LONDON — As a dangerous heat wave sizzled outside, triggering warnings to avoid unnecessary exertions, more than 4,000 people gathered indoors at a June 23-25 conference in England’s capital city to tackle the daunting task of saving Western civilization.

The ARC Conference is hosted by the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship, an international movement co-founded in 2023 by renowned Canadian psychologist, author and YouTube superstar Jordan Peterson and British billionaire Paul Marshall. The organization aims to foster human flourishing and prosperity by recognizing and drawing inspiration from the West’s “moral, cultural, economic, and spiritual foundations.”

Marking its third year, the conference featured a lengthy list of speakers encompassing politicians, academics, artists, entrepreneurs, faith leaders and other influencers from a wide variety of fields.

“ARC brings all these different areas together, encourages public debate on many different pressing societal topics, so that more and more people understand what might be necessary to rescue Western civilization,” Austrian politician and Member of Parliament Gudrun Kugler told the Register.

“Once I get back home, I revisit what was discussed here,” added Kugler, who sits on the conference’s advisory board. “Over an entire year I benefit from the conversations in my professional and personal life.” 

Organized around the theme “The Age of Reconstruction,” this year’s conference featured short talks and panel discussions by U.S. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson, Harvard professor and happiness expert Arthur Brooks, author and scholar Carrie Gress, and children’s rights advocate Katy Faust, among others.

Soviet-born British comedian-turned-political commentator Konstantin Kisin set the tenor for the event in his opening address reflecting on liberty, speaking largely from the vantage point of Europe and the United Kingdom, but also more broadly. 

“‘Liberty’ is becoming a dirty word on both left and right,” he told conference participants, “because many now mistakenly associate liberty with the grotesque excesses of liberalism, which has mutated from the pursuit of freedom from tyranny to the pursuit of freedom from reality.”

Kisin went on to stress the importance of teaching our children against the pitfalls of the digital world, which pulls towards the atomization of individuals. “Human connection, family, community is what sustains our humanness, and no technology will ever replace it,” he said. 

“A society of responsible citizens will only be brought into existence by individuals who decide to do that thing that Jordan Peterson was brought into the world to remind us all to do,” Kisin concluded: “To take responsibility. Not by government diktat, not through the use of force, but by a voluntary choice exercised for the sake of not only your family and your community, but that of your own soul. The fact that we can do that is the beauty of our civilization.”

Conference topics ranged from spiritual foundations of the West to climate change to artificial intelligence, the war in Ukraine and the Middle East, demographic decline, and new definitions of feminism. 

ARC primarily seeks to provide a platform for conservative thought and encourages open debate. Not everyone, for example, agreed with human-rights activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in her break-out dinner-panel discussion moderated by The New York Times’ Ross Douthat, when she made the case for the Christian religion being superior to all others. Discussing the spiritual foundations of the West, it was clear that on the panel as well as in the audience, worldviews collided: There were atheists and Jews, agnostics, evangelicals and Catholics. 

American actor Kevin Sorbo, who is outspoken about his Christian faith, took part in a panel that discussed the impact of movies, television and music.

“I think it is fantastic what they are doing here, reaching out to people that are like-minded and not wanting to create bigger divisions,” Sorbo told the Register.

Widely known for his lead role in the hit 1990s TV series Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, Sorbo uses his fame to do movies with a Christian message.

“God put me on this road. I started 15, 16 years ago, with a movie called What If, directed by Dallas Jenkins, who is now doing The Chosen. Many others, like God’s Not Dead, followed,” he said. His next acting project is portraying Noah in the film The Flood: End of Mankind.

The image of the flood appeared apropos at this conference. Many seemed to allude to what conservative British politician and former Olympic rower Alex Story voiced as a common concern.

“The decline of Western civilization is becoming more obvious. It is very difficult for a lot of people to find a way of expressing their concern about what they see all around them,” he said. “They are not sure how to address it. What we’ve been trying to do with this conference is bringing a lot of the sectors together and reminding people of where we come from, intellectually, to be able to give them a sense of grounding.”

Marc Fromager, a Frenchman who formerly led the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need, came away impressed by the conference, his first. “Participants come from the United States, Australia, Great Britian, many European countries, but we all face the same challenges. We have the same problems also in France,” he told the Register.

Although not intended as a Christian conference, religion and faith were prominent themes. Lorcán Price, a lawyer who is originally from Ireland and now lives in London near the Olympia venue, told the Register that he believes that it is religion that is missing in today’s public discourse.

“People are trying to understand how to draw together demographic change, the technological revolution, and all these pressures on society in a way that allows us to serve the common good, to allow for human flourishing,” he said.

To him the solution is clear: “We should go back to the real source of Western civilization, which is the Catholic Church. Go back to the deposit of faith that helps solve all these technical problems of this age.” 

LEARN MORE

The conference’s livestream is available at ARC-Conference.com/livestream.