If You Love Liberal Democracy, Thank the Church

Religion and Secularism
1

Interesting study about how we became what we are:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/11/how-early-christian-church-gave-birth-today-s-weird-europeans

In September 506 C.E., the fathers of what would later become the Roman Catholic Church gathered in southern France to draw up dozens of new laws. Some forbade clergy from visiting unrelated women. Others forbade Christians from marrying anyone more closely related than their third cousin. The authors of a sweeping new study say that last, seemingly trivial prohibition may have given birth to Western civilization as we know it.

“If the authors are right, or even in the vicinity of being right, it couldn’t be bigger,” says Stephen Stich, a philosopher and cognitive scientist at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, New Jersey, who wasn’t involved in the work. “What they are offering to explain is the emergence of democratic institutions, of individualism in the West.”


This in not a new theory — iirc Jonathan Haidt discussed it years ago, as well as Steven Pinker — though they glossed over the importance of church policy.

Also it’s a good example of how odd history can be.

 

 

2

Very interesting article ThatoneGuy, It makes very good sense and I was not aware of this piece of church history but as one of the last comments suggested,“There are a lot of open questions.” Western civilization has deeper roots than the Roman Catholic Church. Rome had the greatest influence on Western Civilization in my opinion. The Roman Catholic church and Christianity itself would not have flourished in the way they have if Rome had not provided the sweeping historical backdrop for their emergence. Thank you for a great article.

3

I suppose that makes sense. The whole 3/5 of a person thing and all MEN (literally meaning men only) are created equal do sound very church-like.

4

There have been new things on the birth of individualism in the West, meanwhile?

5

I’m not thanking the Church for anything, because they have nothing to do with liberalism. If anything, they have a lot to do with oppression, especially the Fundamngelical churches.

No the Churches have not been. Many of the Evangelical Fundamentalist Churches (Fundamngelicals) are especially guilty of oppression. The best example is anti-abortion laws.

6

Intetesting one to dig up with all the other threads going on now. I’m always suspicious of stuff like this. The data isn’t new, so how are the “findings” a breakthrough?

7

I think the title of the thread is very misleading, this is not what the article says. But maybe our thatoneguy likes provocation…

8

Maybe. I wouldn’t put it past him to do so.

9

I don’t worry too much about the accuracy of titles. They are definitely correlating church policy to industrialized society. The paper is published and reviewed, something we constantly ask for here and rarely get, so that’s cool. But, has it been cited and built upon? I can’t find that, I think I would need a login to something more scholarly. I did find one article in the WaPo that actually commented on it.

Opinion | Here’s the weird thing about a post-Christian Christendom - The Washington Post

My guess is this is more correlation than causation. Roman Catholicism was situated at the center of the part of the world with animals that could be domesticated and a temperate climate for a variety of crops. The “Guns, Germs, and Steel” hypothesis. It was near enough to that crossroads of civilization, where the Jesus stories come from, and they still fight with the other two monotheisms.

Anyway, I think the author of the WaPo article is conservative, but here’s a good point she makes,

Of course, annoyed Christians have long pointed out how much secular liberal morality owes to Christianity — though they don’t necessarily specify that this includes the very values that are now undermining religious traditionalism throughout the West.

So, are traditional values the source of liberal democracy, or are those values more deeply ingrained and Christianity is just riding the wave of progress?

And, on the dark side, is it “progress” at all? She points out how this move to individualism, away from kinship, is affecting us. I think by “they” in this, she is referring to secular humanists, but the question is the same no matter who asks it, and worth considering,

Speaking of which, they could suggest, too, that an epidemic of loneliness and deaths of despair might be what you’d expect from a society that reified the individual without stopping to consider that humans were neither created nor evolved to be truly self-sufficient.