Why do civilizations rise, flourish and fall? Is the decline and fall of the west inevitable? These are the central questions asked in a recently released documentary called Truth Rising. Narrated by Os Guinness, author and the great-great-great grandson of the Guinness beer family, it’s available for free on Youtube. If you find yourself watching the news or scrolling Facebook with increasing dismay, this documentary could help steer your heart and your thinking in a more productive direction. 

It starts with the premise that we are experiencing rising despair, transience, and a loss of identity. Guinness identifies this as our civilizational moment, one where “our original dynamism” is gone and highlights three options: renew the original, replace it, or continue to experience decline. Viewers learn from scholars like Niall Ferguson, former politicians like Australia’s John Anderson and British thought leader Baroness Philippa Stroud, among others. 

One of my favourites is Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a woman whose quiet, understated way of talking belies the drama she has lived. She is able to appreciate and preach the beauty of Western civilization precisely because she was not born into it; she escaped a forced marriage in Somalia and landed as a refugee in the Netherlands. 

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“As a westerner you don’t have to imagine how life would be under Islam or under communism,” she tells us. “All you have to do is buy a plane ticket and go to any of these places that Western civilization has barely touched and spend some time there.” 

Her childhood was filled with discussions of scarcity—not enough food, water, or electricity. 

One of the things she heralds as an amazing accomplishment is the West’s ability to organize and create. “How do you organize people for the common good instead of for the selfish collective clan or tribalism, which leads us to this constant cycle of violence where we are never able to build anything,” she asks. “How can we create something that is sustainable?”

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This question of organizing for the common good is a central one to solving the problem of decline. It’s a question we ponder daily at the think tank where I work, Cardus. Our core purpose lies in researching and writing about “the ways in which society’s institutions can work together for the common good.” 

All too often, leaders, educators and others answer this question wrongly, confusing the “common good” with collectivism. Common property, for example, is not an avenue to the common good, neither are public programs always successful toward their given ends. Trouncing the beauty of each human soul is something that collective ideologies over the years have always done.   

Guinness tells us how he saw this firsthand. Born in China in 1941 under three threats—the Japanese, the communists and the nationalists—he witnessed hunger and killing, show trials in the morning and executions in the afternoon. It was, for him, “a crash course in the realism of life.” 

Where the first part of the documentary is slightly more academic, in the second part we are introduced to even more people who have suffered and stood up for truth. We learn more about Hirsi Ali’s story. When she began drinking as a coping mechanism for the despair she was feeling, it was at AA that she encountered spiritual surrender as a path forward. She decided she would pray to Christ, “and something clicked. I felt someone was listening to my prayers,” she says. 

Predictable for a Focus on the Family documentary is preaching that Jesus is the answer for the world today. But is He not, and is this not just the one basic Truth about which too many Christians have become blasé? The failure of the West to thrive is not monocausal—I for one would be given to pointing to family decline as the source of our social ills. But each of us as Christians is presented with something to do, someone or a cause to serve, which Christ will strengthen us to succeed at. The documentary presents the idea that the West is worth fighting for, and we see it through the lens of individuals who place Christ at their centre, not as a figurehead or symbol, and not even for the strength of a civilization, but as God and friend. 

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Spoiler alert: truth is rising through Christ, the way, the truth and the life. We could all use a reminder to live for Christ in this struggling world. “All my life I craved freedom and I craved love,” Hirsi Ali tells viewers. “In Jesus Christ I have found both.” 

Andrea Mrozek is Senior Fellow at Cardus Family.