Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson

(Wheaton: Crosssay, 2023), 291

Thesis: 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are. 1776 provides us with an origin story for the post-Christian West.

  1. Our society is distinct from most others in history because it is WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic.
  2. All severn of these things are true because of what happened in 1776

"To offer whys as well as hows, ends as well as means, you need faith: a worldview, a set of moral commitments, a religion, grounded in something beyond secular reason." (274)

Notes


Contents


Part 1: Changes

Chapter 1: Roots: The Presence of the Past

Summary: 1776 made us who we are, and understanding the WEIRDER reasons why will help Christians flourish still.

  • "Ours is a forgetful age" (6), but "memory should generate humility" (7)
  • Thesis: "1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are. 1776 Provides us with an origin story for the post-Christian West." (7)
  1. Our society is distinct from most others in history because it is WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic.
  2. All severn of these things are true because of what happened in 1776
  • Table of these events on pg 11
  • Purpose: "My primary motive in writing this is to help the church thrive in a WEIRDER world." (12)
  • "It is impossible to be theologically neutral when it comes to history." (15)

Chapter 2: Quirks: The WEIRDER World

Summary: Our society is very different from that of most of history.

  • The world we live in is WEIRDER. First, we can read (literacy has rewired our brains)
  • Our psychology is different: we tent to see people acting consistently based on innate personal traits rather than varying widely depending on social context, leading to our cognitive dissonance (cf. The Righteous Mind)
  • We are different because of the Church (cf. The WEIRDest People in the World): monogamy, taboos against cousin marriage, bilateral as opposed to patrilineal descent, nuclear families, neolocal residence whereby newly married couples form a separate household from their parents'
  • Art—"The fusion of Ex-Christianity and Romanticism has been culturally fertile": Hamilton is the story of the WEIRDER world, The West Wing: Two Cathedrals is "one of the great television episodes of the modern era", and Harry Potter is a "thoroughly romantic story and a thoroughly Christian story", cf. Dominion

Part 2: Origins

Chapter 3: Maps: Becoming Western

Summary: Guns, Germs, and Steel

  • Cook took Endeavor on a 3 year voyage to observe the transit of Venus
  • Why is so much of the world Western? Because of Guns, Germs, and Steel: geographical advantages allowed Eurasians to develop farming earlier and therefore civilization

Chapter 4: Patriots: Becoming Democratic

Summary: Modern democracy flourishes only in societies that share certain norms and institutions, many of which go back to 1776.

  • Democracy: a system in which the government is based on consent, and where supreme power rests with the people
  • Modern democracy flourishes only in societies that share certain norms and institutions, many of which go back to 1776.
  • Virginia Declaration of Rights: "That religion, or the duty which we owe to our Creator, and the manner of discharging it, can be be directed only by reason and conviction, not by force or violence; and therefore all men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience; and that it is the mutual duty of all to practise Christian forbearance, love, and charity toward each other."

Chapter 5: Lights: Becoming Educated

Summary: The Enlightenment has left us a mixed legacy.

  • The Enlightenment: the traditional narrative, but was it not as light as we thought? The darkness-to-light narrative "reflects a combination of ethnocentrism and chronological snobbery."
  • Enlightenment thinkers believed they were involved in a collective enterprise to free the world from authority and tradition.
  • Many of the leading philosophes defended profoundly racist ideas.
  • Carl Linnaeus developed his binomial classification system with homo sapiens: human were now classified an analyzed like any other animal
  • Kant's Critique of Pure Reason attempted to answer the question of what we can know and how we can know it. Rejected both rationalism (our minds have intuitive knowledge of necessary truths) and empiricism (everything we know comes from experience os objective knowledge is ultimately impossible): Kant said knowledge is possible only by combining knowledge and experience.

Chapter 6: Skeptics: Becoming Ex-Christian

Summary: The ex-Christian world is living off its inheritance. How much Christian capital is left?

  • "We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable" → "We hold these truths to be self-evident": Jefferson's version was grounded in religion; Franklin's version was grounded in reason, but these truths are clearly not self-evident because these are theological beliefs. They are culturally conditioned beliefs that depend on fundamentally Christian assumptions about the world.
    • Franklin's edit was representative of the general attempt to retain Christian morality while removing its theological foundations.
  • The translation to a WEIRDER Enlightenment is a product of Christian influence even while it has made practicing Christianity harder.
  • Voltaire despised Christianity and satirized her apologetics in Candide, but thought that belief in God was needed for public morality.
  • The System of Nature "made the fullest philosophical case for atheism in the eighteenth century (and arguably ever)"
  • If God does not exist, you have to submit to the brutal sovereignty of Nature. The natural world is not run by love, but by power.
  • Ex-Christian scale of thinkers:
    • Profession Christians like James Boswell who hold Christian beliefs but see them as optional
    • Kant's "religion within the bounds of mere reason"
    • Diests like Franklin arguing values are self-evident rather than Christian; Hume's skepticism without hostility
    • Polemic deists like Voltaire raging against the Church while insisting belief in God is important for society
    • Combative atheists like Diderot and d'Holbach rejecting theism but continuing to celebrate values derived from Christianity
    • God haters like Sade who think Christianity's entire moral framework should be eliminated
  • "The progressive secular humanism that prevails in Western universities and media outlets is essentially that of Hume, Voltaire, and Jefferson (though with rather less tolerance for dissent these days)."
  • Protestantism brought division, which over time would bring theological, ecclesial, moral, and intellectual pluralism (cf. The Unintended Reformation)
    • Protestantism did not create religious doubt, but it is weaponize it. The power of skepticism, once unleashed, did not go easily back in the box.
  • A Secular Age is "the most comprehensive genealogy of secularism", cf Secular Creed 156
  • "Secular" is the same as "Protestant pagan", cf. Dominion, a "remarkable book"
  • Gibbon's Decline and Fall is a tribute to pagan antiquity, even a lament for its disintegration at the hands of the Church: the villain is the Catholic Church.
  • Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion is "one of the greatest critiques of theism ever written"
  • Democracy in America: "Americans, having acepted the principal dogmas of the Christian religion without examination, are obliged to receive in the same manner a great number of moral truths that flow from them and depend on them." (159)

