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France Has Forgotten How to Transmit Its CultureBy: Xavier-Laurent Salvador&nbsp; 1. The School That Made France France once possessed one of the most powerful instruments of cultural transmission in the world: its school system. The French Republic used schools to make French the common language of a country that was still linguistically diverse. In Brittany, as in other regions, generations of children learned French at school while regional languages progressively disappeared from public life. The methods used were sometimes brutal, and nobody should wish to reproduce them today. <a data-mce-href="https://eduscol.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/l-idee-republicaine-2024-72816.pdf?attachment" href="https://eduscol.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/l-idee-republicaine-2024-72816.pdf?attachment">But the historical fact remains: the Republican school had a deliberately unifying mission. It believed that a common language and culture could be</a> <a data-mce-href="https://eduscol.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/l-idee-republicaine-2024-72816.pdf?attachment" href="https://eduscol.education.gouv.fr/sites/default/files/document/l-idee-republicaine-2024-72816.pdf?attachment">transmitted</a> . The same confidence existed outside metropolitan France. From Algeria to Vietnam, from Central Africa to Pondicherry, French schools transmitted the French language and elements of French culture. My point is certainly not to defend colonization. It is to observe the extraordinary confidence France once had in the possibility of cultural transmission.&nbsp; A country that once believed it could teach French civilization in Pondicherry now doubts its ability to teach French grammar in Paris. Something else happened after decolonization. The necessary criticism of colonial domination gradually became, in parts of French intellectual life, a suspicion of the very idea of cultural transmission. Historical criticism changes nature when it produces a permanent culture of national repentance. In the process, two very different things have been confused: imposing a culture by force, and believing that a civilization has something worth transmitting. 2. A European Crisis of Transmission The latest PISA results make the consequences difficult to ignore. In 2025, French results in mathematics and reading fell again compared with 2022. In all three main subjects, performance is now among the lowest ever measured by PISA in France. Compared with 2015, the proportion of low-performing students has increased by 12 percentage points in mathematics and 11 in reading (https://www.oecd.org/en/publications/pisa-2025-results- volume-i-country-notes_2d4ff9ea-en/france_6d229453-en.html). France is not alone. The deterioration observed across many Western education systems suggests something deeper than the failure of one government or one reform. We may be facing a crisis in our understanding of education itself. Immigration adds another difficulty, although it cannot simply be described as the cause of educational decline. At the beginning of the educational pipeline, schools must integrate children from increasingly diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. At the other end, universities have themselves become highly internationalized. At my own university, Sorbonne Paris Nord, approximately one quarter of undergraduate students are foreign nationals. At Master’s level the proportion is around one third, with a strong representation of students from North Africa. In our internal figures, the proportion reached 37 percent in the second year of the Master’s degree. There is nothing wrong with foreign students studying in France. Many are excellent students. The question is different. A society receiving populations from different cultural backgrounds needs a particularly strong idea of what it wishes to transmit. Immigration did not create the French educational crisis. But an educational system that has lost confidence in assimilation is poorly equipped to deal with the challenge immigration creates. The old French school was interested less in where the parents came from than in where the children were going. 3. Laïcité Is Part of the Answer This is where France may sometimes be misunderstood by American conservatives. I am a medievalist specializing in the history of the Bible. I also teach at the Catholic University of Paris. I therefore have little reason to want Christianity to disappear from European culture. On the contrary, I do not think European civilization can be understood without the Bible and Christianity. Yet I also believe strongly in French laïcité. There is no contradiction. French secularism creates a common civic space in which the religious identity of a child does not determine his relationship with the state. This principle is especially important today. In parts of France where communal and Islamist pressures have become strong, laïcité remains one of our most powerful instruments for protecting a common civic culture. The answer to Islamization is not necessarily for the French Republic to become less secular. It may be for the Republic to become more confident in its own secularism. Jean Zay, one of the great Ministers of Education of the French Republic, wrote in 1936 that schools should remain “the inviolable sanctuary into which the quarrels of men do not enter.” His purpose was to protect schools from political propaganda. In 1937, he explicitly extended the same principle to religious proselytism (https://enseignement-moral-et-civique-pedagogie.web.ac-grenoble.fr/la-laicite-en-textes/jean-zay-1904-1944-circulaires-du-ministre-de-leducation-nationale). The sentence remains remarkably modern. Children do not need schools to reproduce every political, religious and cultural conflict of adult society. They need schools to teach them. 4. Universities and Academic Sovereignty The same problem appears at university in a different form. Last June, I testified before a French Senate commission on academic excellence. My argument was that what is commonly called “wokism” is not the fundamental cause of the crisis of French universities. It is partly a symptom of something deeper: the loss of academic sovereignty. Research increasingly