Western Civilization is Christianity All the Way Down

A Response to Adam Wakeling

Photo by Pascal Bernardon on Unsplash

In a recent essay for Quillette, Adam Wakeling argues that Western civilisation’s liberal and secular values did not arise from Christianity but despite Christianity. While I am loath to cast shade on a fellow Brisbanite, as an academic with expertise in church history and political theology, I must protest his erroneous reasoning and lack of historical nuance.

Wakeling’s piece is occasioned by a number of developments in the sphere of intellectual debate. Richard Dawkins has reaffirmed his identity as a “cultural Christian,” anti-Islamist author and advocate Ayaan Hirsi Ali has converted to Christianity, as has British comedian Russell Brand who spoke at length about his baptism, comedian-commentator Konstantin Kisin has declared that atheism “has no answers to the lack of meaning and purpose that our post-Christian societies are suffering from,” and Jordan Peterson is still doing the rounds with his own idiosyncratic flirtation with the Christian faith.

All of which must be a bit disturbing for the traditional rationalist. Wakeling seems to be frustrated that contemporary heroes of liberalism are running back to the church at the first sight of a “Queers for Hamas” placard. Wakeling’s anxiety and alarm mirrors that of the Bloomsbury group on discovering that one of their own, T. S. Eliot, had become an Anglo-Catholic.

English historian Tom Holland in his book Dominion and his immensely popular podcast The Rest is History, has been rehearsing the argument that Western civilisation is so suffused with Christian principles, moral genetics, and ideological infrastructure that we take Christianity’s moral vision to be self-evident. Even when Christian beliefs are subject to critique, Holland maintains, they are critiqued according to Christian metrics. Holland is not alone in this view—likeminded thinkers include Larry Siedentop, James B. Simpson, Oliver O’Donovan, and Andrew Wilson. In the West, the pulpit-pounding preacher and the atheist LGBT advocate are all children of the Christian revolution.

I could give several examples to illustrate this point.

The self-evident nature of equality

We all think it is painstakingly self-evident that slavery is wrong. Grass is green, sky is blue, and slavery is wrong. What could be more self-evident? Hence our revulsion at reading in St. Paul’s epistles, “slaves, obey your earthly masters” (Ephesians 6:1). How could an apostle, writing on behalf of his supposed saviour, validate an institution as insidious as slavery?

This protest is rehearsed by another Quillette article by Matt Johnson where he makes the same complaint: “If the Bible is the source of our morality and institutions, why have we rejected so many of the behaviours it explicitly endorses, such as slavery?”

To Wakeling and Johnson the wrongfulness of slavery is self-evident! So how can the Bible seemingly endorse it? The problem is that the inherent evil of slavery wasn’t self-evident to Aristotle, the Romans, the Arabs, the Ottomans, the Mongols, the Ashanti of Africa, the Māori, or the Aztecs. So why our gag reflex at the notion of slavery?

Well, because St. Paul also wrote “There is neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28), he denounced “slave traders” (1 Timothy 1:10), urged a master to receive an absconded slave back “no longer as a slave, but better than a slave, as a dear brother” (Philemon 16). Similarly, as Lisa Bowen has pointed out, African-American abolitionists, while sometimes ambivalent about St. Paul, took his words that God “hath made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth” (Acts 17:16) as the manifesto for their message and the rationale for their rights!

Our revulsion at slavery is formed by an interpretation of the Christian tradition that generated a critique of the institution and practice of slavery by focusing on parts of Scripture and tradition that made the practice seem morally incomprehensible, from Gregory of Nyssa in Cappadocia to the Quaker Benjamin Lay in Pennsylvania.

When Thomas Jefferson wrote that “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” according to Andrew Wilson in Remaking the World, the language of “self-evident” was drawn from John Locke, who got it from Richard Hooker, who took it from the Justinian Law Code, which drew from the Gospel of Matthew, a digest of the teaching of Jesus. The self-evident nature of equality is only true for people who inhabit that trajectory of moral reasoning from inside the Christian tradition.

The capacity for self-critique, to ask the question, “Are we the baddies?”

The British conquest of India only took place because it was preceded by the collapse of the Mughal empire. An empire that was severely weakened by repeated invasions, sackings, looting, rape, and murder by the Persians, Afghani tribes, and the Marathas. The British East India Company seized power in the midst of the vacuum and then through figures such as Robert Clive, plundered, exploited, and starved the population into merciless submission.

This is precisely why Edmund Burke prosecuted a case against the East India Company in the House of Lords for the company’s mendacity and malevolence. Robert Clive, known as “Lord Vulture” for his actions, committed suicide on the toilet from shame!

Let me ask: Who was the Edmund Burke of Persia? When Nader Shah returned to Persia after plundering, raping, and enslaving his way to and from India, which Persian noble called for him to be put on trial for his rapacity? Which Persian official said, “Good grief man, what evil have you done? Looting, slaving, plundering? Have you no sense of moral decency?” The question would not have registered with the nobility who instead applauded the Nader Shah for his conquest. There was no Persian Edmund Burke.

