Remaking the World E-Book

Andrew Wilson

• Herausgeber: Crossway
• Kategorie: Religion und Spiritualität
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 686

Beschreibung

How 7 Transformational Events in 1776 Paved the Way for Today's Post-Christian West With dizzying social transformations in everything from gender to social justice, it may seem like there's never been a more tumultuous period in history. But a single year in the late 18th century saw a number of influential transformations—or even revolutions—that changed the social trajectory of the Western world. By understanding how those events influenced today's cultural landscape, Christians can more effectively bear witness to God's truth in a post-Christian age. In Remaking the World, Andrew Wilson highlights 7 major developments from the year 1776—globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism—and explains their relevance to social changes happening today. Carefully examining key documents and historical figures, Wilson demonstrates how a monumental number of political, philosophical, economical, and industrial changes in the year of America's founding shaped the modern West into a "WEIRDER" society: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. This thoroughly researched yet accessible book offers a unique historical perspective on modern views of family, government, religion, and morality—giving Christians the historical lens they need to understand today's post-Christian trends and respond accordingly. - Relevant Cultural and Historical Analysis: Skillfully connects key ideas and events from the past to the present  - Comprehensive: Examines important developments from 1776, including the American Revolution, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; James Watt's steam engine; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - Informative: Covers key historical figures, including John Adams, Edmund Burke, and David Hume - Biblical: Equips and encourages readers to share the gospel in a post-Christian world - A Great Resource for Pastors, Scholars, and Readers of Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

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“Andrew Wilson’s book is extraordinary in every way: extraordinary in the breadth of research; extraordinary in the multitude of world-significant events that Wilson identifies for 1776; extraordinary in the depth of his insight on what those events meant (and continue to mean); extraordinary in the verve with which he makes his arguments; and, not least, extraordinary in the persuasive Christian framework in which he sets the book. Remaking the World is a triumph of both creative historical analysis and winsome Christian interpretation.”

Mark Noll, Research Professor of History, Regent College; author, America’s Book: The Rise and Decline of a Bible Civilization, 1794–1911

“Andrew Wilson is a wise and witty guide through the eventful year 1776 (eventful in, as he shows, sometimes surprising ways). He convincingly demonstrates that we’re still living in the wake of that historical moment—and offers shrewd suggestions for how Christians might navigate those rough waters.”

Alan Jacobs, Distinguished Professor of Humanities, Baylor University

“Andrew Wilson’s extraordinary Remaking the World delivers a gripping history of how the seeds of the post-Christian West were sown in the late eighteenth century. It is an intellectual tour de force and a model of Christian scholarship.”

Thomas S. Kidd, Research Professor of Church History, Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary; author, Thomas Jefferson: A Biography of Spirit and Flesh

“The eighteenth century is one of the most fascinating and important periods in human history, and in this book, Andrew Wilson shows exactly why. Remaking the World isn’t just a history book, however. It’s a wide-ranging examination and exploration of the past that makes sense of our present and shines a light on the future. Few books offer as compelling, rich, and insightful cultural analysis that covers so much ground as this one. It’s history for history lovers—and for the rest of us.”

Karen Swallow Prior, author, The Evangelical Imagination: How Stories, Images, and Metaphors Created a Culture in Crisis

“Brilliantly conceived, carefully researched, and written with verve, this book shows how one single year—1776—made the world all of us inhabit. Bringing together historical drama and specific events told in granular detail, this is history as it should be recounted—provocative, engaging, and consequential. Heartedly recommended!”

Timothy George, Distinguished Professor of Divinity, Beeson Divinity School, Samford University

“When Americans see ‘1776’ in the subtitle of a book written by an Englishman, they likely think they know what to expect—an apologia for monarchy. That’s not this book. Instead, Remaking the World offers an insightful and trenchant intellectual history of how the ideas and figures of a single year catapulted us into the present. A book like this should make Christians more discerning and critical about the taken-for-granted assumptions that we all believe are routine but are really the product of forces outside our control. Toward the end, Wilson gives Christians a pathway to witness to a world that thinks it has eclipsed the claims of Christianity but remains unable to explain itself apart from it.”

Andrew T. Walker, Associate Professor of Christian Ethics, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary; Fellow, The Ethics and Public Policy Center

“This is an arresting book. Even though Andrew Wilson is a vocational pastor and not a professional historian, his historical judgment and modesty are exemplary. His narrative is sensitive to the many complex causes of ‘modernity,’ never gets bogged down in details, and is written with elegant and lively prose. I can think of no better book to help Christians understand how our world has (and has not) become post-Christian. In Remaking the World, Wilson has established himself among contemporary Christianity’s most subtle and interesting thinkers.”

Matthew Lee Anderson, Assistant Research Professor of Ethics and Theology, Institute for Studies of Religion, Baylor University; Cohost, Mere Fidelity

Remaking the World

Remaking the World

How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West

Andrew Wilson

Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West

Copyright © 2023 by Andrew Wilson

Published by Crossway1300 Crescent StreetWheaton, Illinois 60187

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher, except as provided for by USA copyright law. Crossway® is a registered trademark in the United States of America.

Published in association with the literary agency of Wolgemuth & Associates.

Cover illustration and design: Jordan Eskovitz

First printing 2023

Printed in the United States of America

Scripture quotations are from the ESV® Bible (The Holy Bible, English Standard Version®), copyright © 2001 by Crossway, a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers. Used by permission. All rights reserved. The ESV text may not be quoted in any publication made available to the public by a Creative Commons license. The ESV may not be translated into any other language.

Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4335-8053-6 ePub ISBN: 978-1-4335-8056-7 PDF ISBN: 978-1-4335-8054-3

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Wilson, Andrew, 1978- author.

Title: Remaking the world : how 1776 created the post-Christian West / Andrew Wilson.

Other titles: How 1776 created the post-Christian West

Description: Wheaton, Illinois : Crossway, 2023. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022058032 (print) | LCCN 2022058033 (ebook) | ISBN 9781433580536 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781433580543 (pdf) | ISBN 9781433580567 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Civilization, Western—18th century. | Seventeen seventy-six, A.D. | Secularism—Western countries. | Social values—Western countries. 

