Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth.

For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street.

The thing about culture is that it is always changing.

That's because culture is in a very real sense created by humans, the result of what we think and what we imagine, what we change, what we legislate, what we invent, what we

relate to, and all kinds of other things. There are some moments, however, like ours, in which

the changes are deeper and wider. The shifts in culture more fundamental. I think a lot of people

sense that we're living at such a cultural moment, where the changes

that have taken place over the last several decades have been substantial, to say the least.

My friend Oz Guinness actually calls this cultural moment a civilizational moment.

In other words, we're not just in a critical moment in 21st century America.

We're actually at a critical moment for Western civilization itself.

Of course, history tells the story about civilizations, how they rise and fall.

There are rules to civilizations, and if those rules are broken, then those civilizations no longer have a future.

What Oz Guinness means when he calls this a

civilizational moment is that we're actually at a critical time, where our future is unclear.

Will Western civilization be renewed? Will it enter a time of revolution? Or will we continue

in an irreversible decline? Now I think it's important as Christians for us always to remember that the decline

of Western civilization is not the decline of the Kingdom of God. The Kingdom of God both predates and

will long outlast the history of Western civilization. However, the decline of Western civilization

will be significant indeed because so many of the ideals of the Western

world were shaped and formed by Christian beliefs, specifically those beliefs about morality

and about human dignity. These are things that you don't find in other civilizations that have

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