Nick Freitas challenges Christians to exemplify all that's great and good: Western civilization is 'worth fighting for'

Young men will not fight to preserve Western civilization unless they rediscover its Christian foundations, former Virginia state Del. Nick Freitas said during a speech at the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (ARC) conference in London this week.

Addressing concerns about declining faith, family and patriotism, Freitas lamented that today's young men have been taught to view masculinity as inherently harmful, leaving many disconnected from the very civilization previous generations sought to defend.

"We've essentially seen our young boys be told ... as early as elementary school that they're essentially the source of the world's problems," Freitas said. 

Describing it as "woke progressivism" that portrays men as responsible for everything from crime and war to racism and bigotry, Freitas said its broader aim is "undermining and demoralizing the West." 

"When I read Karl Marx, he's very obvious that he has a disdain for the traditional family," Freitas said. "Marx did a pretty good job of convincing everyone that the traditional marriage was oppressive toward women and so the overall objective was to replace the husband and father with the state."

Looking back over the past six decades, Freitas contended that government has weakened the role of fathers without successfully replacing it.

"The state has done a pretty good job of subverting the role of the father and role of the husband at the same time that they've done a horrible job of actually filling that position," he said.

Freitas pointed to his own family as an example, recalling conversations with his wife after their son decided to enlist in the military. "As he was enlisting during the previous administration, I remember my wife came to me at one point and asked me 'Should we let him?'"

He responded: “What do you mean let him? He gets to make up his own mind. He has to follow the path that God has laid out for him.” 

"I have convinced my son that the United States, that the West, that his family, that his faith, that his legacy is worth fighting for," he said.

But Freitas warned that many young men no longer believe Western civilization deserves their sacrifice.

“Ladies and gentlemen, we’re not going to convince the young men of the West to fight for a civilization that they feel is complicit in their own destruction,” he added. “Right now, they look at the civilization that we talk of and they think to themselves, it’s either complicit in emasculating me or it was powerless to stop it.” 

Rather than defending Western civilization as a political project, Freitas said Christians should recover what he described as its spiritual foundation.

"I don't fight for Western civilization. I fight for Christendom," he declared.

"I want the West to once again recognize that there was a theological underpinning to everything that we believe," he said. "There’s a reason why we have discussions about equity and equality and tolerance when most of the world and most of world history didn’t even consider those things as worth discussing. But if we forget that foundational component of our civilization, then we will lose it. Because I can tell you this, I don’t know many people that die for secular humanism."

Near the end of his address, Freitas reflected on what he described as renewed spiritual interest among young men following the assassination of Turning Point USA founder Charlie Kirk.

“There were so many young men that were showing up on social media saying, ‘I’m going to church for the first time, I bought a Bible for the first time.”

He then posited: “When those young men walk into those churches, what will they find?” 

“The thing that brought me back to my faith was not an excellent argument. It was meeting other men that I knew I could count on in a fight. And young men know that they’re headed toward a fight. They are looking for other men to believe in. They are looking for faith. They are looking for family.” 

Freitas urged Christians to model the convictions they hope to pass on to the next generation.

"Let the arguments that we make not just be in the speeches that we provide but in the way that we live our lives so that there can be no denying that we have something there that is special and worth fighting for."