“Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too.”

What could be wrong with John Lennon’s “Imagine” — a song many of us listened to endlessly in high school — and his dream of a peaceful “brotherhood of man”? Everything, says Melanie Phillips in her brilliant new book “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West — and Why Only They Can Save It.” There are things worth dying and, terrible as it is to contemplate, killing for. A society that no longer believes this is spiritually empty and threatened with collapse. Lennon’s anthem isn’t just saccharine (as those high schoolers often decide when they get older) but, in a sense, the perfect expression of what’s wrong today in the West.

Phillips has been sounding the alarm longer than almost any prominent contemporary intellectual, for over three decades. She’s been predictably dismissed by the usual bien-pensants (Wikipedia, et al.) as an “Islamophobe” and “right-winger,” but Oct. 7, and the waves of antisemitism that followed, are grisly vindication of her warnings. Anyone alarmed about these developments, and who is unfamiliar with Phillips’ work, must read this book.

“The Oct. 7 Hamas pogrom in Israel and its aftermath revealed not one but two cultures of death,” Phillips writes. “The first was Islamism, whose ultimate weapon against the West is, as the Islamists repeatedly declare, that they love death as the West loves life. The second was within the West itself, which has spawned a powerful movement determined to destroy its core values. As a result, the West is stricken with a kind of death wish of its own — a loss of the will to survive.” 

The pathology has been on full display since well before Oct. 7. This is no more obvious than in the lives of children in America and the U.K. Your friendly library Drag Queen Story Hour teaches its young audience that a man with giant prosthetic breasts is an inspiring example of womanhood. Boys are taught that they might “really” be girls and vice versa, a condition requiring life-altering hormones and the removal of unwanted body parts. Violent pornography inundates children with their first smartphone. The family is depicted only as a source of misery, never nourishment, to be discarded in favor of hypnotizing gurus on TikTok. 

Our schools teach children that their nation is entirely racist and imperialist, bringers of nothing but oppression. Why would anyone want to defend such a country, or feel anything but shame for belonging to it? So the past few decades have brought an increasingly frenzied drive to attack everything about the West, above all its religious foundation: not only Christianity, but the Judaism on which Christianity is based. It’s not incidental that Jews, in Israel and the diaspora, are being attacked; it’s essential. “Judaism,” Phillips writes, “is the West’s civilizational soul.” The only way the West can save itself is “by restoring those biblical values,” of Judaism and Christianity.

Phillips realizes this message may make some readers roll their eyes, if not want to hurl her book across the room. In our secular age, religion is widely considered reactionary at worst, or at best superfluous. I think of my mother, who will drive back to the grocery store if she realizes the cashier gave her a dollar excess change. She’d say she doesn’t need to believe in God to be honest. Phillips doesn’t deny that atheists or nonbelievers may behave ethically, or genuinely feel they have no need to believe in a higher power, but insists that doesn’t address the issue on a societal level. “The need to believe in something beyond ourselves to provide a purpose in life appears to be hardwired into the human condition,” she writes. “Atheists may sneer that this is just a sign of intellectual idiocy or psychological weakness. But that doesn’t make it any less true.”

The nonbelievers also need to see that, however dim their view of religion, their entire worldview — their sense of morality, reverence for rationalism and law, belief in equality and the very notion of progress — is rooted in biblical precepts. Monotheism provided the basis for science, because if the sun, moon, planets and stars were the work of a single creator, there must be regular laws governing their motions, which men could set out to understand. The Hebrew Bible gave the world a linear concept of time, which “stopped us from going round and round in circles forever” and made possible the idea of progress. Christian thinkers considered reason a gift from God that was indispensable to faith. This duality spurred great scientists including Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, René Descartes and Johannes Kepler; faith wasn’t an anachronistic obstacle to their breakthroughs, but central to their worldview. True, faith and science haven’t always coexisted harmoniously; think Galileo. But science has grown in tandem with faith, not in resolute war against it.

It’s hard to appreciate the huge intellectual leaps it took for long-ago generations to proclaim views we take for granted. The beliefs of ancient Egyptians and Babylonians are so remote today, we can’t recognize how overthrowing them meant, at the time, an intellectual earthquake. It takes effort to recognize the emancipatory revolution in that ancient history. Even if you don’t believe God literally spoke to his people at Sinai, or even that he exists, you have to see that a religion whose founding moment centers on one God addressing recently released slaves, his people — men and women of all ages, characters and social status, every one an equal — and enlisting them into a covenant, expresses a profound, and previously unheard of, respect for human dignity.  

