Western Civilisation is not based on Judeo-Christian Values
There’s a popular narrative making the rounds that Judeo-Christian values underpin Western civilisation. Some of the most influential proponents of this view include Ben Shapiro, Dennis Prager, and Jordan Peterson, as well as Australian commentators like Greg Sheridan and Jennifer Oriel.
The Ramsay Centre recently tried, and failed, to institutionalise this claim by establishing a degree in ‘Western Civilisation’ at the Australian National University with its $3.3 billion endowment. The program would have emphasised the Judeo-Christian foundations of the West, cheered on by former conservative Prime Ministers John Howard and Tony Abbott.
On the basis of this story, it is reasonable to argue that the well-documented decline in Judeo-Christian belief in the West can only erode its moral foundations. Enter Dostoyevsky — once God is dead, everything is permitted. All that is sacred is soon to lie broken amidst the resultant hedonistic chaos.
The first problem with this conception is that ‘Western Civilisation’ is not actually a thing. To say this is not to indulge in some far-left, postmodernist, self-flagellating relativism, but simply to state a rather obvious historical point. There is no coherent historical, ethical or political project one can refer to as ‘the West’. At best, one can say that many of the ideas that underpin today’s successful modern civilisations had their origins in Western Europe. But this is like saying that Vegemite originated in the Southern Hemisphere. Technically accurate, but ultimately misleading.
To speak of ‘Western Civilisation’ as a coherent whole tends to paint ‘the West’ as some unerring geographical source of great ideas, when it’s clearly not. Many, many more terrible ideas arose in this part of the world than good ones. From industrialised imperialism, Fascism, Aryanism, Communism, the Atlantic slave trade, advanced chemical and nuclear weapons — these are all products of ‘Western Civilisation’.
The only saving grace of ‘the West’ was simply that a few very good ideas also happened to be in the mix, which luckily had the power to limit in the long term the amount of harm the awful ideas could do. Among the most important of these include the (still developing) idea of universal rights to equal treatment of individuals under the law, the right to free speech, and democratic modes of governance.
The ‘Judeo-Christian values’ narrative assumes that it has been primarily religious ideas that have acted as bulwarks against our worst inclinations, implying that a decline in religious belief today would lead to a resurgence of destructive ideological alternatives. Turning away from the Old and New Testaments, they warn, will only lead us into the cold embrace of The Communist Manifesto and Mein Kampf.
But what exactly are these crucial values and beliefs bestowed upon us by our religious forebears? The three that tend to pop up most frequently are freedom of speech, individual rights, and democracy.
Let’s start with free speech. It’s hard to think of a more popular value that conservatives have rallied around in recent times, in their ongoing (and often justified) battle against political correctness. But what exactly does it have to do with religion? The absurdity of attributing the value of free and open inquiry to any religious tradition is captured by these commentators’ consistent failure to mention the term ‘blasphemy’. The blunt truth is that for nearly two millennia, Christian prohibitions on criticising the attestations of the Church directly inhibited the progress of ethics, politics, science, and aesthetics.
As Jacob Mchangama has artfully explained in his podcast ‘Clear and Present Danger — a history of free speech’, the notion of free and unfettered political speech actually originated in the agora of ancient Athens. Their twin concepts of isegoria — equal rights to participate in public debate, and parrhesia — freedom to say what one pleased, provided the moral underpinnings for democratic governance that were promptly abandoned until their resuscitation only a few centuries ago.
What about the other rights and freedoms for the individual that we enjoy today? Responding to the rejection of the Ramsay Centre by ANU, popular conservative Australian commentator Andrew Bolt proposed that in Australia, ‘we put the individual first — that’s from Christianity’. In a recent discussion with the author Susan Blackmore, the famous psychologist Jordan Peterson asserted that ‘Christianity rendered slave and master on same metaphysical footing, as equal before the law.’ Except, as the historical record makes clear, these claims simply aren’t true.
Slavery persisted happily for centuries following the ascent of Christianity to political dominance in Europe. As Stephen Pinker points out in his recent book Enlightenment Now, it is only in the wake of 17th and 18th century Enlightenment thinkers that ‘Christians have been ‘soft-pedalling their legacy of supernatural beliefs and ecclesiastical authority in favour of reason and universal human flourishing.’
