‘Weird’ and ‘Weirder’: Why the West Is So Different

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Glen Scrivener
We believe in the Inviolable worth and equal dignity of every member of the human family. Why? Because if I look at any two people, and I measure them, according to any one metric, well, this guy is going to be smarter than that guy, this guy is gonna be tougher than that guy, this guy is going to be more economically viable than this guy. In what sense? Are they equal? Like equal? How equal in watts? And people start to see oh, yeah, it’s a belief.

Andrew Wilson
I think in the end, it’s easier to say to somebody, you believe this. And here’s why you’re right, than here’s you believe this. And here’s why you’re wrong. Of course, all of us have beliefs that need to be affirmed and challenged in light of the gospel. It’s just so much more of an appealing approach to be able to say these convictions you hold a very dear to you. But actually, they only hold up on Christian premises.

Glen Scrivener
Hello, and welcome to post Christianity. We are a podcast thinking about how we got here and how we move on from this moment. My name is Glen Scrivener, and I’m joined by

Unknown Speaker
Andrew Wilson, great to be here. Very good to be here.

Glen Scrivener
It’s a new podcast. And we want to figure out the history of how we got to this particular cultural moment so that we can be oriented to face the future as the Church of Jesus Christ. Now, Andrew, do you want to introduce yourselves? yourselves?

Andrew Wilson
There all? Yeah, so I’m Andrew Wilson. And I’m the teaching pastor at King’s College London. And I’ve recently written a book which has gone in quite quite a deep dive on this sort of thing called remaking the world. So as you indeed have yourself,

Glen Scrivener
right, so I wrote a book that came out last year called the air we breathe, how we all came to believe in things like progressing kindness, and compassion, and all those sorts of good things that we now take for granted in the post Christian West. And so we thought we’d get together and have a conversation about this sort of stuff. I thought we could begin in 1776, which is, it has my favorite year. Yeah, it seems like have you done a CTRL? F on your manuscript to discover how many times you mentioned 1776?

Andrew Wilson
And you’ll probably have not. I feel like I should, yeah, an awful lot. Hundreds, I would say, yeah. So I wrote a book that really about the way in which we became effectively the post Christian West got formed through this one particular year, and, and looking at it as a sort of window into all of the deeper historical developments that have created the world as it currently is. So why were Western and educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex Christian, romantic, and so this sounds a bit jargony. But the idea is to sort of say, this is how the modern West functions and feels, and to tell that story through the lens of a particular year where there was a lot of change that created the world that we’re in now.

Glen Scrivener
Yes. And that spills the acronym weirder. It does. Because weird was already an acronym in use by people like Joseph Henrich, who sort of coined the phrase back in the 2000s, evolutionary biologist at Harvard, I believe, yep. And he was noticing that those in the West, Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic, you’ve added two extra letters X, Christian, and romantic. We’ll press into that and why you did that. But first of all, let’s let’s get a sense of the weirdness of the West. As an evolutionary biologist, he was noticing that all the psychological studies that people were doing, were incredibly narrow in their focus, because you generally just want to get 20 year olds who are on a university campus, you offer them a free slice of pizza, and they will do your study for them. And turns out most of the world don’t think like 20 year old graduate or undergraduate. So University,

Glen Scrivener
exactly. And 90 plus percent of all like psychological studies were kind of done on that kind of demographic. And it turns out that what we thought of as natural, obvious and universal about human beings is nothing of the sort. It’s very weird. Yeah. Give us a sense of some of the weirdness of the West and how we are different than other times in places.