depends on competitive national and European funding. European cooperation has brought obvious benefits, including mobility and scientific partnerships. But funding creates incentives. European institutions increasingly associate higher education with transversal objectives concerning inclusion, gender equality, environmental transition and other political priorities. The European Strategy for Universities explicitly asks universities to foster diversity and inclusion and proposes institutional changes concerning diversity and gender equality (https://education.ec.europa.eu/sites/default/files/2022-01/communication-european- strategy-for-universities-graphic-version.pdf). The problem is not that Brussels tells a medievalist what to think about a medieval manuscript. It is that Europe increasingly helps determine which questions universities are rewarded for asking. What begins as a funding priority becomes an administrative vocabulary. What becomes an administrative vocabulary eventually reshapes academic institutions. This is why I prefer to speak about sovereignty rather than wokism. Scholarship requires a very simple freedom: the scholar must always retain the right to be wrong. If somebody proves tomorrow that my interpretation of a medieval biblical text is false, I must change my interpretation. That is scholarship. But when political categories, personal identity or lived experience become part of the proof itself, disagreement risks becoming a moral conflict. France does not need an American educational revolution. It needs to recover sovereignty over its own tradition. 5. Back to Basics, Forward with Technology The answer begins with something very simple: return to the foundations. Language first. Mathematics. History. Science. Literature. We often tell children that they must learn “critical thinking.” But critical thinking cannot exist in a vacuum. Before teaching students to criticize knowledge, we must give them knowledge to criticize. Critical thinking without knowledge very quickly becomes opinion. We also need to return to the classics. This year, at the Catholic University of Paris, I teach a course on the literature and cultures of Antiquity to students who generally know neither Greek nor Latin. We begin with the Greeks, with heroes, Athens and Thermopylae. But Western culture does not stop in Athens. It also passes through the biblical world, Rome and the emergence of Christian Rome. Before saying that schools should teach “our culture,” we must answer a difficult question: who is the “we”? The Western “we” is not a racial category. It is not even simply geographical. It is a historical construction. Greece, Rome, the Bible, Christianity, medieval civilization, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and modern science have all contributed to it. Teaching this inheritance does not require children to believe in it. It requires them to know it. But back to basics does not mean back to the past. Artificial intelligence may provide us with the most important educational opportunity in generations. Mass education has always had a mathematical problem. A teacher can teach thirty children, but cannot give each of them an hour of individual tutoring every evening. Wealthy families have always partly solved this problem with private tutors. Most families cannot. AI changes the equation. Outside the classroom, every child could have access to a patient tutor able to explain the same mathematical problem five times, correct grammar, practise a foreign language, review a history lesson or identify gaps in basic knowledge. But one distinction is essential. AI must be the tutor, never the professor. The teacher decides what is worth knowing. The teacher defines the curriculum, establishes standards and evaluates achievement. AI explains, repeats, trains and adapts. I would therefore keep AI outside the classroom as much as possible, but make it available everywhere around it. The teacher teaches. The machine helps the student learn. 6. Learning to Transmit Again The crisis of French education is not only a crisis of resources or methods. It is a crisis of transmission. France once possessed extraordinary confidence in its ability to transmit a language and a culture. Sometimes it did so too aggressively. We should learn from those mistakes. But we should not conclude that transmission itself was the mistake. At school, we need again to teach language, mathematics, history, science and literature with demanding standards. At university, we need to restore academic sovereignty and the freedom of disciplines. In our understanding of culture, we need to recover the long history connecting Athens, Jerusalem and Rome to modern Europe. And we should use artificial intelligence to give every child something mass education has never been able to provide universally: individual attention. The objective is intellectual freedom. Education gives young people the knowledge through which they can become free. Before asking endlessly how we should teach, France, and perhaps Europe, must once again decide what it believes is worth teaching.&nbsp;Xavier-Laurent Salvador is a French medievalist, Agrégé de Lettres modernes and Habilité à Diriger des Recherches (HDR), specializing in the history of the Bible and its vernacular translations in the Middle Ages. He is Associate Professor at Sorbonne Paris Nord University (Paris 13) and also teaches at the Catholic University of Paris. His research focuses in particular on the Bible Historiale, medieval biblical exegesis, the history of the French language and digital humanities. He is co-founder and President of the Observatory of University Ethics (https://www.decolonialisme.fr), a network of French academics devoted to academic freedom, scientific standards and the study of contemporary ideological movements in higher education. In June 2026, he testified before the French Senate’s Commission of Inquiry on academic excellence and the future of French universities. He is also a regular contributor to French public debate through the press, radio and television. His recent books include Les Secrets de la Bible au Moyen Âge (Cerf, 2025), on the transmission and interpretation of the Bible in medieval culture, and Vérité et Écritures, devoted to the relationship between truth, language and Scripture.

