THE LONG READ: A Christian Nation?

WHAT’S THE BASIS OF western civilisation? A commenter here at Not PC suggested that the foundation is religion —specifically Christian religion.

Now that's a widespread view to be sure, but being widespread doesn’t mean it’s not totally wrong. Which it is.

As I said in response to that commenter, "I suspect the Classical Greeks might raise some objections to the proposition, as might several historians of both the Dark Ages and the Enlightenment." 

If the basis of western civilisation can be described as a focus on reason, individualism, and happiness on this earth — ideas that were a product not of theologians but of Classical Greeks — ideas which were fortunately rediscovered for the west in the Renaissance, and then developed further in the Enlightenment — then, far from being any sort of foundation for these ideas, Christian religion is at odds with all of them. (More on that below.)

My commenter however suggested that as leading proof of his thesis was the observation that the USA is a "heavily Christian country" Which is true. As one data point in that thesis's favour he notes that "the US produced 173,771 patents in 2006. Check all Islamic countries since 1700 and you might get 1000.” 

Fine. But observe that a leading cause of scientific inquiry is the Enlightenment focus on reason and this earth. It is not being “heavily Christian.”  And the fact is that theocracy — any theocracy — is bad for free-wheeling scientific research.  

It's equally true that religion — any religion — is a hindrance rather than a help to scientific research. (Faith and mysticism are twin handmaidens of religion, but not handmaidens to truth—they so-called shortcuts to knowledge that are nothing but short-circuits destroying the mind, and destroying science if we would let them.) 

To properly assess causes for the claim above then, we might observe that the number of patents issued during the Dark Ages, over which the Christian church presided, can be counted on the fingers of one foot. Given that Islam is now enduring its own Dark Ages, it’s no surprise to find that their religious darkness (and patent production) is just as stultifying as the west's.

Fact is, the reason for the disparity in those quoted figures above is not because there are different religions in the US and in Islamic countries; it is because the influence of religion is far less and far less all-pervasive in the US than it is in the Islamic theocracies. The separation of religion and state was well done by America's Founders.

NOW I CAN ALREADY HEAR the claim that "the US was founded as a Christian country." Well, it simply wasn't. The Founding Fathers themselves were quite clear that they never intended that. John Adams for example declared explicitly, 

“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

Read that again just so you take it in:

“The government of the United States is not in any sense founded on the Christian religion.”

You can't get too much more of a blunt declaration than that.

Fact is, America's Revolution was not founded on the Christian God or upon any religion at all, but upon a view of human freedom and a declaration of rights that were both a product of the Enlightenment. As Thomas Jefferson explained (and he would know):

“Our civil rights have no dependence on our religious opinions, no more than on our opinions in physics and geometry...”

So declared Thomas Jefferson.

Fact is, the US was not a nation founded on religion at all. It was fully a Nation of the Enlightenment, that proud and unique era in human affairs that represented an overthrow of religion, and a renaissance of reason. [More quotes in this vein here] In fact if religion is anything to America it’s not a bulwark but a handbrake . It’s a threat, not a foundation—which is a what philosopher Leonard Peikoff maintains. 

Think about it: Just what exactly did religion bring to history? Founding Father James Madison has the summary:

“Religious bondage shackles and debilitates the mind and unfits it for every noble enterprise....During almost fifteen centuries has the legal establishment of Christianity been on trial. What have been its fruits? More or less, in all places, pride and indolence in the clergy; ignorance and servility in laity; in both, superstition, bigotry, and persecution.”

Ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution. They do not describe western civilisation, but they do describe the Dark Ages to a 'T'; that ordure-strewn wasteland of crosses and graves and misery; those dark centuries over which the Christian church so dolefully presided.

As philosopher Leonard Peikoff explains, 

"The Dark Ages were dark on principle. Augustine fought against secular philosophy, science, art;  he regarded all of it as an abomination to be swept aside; he cursed science in particular as 'the lust of the eyes'. . .
    “As the barbarians were sacking the body of Rome, the Church was struggling to annul the last vestiges of its spirit, wrenching the West away from nature, astronomy, philosophy, nudity, pleasure, instilling in men's souls the adoration of Eternity, with all its temporal consequences.""

The church made Augustine a saint for his views. No wonder. Augustine distinguished between what he called the City of God (based upon faith) and the City of Man (based upon reason) – he praised the former and damned the latter. Concern solely with life on Earth was a sin, he said. For Augustine, man was "crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous." 

"Intellectually speaking [concludes Peikoff], the period of the Middle Ages was the exact opposite of classical Greece. Its leading philosophic spokesman, Augustine,
held that faith was the basis of man's entire mental life. ‘I do not know in
order to believe,’ he said, ‘I believe in order to know.’ In other words,
reason is nothing but a handmaiden of revelation; it is a mere adjunct of
faith, whose task is to clarify, as far as possible, the dogmas of religion.
    "What if a dogma cannot be clarified? So much the better, answered an earlier
Church father, Tertullian. The truly religious man, he said, delights in
thwarting his reason; that shows his commitment to faith. Thus, Tertullian's
famous answer, when asked about the dogma of God's self-sacrifice on the
cross: ‘Creo quia absurdum. (‘I believe because it is absurd.’)
    "As to the realm of physical nature, the medievals characteristically
it as a semi-real haze, a transitory stage in the divine plan, and a
troublesome one at that, a delusion and a snare - a delusion because men
mistake it for reality, a snare because they are tempted by its lures to
jeopardize their immortal souls. What tempts them is the prospect of earthly
pleasure.
    "What kind of life, then, does the immortal soul require on earth? Self-
denial, asceticism, the resolute shunning of this temptation. But isn't unfair
to ask men to throw away their whole enjoyment of life? Augustine's answer is:
what else befits creatures befouled by original sin, creatures who are, as he
put it, 'crooked and sordid, bespotted and ulcerous'." ['Religion vs America,' Leonard Peikoff]

