Western culture currently faces a period of instability, marked by cultural and practical decline. This instability undermines governments, economies, and social institutions, accelerating their dysfunction and deepening the cultural malaise.

At the heart of this instability lies a profound crisis of meaning. The West has exhausted its once-dominant myths, narratives, and values, losing its sense of purpose and coherence. Without a unifying story, society lacks a shared worldview or direction, fracturing its communal identity.

This void fosters chaos along societal margins. Many individuals experience disillusionment, alienation, and existential angst, reflecting a pervasive sense of disconnection and a loss of a sense of belonging.

The crisis manifests in diverse ways: rising mental illness, social unrest, and institutional decay. Its root cause is the erosion of traditional sources of meaning—religion, community, and cultural narratives—that once provided direction and a sense of identity.

Western societies increasingly prioritize individual autonomy and self-expression, often at the expense of community and shared values. While individualism offers freedom, it risks isolation, loneliness, and rootlessness.

Cultural relativism, asserting the equal validity of all cultures and values, further weakens traditional anchors. In a relativistic framework, absolute truths or universal standards dissolve into subjective perspectives, as seen in the phrase “my truth.” Although promoting tolerance, it fosters moral confusion and nihilism, leaving individuals without clear guidance for their lives.

A striking manifestation is the surge in mental illness, particularly depression and anxiety, with studies linking this to a lack of life purpose, breeding hopelessness and despair.

Social unrest also emerges, as alienation and a lack of shared purpose drive antisocial behavior and extremist ideologies, contributing to political polarization and violence. While this crisis lacks simple solutions, it need not be permanent.

Humans derive meaning from narrative perceptions of their lives, a vital mechanism to address existential anxiety. As a species, we pursue not merely survival but significance.

We are naturally inclined to encapsulate core truths, finding meaning and identity through stories. The human person, a storytelling, metaphor-loving, symbol-making being, relies on myth (core narratives) to convey profound existential meaning. Thus, we connect psychologically and spiritually with narratives, icons, and parables.

Myth provides a culture with its central framework for meaning and purpose. This framework establishes wisdom—a collective sense of purpose, place, identity, and shared values. Hence, the language of spirituality comprises myth, metaphor, and symbol.

Philosopher Loyal Rue coined the term "amythia" to describe the loss of a shared cultural narrative that offers meaning and orientation. Rue contends that Western culture faces a crisis of amythia, marked by profound disorientation and meaninglessness due to the erosion of unifying narratives and worldviews.

The absence of a unifying worldview also fosters social fragmentation, polarization, and conflict. Without a shared understanding, individuals retreat into echo chambers, entrenching their beliefs and hindering meaningful dialogue.

Shattering shared mythic narratives and symbols leaves a fragmented society, where survival and personal agendas dominate.

Communication across divergent subcultures becomes nearly impossible without common meanings. As central myths erode, the West grapples with an anarchy of meaning and value, veering toward nihilism.

A new unifying myth, inherently religious despite its secular perception, offers the sole path to avert this descent, guiding a theology of participation and meaning that restores communal purpose.

The root of "culture" traces to the soil, linked to the act of cultivation—growing and nurturing. Cicero first popularized this term, describing the intellectual, political, moral, and religious soil essential for fostering a virtuous society.

In its broadest sense, culture encompasses the patterns of social behavior, norms, knowledge, beliefs, arts, laws, customs, and habits within human societies. It shapes philosophical self-understanding, influences outlooks, and colors daily life—how we dress, eat, and greet one another.

Culture emerges from and is embodied by its people, forming a mutually constitutive relationship. Individuals are molded by their culture, yet they shape it through collective and individual actions, rendering culture inherently dynamic.

Culture manifests as narrative—mythic, foundational plots, metaphors, and stories that provide meaning and direction. Historically, religions have offered central cultural narratives, while secular narratives, such as those of progress and consumerism, also shape societies.

