Saving Western civilization is the central issue

OPINION:

One pressing issue stands out above all others as Americans are beginning to eye the 2028 race for the White House: saving Western civilization from without and within.

Americans are intensely concerned with the rise of a powerful adversary in the East that threatens all our cherished freedoms communist and atheist China.

They are likewise deeply troubled by the slide of our own culture from its Judeo-Christian roots.

Western civilization, which has led the world into more freedom, dignity and prosperity than any other civilization in the history of mankind, is built on the belief that every human being has immeasurable worth at every stage of life, being created by the love of God. This unfathomable worth and dignity of being image bearers of God brings with it the right to freedom for us all.

The rapid ascendency and renewed threat of totalitarian communism, coupled with our own drifting away from our foundational values, brings us to this defining moment and challenge.

Will we renew our covenant with the God who gave us freedom and our civilizational values or surrender our leadership to a godless, authoritarian system that has killed more of its own people in its ruthless demands for obedience than any other government system in history?

All our freedoms are at stake.

The way we lose is to not recognize the fight we are already in and to fail to summon the courage and fighting spirit needed to preserve our freedoms and leadership. The defeat of the last communist global menace in the Soviet Union took decades of sustained, united confrontation from the West.

Communist China is a tougher opponent than the Soviet Union ever was. Bigger, more technologically sophisticated, economically far more powerful and equally as ruthless, the Chinese Communist Party will test our resolve and character as much as any time in the history of our republic.

That’s where our values come in.

We maintain the fight by standing together, all behind the fundamental values that Western civilization has always stood for: dignity and freedom for all.

So much divides our country today, but bigger are the freedoms that draw us together. We must openly, freely and even passionately discuss our honest differences but also our unifying values that have placed us in a position of global leadership on our nation’s 250th birthday.

Recognizing a common enemy to our most basic and cherished values has the potency to unite us. We were united after 9/11 by the challenge of global terrorism.

China is doing everything it can, using our freedoms of speech, assembly and press, to drive their diversionary messaging that the enemy is someone other than them. They infiltrate our social media and point to the problem as being Israel or the opposing political party or racial divisions or anything else to keep us from focusing on their drive for global hegemony. Why? Because once we are united against an obvious evil, we are powerful and at our best.

Ronald Reagan spent decades traveling America fighting Soviet communism, calling it out as inherently evil. He rallied the American public to move past dtente, where we simply co-exist, to a much clearer understanding of the threat we faced and the only real solution “We win, they lose.”

We are at another “civilizational moment” for the next Ronald Reagan to sound the alarm to the communist threat emanating from China. We and our freedom-loving allies must renew our core values to meet this menace.

Let’s all hope and pray God is stirring in the souls of our fellow countrymen and in our current and future presidents, the fervor and passion to save Western civilization from without and within.

• Ambassador Sam Brownback is the co-chair of the International Religious Freedom Summit and chairman of the National Committee for Religious Freedom. He served as Ambassador at Large for International Religious Freedom from February 2018 to January 2021, and as Governor of Kansas from 2011 to 2018. Prior to that he represented his home state in the United States Senate and the House of Representatives. He earned a B.S. from Kansas State University and a J.D. from the University of Kansas.