A warning from history

What holds a civilization together, a shared faith, a sense of nationhood, or the bonds of family? The history of the West suggests it is not one but all three.

The shifting balance among God, Country, and Family has shaped our laws, borders, and most intimate loyalties. When the three fall out of proportion, civilizations crack; when they coexist in tension, they thrive. But as history shows, when any one pillar attempts to dominate or eradicate the others, the result is instability, conflict, and profound human suffering.

The original imbalance: When family dominated Tribalism

Before the great universalisms of Rome or the Church, the default human order was one where the "Family" pillar reigned supreme.

This was the world of tribalism, where all political, social, and moral life was defined by the kin-group. In such a system, loyalty is owed exclusively to one's own bloodline, not to a shared set of laws, a civic identity, or a fellow citizen. This "Family" dominance created a zero-sum world of blood feuds and constant, low-level warfare. This imbalance is starkly illustrated in early Italy, where Rome itself spent centuries in brutal conflicts, such as the Samnite Wars, to subdue neighboring tribes who prioritized their own kin-group above any shared "Italian" identity.

In this world, fealty was to blood, not law, making the "Country" pillar, a stable state built on shared ideas, impossible. The "God" pillar, too, remained weak, reduced to ancestral spirits and parochial deities rather than a transcendent, universal moral code capable of uniting strangers.

The theocratic imbalance: When "God" dominated all

Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in 476 AD, Europe was left with a massive power vacuum. Into this void stepped the one institution with continental reach, a unified structure, and a claim to ultimate authority: the Church.

This era, loosely defined from the Early Middle Ages to the close of the Investiture Controversy (c. 11th-12th centuries), saw the pillar of "God" assert supremacy over "Country." The political theory of the time was theocracy, where secular rulers were seen as subservient to spiritual rulers. The Investiture Controversy (peaking around 1077) was a conflict between Pope Gregory VII and Holy Roman Emperor Henry IV over who had the right to appoint bishops. When Henry challenged the Pope, he was excommunicated, forcing him to stand barefoot in the snow at Canossa to beg for forgiveness. The power of "Country" was brought to its knees by "God."

In this system, "God" was not a pillar in society; it was the society. This dominance extended deep into the "Family" pillar. The Church alone defined the terms of marriage, legitimacy, and inheritance. It managed what little education and social welfare existed, absorbing the functions of the family and rendering it a subordinate unit whose primary purpose was defined by the Church: procreation and the fulfillment of sacraments. This system eventually cracked under its own weight, leading to dissent and a violent correction.

The rise of the state: The pillar of "country" asserts itself

The challenge to theocracy came from within the "God" pillar itself. Martin Luther's Ninety-five Theses in 1517 shattered the religious unity of Europe, sparking the Protestant Reformation. This theological dispute quickly became a political one. Princes and kings saw an opportunity to break from papal authority and establish their own sovereignty. The resulting conflict was the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618-1648), a brutal religious and political war that ravaged Central Europe.

The war's conclusion, the Peace of Westphalia (1648), was a monumental turning point. It effectively ended the era of theocracy and gave birth to the modern nation-state. The new principle was Cuius regio, eius religio, "Whose realm, his religion." The "Country" pillar had successfully asserted its sovereignty, forcing the "God" pillar to retreat from total political dominance.

This new balance, however, was not just between "God" and "Country." The newly empowered "Country" pillar immediately began to assert its own influence over the "Family." States began to introduce civil marriage, competing with the Church's authority. They took an interest in public education, seeking to mold children into loyal citizens and future soldiers, a role previously held by the Church or the family unit itself. The "Family" was beginning to be squeezed between the two larger, competing powers.

The new idol: When the nation became its own religion

For the next 150 years, this balance held. But the French Revolution in 1789 represented a change as radical as the rise of theocracy. The revolutionaries didn't just want to balance the "God" pillar; they wanted to remove it. In their place, they elevated a new, all-powerful deity: the Nation. In the "Reign of Terror," revolutionaries systematically de-Christianized France. They replaced the Christian calendar, desecrated churches, and established the atheistic "Cult of Reason" and later the deistic "Cult of the Supreme Being." The "God" spot was quite literally filled by a new state religion. The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (1789) captures this transfer of ultimate authority: "The principle of all sovereignty resides essentially in the nation. Nobody nor individual may exercise any authority which does not proceed directly from the nation."

Sovereignty no longer came from God to a Pope or from God to a King. It came from the Nation itself. This was the birth of modern Nationalism. The "Country" pillar had now become a secular religion, demanding total devotion, ideological purity, and human sacrifice, while also viewing the "Family" pillar as a unit in service to its glory. The levée en masse (mass conscription) of the Napoleonic Wars was the ultimate expression of this: the sons of the family now belonged, first and foremost, to the Nation.

