LONDON—Leader of the Reform UK party Nigel Farage and prominent U.S. conservatives said at a major London conference that Western civilization risks losing its identity unless it rediscovers its Christian foundations.
The third Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference took place as a heatwave swept London, bringing together prominent thinkers and political figures from around the world to discuss faith, national identity, freedom, and the future of the West.
Co-founded by Canadian psychologist and commentator Jordan Peterson, Conservative peer Baroness Philippa Stroud, and hedge fund manager and GB News backer Sir Paul Marshall as an alternative to the World Economic Forum, the event drew speakers including Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, former Australian prime ministers Tony Abbott, Scott Morrison, and John Howard, as well as political leaders Farage and lader of the Conservative party Kemi Badenoch.
Peterson was absent this year.
Prominent podcasters included Konstantin Kisin, Dave Rubin, Jonathan Pageau, and Eric Weinstein, while authors such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Eric Metaxas, Ross Douthat, and Rod Dreher also appeared.
‘Something Worth Fighting For’
In a Wednesday talk, Farage said Western civilization was rooted in Judeo-Christian culture and had produced an unparalleled degree of political freedom and prosperity.“I think that what we developed in Western civilization, the basis of which, of course, is Judeo-Christian culture, is undeniable at every level,” Farage said.
Over centuries, he said, Western societies had developed democratic systems under which people possessed the right to choose and remove their leaders.
“In terms of the lives of ordinary people, it has produced the best civilization that humanity has managed in the 2 million years it has been around,” he said.
“It seems to me that is something worth fighting for and worth defending.”
Farage said Western leaders had lost sight of that inheritance over recent decades and, in some cases, appeared not to care about preserving it.
He cited the phrase “We don’t do God,” associated with Alastair Campbell, former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s communications chief and one of the leading architects of the Labour government’s political strategy during the Iraq War.
“We don’t do God, and the promotion of every other culture and every other religion to kids at school, but no fundamental teaching of what we are and why what we’ve created has been so wonderful,” Farage said.
“I think we are in real danger of absolutely losing a sense of who we are.”
The Epoch Times also spoke with many conference attendees, some of whom said they had been encouraged by the ideas discussed and intended to take them back to their own communities and countries.
‘They Come From You’
Sarah Rogers, undersecretary of state for public diplomacy, described at the conference as “President Donald Trump’s free speech Czar,” highlighted the cultural and political inheritance shared by the UK and the United States on Thursday.“Not all Americans are blood descendants of Englishmen, but, in a deep way, we are descendants of England,” Rogers said.
“Our language, our civic and associational norms, our laws, and our intuitions about greatness, about what has made our civilization great and what it means to be great again, they come from you.”
Rogers also drew a parallel between Trump’s 2016 presidential election victory and the UK’s vote that year to leave the European Union.
“When Americans voted for change in 2016, the same year you voted for Brexit, a delusional establishment recoiled and coped,” she said.
“They blamed foreign interference and algorithms, and racism for what they insisted was some blip, some tantrum they could defuse and suppress. They thought they'd manage us into submission, but I don’t think you have, mate.”
‘Inescapably Christian’
Christian author and broadcaster Eric Metaxas told The Epoch Times that he had been struck by the conference’s Christian character.“It’s wonderful. There are so many wonderful people,” Metaxas said.
“I thought it would be more of a secular conservative thing. I’m happy to see that it’s formally Christian.”
Metaxas’s most recent book is “Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the Earth,” in which he reclaims a providential perspective on the founding story of the United States.
Metaxas said Christianity should not be treated as a peripheral influence on Western political thought in relation to the founding of the United States.
He said that there are people who seem to think that Christianity and Christians were “just simply” involved somehow in the birth of America.
“It was explicitly Christian, it was inescapably Christian, Christianity isn’t the side issue, it’s the central issue,” he said.
He said that such ideas about liberty don’t come from the French Enlightenment or even from any Enlightenment; they “come out of scripture.”
“Where does anyone in the world get the idea of liberty, of conscience, of the sanctity of the individual, or that we are all created equal? These are all inescapably biblical ideas,” he added.
He contrasted the American Revolution with the French Revolution, calling the latter a “utopianist secular project,” and argued that France’s rejection of religious authority first led to bloodshed and then to the “dictator emperor” Napoleon Bonaparte.
Metaxas said the Bolshevik and Chinese Communist revolutions had followed a similar course, describing them as “cynical betrayal” that promised liberation but ultimately enslaved the people.
‘We Are Not Sitting Here Arguing About the Top Marginal Tax Rate’
Former U.S. Army Green Beret, social media influencer, podcast host, and former member of the Virginia House of Delegates Eric Freitas said he had been encouraged by the number of younger people attending the conference.His talk on Tuesday focused on how “society was failing our boys,” a subject he covers in his new book “The Manbook,” a guide to becoming the man “you were meant to be.”
“There are a lot more young people here than I expected to see, which is very encouraging,” he told The Epoch Times.
“I think that is what ARC wanted, although sometimes it is difficult to achieve.”
Freitas said he was also hearing more voices that recognize the scale of the challenge facing Western societies.
“We are not sitting here arguing about the top marginal tax rate,” he said. “We are talking about civilizational matters, and that is very encouraging.”
He said Charlie Kirk was “responsible for a lot of young men in the United States reexamining their faith.”
“What they are looking for, along with their faith, they are looking for something that’s true, something that will provide strength and certainty,” he said.
“By certainty, I don’t mean certainty of economic wealth. I mean they are looking for something that will explain what is going in their lives and provide them with a path.
“I believe that is Christianity. I believe that one of the problems we have is that we talk a lot about Western civilization; we do not talk enough about Christianity.
“Western civilization is impossible to imagine without Christianity.”
He said that, particularly since the 1960s, there had been an attempt to remove Christianity as the foundation of Western civilization and replace it with secular humanism.
“It doesn’t work because the structures we have were not built upon secular humanism,” he said. “It was built upon a moral framework provided by Christianity and totally unsuited to any other foundation.”
Freitas said the crisis facing the West would not be resolved solely by conservatives advocating property rights, economics, or representative government.
“It’s going to be protected and preserved by men that actually believe that they’re not just serving their country or their families, but they’re actually serving God,” he said.