The introspective conscience of the west, which even Nietzsche shared, that we might become greater monsters than the monsters arrayed against us, only has traction in a world shaped by a mythology or metanarrative where there is no greater impiety, no worse avarice, and evil than an empire. The anxieties about empire are born from reading Daniel’s court tales and St. John’s warnings of portents of imperial destruction in Holy Scripture.

Biblical Hermeneutics and the Origins of the Scientific Method

Perhaps one might grant all I’ve said but retort that advances in science are really at the root of Western civilization’s rise, not Christianity.

Even our scientific revolutions in the 17th century betray the influence of religious revolutions. In his book The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science, Peter Harrison—an Australian professor of science and religion who has worked at the universities of Queensland and Oxford—argues that the scientific method was largely a rehearsal of Protestant hermeneutics. Protestants believed that God revealed himself through scripture and nature. And just as scripture should be studied literally not allegorically, nature needed a literal interrogation that looked past its grandeur and mystery with systematic and focused scrutiny. The scientific method developed in Protestant nations, as Wakeling admits, because of Protestant biblical hermeneutics applied to nature.

Despite some sloth, the Catholic Church eventually embraced this literal hermeneutic for studying nature. The Church that once condemned Galileo Galilei for heresy eventually produced Fr. Georges Lemaître, the Belgian priest and physicist who first theorised the Big Bang. The saying, “Great is truth and mighty above all,” did not original with Steven Pinker, Friedrich Nietzsche, David Hume, René Descartes, or Galileo. It is a quote from 1 Esdras 4:41, a document produced in the Persian-Hellenistic Jewish diaspora, which then found its way into the Christian canon and has been a stimulation for intellectual and scientific inquiry ever since.

I thought my Dad was Steven Pinker, but turns out it’s the local vicar

Wakeling finds it hard to believe that the virtues of western civilization derive from a religion whose moral biography leaves a lot to be desired. And it’s true that there are sinners and saints in church history—sex-abuse scandals, inquisitions, crusades, heresy trials, and more.

So, I need not deny that the followers of Jesus and the saints might not have covered themselves in glory. But Christendom and its liberal democratic off-spring are still better than the ethos of the Marquis de Sade, Marx, and Mao. The Spanish Inquisition, terrible as it was, does not approach the mass murder and barbarity of Nazi Germany and Eurasian Communism. Religious violence is bad, but irreligious violence is far worse.

The churches of Europe, much like the unnamed “Whisky Priest” in Graham Green’s novel The Power and the Glory, are morally complex. Green’s priest was an alcoholic, coward, and occasional philanderer, yet he ministers to the villages that need him even as he’s hunted by the virulently anti-Catholic authorities. A fitting parable for Christendom if there ever was one.

The recovery of the classical tradition and the various expressions of the Enlightenment brought fresh currents and critiques of dogma into early modern Europe. Once more, this is innovation within an existing intellectual, moral, and legal tradition, not the invention of something entirely new or unprecedented.

There might be spasmodic altruism in nature, but let me assure you, there is no symbol for human rights on the periodic table. Thus, the Enlightenment values of equality, freedom, and the unfettered pursuit of truth are not brute facts of nature. These rights were not discovered or deduced, and they are certainly not products of the French and Russian revolutions. They grew organically from within the Christian tradition, the different currents of which are violently swirling about in the vortex of values that comprises our culture wars. 

Consider the following examples in our culture wars. On abortion, debates about protecting the voiceless and vulnerable in utero versus safeguarding the autonomy of a woman’s body are trying to prioritise two conflicting moral imperatives that both grew from the same root. Likewise, LGBT rights emerge from a concern about protecting what we might call “sexual Samaritans,” outsiders, and outcasts, even when doing so is in tension with convictions about the goodness of marriage, fidelity, and chastity. Both sides in these debates are trading in Christian currency, even if only one side has bothered to notice that there’s an image of a cross on the coinage.

The Maternity of Western Civilization

Wakeling rejects the truth of Christianity’s claims about Jesus, the Trinity, and eternal life, he is free to do so. But his attempt to disprove the influence of Christianity on western liberalism is unconvincing.

St. Augustine famously said, “The Church is a whore, but she is still our mother.” The same applies to western civilization and its liberal and Enlightenment ideals. Christianity has authored evils and brutality, but it is still the womb that birthed the idea that humans must be free to live lives of pious devotion, that the truth will set you free, that wealth can be toxic, that God is on the side of the poor, that it is better to suffer evil than to do evil, that the meek will inherit the earth, that God opposes the proud, that evil empires must be defeated, and that victims have near-sacred status.

If any of that resonates with you, then you too are a child of the revolution launched by the Jew from Nazareth.