This new imbalance created a critical distinction from the earlier theocratic era. While the Church's temporal dominance led to its own abuses, these could be critiqued as failures of human practice or perversions of an underlying Christian moral code. The new religion of Nationalism, however, possessed no such transcendent code of conduct. Its only ethic was the good of the Nation, a moral framework that could justify any action, no matter how brutal, in its own name. This lack of a higher moral boundary, where the Nation itself was the ultimate good, is what set the stage for the cataclysms of World War I and World War II.

The 20th century's black hole: When the state consumed everything

The nationalist imbalance of the 19th century culminated in the 20th century with two rival totalitarian ideologies: Fascism and Communism. These ideologies represented two distinct totalitarian pathologies: Fascism as a pathological hypertrophy of the "Country" pillar, and Communism as a new ideology that sought to consume and destroy all three pillars entirely.

Fascism, and particularly German National Socialism, provides a terrifyingly clear example. The "Country" pillar, redefined as the Volk (people) or Race, became the new, all-consuming god. It was the absolute center of all morality and life. The "God" pillar was either co-opted (the "Positive Christianity" movement, the Reichskirche) or brutally suppressed (the persecution of dissenting pastors like Dietrich Bonhoeffer). The "Family" was systematically perverted and subverted. Its purpose was reduced to its biological function: breeding for the state (e.g., the Lebensborn program). Loyalty was forcibly transferred from parents to the Party via state-run organizations like the Hitlerjugend (Hitler Youth), which taught children to spy on their own parents.

While Fascism idolized a twisted version of "Country," Communism, in its theory, sought to destroy all three pillars in the name of a new global "Class." It is explicitly atheistic. The state actively suppressed and persecuted religion, seeing it as a tool of oppression. Karl Marx famously called religion the "opium of the people," a drug to keep the working class complacent. Communism is theoretically internationalist, seeking to erase national borders and identities ("Workers of the world, unite!") in favor of a global proletariat. However, in practice, it often mutated into a form of Russian or Chinese nationalism. Moreover, it was the first political ideology to systematically attack the family structure itself, viewing the traditional family as a bourgeois, property-based institution that instilled non-communist values. The state sought to replace family loyalty with total loyalty to the Party. Communism, therefore, represents the ultimate imbalance, a black hole that attempts to consume God, Country, and Family, leaving only the Party-State.

The American experiment: Secularism as the balancing act

Against this backdrop of violent imbalance, the American system of democracy and its specific model of secularism were designed to institutionalize a lasting balance between the three pillars.

The American Founders, having witnessed the dangers of a state-run "God" pillar in Europe, sought a solution that did not involve destroying religion, as the French revolutionaries did. Instead, they protected the "God" pillar while simultaneously separating it from the "Country" pillar. The First Amendment is this balancing act: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…"

Crucially, though often unstated, this system also created a protected sphere for the "Family" pillar. By limiting the power of the state through a Constitution, a Bill of Rights, and the principle of federalism, the American model implicitly recognized the family as a pre-political institution. Rights of privacy, parental authority, and the home as a protected space are all part of this framework that views the family as an institution the state must recognize and protect, not create or command.

This balance was never perfect. The American experiment has been fraught with its own violent struggles to find equilibrium: the Civil War, the moral failings of slavery and segregation, and ongoing, divisive culture wars. However, these struggles do not mark failure but proof that the balancing act endures.

The contemporary challenge: A new imbalance?

Today, the balancing act faces new and disorienting challenges. The 21st-century threat may not be a single, overpowering pillar, but rather a simultaneous erosion of all three.

- The "God" pillar faces a decline in traditional faith in the West, often replaced by intense political ideologies that function as "new religions," or by a pervasive public apathy toward the transcendent.

- The "Country" pillar is weakened from without by globalization, which makes borders more porous, and fractured from within by a resurgent tribalism and a loss of shared civic identity.

- The "Family" pillar faces new and profound stresses: economic pressures that make family formation difficult, a culture of radical individualism, deep state intervention in education and welfare, radical feminism, gender theory, and a technological wave that can isolate individuals and undermine parental authority.

The 20th-century threat was tyranny, born from one pillar crushing the others. The 21st-century threat may be incoherence, a society of disconnected individuals, lacking transcendent morals, a shared civic project, or stable generational bonds.

Our politics today, whether left or right, increasingly substitutes identity for duty and outrage for meaning. The result is not the tyranny of one pillar, but the hollowing of all three. The danger is not oppression but emptiness, a civilization forgetting why it exists. Only by recovering purpose in all three spheres can the West avoid dissolving into noise.

The challenge, then and now, is not to erase any one pillar, but to hold all three in a difficult, dynamic, and necessary tension, the only balance by which a civilization endures.