Andrew Wilson
Yeah, so obviously, we’re, we were talking about being Western, which is a very strange term, but we speak and think in English, which is itself a strange, you know, obviously, quite a narrow slice of humanity. But we think it’s normalized, we are all literate. Pretty much everybody listening to this, and everybody within 10 miles of us is can read and in fact, not only can read but can’t not read. So if you get shown a page of ink that is formed in letters, you can’t not you can’t fail to retrieve the information. So you actually can’t see it without thinking in a literate way which rewires our brains in all sorts of ways we enrich give lots of lots of charts to the effect that we are much more likely to trust strangers, for instance, than people who are from more familial cultures with your much you actually, we would think that nepotism is a bad thing, for instance, favoring a family member over someone we don’t know. Whereas in many cultures, it’s the exact opposite. They will say, how could you not do that? And that means that we are more likely we actually work harder and more likely to work long hours in particular kinds of careers in order to secure a few For our family, but much less likely to invest in familial relationships that might last the sense of whole life that our lifetime, that national and national levels, things like corruption are very low. And as I say, Trust of strangers is very high. But that, again is unrepresentative and many we don’t tend to think in. And this is something Jonathan Hite talks a lot about. We don’t even morally we don’t tend to assess right and wrong in as many different ways as many cultures do. Many would say that’s unfair. But they might also say that, and they might say that’s harmful, which we would but they might also say that’s dirty, or that subversive is blasphemous, right? So they would use categories to do to understand right and wrong. And in the West, we generally don’t we just say, No, that’s if it’s harmful, or if it’s unfair, that’s bad. But we don’t really have frameworks for understanding why certain things might be morally wrong. We are obviously extremely rich, everyone listening to this is probably sitting within or standing within 30 seconds of a flush toilet and able, you know, got electricity put within a few yards of you, I expect, we can obviously got instant access to more information than has been printed in the history of the world, the thing that we’re sitting on, or standing near is probably built in one country assembled in another country and been brought to us by means of various container ships and planes and things. And we’re likely to assume things about democracy, about choice about the fact that I ought to be able to choose not just a political party, but a marriage partner, or a breakfast cereal. And that would be true, whether we’re male or female, which again, in many cultures wouldn’t be true. And then we could talk a bit more, I’m sure on the ex Christian and romantic side, but there’s certainly many, many ways in which we are, our brains are just formed by a culture that has made us think in different ways than much much of the world does. And that yes, as you say, the acronym weird Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, is a common now psychological term for describing the difference between people like you and me, and most people listening to this, and kind of everyone else who is still much the majority of humanity.

Glen Scrivener
And we’re going to press into some of the reasons why that is. And what’s fascinating about Joseph Henrichs book, The weirdest people in the world, is that he says, Absolutely the weirdness of the West is because of Christianity. Yeah. And he sort of begins by sort of talking about some of the literacy issues and how we are people read the book, and that has rewired our brains. But what he spends the bulk of the book doing is looking at our marriage and family program. Yeah. And saying, well, as an evolutionary biologist, of course, he would like reproduction is sort of driving his analysis of those sorts of things. But what’s interesting to me is that has not been a particularly controversial statement for him to make that we are weird. And we are weird because of Christianity. And I think I would dispute whether you can hang everything on the Marriage and Family Program. I understand why he does it as an evolutionary biologist. Yeah, but that sort of thesis that it’s Christianity that has shaped us that is getting more and more traction these days, would you say?

Andrew Wilson
Yes, it is. And you’re getting it from an evolutionary perspective, but from a biological sort of deep history perspective, you’re also obviously getting it in more common narratives about the values and ideals of the West, which I think become particularly, I think some of that may have been triggered, even by the sort of more recent turn in the west towards self as a self critique would be a soft term for it, but really sort of, often a rabid hatred of Western ism and sort of self loathing that comes in and and why that phenomenon emerges, which most cultures don’t really do, they are often able to see their flaws, but they don’t hate themselves. And then recent history as much as Western people tend to, and people have started reflecting at this historical level. Why is that true? I think it would be true, even politically, I think the if I can call them the 911 Wars, but that they’re sort of the last 20 years in the living memory of most people listening to this would be again, a lot of self reflection on Well, we we honestly, like invaded countries on the basis that it was obvious to everybody that these are the values that would take their place if you got rid of a dictator. And then 10 years later looked at and went, Oh, gosh, that didn’t go well at all. Like we thought it turns out that, yeah, human rights or democratic values are not innate. And even in the last two years, with a withdrawal from Afghanistan, you, you saw sort of, you know, people are sitting in schools with these sort of, you know, Afghan girls trying to teach them all about why they should basically be good modern feminists and just seeing the total lack of comprehension of what the Western people were saying and realizing this is nothing like as innate as we think. And I think that’s also fed into a broader sense of reflection in the west or so. Okay, are we more unusual than we realized we were and where does that come from? And I think Henrik has explanation and that of, you know, Tom Holland and others will talk about I’m sure, is a lot of that, if not all of it comes from our very soul. civically Christian roots. And that accounts, sometimes for even the anti Christian impulse that in our cultural experience,

