen my own; I genuinely hope to be persuaded. If their worldview held up to scrutiny, maybe the future of the West wouldn’t feel quite so bleak. At the very least, I’d stop feeling like the lone heretic in the Church of Woke, and I’d get along better with my Left-wing, anti-Israel (or at best, deeply suspicious of Israel) friends and family.
The dominant pro-Palestinian narrative offers a tidy solution: Blame Israel, or remove it, and peace will follow. It’s seductively simple, which is exactly why I’m wary of it.
Humans are wired for tribalism. It once ensured our survival — bonding us together, sharpening our sense of threat, and drawing a line between “us” and “them.” Today, it pulls us toward ideologies with simple answers and clear enemies. We’re not just social creatures; we’re religious ones, built for meaning, belonging and, yes, conflict.
Western liberal democracies weren’t designed to erase tribalism, but to civilise it — redirecting ancient loyalties into shared values, laws, and institutions. They emerged through Enlightenment ideals, the rule of law, and centuries of philosophical and institutional development, grounded in Judeo-Christian ethics and classical thought.
At the heart of this project was a radical idea for its time: that the individual has inherent worth. Rights weren’t granted by rulers or mobs, but by virtue of being human.
For a time, these traditions didn’t just restrain our tribal instincts; they sanctified the individual, tying conscience to a moral order beyond blood or creed.
We’ve been insulated from hardship for so long, we’ve forgotten how fragile our freedoms are, or where they came from. Too many have grown safe, soft, and detached, not just from the brutal realities of history, but from the daily lives of those still living under dictatorship, war, or religious tyranny.
We assume peace is the default. It isn’t. It never was.
And in that false sense of security, the cracks in the liberal project have widened into chasms. Our tribal instincts, the pull toward certainty and enemies, are surging back with renewed force, amplified by comfort, complacency, and the dopamine loops of digital echo chambers. We’re awash in propaganda, half-truths, and algorithmically tailored delusions, each reinforcing our chosen tribe and confirming our deepest suspicions.
Liberal democracies may have always carried an expiration date, but the internet hit fast-forward, accelerating what may have otherwise taken centuries into mere decades. Trust in institutions — governments, media, science, even democracy itself — plummeted across the West. In their place rose influencers, conspiracy theorists, and ideological factions competing for moral authority.
But the deeper crisis is spiritual. Liberalism was never meant to float free of the religious roots that gave it moral weight. As the West shed its Christian foundations, it began to lose its sense of purpose — and with it, the ability to define truth, evil, or even meaning. We kept the language of rights and freedom, but severed it from the source.
In losing its spiritual roots, the West didn’t just lose faith in God; it lost faith in itself.
This isn’t a rejection of science. I’m grateful for antibiotics, electricity, and the miracle of millennia of philosophical thought in my pocket. As a self-avowed atheist for many years, I placed great faith in reason and evidence. But I’ve come to see that these tools of modern progress were never meant to carry the burden of moral meaning on their own.
Scientific rationalism displaced the spiritual realm, but it couldn’t replace it. Life became a cosmic fluke. Tradition was mocked, and our ancestors were recast as moral delinquents, judged by standards we barely uphold ourselves.
The thread binding past, present, and future has snapped, leaving many unmoored in a culture of comfort without purpose, and freedom without direction. In the absence of deeper foundations, we haven’t found liberation; we’ve drifted into nihilism, mistaking emptiness for progress. More than half of young adults now report feeling a lack of meaning in their lives.
We’re the first civilisation to reject the idea of God, the afterlife, and moral order — then insist we can run society on spreadsheets and neuroscience alone. Lacking belief in transcendence or divine purpose, we now seek it elsewhere: through technology, digital immortality, the metaverse, or mind-uploading. It’s a flight from death disguised as progress. But these are pale echoes of the meaning once offered by traditional belief systems.
It’s not just unprecedented. It’s an experiment. And we’re the test subjects.
Christian tradition, once the West’s moral cornerstone, is now a cultural prop — mocked, sidelined, or briefly revived at Christmas. The result is a vacuum. As English philosopher G. K. Chesterton warned: “When a man stops believing in God, he doesn’t believe in nothing; he believes in anything.”
And that’s exactly what’s happened. We haven’t found nothing. We’ve found everything: quasi-religious dogmas, identity cults, and ideologies that demand absolute affirmation. In the absence of shared meaning, we’ve replaced religion with politics, and purpose with performance. Identity has become the altar. Tweets are sacred texts, influencers our prophets, and disagreement a form of heresy.
We’ve splintered into tribes, each with its own doctrine, symbols, and blasphemy codes. We no longer debate ideas; we defend sacred narratives. It’s no wonder some Christians call this inversion satanic.
Meanwhile, more confident systems (like political Islam) are ready to fill the vacuum, unapologetically. But we’ll come back to that.
Friedrich Nietzsche saw it coming. When he declared “God is dead,” it wasn’t triumph; it was a warning. Without God, he said, we’d sever ourselves from meaning, morality, and civilisation itself. The void wouldn’t stay empty; it would be filled with chaos, nihilism, or new political religions.
Russian writer Fyodor Dostoevsky saw it too. His underground man was the prototype for the modern self: alienated, disembodied, and fuelled by grievance. In the absence of God, even suffering becomes sacred — because it’s all we have left.
The values now under siege, those that shaped the moral framework of the modern world, were forged through centuries of theological and philosophical struggle. Rooted in texts like the Magna Carta, they were carried forward by thinkers who believed rights came from God, not governments.
