The Gospel would reverse Western moral decay and save our civilisation

Far more significant than economics and demography are problems of moral decline, cultural suicide, and political disunity in the West. Oft-pointed-to manifestations of moral decline include:

1. increases in antisocial behavior, such as crime, drug use, and violence generally;
2. family decay, including increased rates of divorce, illegitimacy, teen-age pregnancy, and single-parent families;
3. at least in the United States, a decline in “social capital,” that is, membership in voluntary associations and the interpersonal trust associated with such membership;
4. general weakening of the “work ethic,” and the rise of a cult of personal indulgence;
5. decreasing commitment to learning and intellectual activity, manifested in the United States in lower levels of scholastic achievement.

The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. Samuel P. Huntington. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996, p.304

Do we not see all these characteristics in Britain and throughout the West?

 

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I do not know whether modern civilization may have a decline

I do not know whether modern civilization may or may not have a decline as well as a progress, a fall as well as an uprise: but if it be so, it will be because Christianity has been overpowered, and unbelief taken its place, and let loose the base herd of human passions from their foul den.

R.Payne Smith, Bampton Lecture, 1869

Not all Victorians believed in the inevitability of progress. A Christian such as Smith applied the gospel as a standard external to the assumptions of his time and place so as not to be held captive to their follies.

Robert Payne Smith, D.D., M.A. (1819-1895) was Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Oxford and Canon of Christ Church from 1865 until 1870, when he was appointed Dean of Canterbury

Leisure is the mother of philosophy

Leisure is the mother of philosophy; and Commonwealth, the mother of peace and leisure. Where first were great and flourishing cities, there was first the study of philosophy. The Gymnosophists of India, the Magi of Persia, and the Priests of Chaldaea and Egypt are counted the most ancient philosophers; and those countries were the most ancient of kingdoms. Philosophy was not risen to the Grecians and other people of the West, whose Commonwealths, no greater perhaps than Lucca or Geneva, had never peace but when their fears of one another were equal; nor the leisure to observe anything but one another. At length, when war had united many of these Grecian lesser cities into fewer and greater, then began seven men, of several parts of Greece, to get the reputation of being wise; some of them for moral and politic sentences, and others for the learning of the Chaldaeans and Egyptians, which was astronomy and geometry. But we hear not yet of any schools of philosophy.

Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, 4, 46

So peace is necessary to the advancement of culture and science etc.