Why You Think the Way You Do: The Story of Western Worldviews from Rome to Home

by Glenn S. Sunshine

Jonathan Edwards is remembered today mostly for a single paragraph out of his

sermon “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God.” This is unfortunate, not only because the quotation is taken out of context and misses the point of the sermon, but because Edwards was the first and arguably the greatest major thinker America has produced. His works included important treatises in philosophy, psychology, and theology; a piece on entomology; and a history of the Great Awakening.

The best-known example of this is William Wilberforce, a key figure in the so-called Clapham Sect, whose conversion to “evangelicalism” (in this context, Christians who held to a high view of Scripture, emphasized personal conversion, and believed that Scripture should be applied to every area of life) moved him to lead the battle in Parliament to abolish the slave trade (a fight that took twenty years) and then slavery itself (which took another twenty-six years). He was inspired in this work in part by the last letter John Wesley ever wrote, which encouraged him to pursue this battle, but only with the help of God. In addition, Wilberforce helped establish the Bible Society, the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, and over sixty other charitable and moral organizations for

the “reformation of manners” (i.e., reform of society) in England.

In the midst of Enlightenment rationalism and deism, a Christian worldview was thus alive and well and even thriving in many parts of the Western world. It had evolved in some ways, particularly in its view of the role of religion in public life. Up to this point, it had always been assumed that being religious was a good thing, and that a good Christian would be the best citizen, as Augustine argued.

What was new was that these ideas increasingly had to be asserted in opposition to both the state and the church itself.

One critical element was royal interference with the colonies’ right to govern their own affairs. For example, several colonies had passed laws abolishing slavery, but the monarchy had vetoed them. In some cases, the monarchy changed the terms of government within the colonies to place them under governors appointed by London.

There is no question that Enlightenment thought — particularly John Locke’s political thought — influenced the founders. And some of them were heavily influenced by deism. Probably the most broadly influenced was Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson went so far as to take a pair of scissors and cut out of the Bible everything he found unreasonable, including all cases of supernatural intervention.

Several people had reported walking in on him when he was on his knees fervently praying. In fact, only a very small minority of the two hundred or so people considered to be founding fathers in America could be fairly described as deists or free thinkers.

The rest belonged to a variety of orthodox churches — Congregational, Presbyterian, Anglican, Baptist, and others (though some of the founders who were members of these churches had somewhat unorthodox views). Many were ministers or had earned divinity degrees. And if you take the time to read what they wrote, both for public and private audiences, it is clear that they thought they were establishing a government based on biblical principles, including the ideas of inalienable rights (which had roots in medieval theology) enshrined in both the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights, limitations on the reach of the federal government to the enumerated powers in the Constitution, and checks and balances within the government to prevent human sinfulness from corrupting the government, even representative government (which they saw as being rooted in Jethro’s advice to Moses in Exodus 18).

To be sure, they rarely cited chapter and verse from Scripture in their political discussions, but their priorities and overall approach to government wer...

In fact, in a ten-year study undertaken at the University of ...

examined 15,000 documents (many unrelated to politics) from the founders and determined that 34 percent of the quotations came from the Bible, the highest of any source. The next highest was the French political philosopher Montesquieu at 8.3 percent, then the English legal scholar William Blackstone at 7.9 percent. John Locke came in at 2.9 percent.5 (Blackstone’s commentaries on the law, which guided the Supreme Court for over a century, also include a great deal of Scripture and argue that the Bible is the foundation for all law...

In their discussion of politics, the founders emphasized the idea drawn from the Bible that only godly men of character should be elected to government, since the forms of government were only a shell; the substance of government and the only defense against corruption were the people who were elected to office. This emphasis on the danger of corruption, drawn from the doctrine of original sin, contrasts sharply with John Locke’s ideas about how to prevent abuse in government.

