It’s not just Western Civilization, but civilization itself in general has been unfriendly to genuine faith in God. Meanwhile, it’s quite possible to have a deep and strong culture without herding people into urban concentrations.
The whole purpose of a city is to increase the local population enough to allow specialization and efficiencies of scale. That points to materialism. It doesn’t require conscious materialistic goals for a city to turn out that way. It’s part of the package. And the whole point of civilization is to make it possible for people to live in cities. It requires a cultural refinement that restrains people from killing each other over petty differences. While that may sound like a good thing, the specific aim of developing a civic culture is to enable materialistic pursuits. Thus, those “petty differences” addressed arise only in terms of material-centric concerns.
It’s only hinted at in Genesis, but the original dispersion of humanity outside of Eden quickly divided into two groups: Children of God and Children of Men. Those terms are challenging to parse, but it basically means Children of Faith and Children of the Fall, respectively. The former would naturally have a far less materialistic interest. Thus, they would have been pastoral and rural. The latter group wasted no time in trying to build cities, and it climaxed with the Tower of Babel.
There is no way we will ever get rid of cities and civilizations until Christ returns. Of course, they will both tend to come and go, but they will never disappear as long as a significant portion of humanity remains materialistic in their pursuits. The issue here is that we would hope that people of faith would recognize that getting too comfortable in the urban environment is not a good thing.
I confess that God requires me to live in a suburb of Oklahoma City. I will be the first to tell you I don’t care for all the conveniences. I’ll use them because they can serve a divine purpose, but it is all derivative of the mission itself. If my mission didn’t include using the Internet, there would likely be zero reason for being in this environment. There’s a good reason why most of my bike rides take me out into rural areas: I don’t want to be in the city. I’d much rather spend my waking hours out in natural environments away from large concentrations of other people, especially people who really like being in the city. I want to spend more time with the “people” who aren’t fallen.
Meanwhile, a very critical vision in my Kingdom service is the image of people who belong to a revelation culture. They are fully aware of the heart-led way and the full depth of faith, but are prepared to go wherever God sends them. They would avoid getting sucked into the trap of “making the world a better place” because they are too busy trying to get folks interested in some other place, not this world.
It’s a culture oriented on divine revelation.