Classification: LCC CB411 .W55 2023 (print) | LCC CB411 (ebook) | DDC 909/.0982109033—dc23/eng/20230130

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058032

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022058033

Crossway is a publishing ministry of Good News Publishers.

2023-09-12 09:10:56 AM

For Mum, Dad, Annie, Sarah, and David, in abundance

We have it in our powerto begin the world over again.

Thomas Paine, Common Sense

The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad.

G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Contents

Illustrations

Author’s Note

Part 1 Changes

1  Roots: The Presence of the Past

2  Quirks: The WEIRDER World

Part 2 Origins

3  Maps: Becoming Western

4  Patriots: Becoming Democratic

5  Lights: Becoming Educated

6  Skeptics: Becoming Ex-Christian

7  Machines: Becoming Industrialized

8  Lovers: Becoming Romantic

9  Profits: Becoming Rich

Part 3 Responses

10  Christians: Grace, Freedom, and Truth

11  Opportunities: Possibilities for a Postsecular World

Acknowledgments

Endnotes

Select Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

Tables

Table 1.1

1776 and the WEIRDER world

Table 3.1

The origin of farming

Figures

Figure 3.1

The origins of food production

Figure 5.1

Frontispiece of the Encyclopédie

Figure 6.1

Declaration of Independence rough draft with Benjamin Franklin’s edits

Figure 8.1

The Nightmare

Figure 9.1

Income per person over time

Figure 9.2

Life expectancy over time

Figure 9.3

Social development in the East and the West over time

Figure 10.1

Johann Georg Hamann

Author’s Note

Eighteenth-century spelling and punctuation can be erratic. In general, I have tidied up the sources to make them more readable; occasionally, I have left them unchanged for effect, even though I know that makes me inconsistent. I have also tended to use each person’s most familiar name or title throughout their lives (Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rebecca Protten, Captain James Cook, and so forth), rather than varying it in order to be strictly accurate. Translations are my own unless otherwise stated.

Part 1

Changes

1

Roots

The Presence of the Past

Who controls the past controls the future.

George Orwell

We are our history.

James Baldwin

In 1776, at Weyanoke on the James River in Virginia, Mary Marot Armistead married her fiancé, John. With all that was going on in America that year, it didn’t make headlines. She was only fifteen, and John was nearly thirty, but age gaps like that were fairly normal in the thirteen colonies. In many ways, they were a classic example of rich Virginians at the time: Mary was the only daughter of wealthy parents and stood to inherit the beautiful family estate on the edge of Chesapeake Bay, while John had attended William and Mary College, shared a room with Thomas Jefferson, started practicing as a lawyer, and then served a stint in the Continental Army before being appointed as a judge.

Together they had eight children. Unusually, in an age of high infant mortality, all eight of them survived into adulthood. Although John became Governor of Virginia, the chances are that most of us would never have heard of the family were it not for their sixth child, born in 1790 and also named John. He was a frail boy, wafer thin and prone to bouts of diarrhea with which he struggled his whole life. But he followed his father into law and local politics and gradually climbed through the ranks until on April 4, 1841, John Tyler became the tenth president of the United States. Four years later, he signed into law the annexation of Texas.

Curiously, that is only the fourth most remarkable thing about him. The third is that he served the longest presidential term in history without being elected, stepping into the role after William Henry Harrison died just a month into his term. The second is that he got married in office, the first of only two presidents to do so, after his first wife suffered a stroke and died in the White House. And the first—which sounds like it cannot possibly be true for someone who predated the metric system and whose parents were courting during the Battle of Lexington—is that as of 2022, one of his grandsons is still alive.

Not Even Past

Harrison Ruffin Tyler still lives in Charles County, Virginia, where his great-grandparents were married in 1776. He is well into his nineties. Born in 1928, just before the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, Harrison was in elementary school when Hitler came to power and secondary school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Like anyone of his generation, he has seen astonishing change, both technologically (televisions, atom bombs, the moon landing, the Internet) and politically (World War II, Indian independence, the Chinese Revolution, decolonization). But the social changes he has witnessed are even more dramatic. Just one year older than Martin Luther King, Harrison lived to see the election of Barack Obama and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, despite having had a father who defended the Confederacy and a grandfather who owned seventy slaves.

Harrison’s father, Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853–1935), lived through an even more seismic period of world history. He learned to read and write before the US Civil War, in a state where people owned slaves but not light bulbs. China was in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion, in which thirty million people died. Japan was a feudal society under the shogun and the samurai. Karl Marx was working on Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum, and David Livingstone was exploring the Zambezi River. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species when Lyon was six. The vast majority of the world’s population worked on the land, with an average life expectancy of twenty-nine. By the time Lyon died, the Second Industrial Revolution had swept across the world, bringing electricity and indoor plumbing, telephones and movies, factories and skyscrapers, planes, trains, and automobiles. Global life expectancy was above forty and rising rapidly. Women in dozens of countries were going to university, gaining equality under the law, and voting.

Lyon’s father, John (1790–1862), would have struggled to cope with the world of his children, let alone his grandchildren. They, and we, would have struggled to live in his. John came into the world on a slave plantation, a few weeks after George Washington’s first State of the Union, and nine months into the French Revolution. He was a toddler when Beethoven was first commissioned to write music and when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As John grew up, his days were continually punctuated by revolution—from the Reign of Terror in France (1793–1794) to the Latin American wars of independence (1808–1833) to the overthrow of nearly all European governments in 1848—not to mention the even more significant “revolution” which was emanating from the mines and mills of Northern England. The speed of transformation was dizzying, as we can tell from the rapid evolution of the English language. Dozens of terms that we cannot imagine a world without—including industry, factory, scientist, journalism, nationality, railway, working class, middle class, statistics, capitalism, socialism, and photograph—were coined during John’s lifetime.1

The world in which John Tyler’s parents were married in 1776 seems almost unimaginably different from ours. It feels more like a period drama or a theme park than a place where our ancestors actually lived: a land of duels and harpsichords, where people took snuff and talked about “Providence” and “victuals,” wearing wigs on their heads, frock coats on their backs, and smallpox scars on their faces.

