Was watching the Timcast with Milo on and thought this point in particular deserved seperate discussion given not just recent but years of events.
The point Milo raised was that the ammendments in America can only work with a Christian society, the 2nd only works if you value life and the 1st only works in a society that regularly attends confession. He obviously has a bias but I want to expand that.
We can see that there's two aspects that is really damaging western society, constant attacks on Christianity and not really any other religion (Jew's get few but quickly slapped down by establishment) and a more individualistic view of the world.
For Democracy to work you need everyone to have a stake in it, everyone to share the same morality and everyone to want to improve their communities. On all fronts we've seen either a decrease or an abandonment of each of these values thanks to education policies, media and mass illegal immigration from conflicting cultures.
So the questions, can Democracy only exist in a fully Christian society, should the West no longer be a democracy and if so what system should take it's place, obviously not communism as no matter what that never works.
Only? Hard no.
Communal values and self-sacrifice can exist without Christianity, and in fact I believe the degradation of modern Christianity's fire and brimstone side in the US is basically what precipitated the failure of the wider population to defend their values and the bloodless corruption of American style democracy we've seen today.
Old-school Christianity worked pretty well, it wasn't warmongering enough to cause undue suffering and the accountability story of Heaven and Hell kept the common man from descending into an everyone for themselves scramble too easily. For those that needed someone else to tell them right from wrong it gave a healthy set of moral guidelines that promoted selflessness and communal good that allowed cooperative societies to flourish instead of coercive ones.
But old-school Christianity didn't completely throw out the more hardcore elements of the old testament like modern Christianity has done. It wasn't just blindly turning the other cheek forever to let god sort it out in the afterlife. Holding to both old and new testament carried some contradictions but looking at everything we know about humanity, those who need someone else to hand them a moral compass clearly have no problem ignoring cognitive dissonance.
If an outsider poked the community hard enough they would crusade the fuck out of them, and feel good about it whilst they did so. And if their neighbors started abandoning their more charitable values of Christianity to take advantage of the community, the old testament taught them that if they didn't do something about those bad neighbors before it got out of control, then god might just flatten their whole city or flood the whole damned planet.
Old-school Christianity knew how to put the literal fear of god even into non-believers, and because there will always be non-believers that was the only reason it succeeded. It did lead to some oppression of benign or even benevolent non-believers and some unnecessary stake burnings (I say some because even if they weren't actually cavorting with the devil, if the whole village agreed they were evil, maybe the community really was better off without them. Although there clearly were a bunch of false positives through hysteria or jealousy). But corrupt authority figures also didn't mark Christian cultures as easy pickings for taking advantage of, they would still retaliate as a community like every other culture. It isn't my ideal solution but I can't argue with the net results for fairness and happiness, compared to some of the ills of other cultures in history.
But I don't think that balance can ever be re-obtained now with Christianity specifically. The veil has been lifted, almost no-one would believe god would start dropping nukes from orbit anymore, and too many people need that belief to hold society as a whole more on the cooperative side of that balance.
For democracy to become viable again, people need to learn to personally take responsibility for and take part in policing their communities again. And that absolute pacifism is as much a vice as any other form of intellectual laziness or responsibility dodging. And maybe, to stop pretending you can't put a value on human life and start actually trying to properly weigh that value on your own terms, rather than letting those in power decide implicitly on the value of your life without ever saying it out loud, people need to learn to decide for themselves if a few dozen old people's lives are worth a million lifetimes of suffering and forced servitude. Only once the bad fear the good as much as the good fear the bad will mutual cooperation become more viable than taking advantage of people. You don't actually need god to sanctify righteous vengeance for that, you just need a shared moral system held sincerely and the will to cost effectively weed out those who would take advantage of your community.