France Has Forgotten How to Transmit Its Culture

You are invited to join the inaugural discussion of an informal global network on education on rights and responsibilities, actions, and on-going initiatives. This will be a virtual discussion from 0900-1000 EDT on September 18, 2026.We can't stress enough that this is not just a network for education advocates and experts. Education is foundational to all aspects of human flourishing, prosperity, national security, and strong and resilient sovereign nations and civilizations. We all have skin in the game--and we need to support those making a difference. See <a href="https://friendstoliberty.com/blog/universal-statement-on-education-freedom-and-responsibility">https://friendstoliberty.com/blog/universal-statement-on-education-freedom-and-responsibility</a> We also think our connections and conversations will be valuable to all of us, from all corners of the world. We recognize the diversity of educational systems. Rightly, the structure of education ought to be a prerogative of national sovereignty and should rightfully reflect the values, priorities, traditions, and culture of the people of and their land. Nevertheless, educating is a fundamental human activity. The “central purpose of education is to transmit humanity’s accumulated knowledge and wisdom, as well as our nation’s particular culture and heritage, to the next generation.” Therefore, there must be elements of an authentic and constructive educational experience that are fundamental to all free peoples, the foundation of healthy communities, nations, and societies that promote human flourishing. So, we all have challenges, opportunities, initiatives, and lessons learned to share with each other and plenty of opportunity to share, help, and support one another. If you would like to participate, please contact james.carafano@heritage.org&nbsp;

Invitation: Sept 18, 2026 Education Discussion

In this First Principles essay, Heritage Foundation scholar Jay W. Richards makes explicit the foundational premises—often tacit—that shape all of Heritage’s research and advocacy. He identifies 15 principles, arranged logically from the deepest foundations upward: moral realism and the natural law, God as the source of moral order, and human equality and dignity; then inalienable rights, government by consent, and the reality of human fallenness; and finally ordered liberty, the rule of law, limited government, religious liberty, the pre-political family, virtue, free enterprise, national defense, and patriotic citizenship. The essay is descriptive rather than prescriptive, aiming to provide a durable foundation for the conservative defense of the American Republic.Please find the First Principles essay: <a href="https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/the-heritage-foundation-first-principles?utm_source=THF_Email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=TheAgenda&amp;mkt_tok=ODI0LU1IVC0zMDQAAAGj0qSlje8uxfM43OgjZx_tWYKgJsBID8PDSJFqIq2G9D2Z8_fYxZksO7-5L_OJRWEPZq-vy-jZnXa9JU_3Epiltrh1V_gvBDW3n-gwZj7gSkzpflc" data-mce-href="https://www.heritage.org/conservatism/report/the-heritage-foundation-first-principles?utm_source=THF_Email&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign=TheAgenda&amp;mkt_tok=ODI0LU1IVC0zMDQAAAGj0qSlje8uxfM43OgjZx_tWYKgJsBID8PDSJFqIq2G9D2Z8_fYxZksO7-5L_OJRWEPZq-vy-jZnXa9JU_3Epiltrh1V_gvBDW3n-gwZj7gSkzpflc" style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit;" data-mce-style="font-family: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">here</a>Jay W. Richards, PhD, is Vice President of Social and Domestic Policy and William E. Simon Senior Research Fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