Yet we are separated from it by only a couple of generations.1 The legacy of that world lives on in our ideas and institutions, our race relations and sexual relations, our ambitions and maps. Grandparents are like that. Their influence lingers on in the lives of their grandchildren, shaping their prospects and their values long after they are gone. “The past is never dead,” wrote Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”2

A Forgetful Age

Ours is a forgetful age, though. Lots of us do not remember the names of our great-grandparents; perhaps it is unsurprising that we do not remember their world either. The rate of change in the last two centuries makes the past feel much further away than it actually is, which inclines us to fawn over the future, and either patronize the past or ignore it altogether.

Our technology does not help us here. We spend much of our lives on devices that are designed to need replacing every three years, accessing social media platforms that amplify the sense of a continuous present and an absent past. A huge number of well-educated people, for example, marked the end of 2016 by lamenting it (quite unironically) as “the worst year ever,” despite having marked the one-hundredth anniversary of The Battle of the Somme just six months before. Mainstream media outlets are no different. The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was repeatedly described as unprecedented in its impact, despite the Spanish flu (or for that matter, the Black Death). More amusingly, I think of the European correspondent for Reuters in the 1970s who, apparently unaware of World War II, claimed that “Relations between Britain and Germany fell to an all-time low today over potato quotas.”3 In an era of instant news, amnesia is baked in. And amnesia has consequences.

One is confusion. The dizzying number of social changes in the anglophone West from 2014 to 2017 alone—gay marriage, Brexit, Trump, #BlackLivesMatter, transgender rights, Antifa, #MeToo, and so forth—left many people reeling, punch-drunk, even fearful about what would happen next. For obvious reasons, periods of social upheaval are always disorienting. But they can be particularly distressing when we do not know our history. Everything feels unexpected, as if it is coming out of nowhere. Developments appear unconnected to the past, and indeed to each other. In the absence of a plausible historical narrative, people retreat into tribalism or conspiracy theories (perhaps both) to help them make sense of the pace of change, because the deeper currents that shape society over decades and centuries—what James Davison Hunter calls the cultural “climate,” as opposed to the “weather”—are invisible to them.4 The results can be painful.

Another result of amnesia is arrogance, and it is available in both conservative and progressive flavors. In the progressive version, our current mores are self-evidently correct, which means that anyone who thought differently a hundred years ago, or even ten years ago, must have been either stupid or evil (or both). In the conservative version, the only reasons for a person’s success are their own ability and effort, which means that anyone who highlights the importance of historical privileges, or oppression, must be either jealous or lazy (or both). Memory, in contrast, should generate humility: the acknowledgment of our past, with all its strengths and weaknesses, and the recognition that the reason we have the moral convictions we do, and the material advantages we do, is because of our ancestors. As James Baldwin relentlessly pointed out, we are our history.5

Remaking the World

The big idea of this book is that 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.6 We cannot understand ourselves without it. It was a year that witnessed seven transformations taking place—globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism—which have remade the world and profoundly influenced the way we think about God, life, the universe, and everything.2

These transformations—some call them “revolutions”—explain all kinds of apparently unrelated features of our culture. They reveal why we believe in human rights, free trade, liberal democracy, and religious pluralism; they ground our preference for authenticity over authority, choice over duty, and self-expression over self-denial; and they account for all kinds of phenomena that our great-grandparents would have found incomprehensible, from intersectionality to bitcoin. 1776 provides us with an origin story for the post-Christian West.

That involves a combination of two claims. One relates to the world we live in today, and one to the world of two and a half centuries ago.

The first claim, which will be the focus of chapter 2, is that the most helpful way of identifying what is distinctive about our society, relative to others past and present, is that it is WEIRDER: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic.7 Those seven features make us outliers. The vast majority of people in human history have not shared our views of work, family, government, religion, sex, identity, or morality, no matter how universal or self-evident we may think they are. We are the WEIRDER ones.3

The second claim is that all seven of those things are true because of things that happened in 1776. Telling that story will occupy most of this book, but we can see it in outline by considering just ten prominent events from that year.

In January, Thomas Paine released his pamphlet Common Sense in Philadelphia, arguing that the American colonies should pursue independence from British rule; it caused an immediate sensation and became one of the fastest-selling and most influential books in American history. In February, Edward Gibbon published the first volume of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which set new standards in history writing, while also challenging the established church and providing a skeptical narrative of early Christianity that endures to this day. James Watt’s steam engine, probably the single most important invention in industrial history, started running at the Bloomfield colliery in Staffordshire on March 8. The very next day, Adam Smith released the foundational text of modern economics, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations.

The most famous transformations of the year took place in the American summer, with the establishing of a nation that would play an increasingly dominant role in the next two centuries: the ratification of the Declaration of Independence (July 4), the Battle of Long Island and the taking of Brooklyn by the British (August 27), and the formal adoption of the name United States (September 9). On the other side of the Atlantic, Captain James Cook was sailing southward in the Resolution in the last of his three voyages to the South Seas, the impact of which can still be felt throughout the Pacific Islands, New Zealand, and Australia. Immanuel Kant was in Königsberg, writing the outline for his Critique of Pure Reason, which would bring about a so-called Copernican Revolution in philosophy. In Edinburgh, David Hume finally completed his Dialogues concerning Natural Religion, one of the greatest arguments against Christian theism ever written, before dying on August 25. The autumn saw Friedrich Klinger write his play Sturm und Drang (“Storm and Stress”), which soon gave its name to the proto-Romantic movement in German music and literature, just as Jean-Jacques Rousseau was writing his extraordinary Reveries of a Solitary Walker. And in December, as Washington and his army were crossing the Delaware to surprise the British at Trenton, Benjamin Franklin arrived in Paris on a diplomatic mission to bring France into the war against Britain. It would eventually prove successful, and lead ultimately to the American victory at Yorktown (1781), and the collapse of the French ancien régime into bankruptcy and revolution (1789).

