Religion the Foundation Stone?

Originally I planned two blog posts here, but as my brain kicked into gear, I realized these are part of the same thought. I was going to write about an hypothesis that Christianity is the foundation stone of Western civilization. I have heard this discussed and the idea interests me but I haven't thought deeply about it, or looked for evidence pro and con. I was going to write a second post about the closure of a single church near my home. The essence of this second post was to be the decline of Christianity in the West. Further thought on this made me toss around the idea that we are seeing a change in Christianity rather than a decline. I decided that these thoughts are connected.

Is the decline of Christianity in the West merely part of the ages old dance of religion within society? Will the product of this dance, once the music stops, be an entirely different civilization? This lead to the further thought, was there ever a single 'Western' civilization?  And if so, when and how did it begin? Historians have delighted in dividing history into eras. Apparently we are entering or are already in 'post-modernity'. Modernity is held to have got going in the 15th century, so is about 500 years old (give or take a century or so). Prior to that was the mediaeval period and prior to that the 'ancient' world, or 'classical' civilization. All these periods belong to what is called Western civilization. This overarching theme (if I may call it that) is accorded a start with ancient Greece and the ideas of philosophers there and a form of early democracy, especially as found in the city state of Athens. Rome conquered the Mediterranean world and what is now western Europe (from which comes the label 'Western') and in its organized commercial and legal world spread these Greek ideas and thus was the midwife of 'Western civilization'. Western ideas died for a time when the Roman empire collapsed in western Europe and the western Mediterranean but revived in another sub-period labelled 'The Renaissance', the rebirth. The technology of movable type added a volatile fuel to this movement, et voilà Western Civ.

Where does religion lie in all this?  Both the ancient Greeks and Romans were pagans of similar hue. The Greek gods and goddesses were more petty and human than the more powerful Roman versions, perhaps reflecting the differences in political power of the two cultures. Religion both reflected and supported the overall culture. But Christianity, a very different idea about the nature of existence was born and nurtured, albeit often violently in the Roman world. This is a mystery despite the number of studies done on this topic. History is mostly a story of gradual, glacial change, but every so often an event occurs that is seismic rather than organic. Christianity survived its first three centuries as an outsider faith where it was periodically and violently attacked by both state and populace. Yet it emerged as the official religion of the Roman Empire.  Nietzsche once famously pronounced the death of God. A fourth or even fifth century Nietzsche would have proclaimed the death of gods as Christianity gradually supplanted the old gods even among the general populace.

I don't really know what Nietzsche meant and I am not alone in that,  but the image below of pews being sold off in a Presbyterian church in Canada in 2018 gives a hard face to the surface meaning of his comment. This congregation was formed in 1905 and they built a very plain, serviceable building for their worship and for the community that is at the core of all Christian groupings. Dare I say, community is at the core of most religions, though not all. Certainly it is for the 'peoples of the Book' (to borrow from Islam): Judaism, Christianity and Islam. Even those religions where community is not emphasized by their religious professionals, the ordinary followers organize themselves into small communities: the Buddhists, Taoists, neopagans and so on. Christianity too has a foundation stone called the equality of the individual person before God, regardless of social status.  Yet people are social animals and we need fellowship. As this blog post is about Western Civilization and thus Christianity, I will reel my thoughts into focus here. As I started this paragraph, this church community began in 1905. In 1921, they expanded and renovated their building, then in 1967 built a new place beside the old. It is the new  you see being disassembled in the photo below.

I mentioned that history usually changes organically but sometimes with an earthquake. This congregation had the money and the optimism to build an entirely new church in 1967. At that time in Canada, the generation who had fought the second world war were at the apex of their earning. The economy was booming with low unemployment and low inflation. Wages were going up at a greater rate than costs. This congregation used their old building as a Sunday School and for meetings and communal activities such as pot luck dinners and scouts and guides. This was also the era of the baby boom. Churches were filled with adults and even more so with their children.  Families often had three, four, five or more children. Yet just over fifty years later, there were only a few adults remaining and even fewer children. One generation is all it took for Christianity to collapse into insignificance in Canada. This congregation has moved in with another and sold their buildings to a developer. For three hundred years Christianity grew slowly from a breakaway sect of Jews in the ancient world, to becoming the officially sanctioned religion of the entire Western world. Over the next five to six hundred years it came to encompass the tribal societies that had displaced the Roman empire in the west. There it consolidated for another five hundred years. Then for four hundred years Christianity expanded with European commerce and military might based on technology to all parts of the world.

In fifty years, this all dissolved. And here is a picture of a small part of that dissolution.

