In 2021, more babies in England and Wales were born outside marriage than to wedded couples. Official statistics show that 48.7 percent of babies that year were born to a legal couple, falling below the 50 percent threshold for the first time since records began in 1845. Melanie Phillips

Since cohabitations break down far more frequently than marriages, particularly when cohabiting couples have children, the growth of cohabitation has served as an engine of mass fatherlessness. Melanie Phillips

The most important target of these radicals was the most fundamental building block of Western society—the institution of lifelong monogamous marriage. Melanie Phillips

Owing their genesis to the Marxist doctrine that all human relationships consist of a struggle for power, these ideologies set group against group in a struggle for cultural supremacy and an unending spiral of ever-more extreme positions. Melanie Phillips

Ancient Israel provided the model for thinkers who shaped both kingship in the UK and governance in the US. Biblical Israel, notes David Nirenberg, had always provided a model for Christian politics. Melanie Phillips

The Torah was the world’s first blueprint for social and religious order that sought to reduce the concept of hierarchy. It placed unprecedented emphasis instead on well-being and the dignity of the common person. Melanie Phillips

The Mosaic laws were not enforced by despotic authority but were voluntarily adopted through individual self-discipline. This gave the world the concept of individual accountability. Melanie Phillips

By contrast, the Hebrew Bible produced the revolutionary idea that every individual was worthy of equal respect. This derived from its perception that humanity had been fashioned in the image of God. Melanie Phillips

The Greeks had little respect for human life. In such ancient cultures, mankind was the hapless instrument of a higher cosmic order that determined the fate of human beings. Individuals were merely the playthings of the gods. People weren’t equal. Melanie Phillips

The West’s abandonment of its biblically-based structures created a vacuum into which the Islamists have marched. They understood something that the West had forgotten—that religion was essential to a culture’s understanding of itself, and that without a religious underpinning, no culture would survive. They understood that the West was evacuating its culture of religion, meaning, and purpose, and so would no longer be prepared to defend it. Melanie Phillips