Between them, those ten events represent a series of transformations that inaugurated the WEIRDER world. Some are so prominent that they have passed into everyday speech. People freely refer to the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution and the Enlightenment. Others are less recognized but no less significant. You could argue that the long-term impact of globalization or post-Christianity or Romanticism or the Great Enrichment has been just as “revolutionary” as American independence, if not more so.

As such, it is only fair to my American readers to point out that much of this book is not about America at all. For obvious reasons, people who look back to 1776 as the start of their nation are inclined to see it as a year in which only one significant event occurred; in the immortal words of Ron Swanson, “History began on July 4th 1776. Everything before that was a mistake.”8 But many of the momentous events that took place in this remarkable year had nothing to do with independence or war with Britain, and instead were occurring in French salons, Italian cafés, German theaters, Scottish pubs, and English factories.

It was a year in which the things that were done—battles, retreats, river crossings, and so forth—were not nearly as important as the things that were said and written. Indeed, it is hard to think of a year in which more quotable, seminal remarks were made than this one. Some of them, of course, have passed into folklore in America because of their rhetorical power in the context of the revolutionary war: Thomas Paine’s “These are the times that try men’s souls,”9 and Washington’s “Are these the men with which I am to defend America?”10 Others are noteworthy for how well they articulated the implications of the revolution: Lemuel Haynes for his fellow African-Americans (“Liberty is equally as precious to a black man as it is to a white one, and bondage equally as intolerable to the one as it is to the other”),11 Abigail Adams for women (“In the new Code of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would Remember the Ladies”)12, and Edmund Burke for Britain (“I can hardly believe, from the tranquillity of everything about me, that we are a people who have just lost an empire. But it is so”).13John Wesley, eager to defend his own loyalty to the Crown and his willingness to pay taxes, explained his radical commitment to simple living: “I have a silver teaspoon at London and two at Bristol. This is all the plate I have at present, and I shall not buy any more while so many round me lack bread.”14

Other statements are famous because they encapsulate the spirit of an age: a spirit of confidence in human reason and potential that was almost tangible in the late eighteenth century, and the aftershocks of which can still be felt today. “We have it in our power to begin the world over again,” declared Paine in one of the most audacious sentences ever written.15Matthew Boulton, revealing his phalanx of steam machines to James Boswell, drew his optimism from the possibilities of technology: “I sell here, Sir, what all the world desires to have—POWER.”16Jeremy Bentham took the opportunity to reframe human ethics (“It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”),17 and Adam Smith did the same with economics (“He intends only his own gain, and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention”).18 Horace Walpole captured the ambiguity of the age of enlightenment and sentiment with his trademark wit: “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel.”19 James Madison, making adjustments to the Virginia Declaration of Rights, insisted that the final section include the phrase, “All men are equally entitled to the free exercise of religion, according to the dictates of conscience.”20 Most influentially of all, the Declaration of Independence proclaimed it “self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”21

These ideas—and the individuals, institutions, and inventions with which they are associated—made us WEIRDER. We are who we are because of them. That is the argument of chapters 3–9.

Table 1.1 1776 and the WEIRDER world

Feature

Development

Key Events in 1776

W

Western

Globalization

Captain James Cook’s third voyage begins

Endeavour / Lord Sandwich sails for New York

Mai returns to Tahiti on the Resolution

Georg Forster writes his Voyage Around the World

E

Educated

Enlightenment

Immanuel Kant drafts his Critique of Pure Reason

Edward Gibbon publishes his Decline and Fall

Carl Linnaeus retires

Baron d’Holbach’s salon, The Club, Poker Club, etc.

I

Industrialized

Industrial Revolution

James Watt’s steam engine

Richard Arkwright’s mill at Cromford

Bridgewater canal opens

Lunar Society begins meeting

R

Rich

Great Enrichment

Beginning of dramatic rise in GDP

Adam Smith publishes Wealth of Nations

American Revolution

Raynal’s Histoire released in English

D

Democratic

American Revolution

Declaration of Independence

Virginia Declaration of Rights

Benjamin Franklin’s diplomatic mission

Washington’s crossing

E

Ex-Christian

Rejection of Christianity

David Hume completes his Dialogues, then dies

Franklin’s edit to the Declaration of Independence

Diderot’s Interview

Sade’s ex-Christian morality

R

Romantic

Romantic Revolution

Rousseau writes his Reveries of a Solitary Walker

Klinger writes Sturm und Drang

Herder, Goethe and friends all in Weimar

First sexual revolution in London

So What?

The final two chapters address the question: So what?

I am writing as a Christian pastor. I find history fascinating, and I am convinced that it can help us become wiser, humbler, and more loving neighbors. But my primary motive in writing this is to help the church thrive in a WEIRDER world. What challenges and opportunities emerge from Westernization or Romanticism or Industrialization, and what should we do about them? How should Christians act in an Ex-Christian culture? What does faithful Christianity look like in the shadow of 1776? And here, I believe, we can draw a great deal of wisdom from an obvious source: faithful Christianity in 1776. How did believers in this turbulent and transformative era respond to what was happening around them? And what can we learn?

As it happens, several strands within the contemporary church look back to 1776 as an especially formative year. It was a crucial period in the development of early Methodism. John Wesley secured, and began fundraising for, a site on which to build a new headquarters in London. John Fletcher, whom most people assumed would succeed Wesley as the next leader, caught tuberculosis, which prompted a complete rethink of how the movement would be led in the next generation. The American Revolution began a chain of events that would lead the Methodists to ordain their own ministers and finally separate from the Anglican church. The need for new premises, new leadership, and a new denomination would prove catalytic for the rapid growth of Methodism in the following century.