In his book A History of Knowledge, historian Charles Van Doren points out that

"God was the last of the three great medieval challenges [note: others being the “struggle for subsistence” and a “world of enemies”], and the most important. Human beings had always been interested in God and had attempted to understand his ways. But the Greeks, and especially the Romans, had kept this interest under control…In the early Middle Ages it overcame the best and the brightest among Europeans. It can almost be said that they became obsessed with God." [A History of Knowledge, Charles van Doren, p. 100]

What were the practical results of this approach to life? You won't be surprised.

Dutch economic historian Angus Maddison points out that from 500 to 1500 AD Europe suffered from zero-percent economic growth. Zero percent! This in a period in which onea slice of bread per day could be considered a good meal. In which the average infant had a life expectancy of just 24 years -- if, that is, they weren't of that third who failed to live beyond their first year. [See Angus Maddison, Phases of Capitalist Development, pp 4-7, and Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective]

Says French historian Fernand Braudel of the pre-eighteenth century era, 

"Famine recurred so insistently for centuries on end that it became incorporated into ma's biological regime and built into his daily life..." [Fernand Braudel, The Structures of Everyday Life: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, pp 73-78]

Everything human took a dive, only re-emerging centuries later with the Renaissance (which represented the rediscovery by the west of Aristotle and the Classical Greeks), and then the Enlightenment (which represented the application of Aristotelian reason to human life).

Life during the Dark Ages was shit. Almost literally. Sanitation collapsed, and disease rocketed; agriculture barely fed those who worked the fields, and that in good years; literacy and education plummeted; learning almost vanished; scientific research itself was almost non-existent, replaced instead by arcane theological explorations into the nature of the supernatural; life expectancy as we've said was just barely above the teens ... and the ethic of faith, sacrifice and suffering oversaw it all. The only thing that flourished in this time was the church, and its churchmen.

The result was not at all a flourishing of reason and a devotion to life on earth. Quite the opposite. For that we had to wait for the rediscovery of Aristotle (for the west) in the Renaissance – and for that we do have to thank the world of Islam (whose scholars had preserved Aristotle’s works, and during the period those works and their secular focus were valued Islam enjoyed its own Golden Age.)

W.T. Jones, the 20th century's leading philosophical historian, summarises the state of the west at this time: 

"Because of the indifference and downright hostility of the Christians ... almost the whole body of ancient literature and learning was lost... This destruction was so great and the rate of recovery was so slow that even by the ninth century Europe was still immeasurably behind the classical world in every department of life... This, then, was truly a 'dark' age." [W.T. Jones, A History of Western Philosophy, vol. 2, The Medieval Mind' pp141-142]

And so it was: An age in which ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution flourished. 

In no way do those qualities describe western civilisation — but they do describe the Dark Ages to a 'T,' those centuries over which the Christian church so dolefully presided, and whose shackles the west had to break to emerge, like a butterfly, from its pagan chrysalis.

And those qualities also describe to a ‘T’ the present-day Islamic theocracies—who like the west of that Dark era rejected the sunlit secularism of the Greeks only to embrace its polar opposite. We can see in them now what the west's Dark Ages was like then (and, in reverse, see in the West now what the Islamic Golden Age may have become, if not for its destruction by theology.)

SO IN SUMMARY, the basis of western civilisation is not Christian religion. Sure, Christian religion in its Enlightenment clothing contributed art, music, literature and much more. But the foundation on which those contributions were made was contributed by the rediscovery and then the application of Greco-Roman thought and Aristotelian reason. 

Because the leitmotifs of western civilisation are not ignorance, superstition, bigotry and persecution —all the things so associated with the Christian-dominated Dark Ages —but their polar opposites: reason, freedom and individualism.

We got these beneficient ideas from the Greeks. And we had to shake off centuries of religion to rediscover them.

RELATED LINKS: 

• Murdering tall poppies - that's what Easter is all about - NOT PC
• The Founding Fathers on religion - Ayn Rand Institute
• Religion vs America - Leonard Peikoff
• The Universalisability of Western Civilisation - George Reisman
• Christianity’s War against the Mind – Aristotle Versus Religion - Andrew Bernstein
• Gimme That Old Time Religion! - James Valliant
• The Nature of Western Civilisation - George Reisman
• The Tragedy of Theology: How Religion Caused and Extended the Dark Ages. A Critique of Rodney Stark’s The Victory of Reason. – Andrew Bernstein (with responses)
• “So, How Come You Keep Bashing Religion?” - NOT PC

NB: This is a 2007 post, re-posted here slightly edited (and with links updated) from a 2010 update. There's a pretty good comments thread back there, if you'd like to check it out.