Although the founders believed that proper governmental structure was important and that they could help prevent corruption through the system of checks and balances, they did not have Locke’s faith in the perfectibility of humanity, nor did they follow him in rejecting the idea of original sin. Thus they did not elaborate the system of government in as much detail as Locke did, but instead argued that the key to keeping the government from turning into a tyranny was the quality of the people elected to office.

In point of fact, the European reaction to the Constitution was more correct than they knew. The colonists were able to pull off a new model of government in a way that Europeans simply could not. One of the advantages the Americans had was that they did not have a long-entrenched system of government or a centuries-old aristocracy or monarchy to deal with. The Americans were free to develop a system of government that drew from the best of the British model while getting rid of institutions such as the nobility and the monarchy that they judged as not helpful.

But this idea also led Rousseau to utopianism — to the belief that the right organization of society would bring about perfect equality and freedom. Rousseau outlined his scheme in The Social Contract. He said that far from being a fundamental right, private property was the source of inequality in the world. To reach an equitable society, all private property had to be abolished, and with it, the idea that the individual had a right to determine her or his interests. Instead, everyone without exception had to submit the final determination of their interests to the general will so that true equality and freedom could be established. Those who refused were to be “forced to be free” by compelling their submission to the general will.

Rousseau’s definition of freedom was almost the complete opposite of how most people use the word. But his strategy was similar to a tactic used by advertisers and other propagandists, namely, to take a word that has good associations, redefine it, and then as you use it, you count on people to accept what you say because of their positive feelings about the word.

So Robespierre decided to enforce civil religion — the Cult of the Supreme Being — and to rechristen the cathedral of Notre Dame “the Temple of Reason.” He began to de-Christianize France systematically from top to bottom. For example, rather than counting years from the birth of Christ, he reset the calendar to I to date it from the Revolution. He renamed all of the months to negate traditional associations with Christian feast days and holidays. And since the seven-day week was a reflection of the Genesis creation story, he made each week ten days long.

As in any utopia, nonconformists could not be allowed to pollute the system, since they would prevent the country from entering the Promised Land. In other words, utopian visions always end in totalitarianism, with nonconformists either forced to conform or be eliminated.

How could this reign of terror happen in a revolution supposedly dedicated to liberty, equality, and brotherhood? The critical factor was the rejection of even the sort of formal Christianity found in England. As we have seen, from their earliest days, Christians had argued for the fundamental equality of all people based on their creation in the image of God and Jesus’ sacrificial death for all. Thus early Christians worked to abolish slavery and over time developed the idea of civil equality to accompany spiritual and moral equality. No other civilization anywhere in history ever moved in this direction — only the West, under the influence

of Christian principles. Along with equality came the idea of inalienable, God-given rights, which led to the Enlightenment emphasis on life, liberty, property, and virtue.

In the American Revolution, most of the founders were orthodox Christians; only a small number were deists or rationalists. They thus lived with a tension in their minds between two paradoxical principles. On the one hand, human beings were seen as being created in the image of God. This meant in principle that each individual has equal value and inalienable rights and thus should be given equal opportunities with everyone else. On the other hand, we are fallen creatures who suffer the effects of original sin and are thus prone to corruption. As a result, the government created by America’s founders was set up with checks and balances to prevent any branch of government from becoming too powerful and corrupt, and the Bill of Rights was formulated to try to guarantee that the people’s inalienable rights would not be abridged by the government.

But at the same time, the founders did not rely on institutional structures to keep the country headed in the right direction. Instead, they knew the institutions would only be as good as the people elected to fill them, and thus they emphasized the character of those who would be elected far more than the structure of government. Some of the founders worked to establish a public school system to educate people, not just on the basic subjects, but on morality and the Bible; after all, education was not just about reading and writing but also about character formation. Others set up Bible societies and other religious organizations to try to instill virtue in the people, because only then would the government be kept from becoming too corrupt. In short, although the conditions of each revolution were different, so were the ideas that motivated them — and the ideas determined the outcome every bit as much as the historical circumstances. But things did not stand still. The 1800s saw the consolidation of a much more secular, “modern” worldview grown from the roots of Enlightenment thought but progressing well beyond them. The next chapter examines how that worldview emerged.