Renewal

Currently I am re-reading Thomas Merton's Ways of the Christian Mystics. For those unfamiliar with Thomas Merton, he was in the last part of his life a Trappist monk, who became a modernized eremitic. I say modernized because he remained connected to the world through extensive correspondence and writing, while living a solitary life on the grounds of his abbey. He died, in fact, on a trip to Thailand for an ecumenical  conference on the spiritual life. One of his main interests and focuses of correspondence were with Buddhist monks.

In this little (and it is little: truly pocket sized) book he surveys English (Catholic), Russian and  Protestant spirituality and monasticism. The point of this brief post was prompted by this latter chapter. In it he discusses the surprising revival of Protestant monasticism in the post world war 2 period. He places Anglican monasticism outside of this, noting in an unexplained sentence that it is 'catholic'.

What interested me, however, were his comments on the revival and renewal of Christianity in the first two decades after the end of the second world war. He saw this Protestant style monasticism, exemplified by the Taizé community as evidence for a revival and rejection of arid formalism. In the changes in liturgy, the moves towards a simpler Christianity focused on worship and charitable action in the world, he saw a pan-Christian revivalism and renewal.  Thomas Merton died in 1968, so he could not predict nor see the collapse of Christianity in the western world that began to be evident in the 1970s. Sociologists working in the last decades of the 20th century crunched the numbers and saw slippage as early as the 1950s. The Canadian sociologist Reginald Bibby, for example noted that despite the exponential growth in church construction and membership in the 1950s, churches were actually growing slower than the rate of population increase. Vitality hid an inner crumbling it seems. Sociologists have since begun to posit a change to another type of Christianity replacing institutions with individual or even online realities. But this is not a theory accepted by all such. Steve Bruce, the English sociologist sees decline, not change. Historians have joined the debate, attempting to find the time where decline began and reasons why.  Callum Brown the British historian of religion places the collapse as beginning in the 1960s and assigns the reason to the disappearance of women from the institutional church.  Debate rages among scholars of all sorts over whether the United States is the lone hold out or not in this western collapse of Christianity. So, soon after Thomas Merton's death churches emptied, the western world changed laws to root out Christian foundations, atheists began their boldest attacks on Christianity (claiming they were attacking 'religion' but Christianity was their target).

Of course, only time will tell but at this point the future does not look good for Christianity, and I would argue for western civilization as a project. Despite what that curious bunch called 'the new atheists' might argue, western civilization rested on a foundation of Christianity.

The Protestant Work Ethic?

I just finished watching a series by Niall Ferguson where he looked at 'western' civilization and its rise and potential fall. He quite creatively posits six 'killer apps' that made the West dominant: competition, science, medicine, property ownership, consumerism and the work ethic. (PBS has a nice, easy to remember page listing these:  Six Killer Apps  ).

Like all television presentations there is much left out, primarily nuance, but in general he makes a good case. The principle curiosity (as in a curio), is his resurrection of Max Weber's protestant work ethic theory. I have profound difficulties with social scientific theorizing as humanity is, in my view, much too supple and complex to be understood or predicted in a theory. Weber's is not accepted uncritically anymore in any case, so i was surprised to see him use this for his final of six shows. This leads Dr. Ferguson to ignore Catholicism in the United States and in China. He compares the U.S. and China in terms of the Protestant work ethic in this last episode. He mentions only Protestantism assuming that the only innovative and hardworking people in either society are Protestants. You can make a case for Christianity being tied to the rise and dominance of the West, but not just Protestantism. In an earlier episode, he contrasted South America with North America and suggested that the rise of North America to prosperity was in part linked to Protestantism. This ignored the fact that there were large numbers of Catholics in North America. I should mention here that by 'North America'  he actually meant the United States. Yet the wealth that industrial capitalism brought to the U.S. was in the second half of the 19th century at a time when Catholic immigrants largely provided the cheap work force for new factories. You could make some case for this in Canada's history, as French Canada remained pre-industrial with a pre-industrial mindset bolstered specifically by the Catholic church - but not for the United States. In English Canada, Protestantism and industrialization dominated from the 1850s, though the cheap workers were mainly English and Irish, both Catholic and Protestant.

I would agree that the 'work ethic' is intrinsic to the rise and dominance of the West, but I wonder if it can be attributed to Protestantism alone. There is a link perhaps, but one more associated with individualism than directly to Protestantism. The United States did and does have a Protestant based mentality, to which Catholics are integrated. Hmmmmm. So, maybe he is correct in the end, but with a savage disregard for nuance in his arguments.

I'll think about this more and post when I have more marking to procrastinate from....