Apostate by Kevin Swanson (Parker, CO: Generations with Vision, 2013)

With a sobering subtitle--"The Men who Destroyed the Christian West"--this book accomplishes a few things. First, excluding the chapter on Aquinas, the author walks through the past 400 years of Western Civilization and identifies key Apostates, from Descartes to Locke to Rousseau to Bentham to Emerson to Marx to Darwin to Nietzsche to Dewey to Sarte, and then the author applies the Biblical principle of judging a tree by its fruit. The end result--a very bleak 200+ pages that follow the demise-trajectory of the West. Second, while providing this high overview of the West's demise-trajectory, the author observes/comments several times that this rebellious-apostate experiment is about to end; the West is most certainly running on fumes, i.e. "The heyday of humanism is long gone. This experiment with godless materialism is almost over" (154). Thus, a society that sows death will eventually reap death, and we are most certainly in the latter reaping stage, e.g. the great wars from the prior century, legalization of on-demand abortion, etc. Third, the West is going to crash and burn, however, the author encourages Christians to prepare, engage, and build the next Christendom: "If we train our children in the knowledge that is rooted in the fear of God, and in the firm hope of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, then our children will be the ones motivated and equipped to rebuild our broken-down systems. Our children will plant gardens in the ashes of what used to be called "Western Civilization" (301).