07.12.07
Christianity and world history
Christianity’s Fertile Roots
A review of The God that Did Not Fail: How Religion Built and Sustains the West, by Robert Royal
Attempts to propagandize the place of Christianity in world history invariably get the issues wrong, in part because of the lack of a larger perspective. That larger perspective should start in the Neolithic, look at the whole global context, and try to understand Christianity’s strengths and limitations at the same time. If you start in the Middle Ages and proceed to the present you are confronted with an enigma. Whence modernity? It is not use saying Christianity laid the foundations of modernity or ‘Western Civilization’ if the rise of the modern began with a revolt against medieval theocracy. Nor does it help to give credit points to Christianity for the emergence of democracy if it opposed democracy tool and nail.
The contribution of Christianity to culture is immense, but limited. And if it is true that this contribution is real it doesn’t follow that we should persist in Christian adherence in the false expectation that it will continue to make such contributions. The time-frame of Christianity is that of the Axial Age, the parallel emergence of multiple spiritual traditions, and this context shows the momentum to move on, just world history has always moved on eventually from all of its religious formations visible since the Neolithic.
In The God That Did Not Fail, Robert Royal tells the story of Christianity’s role in world history, a story in which the religion symbolized by the cross acts as a lantern lighting the way as civilization progresses. The president of the Faith and Reason Institute in Washington, he treats religion generally, arguing that faith has built and sustained Western civilization from Hebrew, Greek, and Roman times through the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the rise of modern democracy, and to the crisis of secularism that assails us today. But the vindication of Christianity is the beating heart of this excellent new book.
The author’s point is provocative in the context of the present cultural moment. For, needless to say, there is a competing story being told in the media and in the universities. It insists that faith, and especially Christianity, has done little other than impede civilization’s progress. With its dogmatic and anti-scientific irrationalism, Western religion is a curse.
It is not just the press and academic elites who sound this theme. The same week I was reading Robert Royal, I got into a discussion with a secularist and an ex-Catholic who rarely misses an opportunity to discuss his childhood faith. Making fun of what he understood to be the pointlessness of medieval Christian theology, he said, “Well, that’s religion for you. In the Middle Ages, the theologians did nothing but sit around and argue about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin!”