The year was 1848 and three people, their lives previously unconnected, were about to reshape the world. Karl Marx's Manifesto rolled off London presses as women gathered at Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s convention in Seneca Falls, N.Y. to demand equal rights. At the same time, Alfred Russel Wallace sailed to Brazil to collect specimens for something being called natural selection. This pivotal year marked the moment Western civilization began a two-century descent—not merely from tradition, but Creation itself.

In this sweeping historical and cultural analysis, “The Age of Envy” traces how a single sin—envy, first glimpsed when Eve reached for forbidden fruit in Eden—bloomed in 1848 into an all-consuming assault on God's created order. With meticulous scholarship and compelling narrative, this work reveals how hierarchy, distinction, and purpose—the pillars of divine design—have been systematically dismantled across every sphere of Western life.

From Gothic cathedrals to brutalist concrete blocks, from Rachmaninoff's soaring harmonies to Schoenberg's discordant atonality, from Bouguereau's luminous canvases to Pollock's chaotic drips, we witness beauty itself profaned by the relentless scourge of envy. Author Forrest Maready expertly guides readers through the decline as Darwin's theories, Marx's revolution, and feminism’s equality elevated human authority over divine truth.

The moral unraveling accelerated through the 20th century—from sexual revolution to gender fluidity, from religious decline to relativism's triumph—appearing not as progress but as the inevitable harvest of seeds planted in 1848. When humans envied God's authority to determine truth, beauty, and purpose, they set in motion a de-creation that continues today. For anyone troubled by the West's trajectory, this book presents a provocative hypothesis: our crisis is not ultimately political or economic, but the inevitable result of humanity's ancient temptation of envy.