Glen Scrivener
Yeah, completely. So like in my book, the air we breathe, I look at seven values that we now consider to be the air we breathe. And we consider these to be natural, obvious and universal and that absolutely nothing of the sort. So I talk about the quality, compassion, consent, especially in the sexual realm, enlightenment, science, freedom and progress. And what I find interesting about that is when you reverse those values, you get something that is unequal, cruel, coercive, unenlightened, anti science, restrictive and regressive. And if you hear something that is those things like that is the worst isn’t like, Well, why are those things the worst will be? Because Christianity has done a number on us. And we are all living in this this sort of crater that has been produced by the Jesus asteroid that a slow motion crashed into the West. And we take that shape now, such that we find it odd when other people don’t make those same assumptions. Yeah. And when did you start waking up to this particular kind of analysis of the Western Christian?

Andrew Wilson
I’d love to say it because I read your book, Glenn. But as you know, I loved your book, because I thought you made such a good, you popularized something very well, which I think I had been, I’ve been thinking and noticing a bit, but I think you crystallized it brilliantly. I probably, I think the last is only been really the last five or six years, I think the first book that made me see it, as a thing was John heights, the righteous mind, which was only published, I think, in 2010 years old, 12 or 13. And he introduced me to the acronym, I’d never come across the weird morality thing before and that I found really helpful because it was it was so vivid, and some of the even just these extraordinary and sometimes quite grim, thought experiments he does where he says to people, okay, a guy buys a raw chicken from a supermarket takes it home has sex with it. And do you think that’s wrong? And watching Western people try to explain why it was without a moral framework for it?

Glen Scrivener
Yes, without saying, but it’s not harming.

Andrew Wilson
Because they say it’s not it’s not harmful. So how could it be wrong, but I kind of know in my gut that it is, but I don’t know why. And lots of examples, like trying people trying to explain why incest was wrong, or whatever. And I was just so eliminating, I thought, that’s exactly what would happen to my group of friends from university. And yet, I don’t think I they will be able to explain why. And I was fascinating to be able to think about that as a particularly Christian Western phenomenon. And so I think that that got me started down a line, which then, as I, you know, went to the whole origin story of the book I wrote, but I think I began to realize that there was actually the Christian component driving all of that strangeness of morality, which I was, I think, well, on the way to, obviously Tom Holland has shaped both of us quite a lot, I think with him and his very much as a sort of history of contrast in the modern West with the ancient Greco Roman world, which is his field. And I think realizing, yeah, it’s not at all strange for Caesar to say, yes, it went into Gaul and killed a million people. And no one today would regard that as a good yeah, in a way that he clearly does is calling comedy. Yes, exactly. And I think that really helps. Even though I’d studied quite a lot of the Greco Roman world, I just hadn’t seen the contrast with the classical world in the way that he did. And it really helped. And then I read Yeah, Henrik, his book, when I was beginning to work on my own book and realize, oh, that’s, that’s great, because that’s give me lots of charts and data for what I was already moving towards. And so yeah, so a combination of those three, eight, the height Holland enrich,