The Heritage Foundation First Principles

The conservative movement is in the midst of a global resurgence on the heels of key elections in the United States, Argentina, Italy, and beyond. However, many countries lack the conservative infrastructure needed to direct and sustain this growing momentum in recent and upcoming elections. In response to multiple inquiries from activists and academics around the world seeking guidance on how to establish a landmark, impactful conservative think tank in their own countries, we have gathered world-class experts to share their time and expertise. This workshop will not only provide expert knowledge and advice but will also be an invaluable opportunity to expand your network of conservative think tank professionals.&nbsp;Agenda (December 9) Welcome Fundraising and Development (Breakfast session)     Establishing and growing a donor base     Protecting research integrity Research and Values (Morning session)     Foundational ideas and applying conservative values to the modern policy debate     Developing a cohesive and relevant research agenda     Research methods     Building a research team&nbsp; Leadership and Management (Lunch session)     Establishing an effective leadership and operational structure     Building a media team&nbsp; Communications (Afternoon sessions)     Establishing and Growing Your Social Media Presence     Developing and implementing a media strategy&nbsp; Government Relations&nbsp;     Connecting with and influencing decision makers Partnerships     Amplifying reach through collaboration     Networking Events&nbsp;     Design and organize a successful event Developing Young Talent&nbsp;    Internships    Programs and activities &nbsp;&nbsp; Networking Reception (Evening session) If you are interested in participating contact glory.duran@heritage.org&nbsp; Please feel free to share this invitation.

