“To quote Tom Holland, “How was it that a cult inspired by the execution of an obscure criminal in a long-vanished empire came to exercise such a transformative and enduring legacy on the world?”⁠ Could a cult leader with a message built on tricks and illusions create such an abiding influence for goodness and beauty? Could an ordinary man from a tiny town in Judea stir the hearts of his followers toward the tearing down of worldly systems and assumptions that treated women and children like animals? Like a fish that cannot comprehend what it means to be “wet” because water is all it knows, Westerners breathe in the air of Christendom and bathe in its assumptions. We take concepts like the equality of women, the dignity of children, the evils of slavery, and the abhorrence of pederasty for granted, all while taking an ax to the roots that gave birth to and furnished those concepts in the first place. The Western mind is suffering from amnesia. We march at a “Me Too” rally and then take to social media to complain about the oppressive character of Christianity. We post the Black Lives Matter square on our Instagram and then immediately drop our children off at a public school that is obligated to teach Darwin (a raging white supremacist) but will lose funding if they open the Bible. Westerners want the fruit that Christianity has produced, but they don’t like the tree. Irony is not a strong enough word. “So profound has been the impact of Christianity on the development of Western Civilization that it has come to be hidden from view. It is the incomplete revolutions which are remembered; the fate of those which triumph is to be taken for granted.”⁠ Our “water” in the West is Christian through and through, and we no longer know what it is to be wet.”

• from The Last Stand, p. 119-120