Chapter 7: Machines: Becoming Industrialized

Summary: 1776 and the roots of the Industrial Revolution

  • 1776 was a starting point for the industrial revolution with Watt's steam engine, Arkwright's mill, and the Bridgewater canal
  • The industrial revolution started in Britain due to power (steam condenser), manufacturing (metals, mechanization, management, marketing, money), and invention

Chapter 8: Lovers: Becoming Romantic

Summary: "Be yourself, follow your heart

  • The recent sexual revolution of the 1960's has roots in the eighteenth century
  • Rousseau's project of "self-discovery"

Chapter 9: Profits: Becoming Rich

Summary: The Great Enrichment finally led to economic growth outpacing population growth.

  • The eighteenth century witnessed "The Great Escape/Enrichment" and increase in standards of living after centuries of the "Malthusian trap" of stagnant standards of living as new technologies resulted in survival or more children rather than increased standard of living. Economic growth started outpacing population growth. The average person today has a standard of living roughly 10x that of someone in 1776.
  • The Wealth of Nations: National wealth is the productivity of labor
  • The Great Enrichment was driven by:
    • Institutions: Good institutions and strong property rights encourage investment and trade. Institutions created incentive which generated investments and innovations which facilitated industrialization which brought enrichment.
    • GREED (guns, resource extraction, enslavement, death), i.e. European colonization
    • Culture: curiosity, discovery, Christianity, literacy....
    • Fragmentation: "Competitive fragmentation of power": Natural barriers in Western Europe created division which generated competition which generates growth.

Part 3: Responses

Chapter 10: Christians: Grace, Freedom, and Truth

Summary: The celebration of grace, pursuit of freedom, and articulation of Christian truth as a critique of the Enlightenment by Christians in the 1770s can be a model for Christians today.

  • David Hempton: "Christianity was sometimes at war with modernity and sometimes was its midwife."
  • Grace
    • "Insuperable" grace of Calvin (it is so powerful that it overcomes human resistance) vs "Prevenient" grace of Wesley (it could be either received or rejected)
    • "Getting saved" is new: The eighteenth-century Britain saw a change in the way people talked about grace, a singular conversion experience was often seen as essential
    • Evangelicals (Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, evangelical Anglican) played a larger role in the spread of the British empire, rise of America, and abolition of slavery
  • Freedom
    • Presbyterian pastor john Witherspoon: "Perhaps there are few surer marks of the reality of religion than when a man feels himself more joined in spirit to a true holy person of a different denomination, than to an irregular liver of his own."
  • Truth
    • Johann Georg Hamann's theological vision of truth: "The only bread and manna of our souls, which a Christian can no more do without than the earthly man can do without his daily necessities and sustenance—indeed, I confess that this Word of God accomplishes just as great wonders in the soul of a devout Christian, whether he be simple or learned, as those described in it."
    • He was a Christian philosopher who offered a Christian critique of the Enlightenment:
      • Since God took on flesh in the incarnation, the rationalist tendency toward asceticism and gnosticism must be resisted.
      • We must resist the temptation to self-exaltation and price because the message of the cross is foolishness.
      • We need faith if we are to know anything at all. reason on its own, divorced from faith, gets us nowhere.
      • Resists the needless philosophical habit of separating things which God has joined together.
      • "The essential option comes down to one or another form of secular postmodernity or a post-secular theology."

Chapter 11: Opportunities: Possibilities for a Postsecular World

Summary: There is no silver bullet, we must be faithful and stay the course!

  • "To offer whys as well as hows, ends as well as means, you need faith: a worldview, a set of moral commitments, a religion, grounded in something beyond secular reason." (274)
  • The church of 1776 does not offer us a silver bullet.
  • The more privileged you are, the more tempting it is to seek justification by works. "In a world powered by works and measured by achievement, there is something deeply refreshing about the unmerited, transforming favor of God, given without regard to the worth of the recipient...Identity is given rather than constructed." (279)
  • Christian freedom is more liberating than secular WEIRDER freedom. "Christianity is liberating or it is nothing."
    • "Genuine liberty is not just a matter of freedom from things that might restrict our autonomy but freedom to choose those things that cause us to flourish, and become what we were originally created to be. In order to be truly free, we need to be liberated from captivity to sin as well as captivity to human oppressors or economic circumstances." (282)
    • "The opportunity for the church, then, is to present the WEIRDER world with the Christian vision of liberty in all its fullness: freedom from and freedom to." (283)
  • We need a "renewed commitment to the doctrines, practices, and experiences that have sustained the church in the past." (288)
  • Stay the course: "Fidelity scores higher than novelty...We are responsible for obedience not outcomes, faithfulness not fruit...There is nothing new under the sun." (288)

Topic: History

Source

New Words

  • antipode: A direct or diametrical opposite (18)
  • petard: A small bell-shaped bomb used to breach a gate or wall. (134)
  • emollient: Softening and soothing, especially to the skin. (138)
  • pestiferous: - Producing or breeding infectious disease. (163)

Created: 2024-01-16-Tue
Updated: 2024-07-05-Fri