Glen Scrivener
there we go. All the H’s. Larissa site, Sidon top, yes, was quite interesting, whether inventing the individual, which has been in the last 10 years. Yes. As a book that really woke me up to the, the sense of, we take it for granted that society is obviously a collective of individuals who we all stand on our own two feet, yeah, we are equal to one another. And we we just consent to be in this sort of contractual arrangement that we call a society and if I choose to opt out, I choose to opt out, but I am the center of gravity in in political philosophy, and he’s like, Well, that that’s weird. That is so odd. Let’s let’s go back to ancient societies where you have the part of familiars that the head of the household who acts like this priest King, who has you know, life or death power over others, you know, in his household, who keeps the fires of the other half. So fascinating. Yeah, as the ancestor worship and his job is to pass on to the eldest son, that job of being the the high priest, and even when the Greeks had a thing called democracy, it was it was the heads of the household, the fathers coming together in order to narrow down the options that were actually being decided by divination. And you know, the women in the in the culture were those who are sort of the more prophetic types and they were hearing from things like the Delphic Oracle and, and the men Then what kind of the men as heads of the household, we’re voting on the sorts of things that the Delphic Oracle might say, narrowing down those options. And you’re like, well, that’s not democracy, you know, what we would be used by that.

Glen Scrivener
And inventing the individual is just such a fascinating thought, because we tend to think, you know, what is obvious about a moral framework, for instance, is well, you just need Immanuel Kant to come along, and tell you give you the categorical imperative, you know, act in such a way that it will, that ought to be a duty, you know, for everybody, for everybody to reserve. And that’s all you need. Or if you don’t like Immanuel Kant’s, then come along another 100 years, and Jeremy Bentham, and John Stuart Mill will give you some utilitarianism. Yeah, if you don’t like the duty ethics of Kant’s, Fine, let’s go with the utilitarian leisure and maximize pleasure. But in both accounts, you’ve got this sovereign individual who is obviously equal. And you know, my utils, for a utilitarian counted the same as yours count the same as the, you know, whoever in society. And you’ve already assumed so much of the invention of the individual, as this sort of sovereign who stands before God or before the eyes of the law as this equal kind of party in an end is the center of political understanding. Yeah. And all of that is just borrowed capital from Christianity, all of it. And so modern people who are just like, Oh, you don’t need Jesus, you just need Kant’s. You just need Bentham. And you’re like, No, no, no, you need to trace the story back a lot earlier.

Andrew Wilson
Yeah. I think individualism is so deep that you don’t even realize it’s an assumption. You just, it seems innately obvious. And again, one of that’s one of the factors about the 911 wars, where you think, yeah, this with this really is so deep in us, we don’t think of it as a cultural distinctive. So if you go abroad on holiday, you notice, obviously, they speak a different language they do. And you laughing Oh, look at the way we eat dinner. And, and maybe if you traveled to a very different part of the world, you you come to realize that there is some other assumptions you hold that are not globally shared. Individualism seems so fundamental to us that you almost never, if you’re a Western person interact with someone who doesn’t, at least to some degree, share that assumption. Because the kinds of people even when you travel, you’re interacting with at any, in any depth are those who show that assumption. And what’s even taught does, which I found so fascinating was to go back to sort of 11th century, which is not a period of history I knew very much about and most of us, it’s not a, it’s not a period, we study much, and really drill in and say, Can you see the changes that are taking place that obviously you can trace back to Augustine and then back to Paul and Jesus, but particularly in the sort of 10th 11th 12th century, the way in which Western people come to think about the individual as a as the sort of almost the fundamental agent in society, it hasn’t washed through yet it hasn’t produced the same, obviously, politically, economically, all of those things, it’s still a very, what we would think of as a very feudal society, hierarchical authoritarian right. But the but the the metaphysical transformation, the religious content, ultimately, most social changes are religious in nature when you get down to rock bottom, because that’s, it’s the deepest values we hold which are shaping those things, but they’re often so deep that you don’t know they’re there. And individualism is one of several like that which we’ve forgotten are even values that seems so innately obvious to us.