Unfortunately, however, deism is an unstable worldview. Because the only role God has is to kick-start the universe, if another alternative can be found to explain how the universe got here, we can safely eliminate God from the system altogether.

The Latin scientia simply meant “knowledge”; thus any field of study was a “science” since it involved knowledge about the subject. Reducing the meaning of the word science only to studies that followed this particular methodology reflects a fundamental shift in the understanding of what it meant to know things. Now only things that could be tested and confirmed through the scientific method qualified as real knowledge; everything else was dismissed as subjective or irrelevant. Second, the scientific method works well primarily in the natural sciences — in studies of the material world. Thus the shift to materialistic metaphysics was encouraged by the development of the scientific method, which was then enshrined as the one way to get true knowledge because the worldview said that the only thing there was to know was matter and energy. In other words, materialism and scientism — the idea that the only way you can truly know anything is through science — go hand in hand.

Christianity teaches that human beings are created in the image of God and thus have dignity and worth and occupy a special place in the creation. Where did we come from and how do we explain human distinctiveness if we accept a purely materialistic view of the universe? The answer, of course, is that we evolved from “lower” species.

For people who found naturalism appealing, Darwin’s theory was a godsend. It was the missing link needed to round out a fully naturalistic worldview, and Darwin’s

teaching has since become foundational for naturalistic thinking and scientism. Interestingly enough, his theory does not fit the definition of science. For a theory to be scientific, it must be able to be validated through the scientific method: A theory is proposed and predictions are made from it. These predictions are then tested through experimentation. • If the experiment fails, the theory must be discarded or modified. • If the experiment succeeds, it does not prove the theory true, but it does make it more probable that the theory is correct.

Darwinism is not itself subject to the scientific method any more than anything in history is. The past is over; you cannot revisit it, observe it, test it, or experiment on it. All you can do is look at the surviving evidence and try to make sense of it. Darwin knew, of course, that he had no access to the past, but he reasoned that if his theory were true, then natural selection would...

cannot be accounted for via natural selection. Rapid emergence of species falsifies his theory. It also sounds like special pleading, a “Darwin of the gaps” explanation, to say that the fossilization of the transitional forms predicted by Darwin never had the opportunity to take place in the emergence of any species on the planet, past or present.

But, of course, none of this matters because Darwinism is not a scientific theory but a worldview assumption, and as such, it is not falsifiable. Certainly, naturalists think they have good reasons to accept natural selection, but people always believe this about their articles of faith.

But as people employ this method, it is literally impossible to recognize evidence that would contradict Darwin because every explanation of the data begins by assuming that evolution is true and proceeds from there. In other words, Darwinism interprets the evidence rather than the evidence testing Darwinism. As a result, no matter how many failed predictions come from Darwinism, it can never be proven false. Simply put, naturalistic evolution is an article of faith.

The loss of the idea of the image of God in the materialistic assumptions of the age led to a rejection of the goodness of work, which meant that labor returned to drudgery. Workers no longer had the satisfaction of the old guild craftsmen who made a product from start to finish.

The problems of industrialization fueled one of the most important materialistic philosophies of the nineteenth century — an idea that originated with thinkers who tried to apply scientific methods to history, even though history itself is not subject to the kind of prediction and experimentation possible in the natural sciences. Oddly enough, this line began with Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, a philosopher who combined Enlightenment faith in reason with a denial of both scientism and materialism.

As always is true of utopian schemes, when people tried to implement it, it resulted in totalitarianism.

