How a Jewish-Christian Alliance Can Rescue the West

Israel’s recent 12-day war with Iran once again focused Americans’ attention on the Middle East. But it’s what happened Oct. 7, 2023, when Hamas launched a brutal terrorist attack on Israel, that united many Jews and Christians to confront the barbarism threatening our civilization.

Melanie Phillips is the author of the recently published book “The Builder’s Stone: How Jews and Christians Built the West and Why Only They Can Save It.” She is a legendary journalist, broadcaster, and reporter who is staunch in her defense of values that perhaps seem out of fashion today but are the foundation of our civilization.

The following is an edited and abridged transcript of our recent conversation on the “Heritage Explains” podcast.

Victoria Coates: Tell me about the passage from Psalms that gave the book the title “The Builder’s Stone.”

Melanie Phillips: It’s from Psalm 118 and it’s the line which says, “The stone that was cast aside, ignored by the builder, has become the cornerstone.”

I chose it as my epigram and then my title because what the book is about is the Jewish people and the Hebrew Bible as being the foundation of Western civilization and civilized values.

Coates: You dedicated your book to your grandchildren, which I think is quite fraught because of what we’ve seen since the Oct. 7 attacks. What is happening to our youth demographic? Was that something that motivated you in writing the book?

Phillips: I dedicated it to my grandchildren because it is so important for young people to understand what so many of them don’t see in front of them and hopefully to do something about it.

It’s not surprising that children or young people are in this state of being so indoctrinated against Israel and the Jewish people. One of the themes of my book is that one can’t understand the onslaught on the Jews and the state of Israel, unless one understands what the West is doing to itself because the two are intimately linked.

At the core of those values is the Hebrew Bible mediated through Christianity, which is the foundational creed of the West. But the values are essentially Jewish values from the Hebrew Bible.

It’s not surprising, therefore, that if you have a Western intelligentsia, a Western elite that has turned on itself effectively, that in attacking the core values, which are biblical values, it is also turned on the Jews and on Israel.

America, for all its troubles and all its divisions, still has a great bedrock of believing Christians. In Britain, the established church, the Anglican church, has been in the forefront of cultural collapse for various reasons. That makes Britain a very different and much more dangerous and tragic place than America.

Coates: That the Bible played a core role in creating Western values almost seems quaint or naive by 2025 standards, but it’s inescapably true. Can you talk a little bit more about that?

Phillips: I mean with reference particularly to Britain, which is a very particularly godless place.

The Western elites have told themselves, “Get rid of biblical religion, and we can have a better world, a world of conscience and brotherhood of man and universal values.” But crucially, we’ll have a world in which we can all realize our deepest wishes and ambitions and feelings, and we’ll all be rational and happy.

Neither of those things has come true. On the contrary, the opposite has happened, having got rid of God on the basis that anybody who is a religious believer is fundamentally irrational.

We have record amounts of deep unhappiness, especially among the young, record amounts of psychological ailments and illnesses.

The point is this: the remedy is within the West’s own purview, because the values that made the West civilized, and gave people in the West meaning and purpose, are still there and can be retrieved.

That does not mean I’m saying that everybody should become a religious person. I’m saying something quite different. I’m saying that in every single category of people, cultural, religious, ethnic, the old divisions don’t apply anymore.

What are the old divisions insofar as they ever had validity? Left versus right. Women versus men. Gays vs. straights. One religion vs. another. Black vs. white. Religious faith against people who are atheist or secular or agnostic of no religious faith. Those divisions no longer seem to me to be valid.

The crucial division now to me is between everybody within all those groups. All those cultures and faiths and ethnicities and groups who believe in Western values and who want those values to survive are prepared to do something about it. There are people in all those groups who think that.

In getting rid of the Bible, as it were, the Western elites have introduced a kind of quasi-religion, which I would call the religion of universalism, expressed in what especially in Britain and Europe are called human rights.

This religion of universalism says that transnational institutions and values and laws should take precedence over national laws and institutions. Why? Because the nation state is basically illegitimate. And international or transnational institutions and laws have legitimacy because they embrace the entire world, therefore they represent the brotherhood of man.

What I’m saying is that the remedy is actually in the West’s hands, and here are the Jewish people going back to the builder’s stone, the line in the psalm, reviled by the elites.

The unique selling point of the Jewish people is cultural survival. They’ve taken grievous losses over the years, but they’ve survived and thrived as a people, and they have been able to rebirth their ancient homeland in the state of Israel.

The Jews understand what education actually means: not just educating the young but celebrating your culture and memorializing it.

That’s the point. You must have a memory of the culture that you have. And it’s only by the present connecting to the past that it can ensure it has a future. That’s what the Jews can teach the West, which the West has kind of not just forgotten. It’s actively trying to dismember itself, remove its links with the past, and therefore it won’t have a future.

Both Jews and Christians, if they all step up to the plate, could and should start to agitate in public on behalf of the Christians who are being massacred across Africa and the developing world. And they should stand up against Islamism, political Islam, across the world.

If Jews and Christians were to do that, and to stand up for the West, on the basis that the West’s values are unique and uniquely wonderful and have to be defended because otherwise we’re going to lose what is civilized.

Coates: You close with a 10-point program for what you call a cultural resistance movement. I think we all hear resistance, and we think the worst, but I think we do need to adopt some of these tactics to save the West. Can you walk us through that?

Phillips: People who think like this from all cultures and creeds will get together to, first of all, reclaim the language and the institutions from the corruption that’s overtaken them: the universities, the schools, public discourse, public meetings, putting themselves in the public domain, the levers of the state.

It would help greatly if the church could kind of reconfigure itself, be much more about doing than dogma. It’s not what you believe. It’s what you do. It’s that everything you do should be infused with the principles that come from the faith, but with principles which are all designed to elevate the self, so that you become a better person and that you make a better community, you make a better society.

Again, I’m not asking people to become Jews. The rules that Jews follow to do this are arcane in the extreme and particular to Judaism. But this idea that you take religion out of the church and into the home, into the school, into the relationship between parents, is very profound and very profoundly useful in binding people into something which becomes part of their everyday life.

Religion has a terrible image and it should have a PR makeover. People think everyone who’s basically a religious believer is deeply stupid and anyone who’s smart must be an atheist or an agnostic.

And so, what I’m saying in the book in my last chapter is that there should be a concerted effort not to convert people to religion, but just to say: “Open your minds, people.”

The ultimate lesson that the Jewish people have as the secret source of survival, cultural survival. The rescue remedy for the West is, as I’ve said in my book, two words: “Choose life.”

And it’s not clear that the West is currently doing that, because the West is facing a death cult in Islamism, which seeks to destroy it. [The West] can’t fight off the Islamist death cult, unless it understands the great lesson from the Jewish people, which is, “To love yourselves, you have to choose life.” That’s ultimately what my book is about.

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