Invitation: International Think Tank Boot Camp, December 9, 2026, Washington DC

Repost from American Mind: <a href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/keeping-the-wests-flame-burning/" data-mce-href="https://americanmind.org/salvo/keeping-the-wests-flame-burning/">https://americanmind.org/salvo/keeping-the-wests-flame-burning/</a> &nbsp;By: John-Henry KeenanAt the outset of Marco Rubio’s tenure as Secretary of State, his department introduced a new paradigm for U.S.-European relations: civilizational alliance. Rubio and his aides have persistently sought to remind Europe that our relationship is based not merely on trade deals and defense agreements, but ultimately on a shared Western anthropology and history.Rubio’s July 4 message declared,[America’s] seeds were planted by the philosophers of Athens, the imperial majesty of Rome, the monks and kings of medieval Christendom—centuries of European exploration, science, faith, and restless ambition finally unleashed from every constraint on the boundless American frontier. America was the destiny of an entire civilization. These overtures, though sometimes welcomed by European citizens bearing the brunt of civilizational decline, have been met in conventional diplomatic circles with reactions ranging from ambivalence to indignation. European elites are loath to admit they have a civilization to maintain, and if they do, they speak of it with contempt. Rather than face the matter head-on, the most typical response has been to accuse the U.S. of brashness and insincerity. Critics scoff that we are hypocrites for touting civilizational alliances while unabashedly pursuing America First policies. This apparent contradiction rests on three errors.First is ignorance of the very Western tradition Americans wish to revitalize, in which duty to one’s country is second only to God. This wisdom was passed down from Cicero to Augustine to Aquinas, who taught that “just as it belongs to religion to give worship to God, so does it belong to piety, in the second place, to give worship (cultum) to one’s parents and one’s country.” The duty of patriotism stems from the gift of life we received from particular people in a particular nation. Naturally, those who see no significance in national origin can see no duty stemming from it.But in truth, even nations that share a common civilization are perfectly free—and indeed obliged—to be patriotic and to pursue their own interests for the sake of their citizenry. Working to preserve a shared civilization is exactly what helps them clarify the just pursuit of interest or “interest well understood,” as Tocqueville calls it. For example, a businessman who is outmaneuvered in the market never objects to competitors seeking their own prosperity. He objects only if they cheat to get it. So too with nations. This is doubly true for the civilization that produced Aquinas and Tocqueville, Parliament and Congress.Second, these dynamics of Western civilization are lost on contemporary Europeans because they have abdicated both individual and national sovereignty. They fear individual action apart from collective consensus. Of course, this is to misunderstand both consensus and individuals, since authentic consensus arises only from the free assent of individuals. But contribution to a consensus is far from the only sovereign power individuals hold.There are a host of matters that individuals may decide for themselves without needing permission from anyone else. The sum of these choices makes up moral character, and indeed, sovereignty itself. To circumscribe them is to destroy the possibility of the moral greatness and virtue that the West champions. As is true for individuals, so also for nations.The nations of Europe have to a large extent surrendered their sovereignty to the E.U., which acts like a nation but does not take responsibility for its actions. Those in Brussels claim merely to be following the consensus of European nations, whose leaders themselves take no responsibility and dutifully follow the decisions of the E.U. To those within a system built on a shared abdication of responsibility, the sight of Americans letting their yes be yes and their no be no is an unconscionable disturbance of global order—and, if European member states catch on, to their job security.Third, abdication of sovereignty is not applied equally. The real objection is not so much to any national interest but to the assertion of American national interest. If Ghana or Paraguay stood up at the U.N. and cited their national interest, everyone would murmur appreciatively. Only strong nations are not supposed to seek their interests, and since the U.S. is the strongest, we are expected to support the interests of others over our own. This moral hierarchy is one of the glaring symptoms of how much globalist institutions have been captured and perverted by radical “Third Worldist” policies.But this critique rests on another false premise: that American national interest is inherently at odds with the welfare of others. In practice, the opposite is often true.America might be prosperous, but we also have millions of poor people living here, so many that we spend around 25% of our considerable budget for their ostensible welfare. The U.S. is also deeply concerned with global welfare. We dismantled boondoggle institutions like USAID precisely to redirect funds from woke nonsense to real needs. Just recently, Secretary Rubio spearheaded $100 million in direct aid to the Cuban people. Finally, another 15% of U.S. spending goes toward preserving the longest large-scale peace since the fall of Rome, enabling billions of otherwise vulnerable people to live in relative security.So separating U.S. interest from the interests of the poor and marginalized is dodgy at best.But on a deeper level, the contention that strong nations have no legitimate self-interest is a dangerous absurdity. Yet it is embedded deep in the minds of Western elites who distrust not the self-governing individual in principle, but only those who govern themselves well. The weaker, the meaner, and the baser, the more license they grant, particularly over those who are naturally stronger.This is the logic that has afforded migrant rape gangs the protection of law in Britain and outlawed objection to them. It is the logic that grants or withholds jobs and benefits based on race and victim status. It is the logic that demands the United States submit to tyrannical institutions like the International Criminal Court that could not even exist without the Pax Americana.It is difficult to pinpoint the source of these inversions. Many have suggested they spring from a perversion of Christian charity. That may be, although I hesitate to blame even the perversion of a theological virtue. Rather, one of the seven deadly sins seems a more likely culprit: despair.Many on the Left believe that the West never offered humanity anything besides oppression and that it now offers a vast storehouse of ill-gotten gains, good only for distribution and dissolution. On a fundamental level, Western nations have no right to pursue their own interests because they have no right to exist.America disagrees. Humanity’s best hope does not live in the grave of the West. It lives here, where the flame of Western civilization has been burning for 250 years. We intend to keep it burning, both for our own sake and for the world’s.