It was a landmark year in other denominations as well. American dissenters, as we have just seen, saw the crucial words “free exercise of religion” appear in the Virginia Declaration of Rights and subsequently in the first amendment of the US Constitution. San Francisco was founded by Catholic missionaries. Former slave trader John Newton was working on the Olney Hymns, which would be published in 1779 and include his “Amazing Grace” and William Cowper’s “God Moves in a Mysterious Way.” Lemuel Haynes wrote his antislavery manuscript Liberty Further Extended.The fifteen year-old William Carey, who would grow up to become the father of modern missions and translate the Bible into six Indian languages, had the experience that led to his conversion. Marie Durand, the French Huguenot famous for scratching the word “RESISTER” on the wall of her cell during an imprisonment that lasted thirty-eight years, died at the age of sixty-five. Calvinist vicar Augustus Toplady published “Rock of Ages.” Holy Trinity Church Clapham, later attended by members of the Clapham Sect including William Wilberforce, Granville Sharp, and Hannah More, opened for worship.

Most of these people would be widely known within Christian circles today, and often outside them. Their institutions, hymns, missionary exploits, and abolitionism are part of the mythology of evangelicalism. But we will also reflect on some individuals whose contributions are less recognized: Rebecca Protten, the former slave who became a Moravian missionary; Johann Georg Hamann, the first postsecular philosopher;22 Olaudah Equiano, whose Interesting Narrative would become so important in the battle to end the slave trade. Though miles apart in their experiences and writings, each of these people have a great deal to teach us about living as Christians in a WEIRDER world.

The Need for Roots

A few years ago, I noticed how many of my favorite authors were writing during or immediately after World War II. It had not occurred to me before, and I wondered why it might be the case. There are probably some stylistic reasons. Their language is near enough to our own day not to sound arcane, and the crispness, simplicity, and visual quality of their prose was shaped by the advent of the cinema. Their works are also marked by a deep awareness of radical evil, which is hardly surprising given the times in which they lived. It gives their essays an urgency, and their poetry and fiction a cosmic drama that few writers before or since have achieved: think of Big Brother and Room 101, Sauron and Saruman, Lord of the Flies, the White Witch, Animal Farm, and the role of sin and the devil in Graham Greene’s novels.

So it is fascinating how often their responses to radical evil involve an appeal to history. Sometimes this comes as a direct address to the reader, like James Baldwin’s writings on race, Hannah Arendt’s on revolution, Leszek Kołakowski’s on communism, Isaiah Berlin’s on liberalism, or Dorothy Sayers’s Creed or Chaos. T. S. Eliot and W. H. Auden do it through their numerous references and allusions. Greene and Flannery O’Connor draw on their Catholicism. C. S. Lewis makes the point through essays on why we should read old books and by skewering chronological snobbery at every opportunity, from That Hideous Strength to the fates of Uncle Andrew and King Miraz in the Narnia stories.

J. R. R. Tolkien does it through his medieval language and setting, his complex prehistories, and his plot: remember Sam on the edge of Mount Doom, reminiscing about the Shire and reminding Frodo of the old stories long before totalitarian evil seized the world. Simone Weil’s greatest work is entitled L’Enracinement, usually translated The Need for Roots. Most powerfully of all, George Orwell creates worlds where nobody remembers the past, and where those in power, from the pigs in Animal Farm to the Party in 1984, are free to manipulate it for their own purposes, throwing unwanted recollections down the memory hole. “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”23 All of these writers had witnessed the near-collapse of the West in recent memory, and they knew the dangers of losing their history, as well as the importance of not allowing it.

We do not have to look too hard for contemporary equivalents. History is the most contested of subject areas, now as then, because (as Orwell pointed out) those who control the past control the future. If you want to prevent twenty-first century Christians from preaching the gospel, pursuing social reform and holding fast to orthodox faith, then history is your friend: just cast eighteenth-century missionaries as rapacious villains, nineteenth-century reformers as patrician moralists, and the defense of biblical authority in the twentieth century as a thinly disguised power play, and browbeaten believers will flee the public square like rabbits in the field when the fox arrives. Conversely, if you want to ensure that the divisions and injustices of the eighteenth-century church continue into the present, then give people a triumphalist historical narrative of evangelistic breakthrough, social transformation, and spiritual revival, while carefully omitting the egregious racial, sexual, and political failures of their heroes. Paint goodies and baddies in lurid color, and make all historical context a vague, indecipherable pastille gray. Rinse, wash, repeat.

We are storytelling creatures, so narrating origin stories is inevitable. Indeed, since it is impossible to be theologically neutral when it comes to history, narrating theological origin stories is probably inevitable. The only question is whether those origin stories are true, good, and beautiful: whether they reflect what really happened and why; whether they nudge us toward courageous humility and love; whether they recount the wondrous deeds of the Lord alongside the successes and failures of human beings. The arrogance of amnesia is always a threat, not least in periods of great technological and economic change, and so is the defeatism born of weary cynicism about flawed ancestors.

So it is vital, as the Psalms and the Prophets remind us, to remember: remember the deeds of our fathers and mothers, remember the rock from which we were hewn, and the quarry from which we were dug. It can help us understand why our world is the way it is—how it became Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic, not least through the transformations of 1776—and how to love, live, and thrive in it.

1  The British Prime Minister H. H. Asquith (1852–1928) was born during the life of Eliza Hamilton (1757–1854) and yet lived to see the birth of the future Queen Elizabeth II (1926–2022). More astonishingly, a giant tortoise named Adwaita, who once belonged to Robert Clive of India, was born in the Seychelles before the Seven Years War started (ca. 1750) and died during the American occupation of Iraq in 2006. The past is closer than we think.

2  Needless to say, none of these transformations springs up out of nowhere in 1776. For the larger stories within which each development makes sense, see chapters 3–9.