This brings us to the third value that is claimed to derive from our Judeo-Christian heritage: liberal democracy. The ‘render to Caesar’ quote in the Bible in particular is often cited as a key step empowering Christian (but not Islamic) cultures to develop secular political institutions like democracy. But I’m not so sure it’s worthy of such a distinction.
The quote itself was offered by Jesus in response to being asked the awkward question of whether Jews should pay taxes to their oppressive Roman authorities. Jesus told them to look at whose head was on the coin, and his followers ‘marvelled’ when Jesus concluded that the coin was therefore Caesar’s after all, and should be returned to him.
Now, at best, this amounts to an argument that one should not disobey earthly authorities in the name of heavenly ones. But it makes no claim that earthly laws and institutions shouldn’t be based fundamentally on heavenly principles. Indeed this is precisely what happened once Christianity became the dominant religion. The Christian doctrine of the ‘divine right of kings’ gave moral legitimacy to unjust monarchies by asserting that political authorities were ultimately acting on behalf of religious ones.
Far from the birth of the limited state, the ascendance of Christianity coincided with the decline and fall of Rome, followed by that thousand-year stretch so barren of progress we literally refer to it as ‘the Dark Ages’. The idea that government does not have the authority to mandate individual conscience only emerged via explicit philosophical arguments presented in the 17th and 18th centuries by the likes of Locke, Montesquieu, and Voltaire. Jesus had very little to do with the whole thing.
Many apologists for religion, especially Jordan Peterson, are rightly fond of articulating how the teachings of Marx led directly to the gulag, refuting those nauseating theorists repeating the mantra that real Marxism has yet to be tried. As Yuval Noah Harari has pointed out however, such critics should be equally fond of articulating what exactly in Christianity allowed for the atrocities of the Inquisition and Crusades. It’s not good enough, Harari reminds us, to claim that the ‘religion of love’ was completely distorted and misapplied in these cases. This is to dodge the ‘soul-searching’ into the genuine causal role that Christian doctrine played in stifling human curiosity and holding back human progress for centuries.
You can certainly read many of our modern values into various biblical stories, as Peterson has done at length, but this is often just an exercise in confirmation bias. If you set out to validate the story that Christianity brought forth modernity, you can certainly find ample evidence to support your case. To be judicious however, you would need to complement this with a second inquiry, where you go through every bible story that cuts against these values. That could take a very long time.
So if religion had nothing to do with the astonishing progress we’ve seen since the Enlightenment, what did? As the 20th century philosopher Karl Popper argued, the actual foundation of modern civilisation is a secular tradition of conjecture and criticism of ideas, which continually resolves our deepest problems and conflicts without the need for violence. This thread winds through the complex story of the British and Continental Enlightenments, but has only recently taken root everywhere in Western Europe following the utter devastation of the two world wars.
Contrary to what defenders of religion assert, the moral structure surrounding us that has emerged from this long, bumpy process does not require a God above it in order to function well and enjoy legitimacy. Atheists like Raskolnikov need not abandon the ‘moral law’ in pursuit of their selfish, individual desires, once they have ceased believing in the almighty.
In fact, as has been pointed out many times, a genuinely objective moral law is only possible in the absence of a personal, interventionist god. Theologians have for centuries grappled with, but never resolved, the problem of whether God himself is bound by a moral law beyond him. If he is so bound, then he’s irrelevant. We can just cut out the middleman and obey the moral law directly. If he’s not bound by such a moral law, then he’s a tyrant who can overturn the moral law at his own arbitrary, personal whim. A real moral law binds everyone, including any beings more powerful than ourselves.
This is why ‘moral realism’, which the likes of Peterson fervently affirm, actually requires the non-existence of God, not the other way around.
Christianity’s decline in the West coincided with Enlightenment thinking for a very good reason. The softening of Christian theocracy’s grip on humanity meant that people were freer to pursue more rational systems of ethics. It was precisely when and where the secular ideas of free speech, individual rights and democracy waned, such as in early-20th century Germany, that violence and terror resumed their default status as plagues on the human condition.
Clinging on to the seductive myth that Judeo-Christian values brought about modern civilisation is not only mistaken, but dangerous. This is because it doubles down on a commitment to sources of dogmatism that have fostered so much division and animosity throughout our tortured history. More than ever, we need to emphasise our common humanity, not our balkanised religious identities. We need to accept that our ideas are generated by us fallible humans, and not from some other divine, inerrant source. Only then can we hope to collectively fumble towards a better future, of our own making.