Keeping the West’s Flame Burning

Reposted from: <a href="https://americanreformer.org/2026/07/swedish-awakening/" data-mce-href="https://americanreformer.org/2026/07/swedish-awakening/">https://americanreformer.org/2026/07/swedish-awakening/&nbsp;</a> By: Henrik Schildt&nbsp;The Failure of Secularism Leaves a Fertile Field&nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; &nbsp; There are good reasons to believe today that Sweden is witnessing a rediscovery of the faith. The exhaustion of the Christian moral order that attempted to preserve Christian ethics after discarding Christian truth has in many ways opened the minds and hearts of young, predominantly male, Swedes to the reality of God. Yet this alone does not explain the return. The collapse of secular modernity explains the exhaustion of the old order and not the return of faith. At most, it prepares the ground. The seed itself comes from Christ.&nbsp;At a small café in downtown Stockholm last fall, Pentecostal pastor Josef Barkenbom preached from 1 Kings 14 on how we should not be fooled by the temptations of life without God. After the sermon, I encountered teenage boys attending a church for the very first time.&nbsp;In my native Sweden, long known for its exceptionally secular population and plummeting attendance at the Lutheran-Evangelical Church of Sweden – our effective state church – over the last half century, places like pastor Barkenbom’s newly planted Stockholm Church have begun to sprout. Baptist pastor Johnny Lithell, after a pastoral fellowship at Capitol Hill Baptist Church in Washington, D.C., planted a church in Gothenburg in 2018, and has seen a steady rise in members at his congregation. Across the country, the free churches, which are any Protestant denomination outside the Church of Sweden, have seen a considerable uptick in attendees and new members over the last year, especially among young men.&nbsp;An Empty Kingdom This seed of a Swedish Awakening of faith comes after nearly a century of Christian slumber. Up until the year 2000, when the Church of Sweden officially departed from state care, all Swedes received automatic church membership at birth. In 1975, 95 percent of Swedes were members; today’s figure is 51 percent. The liberalization of Protestantism in Sweden and much of the West after the Second World War, Sweden’s expansive welfare system, and the hyper-rationalization of public discourse all rendered church life superfluous. The state became a substitute for the church. The idea that all men were created with an immortal soul was thus deemed a peculiar anachronism.&nbsp;The Social Democratic party, which has governed Sweden for most of the last hundred years, incorporated the Christian concept of koinonia into its party program, but without any of its transcendent power. Solidarity became coercive through law. Moral language detached from salvation became accusatory, not redemptive. Christian moral obligations became bureaucratic entitlements.&nbsp;The American Mirror For a long time, Sweden has been susceptible to all things American. In the 1950s, author Vilhelm Moberg published the tetralogy, The Emigrants, which told the tale of Swedes leaving their famine-stricken homeland in the mid-1800s for greener pastures in America. Others fled religious persecution from the Church of Sweden, which banned Baptist, Pentecostal, and Presbyterian expressions of faith. Moberg’s story of Kristina and Karl-Oskar, who embarked for America on the ship Charlotta, is still required reading in Swedish schools. The conclusion was not the idea that America was the new Jerusalem, but rather that everyone has the right to seek better fortunes in a foreign land (which also partly explains Sweden’s generous immigration laws). America has since then become a kind of mythological place in the Swedish psyche, where great things are possible.&nbsp;As a result, when identity politics came crashing down in America in the 2010s, Sweden was quick to adopt its moral assumptions. The Swedish political, cultural, and media elite enthusiastically embraced its dogmas. Legislation imposed female quotas on company boards. Governmental agencies, including the police and Armed Forces, prioritized women and immigrants. In the name of anti-racism, the spread of Islam in Sweden was seen as progress, whereas Christianity was viewed as reactionary.&nbsp;Nowhere was this more visible than in the Swedish education system that heavily promoted female empowerment from a young age. Boys, who not only develop later than girls but are seen as transgressors within US-imported identity politics, were not only left behind, but also ignored. As a result of Sweden’s progressive politics, women today dominate 80 percent of all governmental authorities (which in Sweden are a staggering 450).