The indelible stamp of the Creator
Christianity reshaped the Western mind
“Christianity reshaped the Western mind in such a way that even people who consciously despise Christianity, or religion generally, nonetheless are captives of its categories and imperatives. The secular humanist who insists on the primacy of human rights, the cosmopolitan globalist who adores the U.N., the Marxist who wants the workers of the world to unite, the radicals who want to remake the world anew, the scientists who believe that there are universal laws to the universe that are discoverable through reason, the conscientious objectors to this, the protestors of that, the feminist champions of sex workers, the billionaires who try to expiate their consciences with philanthropy, heck even the Muslims and Hindus who use our system of dating: They all—all—are standing on a foundation created by Christianity in ways large and small. Even the concepts of the “secular” and the “religious,” “theology” and “pagan,” are largely Christian inventions, or are at least suffused with Christian innovation. In a way, even the people trying to beat the house of Christianity, are nonetheless playing with its chips.” (Jonah Goldberg)
When I was a Penn State undergrad I took a history course just about every semester: Ancient, US, Asian, European, US military. Some place in there we had a textbook that included material on how Jewish and Christian thought shaped the western world. I long ago lost track of the book but the idea remains. So when Jonah Goldberg’s piece arrived today it caught my attention. If you subscribe to the Dispatch you can see the whole article
Since April Goldberg’s been reading Tom Holland’s book, Dominion: How The Christian Revolution Remade the World. The introduction on my Kindle says, “Crucifixion, the Romans believed, was the worst fate imaginable, a punishment reserved for slaves. How astonishing it was, then, that people should have come to believe that one particular victim of crucifixion-an obscure provincial by the name of Jesus-was to be worshipped as a god. Dominion explores the implications of this shocking conviction as they have reverberated throughout history. Today, the West remains utterly saturated by Christian assumptions. As Tom Holland demonstrates, our morals and ethics are not universal but are instead the fruits of a very distinctive civilization.”
Here's a segment of the book from Chapter 20 "Love: 1967 Abbey Road". "The Beatles did not—as Martin Luther King had done—derive their understanding of love as the force that animated the universe from a close reading of scripture. Instead, they took it for granted. Cut loose from its theological moorings, the distinctively Christian understanding of love that had done so much to animate the civil rights movement began to float free over an ever more psychedelic landscape. The Beatles were not alone, that summer of 1967, in ‘turning funny’. Beads and bongs were everywhere. Evangelicals were appalled. ... Conservatives, when they charged their opponents with breaking biblical commandments, had the heft of two thousand years of Christian tradition behind them; but so too, when they pressed for gender equality or gay rights, did liberals. Their immediate model and inspiration was, after all, a Baptist preacher. ‘There is no graded scale of essential worth,’ King had written a year before his assassination. ‘Every human being has etched in his personality the indelible stamp of the Creator. Every man must be respected because God loves him.’ Every woman too, a feminist might have added. Yet King’s words, while certainly bearing witness to an instinctive strain of patriarchy within Christianity, bore witness as well to why, across the Western world, this was coming to seem a problem. That every human being possessed an equal dignity was not remotely self-evident a truth. A Roman would have laughed at it."
If you’re interested in how Christianity shaped society this might be a helpful read.
This abides,
Brother Robert, OA
The Feast of Augustine, Bishop of Hippo and Theologian, 430