3  There are numerous other ways of referring to this world, but all of them suffer from significant limitations. Some—the First World or the civilized world or the free world—are patronizing and inaccurate. Geographical descriptors like the Western hemisphere make little or no sense to anyone who has consulted a globe and seen where “Western” countries actually are. Chronological terms like modern, late modern, or postmodern are complicated by heated disagreements over what exactly “modernity” is and whether we are still in it. Some terms highlight ideas and values (secular, liberal, or pluralist), or institutions and systems (capitalist, democratic), to the exclusion of material circumstances. Others do the reverse and focus on material or technological development, like industrialized, rich, developed, urban, bourgeois, postindustrial, or digital, although these terms are too broad to stand on their own, since they apply just as much to Shanghai and Dubai as they do to Paris or Chicago. By contrast the term WEIRDER, in bundling seven adjectives into one, combines geographical, material, ideological, historical, and even emotional features of the world it describes, which gives it a range and nuance that other terms lack.

2

Quirks

The WEIRDER World

Once the world of ideas has been transformed, reality cannot hold out for long.

G. W. F. Hegel

With most people, unbelief in one thing springs from blind belief in something else.

Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

The world you live in is WEIRDER. I am too. So are you. Let me tell you about yourself.

Start with the obvious: you can read. You have been literate since you were a small child. The way you process information is marked by that fact in countless ways, including the manner and scope of your education, the things you remember and forget, the length and shape of your sentences, the way you solve problems, and your approaches to tradition, law, religion, and social hierarchy. Not only can you read, and almost certainly write; in a sense, you cannot not read. If you tried to look at the characters on this page simply as swirls of ink, without any semantic content, your brain would find it impossible not to retrieve the information. If you have ever tried the Stroop test, in which a color’s name is written in ink of a different color (like the word red written in blue ink), you will know how difficult it is to stop yourself from reading, even if you are desperately trying not to. Literacy has rewired your brain.

Specifically, you can read in English. This Germanic language, a curious amalgam of Frisian, Latin, Saxon, Old Norse, and French, was spoken only by about four million people when Geoffrey Chaucer was writing it down in the late fourteenth century. Today, English is used by at least two billion people worldwide, three quarters of whom do not speak it at home. This five-hundredfold increase is not the result of unusually high fertility levels in the British Isles. Rather, it is the result of the widespread commercial, political, and cultural influence of English-speaking people over the last three centuries in particular.

As such, your ability to read this page is striking evidence of Westernization. Granted, there are a number of different ways of defining “the West.” We might see it through the lens of geography (those who live in Western Eurasia) or demography (those descended from the West Asian population core, whom we will meet in chapter 3). We might trace it back to its historical origins in the political division between the Eastern and Western Roman empires or the subsequent religious one between the Eastern (Greek, Orthodox) and Western (Latin, Catholic) parts of Christendom. We could define “the West” based on the history of colonization (the North Atlantic maritime empires and their American and Antipodean settlements), or based on economic ideology during the Cold War (the capitalist and communist systems on either side of the Berlin Wall). Or we might use a combination of these. But the fact that you speak English means that you have certainly been Westernized in at least one of these senses, and probably in all of them, even if you live thousands of miles away from the land of Shakespeare.

You have been educated in a wide variety of subjects that make very little difference to your day-to-day life. For at least ten years, and probably longer, it is likely that the state paid for you to be taught various subjects (like history, chemistry, literature, and so on) that are of no vocational value to the vast majority of its citizens. The state saw education as a public good in itself, a basic privilege that we expect all children to receive. So did your teachers. So do you. You might believe that state-funded education should become entirely skills-based at age sixteen. You might believe that taxpayers should fund doctoral studies for arts graduates. But you almost certainly believe that some measure of vocational irrelevance—learning things simply because they interest us and expand our horizons—is important to our intellectual and personal development and that we should all pay taxes in order to fund it.

This point is made powerfully in Tara Westover’s bestselling memoir, Educated.1 Born into a family of Mormon survivalists, she develops plenty of technical skills in her father’s junkyard but receives no formal schooling and arrives at university aged seventeen knowing nothing of Western art, and without having heard of the Holocaust. Her classmates, and we as readers, regard her as both inexplicable and tragically impoverished for her ignorance, and root for her to become educated, which she eventually does. In the process, we come to realize just how important we think education is, and how far we see learning for its own sake as integral to human flourishing.

You see academic qualifications as a key indicator of social status: more important than noble blood, land, class, family connections, and perhaps even wealth. You want your own children, if you have them, to be educated to the highest level possible. Because you are literate, you will continue to learn superfluous information throughout your life without thinking you are wasting your time (which includes reading books just like this one). Whatever your political views, you almost certainly regard the education of all children—not just unusually well-born, gifted, or affluent ones—as a social and moral imperative, not least because it has the capacity to promote social equality by enabling bright children from poor backgrounds to succeed.

The room in which you are reading this is a microcosm of industrialization and economic prosperity, however wealthy (or not) you are in relative terms. You are sitting or lying on a piece of furniture that was not built in your house, and perhaps not even in your country. You bought it because it was the best available item at the cheapest available price. Numerous products within a few feet of you were designed in one country, built in another, sold in yet another, and have reached you by means of a complex web of container ships, railways, delivery vans, and retail outlets. The room has at least one window and a door. It has electric lighting, mobile phone signal, and perhaps Wi-Fi. The building you are in contains more timepieces than the average medieval country. The presence of central heating and air conditioning means that you are neither too hot nor too cold at the moment. There is a toilet within thirty seconds’ walk of you. You are wearing at least one piece of clothing made of cotton, and probably several. There is a device nearby, no larger than a human hand, that gives you instant access to more information than has been printed in the history of the world.

Equally striking are the things that you are not experiencing. You are not at war. You cannot smell livestock or their excrement from where you are sitting. You are not hungry or thirsty. You almost certainly do not work on the land, and even if you do, your produce will not generate the vast majority of the calories you consume in a day. The clothes you are currently wearing were not made by you, and they do not express a particular regional or cultural identity; the shirt, trousers, and shoes you have on look roughly equivalent to what people your age are wearing in Beijing, São Paolo, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Los Angeles. You do not owe a proportion of your labor to a master, lord, or family member (unless you count taxation, on which see the next paragraph). You do not barter, and you do not store most of your available wealth in physical form. You may never have seen a dead body. You have never offered an animal sacrifice. You are not married to one of your blood relatives, and you do not personally know anyone who is.

