Day is dying in the West

 When Methodist poet Mary Lathbury wrote an evening hymn in 1877 for the Lake Chautauqua summer camp movement, she wasn’t being political.  “Day is dying in the west” she wrote, meaning quite literally the sun was setting and night was coming.  But even then we could continue to worship God “while the deepening shadows fall” and “the stars veil Thy face”.

I, however, can’t get away from that phrase and apply it to a haunting and daunting reality.  Day is dying in the west for sure.  And metaphorically speaking, truth (day and light) is waning in Western civilization.  For thousands of years, the West stood against error, whether paganism and barbarism in its young days or Nazism and Communism in more recent days. 

Last December, the Telegraph ran an article “The signs that Europe really is doomed – and taking Britain down with it”.  So the concern is broadly based.

A recent glimpse – one small incident among hundreds every year – was the death of an 18 year old Southampton university student named Henry Nowak.  He got into an altercation with Vickrum Digwa, a member of the Sikh religion and Manchester police were called.  When they arrived and questioned these boys, Digwa said he was racially insulted.  Nowak said he had been stabbed and was having trouble breathing.  The recently DEI indoctrinated Manchester police roughly dragged Nowak down a gravel driveway and forcefully handcuffed him, while Nowak repeatedly pleaded throughout his ordeal of his stabbing and breathing difficulty.  Some 3-4 minutes later, Nowak left handcuffed, face-down on the ground becomes unconscious.  An officer decides to check his pupils, which are unresponsive.  Moment later, Henry Nowak is dead.

The cover-up by Manchester police began, trying hard to squash this story, going as high as the Prime Minister’s office.  Relentless outcries forced release of body-cam footage and while edited, it showed enough.  Henry Nowak had been stabbed and officers were pre-disposed to believe the Muslim Sikh over the native-born white Brit.

As Frank Haviland writes in the European Conservative, “The true tragedy of Nowak’s death, however, is not just the callous indifference of those involved but what the response says about Britain, its governing class, and how far we have fallen as a nation.”

I’d go further.  Henry Nowak’s death is yet another glaring reminder:  day in dying the west.

 Last February 2025, the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship held a conference in London to give “significance in reestablishing and strengthening the foundations of Western civilization”.  While mostly Catholic, the conference invited other speakers, among whom was Christian thinker Os Guiness.  One notable thing he said: was that when people “disobey the ways of the Lord and don’t live as he calls us to live — it produces chaos and displacement, and finally exile. But if people return to him, he returns to them and restores their fortunes. […] So even in periods of deep decline, which we are experiencing now, we have the hope of return if we return to the Lord properly.” 

Indeed, the hope of Western civilization has always been, and remains, in the Lord God of heaven.  May His kingdom come!