THE BUILDER’S STONE: How Jews and Christians Built the West – and why only they can save it By Melanie Philips. A Wicked Son book An Imprint of Post Hill Press - $18.00 Available at Amazon.com

Reviewed by David W. Virtue, DD

www.virtueonline.org

August 15, 2025

Secularists and atheists will not like this book. In fact, they will hate it. And they will hate it because they believe the public square should be naked, devoid of religious belief. They discarded religion at the Enlightenment, and think it is now no longer relevant in a technological age run more by AI than the Torah or the Sermon on the Mount.

Melanie Phillips would respectfully disagree. The brilliant British Jewish author, columnist and Israeli defender, contends that the West is destroying itself from within and without, and only Jews and Christians standing together can make it possible for Western civilization to survive.

While Phillips is on the Jewish side of the equation, she argues like a Christian apologist defending the West against its cultured despisers.

Her book, How Jews and Christians Built the West, and why they are the only ones capable of rescuing it from its decline, is a book of extraordinary analysis and wild hope. Few can escape the conclusions she offers.

It is profoundly ironic, that, at the opening, she cites Psalm 118:22; “The stone the builders rejected has become the chief corner stone.” King David wrote the Psalm to celebrate God’s steadfast love and faithfulness. The Jews sang this during festivals and ceremonies, possibly even the Feast of Tabernacles, commemorating God’s miraculous provision during Israel’s journey in the wilderness. For Christians it is Jesus himself who is the chief cornerstone of His Church, but the New Testament says that the God of Israel gave to Jesus "the throne of his father David" (Luke 1:34), and so we Christians should realize that the foundation of Jesus' kingdom is profoundly Jewish.

Her book is written against a background of unprecedented cultural tumult in the West with a society deeply polarized as a tsunami of antisemitism eats at the very heart of the West with liberals and left-wingers happily destroying the very roots that gave rise to their freedoms.

Phillips believes that the present divisions are not between conservatives and liberals, white skinned individuals and people of color, heterosexuals and gays, but those who want Western civilization to continue and those who don’t.

At its heart Phillips believes that there is an attempt to “destroy core values” of national identity and cultural self-belief, entailing a progressive collapse of social order and rationality into anarchy, stupefying imbecility and moral squalor.

Phillips believes, with some justification, that the cultural crisis is being exploited and manipulated by Islamists, who recognize in the weakness of the West their chance to conquer it and subjugate it to Islamic rule. “All this is coalescing around antisemitism and the demonization of Israel, both the symptoms and the cause of civilizational collapse.”

She believes that the US may still be able to turn itself around but Britain and Europe are lost causes because of the sheer number of Islamists and the feebleness of their response to the threat they pose. Therefore, the cultural collapse is the most critical front in the West’s struggle for survival. “This cultural war of attrition has now reached a tipping point.”

“Establishment politicians across the spectrum seem frozen in the headlamps of self-destructive ideologies and the increasing Islamist threat. Establishment liberals are attempting to silence dissent – which they demonize as 'right wing' or even 'far-right' – in flagrant disregard of liberal principles of free speech and due process.”

Phillips believe that this is the moment when the West will either pull itself together or go over the edge of the cultural cliff. This is the moment when we all hold our breath that Western leaders will make the right call.

Phillips makes the bold assertion that issues like transgender mutilation, punishing universities, or throwing out illegal immigrants are the results of what’s gone wrong. At the root it is a spiritual problem. A crisis over meaning and purpose. “That takes us headfirst into the issue of religious belief. A key issue behind the West’s civilizational travails is a spiritual vacuum underpinning the denigration of the nation, the abandonment of the family, the destruction of education; it has shaped contempt for the past and despair about the future; it has replaced emotional health by a profound loneliness. All these things are connected.”

Phillips' remedy is to learn from the resilience and experience of the Jewish people. “The Jews' unique selling point throughout history has been a culture of survival – as the State of Israel has once again shown the rest of the world.”

The barbaric slaughter of October 6, 2023 and the West's pathetic response to it was the canary in the coalmine, revealing a culture in an advanced state of decay and disintegration. Phillips believes that the Jewish targets of this onslaught could become the West’s salvation. October 7 turbo-charged the West’s decades-long process of cultural suicide.

Oct. 7 was a new front in the Islamic holy war against the West that took the battle onto a higher and triumphalist level, says Phillips. She notes that the Palestinian attempt at the genocide of the Jews was labelled “resistance,” while Israel’s resistance to being annihilated was labelled “genocide.”

“At the heart of all this was the doctrine that there was no such thing as objective truth. Everything was relative; everything was a matter of opinion. Because there was no truth, feelings became more important than facts.”

The principles of justice, freedom, and tolerance are not universal. They are core principles of the West alone. Uprooting them from the Western civilization that gave them birth has turned them into weapons to be deployed against the West by its enemies.

The West’s abandonment of its biblically-based structures created a vacuum into which the Islamists have marched. They understood something that the West had forgotten – that religion is essential to a culture’s understanding of itself, and that without a religious underpinning, no culture will survive. They understood that the West was evacuating its culture of religion, meaning, and purpose, and so would no longer be prepared to defend it.

The West, however, refuses to acknowledge the war being waged by the Islamic world against Western civilization. Worse, by appeasing Iran, undermining Israel, and ignoring the Islamization of the free world, it has been giving succor to its mortal enemies.

Phillips believes there is an antidote to this - it is the Jewish roots of the West. Judaism is the West’s civilizational soul. Christianity itself, the institutional foundation of that civilization, rests upon Jewish precepts that Christianity thus channeled into Western culture.

So for the West, the fight for its survival as a civilization is very much on, and everything is to play for. And in this great cultural struggle, the Jewish people can play a vital role. That’s because Jewish principles and experiences are the West’s rescue remedy. It’s only by restoring those biblical values that the West will be able to save itself, concludes Phillips.

Another book that I must mention, written in a similar vein but from a distinctly Christian perspective is by Dr. Os Guinness, social critic and Anglican. His book: OUR CIVILIZATIONAL MOMENT: The Waning of the West and the War of the Worlds is a must read for any thoughtful Christian.

The world is fast approaching the climax of one of the great turning points in history, writes Guinness. “After nearly two millennia of existence and half a millennium of unprecedented dominance, Western civilization is on the wane and the shadows it casts are lengthening. Guinness notes that the most vehement and radical enemies assaulting the West are from within.” Echoes of Phillips.

“The root of the decline lies not just in the philosophical, ethical, cultural, economic, and technological spheres but the deepest cause of all—the deteriorating condition of the roots of the animating force that once made the West the civilization it has been. The faiths that gave vitality and unity have become enervated and rejected entirely.”

I recommend both these books to readers. They can be purchased through Amazon.com

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