​Every person, every family, every civilization must eventually decide what it loves and values enough to defend. And when it refuses that decision—when it mistakes hesitation for virtue—it becomes prey to those who have already decided. The modern West, weary and ashamed of its own moral vocabulary, now kneels before its own doubt. It calls this humility, but it looks a lot like surrender.

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We have convinced ourselves that openness is the highest good, forgetting that to leave the door permanently ajar is not an act of hospitality but an abdication of responsible ownership. One doesn’t prove kindness – or protect the family - by leaving the front door unlatched at midnight. Yet this is the posture we’ve adopted toward the world. The West - and the church is not excluded - has become so terrified of appearing judgmental that it has forgotten how to exercise judgment—except, of course, against those unfashionable souls who still remember what judgment is for. Having banished conviction, it now reserves its fiercest moral outrage for anyone reckless enough to possess a moral compass.

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Multiculturalism began nobly enough—as a recognition of shared humanity and a safeguard against arrogance. But like all ideals detached from realism, it has become a parody of itself. It assumes that every culture wants the same thing—a comfortable coexistence secured by good manners and mutual respect. But there are cultures—and movements within them—that are not interested in coexistence, not in the least. They are interested in conquest. And the West, in its fatigue, has made their work easier by labeling discernment as bigotry and conviction as oppression.

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This is the fatal flaw of relativism: it hands the strong arm and the loudest voice a moral blank check. When a society forgets the difference between mercy and masochism, it invites the bully to set the terms. The pluralist conscience says, “Who am I to judge?” The aggressor replies, “Exactly.”

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And so the tables turn. The language of justice is weaponized, the rhetoric of tolerance is mimicked, and soon the very virtues that once safeguarded liberty become the instruments of its undoing. 

The grievance peddler discovers that the surest way to silence a free society is to shame it into self-loathing. 

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Indeed, that single sentence could serve as the epitaph of Western moral decline. For nearly a century now, we’ve watched the slow triumph of the grievance peddler—the professional victim, the moral extortionist, the self-appointed conscience of the perpetually offended. What began as a legitimate demand for justice has metastasized into a cultural racket, a kind of emotional protection scheme: “Affirm my pain, or I’ll label you a monster.”

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The professional victim has replaced the priest as the new moral authority. Only, instead of absolution, he offers condemnation. The faithful line up, not for forgiveness, but for public shaming. The contemporary moral puritans are every bit as dogmatic as their religious predecessors—but they hide their authoritarianism behind the soft, therapeutic language and fashionable posturing of modern progressivism. The Inquisition in yoga pants.

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And it has worked brilliantly. A civilization once confident enough to question its gods and kings now trembles before the mob on social media. The West, having replaced moral conviction with therapeutic self-doubt, has learned to police itself through guilt. So we wander, muttering about nuance, as though the refusal to take a stand were itself a moral stance.

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Every achievement must be apologized for, every virtue interrogated for hidden privilege, every success reframed as theft. The grievance merchant does not seek truth or reconciliation—only retribution. This is what happens when the capacity for self-criticism, which once gave the West its strength, turns cannibalistic. The same moral sensibility that produced reform and progress has been weaponized into an instrument of self-destruction. The free society, ashamed of its own freedoms, kneels not out of humility but out of habit—begging forgiveness for being the only civilization that ever learned how to forgive.

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Let’s be clear: to say this is not to call for exclusion. Civilization depends upon exchange; the Gospel itself commands welcome. But welcome is not self-erasure. Real hospitality presupposes a home, and a home has walls. And within those walls live people with values, contours, limits. You cannot mindlessly invite the world in and not expect your family to be dismantled within the very structure that makes invitation possible. You will have nothing left to offer your guests but the rubble of what once held it together.

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And those who stand paralyzed amidst the rubble of belief will be ruled by those who rebuild the framework of meaning—no matter how brutal, tyrannical or intolerant that meaning may be. The tyrant always knows what he believes.

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The remedy lies not in nostalgia for vanished certainties, but in recovering the discipline of thought that made those certainties possible. If the West is to survive as anything more than a marketplace of feelings, it must again learn what the Western inheritance has gifted the world: that truth is not an imposition but a liberation—and that to wield it is not to dominate, but to live.

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The door may be opened to the stranger but only by those who know what it is to keep a house and will not apologize for building it in the first place. They are those who still tend hearth and home; and the well-being of the family within.