And they have survived despite seemingly impossible odds. Phillips argues that the “secret sauce” of Jewish resilience is education: the extraordinary emphasis on not only the Hebrew Bible, but the huge body of laws presented by the rabbis. This especially includes the Talmud, which Phillips calls “a work of genius whose significance both to the survival of the Jewish people and the development of the West is largely unappreciated.” With it, Jews not only gave the world a practical guide to everyday life, but “a mind-blowing fractal of logical reasoning” central to Western thinking. Through diligent study of the texts, Jews in the Diaspora found sufficient reason to go on being Jewish, and to live. Napoleon, upon seeing Jews fast at Tisha B’Av, is said to have commented, “Any nation that still cries after 1,500 years is guaranteed to return.” But the important point is not that Jews wept, but that they’d kept alive the memory of what they were weeping for.

As someone who was staunchly atheist most of my life, and who turned to a fairly destructive way of filling the God-shaped hole, I may have been the perfect audience for Phillips’ book. But it is for anyone, religious or not, who wants to understand why our world seems to be in crisis, and contemplate solutions beyond making another donation to the ADL. Phillips is one of our clear-eyed giants, like Douglas Murray, who needs to be heard.

Kathleen Hayes is the author of ”Antisemitism and the Left: A Memoir.”

Excerpt from ‘The Builder’s Stone’

Elevating the autonomous individual to the center of the universe has not ushered in an age of general contentment and satisfaction. On the contrary, there are increasing rates of depression and other psychological disorders, epidemic cruelty and venom on social media, agonizing confusion about sexual and gender identity, and social division into warring tribes fighting each other for power and privilege. 

Such distress is a civilization’s great cry for meaning. Taking the view that the pursuit of reason, freedom, and happiness necessarily means junking religion, the West has instead rendered existence itself progressively meaningless. 

For life to have meaning, it needs a sense of purpose. In recent decades, however, the West has taught itself that life is purposeless. There is nothing beyond ourselves. Life, the universe, and everything are the result of accidental developments. The appearance of design in the universe doesn’t mean there’s a designer; in Professor Richard Dawkins’s famous image, the watchmaker is blind, working without foresight or purpose. 

For Dawkins, facing up to the randomness of existence is a heroic act. For countless others, however, it is a recipe for despair and demoralization. Random developments produce unforeseen consequences that we are unable to affect in any way. By contrast, moral agency means we make a difference through how we choose to behave. Our actions matter. 

Moral agency is therefore a principal source of individual power; but the West has dispensed with moral codes as a curb on the freedom of the individual. So the paradox is that the more freedom we have, the less point there is to anything. Without moral agency, we become powerless, the plaything of determinist forces beyond our control. Human beings are helpless, in the grip of uncontrollable forces whether they be — as Marx, Darwin, and Freud told us—economic, biological, or psychological. 

If the human being is nothing more than a sack of atoms whirling through space and time, if our consciousness is nothing more than the snapping of synapses and selfish genes, existence is random and therefore pointless. The resulting sense of powerlessness is a recipe for exponential misery, a ratchet effect of unrealistic expectations and the creation of permanent disappointment, dissatisfaction, and disillusionment. 

This has driven, in turn, increasing attempts to forge a meaning to life beyond both religion and the satisfaction of the individual self. 

The most obvious expression of this quest is the array of causes to which young people gravitate to find a focus for their idealism. One cause after the other claims to be about the betterment of the world — eradicating prejudice on grounds of race, sexuality, or gender, promoting the Palestinian agenda, saving the planet. 

In fact, these causes are all based on demonizing and hating other people: white people, men, heterosexuals, Jews, and humanity in general. 

Worse still, since these causes are utopian, they all fail to deliver the perfection of the world that they have promised. From multiculturalism to environmentalism to post-nationalism, Western progressives have fixated on unattainable abstractions for the realization of utopia. Since this inevitably results in disappointment, they consequently seek scapegoats upon whom they turn with a rage that’s as self-righteous as it is ferocious in order to bring about by coercion the state of purity that the designated culprits have purportedly thwarted. 

Traditional liberal values, in the settlement that arose from the Enlightenment, involved tolerance, freedom, and the pursuit of reason. These values have come to characterize modernity in the Western world. Yet what’s called “liberalism” today has involved the repudiation of those virtues and replaced them with intolerance, oppression, and irrationality. Liberalism has mutated into its nemesis. These ideologies are all fueled by a rage against the world that exists and a desire to remake it anew. But rather than filling the existential vacuum, these ideologies merely deepen it.