Culture is multifaceted, comprising interwoven subcultures that are shaped by various factors, including ethnicity, religion, nationality, socioeconomic status, and geographic location. Systems theory proves helpful in analyzing these dynamics.

Anthropology, history, and philosophy distinguish Eastern cultures—encompassing China, India, Japan, Korea, and surrounding regions—from Western cultures, which include European civilizations and their influence in North America, Australia, New Zealand, and parts of Africa and South America.

Such distinctions remain imprecise. Is Russia Western, Eastern, or distinct from both? How do we classify the Middle East’s rich history? Is modern Japan Eastern or Western? Argentina appears Western, but what of Brazil?

Given the complexity of culture, we must avoid overgeneralization, acknowledging the limits of fully describing any culture.

This analysis seeks to comprehend, even superficially, the West’s underlying worldview, core ideas, and narratives.

We focus on the West’s transition from classical to Judeo-Christian culture, evolving into more secular expressions. This overview employs broad strokes for brevity.

Western culture emerges from a hybrid of classical influences—primarily Hellenism and Roman culture—combined with the Judeo-Christian religious worldview and pre-Christian contributions from Celtic, Gallic, Germanic, and Slavic peoples. These influences clashed and transformed one another.

The classical world of Greece and Rome introduced democracy, philosophy, the rule of law, and the concept of the individual as a person. Its religious outlook was polytheistic, animist, and pagan, yielding impressive achievements. Yet, it also fostered slavery, tribalism, military conquest, and dehumanizing imperialism.

Despite its erudition, the Greco-Roman culture spread violence, abuse, and harshness. Women were deemed inferior, and many people were enslaved and justified as such by the natural order.

Contemporary Westerners often overlook that the architects of justice and law also practiced infanticide, subjugated women, and endorsed slavery.

The same minds that shaped early notions of dignity sponsored barbaric entertainments—gladiatorial combat and public executions involving torture and wild animals—devaluing the poor and marginalizing the weak.

In this classical world, the poor mattered little, sex often signified power, and life remained arduous for most.

Don Cupitt observes, “The ancient Greco-Roman world was a harsh slave society with little interest in humanitarian considerations. Is there a single case of humanitarian prison visiting in all of pagan antiquity? Did anyone organize relief for the survivors of Pompeii?” In this pitiless age, Christianity’s appeal emerged.

Rome adopted and adapted Hellenism, spreading its imperial ways—values, ideas, and law—termed the imperium.

Cultures and empires evolve; few endure. Rome decayed internally from corruption, economic disparity, military overreach, and daily violence, with northern invaders merely accelerating its fall.

Christianity emerged in the classical world as a marginal faction of religious rebels and misfits, viewed as subversive by imperial elites. This sect, devoted to the teachings of an itinerant Jewish rabbi and cultural revolutionary, posed a threat by challenging the Greco-Roman imperium with its inverse values.

Christians refused to offer ritual homage to the emperor or join public pagan sacrifices—a significant defiance in that era’s mindset. Their values critiqued the empire: justice through peace, care for the poor and marginalized, and the dignity of all persons, not just the elite. Mercy, love, kindness, and mutual care defined their daily witness, gradually winning converts and ensuring growth, though occasionally inciting Rome’s wrath.

Eventually, outsiders became insiders. While Constantine’s sanctioning in the 4th century solidified Christianity’s integration into the empire, its rise beyond small communities preceded him. The imperial narrative of the Iliad and Aeneid gave way to the Gospels and biblical writings, establishing Christianity as the foundation of a new imperium.

As Christians ascended within the crumbling empire, they assumed administrative roles, co-opting the Kingdom of God with Rome’s structure. Yet, power bred corruption, as imperialism tainted Christianity, shaping Christendom—a mutual transformation.

For a millennium, Christianity dominated Western culture, often diverging from its founder’s vision yet fostering a more humane society. Despite crusades, inquisitions, and wars, it promoted love, mercy, and kindness, influencing moral attitudes to this day.