Glen Scrivener
So what were some of the assumptions that they’re making in the 11th century and the papal reforms? I guess you could start in Genesis one if you’ve got the the image of God male and female. That’s obviously huge for the history of everything you’ve got you know Christ coming as the highest member of the hierarchy descending today the slaves death, to invite us now into a family where we’re all brothers and sisters and no one is Lord except him. Yeah, you’ve got the Apostle Paul and you know, male and female slave and free all one in Christ Jesus, you’ve got all Gustin kind of, in the debris of, you know, the western half of the of the Roman Empire being smashed by by the Goths kind of knitting together, intellectually knitting together Europe, again, on the basis of covenants, yeah, rather than on the basis of anything else, ethnicity or even family, you know. And then Larry, Sidon type is noticing, okay, and the church is starting to get very serious about who you cannot marry, and you cannot marry your seventh cousin, kind of how your first cousins all the way out to the very fringes. So that now you’re, you’re suddenly having to have relationships based on covenant, rather than relationships based on kin, which smashes apart the kind of the feudal relationships and the tribal relationships that are going on. And now I start to now and that starts to be a need for things like charter towns. I mean, we’re moving on a bit,

Andrew Wilson
you know, but I think that’s the right way to go. I think the only other element that I think is vital in that story is is when we, you know, you mentioned Augustine, obviously this sort of his more The City of God has great sort of theoretical framework for the collapse of Western Rome and, as you know, is obviously on its way and is well underway by his day. But also his confessions, which are this sort of very an extraordinary text, the one of the most unexpected, you’d sort of place if you didn’t know it was written, when it was and you suddenly found it, you’d think it was written 1000 years off either romantic because you really would, because it’s so personal. And so he just looks into his own soul so much, and obviously does the whole book in the form of a prayer first person, and the amount of self reflection, you know, the the famous line your Lord and I prayed at the time, Lord, make me chase, but not yet. And now people use it as a punchline, but at the time, what an extraordinary thing to say. So that that is in some ways, the first, the first work that we would recognize now as individualist in a way and obviously that’s anachronistic in so many ways, but you read it today. And the reason it speaks to us as because it talks about the self and the way that we do, and we do because EDID, then as you say, you’ve got the sort of making the smaller, the family smaller through the sort of the first half of the medieval period, really this sort of beginning in the sixth seventh centuries, and then through, but gradually the family is getting smaller and smaller. That which doesn’t mean people have fewer children, it means that the family network that you operate with doesn’t extend to an entire clan, it actually increasingly becomes closer to what we would now call us, and even a nuclear family, but an intergenerational nuclear family where you are, you know, everybody in your lives, you know, there might be 20 of you, grandparents don’t have kids. But you’re very aware of them. But that means that you’re instead of saying I’ve now got 300, people who I regard as part of my immediate identity circle, that identity circle is going a lot smaller, which means that the interactions you have with other people in in the community have to be done in a more neutral way with them as agents and individuals in their own right, rather than members of a clan, or a tribe that is interacted with somewhat differently and with more greater levels of trust or distrust according to your relationship with the clan. And that means that you then do start establishing these sorts of as you said, these institutions like well, a monastery would be one. That’s right, the only

Glen Scrivener
one right, and I think that’s really interesting as well, I think I think that I would add to Joseph Henrichs kind of analysis would be obviously he focuses on marriage and family program, but the sexual ethic of Jesus was revolutionary in prising singleness as well. chaste singleness. And so the monasteries and and those sorts of religious communities again, absolutely not based on progeny, absolutely not based on on family, and you and you have rules. So you’ve got a rule of Saint Benedict, and you have you have these rules. And Augustinian monk takes these vows. And again, it’s this idea of the choice of the individual, the consent of the individual is forming a community around them, rather than I’m just thrown into this world as the son of this guy. And you know what, we’re a part of this thing. And that birth of choice, yeah, Kyle Harper, who we’re going to talk to, on the on the podcast, really presses into how the sexual ethic of the early centuries of Christians kind of foregrounded choice, yes, and brought about a sense of freedom, actually, because here are here are people who were saying no to biological reality and biological necessity, because they’re saying no to sex, and suddenly consent, and choice, and communities that are not based on biology, but are based on covenant and these rules that start so.

