Many men today speak passionately about the collapse of Western society. Women, they say, no longer respect them. Gender roles are in chaos. Children grow up without fathers, if they are born at all. Immigration worries them, particularly from Islamic countries. “These backward people,” they say, “do not respect our hard-earned freedoms. If we let them in, it won’t be long before they replace us.”
This position suffers from a fundamental contradiction: the West is regarded as the superior culture because in it individuals, male or female, are free and equal before the law; however, when the same freedom affects the family, it is suddenly taken as proof of our inferiority. A culture in which women are able to pursue their life project without (these men as) Father is described as sick and vulnerable to outside influence. Thus, individuals should not in fact be entirely free, but subject once again to ancient rules governing their genitals.
I think these ideas reflect a deep-seated insecurity and a misunderstanding of what the West represents. In a way, the history of the West has consisted in managing the anxiety provoked by the loss of paternal authority over female sexuality and reproduction. Seen from this perspective, the present state of society may not be healthy, but it makes sense: it is the continuation of that historical movement toward a world of adults — individuals no longer governed by real or symbolic parents.
Moses and the displaced father
The root of the Western imagination lies in stories such as that of Moses in the Hebrew Bible. This story is not merely about the liberation of a people; it is also a family romance that immediately raises a question: where is Moses’s father? One need only read the story — the man is nowhere to be found.
Pharaoh, by contrast, is very much present. He fears the growth of the Hebrews, so he orders the death of their newborns. In response, Moses’s mother, Jochebed, hides her child and sets him afloat on the Nile, where he is rescued and adopted by Pharaoh’s own daughter. The child survives through the actions of women who defy paternal authority. Moses grows up within the Pharaoh’s household, only to return later and overthrow him with the aid of a more powerful and distant paternal figure: God.
The story of Moses prefigures a central Western motif: the elevated son — the child abandoned or threatened by Father, preserved by Mother, and returned as Liberator. Unlike other mythologies, this is no longer a vigorous, masculine battle among powerful gods. It is a human drama, situated in real families and households. This feminisation — or humanisation — of ancient myth marks something distinctively Jewish and prepares the ground for Christianity.
Christianity and the Triumph of the Child
Many are turning back to Christianity in an attempt to form families today. Famous intellectuals like Jordan Peterson capitalise on this, invoking a masculine God to justify social order against a feminine chaos. In this narrative, Christianity is what kept the West from dissolving into disorder: it sanctified the monogamous family, established a “natural” social hierarchy, and provided a moral framework that balanced freedom with responsibility.
But this quaint appeal is embarrassingly out of date. If fatherly order and responsibility are what matter, Islam also claims to balance freedom with law on their own terms. Why not convert to Islam? At this point these enlightened men fall back on the other claim: that what truly distinguishes our culture is freedom and its openness to reason and questioning. But if that is the case, then Christianity must also be open to questioning. And when we look at it historically in this light, the irony becomes even clearer.
Christianity arose as a religion of slaves, women, and outsiders — people who were not fathers of households but dependents within them. Its “freedom” was not the libertas of the Roman paterfamilias but quite the opposite. And its symbolic architecture reflects that.
Indeed, one does not need to look far to see what distinguishes Christianity from Islam and other religions: Jesus is not a patriarch but a son — celibate, virginal, eternally childlike. His teaching does not reinforce the father’s power but relativises it, dissolving kinship into a new community: “Who is my mother, and who are my brothers?” Pointing to his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my Father in heaven is my brother and sister and mother.” (Matthew 12:48–50)
This sentiment stems from a more fundamental hostility toward kinship itself. Jesus makes this explicit when he declares: “If anyone comes to me and does not hate father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters — yes, even their own life — such a person cannot be my disciple.” (Luke 14:26) Such words are shocking when measured against the reverence for parents found in most other cultures. They show that Christianity does not merely subordinate family to God, but actively breaks the sacred tie between parents and children. This hostility was not an invention of the Church fathers. It was an adaptation from a theme the Romans had inherited from Ancient Greece.
From Jocasta to Mary
Greek myth had already dramatised the conflict of father and son in the act of cosmic creation; however, nothing illustrates it clearer than the story of Oedipus. This story may be the core of all Western literature and popular culture, from the Bible to Star Wars, with its eternal question: Who are my real parents? (Sophocles, Oedipus Tyrannus).
The story begins in Thebes when King Laius, fearing displacement, orders to expose his newborn son. His wife Jocasta obeys, but the boy survives with the help of a shepherd. Oedipus grows up in Corinth believing to be the son of Polybus and Merope, the local rulers, until an oracle drives him back towards Thebes. On the way, Oedipus ‘unknowingly’ kills his father Laius. Then, Jocasta, also ‘unknowingly,’ receives her son back into her bed. Oedipus, now King of Thebes, uncovers the truth and is condemned, while Jocasta takes her own life. Both mother and son are destroyed under the weight of the dead father, whose law of kinship — the prohibition of incest — continues to rule them.
Christianity sanctifies this doomed alliance in the figure of Mary. Emerging in the Hellenistic world among Jews, Christianity transforms the Oedipal tragedy. In Jesus, the son displaces the father without condemnation. He becomes “one with the Father,” while the mother is absolved of incest through virginity. The paternal role dissolves into distance: no threatening Laius, no Joseph exercising authority — only a transcendent God. Yet this God remains a paternal figure, still standing above women, even as his authority recedes.
Christianity is not a regression to pre-civilisational matriarchy, but something new: a religion centred on the child. The crime that destroyed Oedipus and Jocasta is symbolically elevated: the mother orbiting the son-father in the role of spouse-daughter. Through virginity, the mother becomes childlike herself, freed to a degree, yet still under the distant gaze of the Father in heaven.
Dad is dead
Nietzsche’s declaration — “God is dead” — was a poetic echo of something older. What had been dying for centuries was not God as such, but the Father: the figure who once stood between women and their sexual freedom.
Where Laius sought to control Jocasta’s womb, where Joseph’s God hovered over Mary, no such figure remains today. The long arc from Athens to Christianity and on to modernity ends with the daughter confronting the absence of the Law, discovering her own capacity to choose.
This transition cannot be easy. The collapse of the father does not immediately bring clarity. It produces confusion, excess, and symbolic disorder. “Mother” dies too. What remains is a vacuum in which desire, identity, and reproduction are renegotiated in unstable ways.
Some contemporary phenomena are therefore genuinely disturbing: the denial of sexual difference, the pressure placed on immature children regarding sexual identity, the persecution of men by women “empowered” by the secular state. There is, undeniably, a form of madness here. In this sense, the men who sense disorder are not entirely wrong.
But I think they are wrong about its cause — and its cure. What is collapsing is not Western civilisation, but the final remnants of a paternal structure that Christianity itself had already hollowed out from within. What remains is a far more demanding task: a world of adults who assume individual ownership of their reproductive bodies.