By law, you have the right to vote. You take it for granted that your governments have the right to tax you, and that you have the right to boot out your officials if you disapprove of them. This conviction extends to all sorts of other institutions as well: it seems natural to you that businesses, charities, voluntary organizations, religious groups, and unions should take into account the views of the people they represent, whether expressed through formal elections or informal consent—and that if they do not, the appropriate response is to withhold your support from them. It also extends into your private life (a category that you almost certainly believe in). Fundamental to your understanding of human freedom is the capacity to make choices. From breakfast cereals to career paths, fabric softeners to family size, marriage partners to religious commitments, you expect to be able to choose for yourself rather than acting out of legal compulsion or familial obligation. Remarkably, all of these things are true regardless of whether you are male or female.

Your view of the world is Ex-Christian in a variety of ways, even if (like me) you believe in God and go to church every week. You doubt. Some days it is harder to believe than not to believe: in miracles, in the goodness of God, in the idea that he can hear your prayers, even in his existence. You distinguish sharply between the sacred and the secular, even when trying not to. You probably regard the language of faith as inappropriate in certain contexts: in meetings with clients, in political broadcasts, during sexual intercourse, or whatever it is. You struggle with mystery at both intellectual and emotional levels. You spend a substantial portion of your leisure time consuming media—articles, songs, newspapers, websites, television shows—whose ideology is either post- or anti-Christian.

You accept religious pluralism as a reality in your society. Even when pressing for Christian ethical commitments in the public square, you would be careful not to articulate them using biblical arguments alone. You operate on a secular rather than a religious calendar: your year starts in January and/or September rather than Advent, and your week starts on Monday rather than Sunday. You think religious commitment is a choice that each person should make for themselves. You reject theocracy, believing in the separation of church and state. You see lightning bolts as atmospheric phenomena rather than acts of God. In Charles Taylor’s language, you see the self as “buffered” rather than porous or vulnerable, and naturally view this world, rather than the next, as the location of ultimacy and meaning.2 You live in a universe rather than a cosmos: a disenchanted world of impersonal laws (even if they are occasionally broken) rather than a divinely indwelt temple.

At the same time, you hold all sorts of Christian assumptions about the world, even if you do not believe in God.3 It is clear to you that there are such things as human rights, such that a certain level of dignity belongs to all people simply because they are members of the human race, and laws and customs should reflect this in practice. You reject polygamy. You believe in limitations on the power of the state and that the rule of law is essential to a healthy society, whereby the rex (king) is always subject to the lex (law). You think those with much should provide for those with little, whether this is expressed through a redistributive state, charitable giving, or both. You affirm the fundamental equality of all people before the law. You abhor slavery. You do not seek to justify inequalities in wealth or status as part of the natural order of things, and to a greater or lesser degree you seek to reduce them.

You think the central unit in human relations is the self, the sovereign individual, rather than the group to which the self belongs. You think all people are equally endowed with free will, reason, and moral agency. Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride. Love is more appealing to you than honor. You think colonialism is morally problematic, and that those who have benefited from it have obligations (however defined) to those who did not. You think of time as an arrow rather than a wheel: you believe that we are gradually making progress toward a better world rather than declining from a previous Golden Age or recurring in an endless series of cycles, and as such you would think “behind the times” is an insult and “ahead of her time” is a compliment. You admire people who forgive their enemies. You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and sense of self are all haunted by his ghost.4

Finally, you see your identity as something you choose and construct for yourself rather than something you are given. The true “you” is not imposed on you from the outside, by your ancestors or your community; it is something internal, and only you get to say exactly what it is, even if you describe it using categories strikingly similar to the ones your peers use. You may choose different self-definitions in different contexts (so your Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn profiles may vary from one another, and indeed from what they each said five years ago, depending on what aspects of yourself you want to emphasize). Authenticity is far more valuable to you than conformity. You shudder at the thought of being in an arranged marriage. It might seem natural to you that people can choose their sexual orientation, gender, and pronouns, or it might seem absurd—but either way, you almost certainly see your own sexuality as an integral part of what it is to be you, and regard sexual intercourse as a context for self-expression, not just procreation or marital union.

You make all kinds of decisions based on your gut feeling. You used to watch Disney movies where the lead characters had to “find themselves,” “follow their hearts,” or “be true to themselves,” and perhaps you still do. You have taken at least one personality test. You see dancing as an opportunity for expressing individuality rather than aligning yourself with what everyone else is doing; in Roger Scruton’s phrase, you dance “at” other people rather than “with” them.5 Many of your contemporaries wear tattoos, with designs they chose themselves. You believe that great art, music, and literature come from within and involve creation and imagination rather than representation and imitation. The artwork in your office likely contains far more abstract shapes than religious or mythical figures. You find wild and remote landscapes more beautiful than meticulously manicured gardens and would use words like “inspiring” or “breathtaking” to describe them. More of the songs on your playlist are about romantic relationships than anything else.

I have just made over a hundred generalizations about you, and you have probably worked out which ones (e.g.,“your room has electric lighting,” or “you have taken at least one personality test”) relate to which development (e.g., industrialization or Romanticism). The vast majority of these statements are presumably true in your case. And the vast majority of them are not true of most people in history.

That insight is not new to you. If you have read much history, traveled a bit, lived in a diverse area, or even watched television, you already know how different you are from a great many of your fellow humans. But it hopefully makes the point nonetheless. You are WEIRDER, and you know it.

Weirder Psychology

But being WEIRDER affects our behavior, and even our brains, in ways that are much less obvious. The moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt gives a host of examples in his superb book The Righteous Mind.6 For instance, we are unique in regarding certain actions as morally permissible even if we find them personally disgusting. Haidt gives the example of a man who purchases a raw chicken from a supermarket and then has sex with it. Most people throughout history would regard that as morally wrong; WEIRDER people will usually say that it is gross, but it cannot be immoral if it does not harm anyone.