Human nature remains constant across cultures, although culture shapes which traits—such as love, mercy, creativity, war, hatred, and destruction—are emphasized. Christianity tempered these toward compassion, introduced hospitals, ended infanticide, founded universities, improved literacy, elevated women’s status, and aided the poor, though it did not eliminate war or oppression.

For over a millennium, the Judeo-Christian tradition has provided the West with foundational narratives, shaping its self-understanding. Yet, Christianity now faces a period of upheaval, losing cultural significance and influence across Western societies. This turmoil has triggered institutional and denominational decline, theological confusion, and the abandonment of once-held orthodoxies.

Christianity’s decline in Western cultures spans decades, reaching a point where it no longer serves as the core, unifying mythic-symbolic narrative. The Christian mythos—its narratives and collective rituals—fades as church attendance drops and supernatural cosmology loses credibility, leading to the decay of mainstream Christian expressions.

Despite this, Christian moral values—such as kindness, compassion, and concern for the vulnerable—persist, although their longevity remains uncertain.

The potential loss of this tradition poses risks, given its profound impact on the West. While current forms, institutions, and expressions of Christianity—often flawed, outdated, corrupt, or abusive—thankfully fade, its core wisdom merits retention and re-engagement, embodying the West’s most humane and dignified traits.

Christianity’s decline stems partly from the effects of secular and humanistic reasoning. Christian theology has failed to adapt to contemporary thought. Instead, it has veered into dogmatic claims, rendering them literal rather than metaphorical, and clinging to outdated metaphysics and magical thinking.

Institutional failures—moral lapses, shallow communities, clergy abuse, political overreach, and cultural control—further erode its credibility, portraying it as a detrimental cultural force.

However, it was the Christian West, shaped by classical influences, that fostered the Renaissance’s humanism, the Enlightenment’s focused reason, and the rise of science, technology, and industrialization.

The Church resisted these self-caused developments; yet, the critiques it faces today for past and present actions stem from Christianity itself, which has transformed Western moral and anthropological foundations.

The Renaissance, Enlightenment, and Romanticism reinforced the concept of human dignity, extrapolating it to include the rule of law, democracy, human rights, market economies, and liberalism.

These movements also embraced freedom of conscience, tolerance, pluralism, individualism, and anti-dogmatism.

The Enlightenment posed challenges that Christianity largely ignored. Catholicism, however, stands out for efforts to align with this thinking, though progress remains incomplete.

Catholicism accepts evolutionary theory and science, acknowledges freedom of conscience and religion, embraces church-state separation, and supports democracy. Granted, this acceptance was long in coming. 

Vatican II sought to modernize Catholicism, aligning it with secular culture, welcoming dialogue, and adopting the restraints of tolerance and humility.

Yet, the Church faltered earlier. Vatican I’s definition of papal infallibility proved less than ideal, while the Syllabus of Errors and resistance to Enlightenment ideas caused more than their share of cultural and intellectual harm.

Conversely, Mainline Protestant churches compromised by uncritically adopting Enlightenment reductionism now face a different set of consequences.

American Evangelicalism, reacting against the Enlightenment, spawned fundamentalism, literalism, and regressive theologies, tarnishing Christianity’s image.

Christianity’s influence wanes amid secularization, yet the notion of secular triumph over religion is flawed. Some Christian forms—vapid superstitions—deserve to fade, but a core value endures.

Evolutionary psychology, anthropology, and sociology suggest that humans are inherently religious, drawn to narrative, meaning, rituals, and symbols.

Secular thinkers recognize that secularism, while beneficial, fails to provide cultural meaning.

As culture abhors a vacuum, hybrid myths of progress, consumerism, individualism, and technology emerge, yet they fail to deliver authentic meaning, offering only consumption and pleasure. Secularism, lacking a transcendent purpose, leaves individuals disconnected and unfulfilled.

A growing consensus heralds a post-secular era, where diminished religious influence persists, calling for rapprochement—a dialogue between secularism, religion, and Christian-humanist ideas.

The next section will briefly explore the implications of this rapprochement for Christianity and Western culture.