&nbsp;Male motivation to seek work was weak in a world that viewed him as unwelcome. Young women fared better in education and at work and tended to discard men of lower social status. Young Swedish women today will get married. The question is whether it will be to the shrinking number of men of high status, their careers, or the state itself. Yet, for men, in the cradle-to-grave welfare state, there is little risk that he will fall too far. He will be left well fed and warm, but empty.The Limits of Secular Grace &nbsp;The experience of emptiness often leads to resentment and despair, as we have witnessed in the rise of the nihilistic alt-right. Sin-burdened man appears capable of rejecting God’s truth as much as seeking it. But when secular modernity has lost its appeal, its promises lose their hold on the human heart and fail to offer real satisfaction. The Parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 15:17 teaches us that when we are exposed to deep hunger, the Holy Spirit often begins His work. The longing that emerges is not evidence that God is absent, but that He has made the human heart for Himself, and by His grace is drawing it back toward its true end.Preparing the Ground Though Swedish conservatives focus on tradition, family and culture, the question of Sweden’s Christian origin, most visible on the golden cross of Christ against a blue Nordic sky on our flag, has until recently remained neglected. The center-right government that today steers the kingdom is rationalistic. The Christian Democrats and the Swedish Democrats – our most conservative parties in the Parliament – speak often of Christian values, but rarely of Christian faith. They speak of what works, but not what is worth living for.&nbsp;The collapse of secular modernity explains the exhaustion of the old order. It does not explain the return to faith. At most, it has prepared the ground for faith. The seed itself comes from elsewhere. Through God’s grace, this void is now being filled with the younger generation seeking Christ. What they seek is not entertainment or emotional uplift, but the recovery of a soulful order in a society that has become profoundly disordered. For a generation raised in schools and media that treated masculinity as a problem to be managed rather than a virtue to be formed, the free churches offer clear teaching, male leadership, and a call to responsibility. They are drawn not by spectacle or sentiment, but by the reintroduction of authority, first the authority of Scripture, and ultimately the authority of God Himself.The Return of Authority This is why the free churches are succeeding where the Church of Sweden falters. The latter, shaped by decades of liberalization and institutional caution, instinctively recoils from Bible-centered preaching when young men ask for it. The former, less burdened by cultural accommodation, dares to teach the Gospel, including its demands. Here the young men find a place where their hunger for structure, purpose, and moral seriousness is not pathologized but directed toward submission to Christ.&nbsp;However, the Church of Sweden remains the default church for many coming to faith. Last year it recorded, for the first time in decades, an uptick in young people seeking first communion. Yet not everyone is equally welcome. In April last year, two female vicars wrote in Dagens Nyheter (Today’s News), Sweden’s largest newspaper, that young men had begun attending Sunday services asking for Bible-centered guidance. Their hunger for spiritual direction was met with suspicion. The vicars feared that Bible-centered Christianity was homophobic and misogynistic, and blamed their beliefs on American pastors from the internet.&nbsp;The Gospel without Apology Yet it is precisely these young men’s attraction to robust, Bible-centered preaching, often influenced by the witness of confessional Reformed churches in the United States, that reveals the true character of this awakening. Far from a mere cultural import or online fad, the clear proclamation of God’s sovereignty, the total authority of Scripture, and the demand of the Gospel is being used by the Holy Spirit to awaken a generation. What the liberal vicars dismiss as “American pastors” is actually the sound theological inheritance of the Reformation, now returning to Swedish soil through free church pulpits and digital voices, calling young men not to cultural conservatism but to living submission to Christ.The Church of Sweden’s instinctive turn toward therapeutic and feminine non-confrontational spirituality risks alienating these men once again. But if the free churches continue to call them to submission to God and Scripture, they will shape a generation capable of faithfulness in a society that has long abandoned the language of command. This would in many ways mitigate the negative impact that Sweden suffers from the erosion of the mediating institutions. Tocqueville worried about the dangers of societies where there is no middle layer of institutions between state and man.&nbsp;The Seed of the Harvest This seed of awakening, still modest, bears watching not only for Sweden but for the broader West. It suggests that even the most thorough experiment in secularized Christian ethics eventually reaches its limit. The young men returning to these churches are not fleeing modernity so much as discovering, by the drawing of the Holy Spirit, that a world without transcendence cannot finally satisfy the deepest longings the emptiness of secularism has awakened. Whether this seed grows into a genuine Swedish spiritual awakening will depend on whether the churches offer belonging with burden, and whether they have the courage to speak with authority – the authority of the living God – in an age that has grown suspicious of all authority except its own.&nbsp;

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France Has Forgotten How to Transmit Its Culture

Invitation: Sept 18, 2026 Education Discussion

The Heritage Foundation First Principles

Invitation: International Think Tank Boot Camp, December ...

Keeping the West’s Flame Burning

Swedish Awakening