The Great Degeneration

"The Great Degeneration," (Penguin Press, New York, 2013) is a rather small volume written by Niall Ferguson, the Scottish contrarian, prolific author, and current professor of history at Harvard. He seeks to explain the decay of crucial institutions in four key areas; democracy, capitalism, rule of law, and civil society. True democracy provides for a majority of people being included in economic opportunity rather than providing for a small elite. Capitalism is the means or engine for this process. The rule of law provides for impartial adjudication of the inevitable conflicts, and civil society through volunteer associations provides opportunities to aid the less fortunate.  More specifically he sees the huge increase in public debt as a breaking of a "generational contract," and ever more complex regulation strangling the economy.
    Ferguson believes that this momentum provided by these institutions has peaked and is now declining in the West. He sees the reemergence of an "extractive" elite, lessening of economic opportunity, rule of lawyers rather than rule of law, and ongoing shrinkage of volunteer associations as the role of government continues to expand. Sadly, what he, raised by atheists, and continuing in that belief, does not see is the role of Christianity, and particularly Protestantism with its emphasis on individual relationship with God, and practice of the Bible on the rise of the institutions that he seeks to restore.
     Despite citing on page 116 the work of Marvin Olasky, a Christian historian, who shows the prodigious practical output of an association of 112 Protestant churches in New York city at the turn of the 20th century in establishing industrial and other schools, libraries, kindergartens, savings and loans, medical dispensaries and other beneficial things, Ferguson misses the implication. It is the decline of genuine Christianity as manifested in submission to the Lordship of Jesus Christ through obedience to the Word of God (the Bible) that is at the root of the decline of society and its relevant institutions.
    Particularly tragic in this is the reality that Ferguson has somehow escaped much of the prevailing Leftist academic orthodoxy, which allows him to actually think in a helpful way. May he surrender to his Creator and come to the cross of Jesus Christ.