The American Declaration of Independence says our rights are “endowed by their Creator.” That’s not poetic fluff; it’s theology.
And yet, the West is judged by its worst chapters, as if no other civilisation enslaved, conquered, or subjugated. The irony is that the West tried to abolish these things. It confronted its sins and built the very frameworks now used to condemn it. And now, that act of moral self-reflection has become the West’s greatest liability.
Today, we see Hamas-aligned lawyers invoking “human rights” to defend a group that revels in murder, rape, and child abduction, as if such atrocities now qualify as protected civil liberties.
It’s a bitter irony. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, drafted in part by Jewish jurist René Cassin and influenced by fellow Jewish legal scholar Hersch Lauterpacht, was grounded in the moral foundations shared by Jewish and Christian tradition: the inviolable dignity of the human being. That these principles, born from the ashes of genocide, are now used to shield those who glorify it is not moral confusion, but moral collapse.
Religion has been abused, Christianity included. But its core ethics helped lay the foundations for the freedoms now under threat. Misuse doesn’t erase that legacy; it highlights the danger of forgetting it.
History shows that ideological possession isn’t limited to religion. Mao Zedong and Joseph Stalin suppressed organised faith, then made themselves gods, replacing belief with political dogma. In the 20th century alone, their regimes claimed more than 100 million lives. As Israeli professor and author Dan Ariely observed:
“Ownership isn’t limited to material things — it applies to points of view, too. We often love our beliefs more than we should. We prize them beyond their worth and struggle to let go — not because they’re right, but because we can’t bear to lose them. What are we left with? An ideology: rigid and unyielding.”
That’s where we are now: ideologically possessed, spiritually starved, and historically forgetful. We cling to our convictions not because they’re true, but because they’re ours, even as they hollow us out.
As our institutions fracture, so does our ability to speak across difference. Dialogue (the lifeblood of democracy) is often the first casualty. What follows is suspicion, polarisation and, eventually, conflict. As American philosopher and neuroscientist Sam Harris warned:
“All we have between us and the total breakdown of civilisation is a series of successful conversations. If we can’t reason with one another, there is no path forward, other than violence. Conversation or violence.”
These are the options.
We still speak the language of human rights and equality, but the words have been emptied of meaning. Our opponents use the same vocabulary, but in ways that feel alien and increasingly antagonistic.
There was a time when disagreement didn’t demand disavowal, when we could argue fiercely and still believe we were on the same team. Now, it feels like we’re edging toward civil war, while our anti-Western adversaries look on with quiet satisfaction, amused that we’re doing their work for them.
Fragmented, faithless, and at war with ourselves, we’re no longer equipped to confront external threats. Our enemies don’t just observe our weakness; they’re preparing to exploit it.
The ideals that once held the West together — tolerance, empathy, universal dignity — haven’t vanished. But they’ve been distorted. Some are besieged, others weaponised beyond recognition. Take, for example, multiculturalism. Grounded in civic values, it can enrich a nation. But stripped of shared foundations, it just imports rival ideologies.
Multiculturalism without assimilation becomes tribalism. The result? Parallel societies, Sharia courts, and culturally segregated enclaves, while Western culture steadily shrinks in the name of inclusion, even when what’s included rejects liberal values. This isn’t mutual respect. It’s asymmetry. Not multiculturalism, but cultural self-erasure.
In trying to accommodate every worldview but its own, the West has thrown out its back, and misplaced its spine. What we call benevolence has warped our moral compass, applauded by those who enjoy every freedom of the civilisation they claim to despise.
Words are now treated as violence, while actual violence is rationalised or excused. In academia and activist circles, you’ll hear that misusing someone’s pronouns constitutes harm — while beheadings, rapes, and hostage-taking are framed as legitimate “resistance.”
Nowhere is this confusion more obvious than in the UK, where fear of being labelled racist left authorities paralysed while grooming gangs perpetrated widespread sexual violence against working-class girls — systematically, and for decades. Meanwhile, citizens are arrested for tweets (seriously).
When tolerance becomes the acceptance of intolerance, and empathy unmoored from reason becomes a vice, we’re left with an uncomfortable truth: Not all cultures are compatible, not all inclusion is virtuous.
Civilisations don’t collapse overnight. They unravel — slowly, then all at once — through moral confusion, cultural amnesia, and the erosion of the values that once held them together.
We’ve grown ashamed of our foundations and persuaded that inclusion means surrender. But it’s not too late to remember who we are, or who we were meant to be.
Reclaiming the West doesn’t mean denying its flaws. It means defending the principles that allowed us to confront them: conscience, reason, freedom, and human dignity. They weren’t conjured from thin air, but shaped by centuries of religious tradition and moral struggle. Even for the secular, there’s power in recognising the scaffolding that made the West what it is.
We cannot afford to forget the faith that built the civilisation we now risk losing. If we don’t defend what we’ve inherited, we’ll be left at the mercy of whatever rises from the ruins. History has already shown us what comes next.
 | A guest post by
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WOW!!!! That was easily one of the best articles I've read lately. We are also politically 'homeless' here in Toronto and Canada having formerly been left of centre on most issues but have moved closer to the centre and now right of that - all the performative social justice which in reality defies merit over 'feels'. So much more to say ...
"History records, how great the fall can be". I recently finished a book by the historian Victor Davis Hanson titled, "The End of Everything." He records the fall of four great civilizations of antiquity (Thebes, Carthage, Byzantium, and the Mayans). Highly developed civilizations that were riding high until, in the blink of an eye, were literally erased from existence. Never assume that it cannot happen to us.