The Black Book of Communism, edited by French historian Stéphane Courtois, estimates that 94 million people were killed in Communist states in the twentieth century, including 20 million in the Soviet Union, 65 million in China, 1 million in Vietnam, 2 million in North Korea, 2 million in Cambodia, 1 million in Communist Eastern Europe, 150,000 in Latin America, 1.7 million in Africa, 1.5 million in Afghanistan, and 10,000 due to “the international Communist movement and Communist parties not in power.”

Contrary to popular belief, this makes Communism — an explicitly atheistic system — a far greater killer than any force in history, including religion. And these numbers do not include additional millions put into the gulag or forced labor or reeducation camps. In Communism, as in any naturalistic system, human rights do not exist. (Are they matter or energy?) All that matters is the historical dialectic leading to the utopia, and anything or anyone that gets in the way

of the evolution of human society must be ruthlessly eliminated.

What Marx did not anticipate is that the free market system could reform itself. William Wilberforce, the evangelical who led the charge against slavery in the British parliament, also campaigned for workers’ rights, including limiting the work week, paying a living wage, setting restrictions on child labor, and a host of other issues. As the nineteenth century progressed, trade unions — many led by Christians — pushed for reforms, and governments responded, so that over time the abuses in the factories were overcome and the horrendous living conditions of the workers were improved through a combinat...

Most people are not, and have not been, ready to go as far as Nietzsche did in his attempts to deal with the meaninglessness of the world. But the problem will not go away in a materialistic worldview. Some people even celebrate meaninglessness.

But in the end, Sartre himself could not live with the implications of his ideas. Most other people cannot either.

The most important of these thinkers was Sigmund Freud. Freud believed that human life was governed by dark, nonrational forces operating in our subconscious mind. In particular, the dominant motive for human behavior is the drive for sex, an idea very congenial to Darwinism in general and evolutionary biology in particular, since sex is the means by which we reproduce and thus through which evolution occurs.

This set of ideas is a branch of postmodern thought known as “deconstructionism,” from the idea that texts can be deconstructed and reconstructed as suits the reader. Although this may seem pretty abstract, it has a number of important and immediate implications. The first, and hopefully most obvious, is that it eliminates the possibility of saying anything that is objectively true. All truth claims are equally true and equally false. And even if a speaker makes a subjective statement (“I am hot”), there is no guarantee that the listener will understand the statement in the way the speaker intends it or that it will be true in the listener’s personal context.

Objective truth to a deconstructionist is thus inherently incommunicable and by implication unknowable. It is a small step from there to the idea that truth itself simply does not exist. All that is left is a radical cultural relativity in which no culture can claim superiority in any meaningful sense to any other.

In short, we have

arrived at nihilism from a different direction, not from the lack of meaning in a naturalistic world, but from the impossibility of knowing anything or judging anything to be right or wrong.

In the same way that existentialism is essentially nihilism-lite, most popular postmodernism is deconstructionism-lite. It tends to accept many of the premises of deconstructionism — a rejection of objective truth, insistence on cultural and moral relativity, and so on — without following through on all of the implications of these ideas or on the theory of language that supports them.

Typical postmodernists reject the idea of absolute truth in favor of the idea that truth is relative and personal. In other words, what is true for one person is not necessarily true for another, though in practice this belief is largely limited to areas of morality. Everyone agrees that gravity works, for example, but they do not agree on whether it is OK to cheat on an exam or on a girlfriend.

The idea of radical freedom and autonomy also leads directly to the great postmodern virtue — tolerance. Not only can you not do anything that limits another’s freedom or usurps their rights; you cannot suggest that there is anything wrong with what they decide to do with their freedom. To do so is to commit the unforgivable sin of being intolerant, judgmental, or bigoted (which all mean essentially the same thing to a postmodern). This is a major shift in the idea of tolerance. In the past, tolerance applied to people. You could strongly disagree with certain ideas, while tolerating the people who held them. Increasingly, however, toleration applies to ideas and moral decisions, such that not only are they not subject to criticism but must be positively affirmed and celebrated.