We see the world in terms of discrete, separate objects rather than the relationships between them. If asked to define ourselves using the phrase “I am _____,” we are much more likely to self-identify using our interests, achievements, and personal characteristics than using genealogies or relationships to other people. We think analytically, based on abstractions, more than holistically, based on context. There is data for all of this.

It runs so deep that it affects our visual perception. In the framed-line test, a group of Western and East Asian participants are shown a vertical line inside a square frame. They are then shown another square frame of a different size and asked to draw a line that is identical to the first line, either in absolute terms or relative to the size of the frame.7 Western people excel at the absolute test because they remember the line as a distinct object. East Asians excel at the relative test because they remember the line in relation to the square. Our brains have become WEIRDER.

Haidt’s most important observation is that we evaluate morality in a far narrower range of ways than most societies do because we value autonomy far more than tradition or solidarity. In a WEIRDER culture, actions are assessed as right or wrong based on two key questions: whether they cause harm to another person and whether they are fair to everybody. These two questions are used to evaluate morality in almost all cultures, but most societies will add several others. Is this action loyal, or does it reflect betrayal or treason? Does it express appropriate submission to authority, or is it subversive? Does it demonstrate sanctity, purity, and cleanness, or is it filthy, prompting repugnance and disgust?

Because we are unfamiliar with these moral frameworks, by and large, we struggle to understand the way many people in the world appraise right and wrong. A dramatic example of this was played out in 2006, in front of hundreds of millions of people. When Zinedine Zidane headbutted Marco Materazzi during the World Cup final, after Materazzi had insulted his sister, the WEIRDER world was baffled that anyone could be so foolish as to get sent off at the pinnacle moment of his sporting career, and lose his country the biggest trophy in sport, over something so trivial. Much of the worldwide audience, for whom a sister’s honor would matter far more than prize money or national prestige, did not see things that way. Many were baffled that anyone could do anything else.

For Haidt, our narrowness of moral vision—evaluating morality along two axes rather than five or six, and with a disproportionate emphasis on the question of whether something is demonstrably harmful—helps to explain why our political and cultural disagreements are so heated. Many citizens are appealing to moral frameworks that many others simply do not recognize. In a subsequent book, he goes on to show how the reduction of all moral reasoning to accusations of harm, and the gradual morphing of what constitutes “harm” in the first place, has contributed to various other modern pathologies including safetyism, trigger warnings, cancel culture, tribalism, safe spaces, microaggressions, and the dismissal of dissenting views as oppressive.8 Being WEIRDER, without realizing that we are, is making us angrier and increasingly divided.

The anthropologist Joseph Henrich, who first coined the term WEIRD, takes things in a slightly different direction.9 Psychologically speaking, he argues, we are “highly individualistic, self-obsessed, control-oriented, nonconformist and analytical” when compared with the rest of humanity. We look for universal patterns to structure our information. We project trends. We break down complex phenomena into manageable chunks and assign them abstract properties, meticulously analyzing trees but often missing the forest. We are patient, hardworking, trusting, and overconfident. We are unusually impartial, often treating strangers very much the same way as we treat our family members, and deploring nepotism. Moral transgressions cause us guilt rather than shame; we are more likely to lose sleep than lose face. Our intuitions and institutions are strikingly individualistic. We value self-esteem more than other-esteem. We tend to see people as acting consistently based on innate personal traits rather than varying widely depending on social context. As a result, we are more likely than most to suffer from cognitive dissonance.

The effects of this in daily life are far-reaching. Statistically speaking, we are unusually comfortable with delayed gratification, and likely to wait significantly longer before receiving a payoff for something we have done. Our honesty toward people we do not personally know is high. If WEIRDER people are given diplomatic immunity, such that we can park wherever we want without receiving a ticket, we will stick to the rules anyway; perhaps unsurprisingly, the propensity to stick to the rules in situations like this is closely correlated with the lack of corruption in a country. (In a natural experiment among UN diplomats in New York City, from 1997–2002, the delegations from Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the UK got no parking tickets at all. The delegations from Egypt, Chad, and Bulgaria accumulated one hundred tickets per member.)10 When appraising people’s choices, we place a large amount of weight on their intentions, not just their actions or their consequences. We are much less likely than most people to testify falsely in order to save a friend. We are much more likely to voluntarily give blood. There is data for all of this too.

The main cause of all this, in Henrich’s view, is the Western church.11 (This is one of the reasons I refer to the WEIRDER world as Ex-Christian, even though Henrich does not.) His story goes roughly like this: Ever since the advent of farming, human beings have functioned in intensive kin-based institutions involving extended families, clans, and tribes. That is still how much of the world works. But the Western church, beginning with Pope Gregory the Great in 597, gradually dismantled kinship-based relations in medieval Europe by introducing a number of new norms.1

The cumulative effect of those changes, across the next thousand years or more, was huge. Polygamy and cousin marriage all but vanished. Women got married and had children later. Families got smaller. Europeans began choosing their relational networks rather than being born into them, and began forming voluntary associations like charter towns, guilds, universities, monasteries, and convents. Artisans and merchants traded on the basis of their reputation, not their family connections, which incentivized impartiality, cooperation with strangers, precision, punctuality, and diligence. By the High Middle Ages, Europe was experiencing urbanization, a rise in trade, commerce and credit, renewed interest in law, improving transport connections, and even a craze for towns having their own clocks. The implications of all this would ultimately feed into the Protestant Reformation, all the transformations of 1776, and what we now refer to as the “modern world”—including what sits between your ears.

It does not matter much whether you agree with all the details of Henrich’s narrative (or Haidt’s, come to that). I do not agree with all of them myself. The point I am making here is that your psychology and your behavior, not just your environment and your culture, are WEIRDER, including in all sorts of ways that you may never have noticed. And there is an impressive amount of experimental research to back that up.

Weirder Art