Andrew Wilson
And it’s got huge implications for the economic heft of Western Europe today, and over the last 1000 years, because one of the things that happens next from there, I mentioned the thing about trust, like if I’m not related to you, and I’m not dashing most of the people I trade with, I’m not related to either I have to, there has to be rules, even if they’re not, like community rules, like the rules of Benedict, but you still need rules that effectively mean, I know that if I sell you this at this price, you’re going to end up honoring that deal and, and that the way economics works is no longer based on familial connections or even retribution is based on a sort of common shared understanding of a public square that there are certain things I might do at home. But I come and bring myself into the public square, I have to think about myself as someone who’s subject to a broader code of norms that treat you with the same degree of dignity if you’re related to me and if you’re if you’re not, and that affects the track the beginning of things like the guild’s Yeah, and as you mentioned, the charter towns where people say actually as a citizen of a of a city or a town or a burger of a burr or a town Yeah, a lot of European languages that I do the burger or the you know, the burr or whatever. Yeah, becomes the sort of that’s that my identity is tied to this community. And that city becomes more prominent in my self understanding that it ever would have been in in the ancient world, except insofar as my family were all living there and of course, they begin to think about themselves as agents within a put with a political and an economic identity, and then eventually an academic I density because they set up universities and so you end up going, what looks like a very obscure religious thing, monasteries and convents. But as you build that up over five 600 years by the time Siedentopf is talking about the 11th 12th 13th century, Western Europe is thinking in terms of, well, I belong to a town I may or may not belong to a religious order, I belong to may belong to a guild from I trade, and I’m, I may have been to a university or I may intend for my son or to study at a university as well. And then you realizing Wow, there’s lots of these nonfamily entities in which people are finding what we would now call their identity, but their sense of home and belonging and moral norms. And that then meant that intellectual freedom in the university economic power came out of it political. And so the, the way in which Western Europe began to think was shaped, again, because Christianity had effectively put what you’ve rightly called consent, at the heart of some of these relations. Coupled with the sort of individualistic tradition going back to, you know, Romans seven or Augustine’s confessions, people begin to think about their own motives and scrutinize themselves in that way. And the two, I think, aligned along with some other some other developments create multiple institutions that are not to the family, not the extended family at all. Yeah, and yeah, I’m really set up all sorts of things that we now take for granted in the modern world. Yes.

Glen Scrivener
Should we talk about people reforms in the 11th century, in terms of, you know, here starts to be as the Canon lawyers are processing all of this, and these institutions that are built, not on family, but on covenant? They start to speak in the language of rights. Yeah. And this, this was kind of a new developments. Obviously, Christians knew I have an obligation to the poor to give to the poor. But what started to be new was no the poor have a claim on me rich, and that

Andrew Wilson
that was not merely patronage as a sense of rights isn’t for obligation,

Glen Scrivener
right. And that the right of the individual in their own rights, they have a claim on the resources of those who are wealthy, which which is not the responsibility model of the wealthy should give, yes, but the poor have a right and that that sounds very modern,

Andrew Wilson
it does sound very modern. And I think it’s it’s coupled with the other thing that’s happening in the PayPal reforms, which is, of course, the idea that the there is an there’s many things happening, but there’s the power of the state is confined by the authority of the Church, because ultimately, the king is beneath God in the hierarchy. And we’ll see this very iconic, famous scenes or is overused word, but where the pope excommunicate the Emperor and the Emperor faff around for a bit going, what am I going to do? But eventually it says, yeah, the emperor has to come and repent in the snow on his hands and knees, the door shut in his face. Yeah. Right. And it’s just an extraordinary. So this is in 1076. So 700 years before my Yeah, my period, I guess. But it’s a really extraordinary moment. Because at that point, again, the power of who would in any society would be taken for granted as the top of the hierarchical tree has been subjected to the power of the the authority of the Pope and effectively saying your, your right to govern is given to you by God. And if you don’t fall in line, and those two things together, you relativize, human worldly power at the same time as lifting up the rights of individuals. And you end up with a more theological account of who owes who wants, right. And then you put that together with the more individualistic community developments we’ve referred someone almost in, in society as a whole in Europe. And you can see how you end up with a group. I mean, a millions, billions of people today thinking, obviously, individuals have rights and those rights are innate, and rooted fundamentally, I think, in theology, but we won’t call it that anymore. Rather than in where I belong to a particular family or community. But to this day, many people globally don’t think that way at all about where their identity is found and where their rights if they even use that language come from,

Glen Scrivener
especially because it’s so shocking to tell people you can think middle medieval monks. Yeah, yeah, well, secularism does exactly

Andrew Wilson
the very thing because that’s exactly right. Because we generally think of, and, you know, we often were having this conversation, you know, a few miles away from Pevensey Castle, in southern and you just go and you look at an old tumbledown Castle like that now, and it just it symbolizes sort of what people often call the dark ages and think, Oh, well, that was the world that we used to have. But now we’re in in this new bright one, I think, actually, the assumptions you have about individual rights and the relationship between the state and the authority and agency of individuals and how large families are whether you can marry your cousins and all of those sorts of things are grounded in this world that you feel is so dark, but actually that’s where you got a

Glen Scrivener
lot of it from it’s just full of coils and bubonic plague. And that’s that’s all that we think turnips and turnips are the Dark Ages. And I’m you know, I even I remember writing a, an article that you know, about Don’t be a medieval, what was it? Don’t be a medieval youth worker, and it was this sort of tirade against and what I meant was Palladian really but but medieval just becomes a synonym for Baku. words. Yeah, rubbish broken. And I find myself even like having studied some of this stuff, I found myself the other day saying, Oh, my Wi Fi is positively medieval. Yes, just so anachronistic. It doesn’t mean anything, unless medieval has become a synonym for rubbish backward, and which, which it kind of is. And maybe one of the reasons for that is we haven’t mentioned a certain member of a charter town, a citizen of a charter town, who was also an Augustinian monk, who was also a university faculty member. So he had sort of all three, in this story, Martin Luther, he’s often sort of called the, you know, the man at the, at the hinge of these two ages, the, you know, the first modern man who brought us from medieval period into modernity, and in the mythology, and we might press into it, the ways in which this is mythology, but in the mythology, he stands against both Pope and Emperor on the basis of his conscience. Yeah, that’s the sort of the way the way the story is told. And so what a very modern man, Martin Luther is, as a single man standing up against the entire hierarchy and saying, Here I stand, I can do no other. And certainly that telling of the story, thrills down Protestant hearts, doesn’t it?

Andrew Wilson
It does. And I think it’s, you know, he probably didn’t say the final punished, probably wasn’t doing it simply as individualistically as all that. And he’s, he’s more the last medieval than the first modern, I think, in a lot of ways. But yes, that I think the idea of the the Disney version of the story, which is effectively the Disney version of every story is this individual discovers who they truly are by looking into their hearts and confronting the world. I think if you were trying to look for an individual who was the forerunner of that trend, Luther does, he does work as a as a sort of a totemic figure, because he is obviously is a tremendously courageous man. And he does speak about the importance of not going against your conscience. And he does go on a very rapid transformation, theologically, between 1516 and 1520, or 21, that most people haven’t traveled anything like that far in their lifetimes, and he did in the space of four or five years. So I think, you know, and you don’t want to take away from that, and it is absolutely extraordinary figure. But again, you would say yes, at the heart of this sort of modern conception of selfhood, and lots of things we talk about a lot. Now, there’s not the language you Luther would have used, but selfhood and identity and individuality and freedom of expression, all those things. You’d say, Yeah, Martin Luther, again, the most sort of the embodiment of a late medieval, early modern Christian, is expressing all of those ideals. And that’s one of the reasons why he’s popular not just as a Protestant figure, but even as a modern figure, as you say, is it sort of seems to be a transitional guy in the history of Western thought, yes. And rightly so. I think,

Glen Scrivener
you know, and as Christians, we do believe that there was a man who stood between the ages who took us from took us from darkness to light, we kind of we do believe in an enlightenment that happened in the first century, the light shines in the darkness, the darkness has not overcome it. And so how could this story not in some ways, resonate with us that there was this Luther figure who stood up against the priests and at great cost to himself, you know, just like Christ, here comes Martin Luther. But then there starts to be this sense of Luthers very theological critique of the medieval church starts to be I think, in the popular imagination, a wholesale rejection of medieval times. Yes. And we cast them as the Dark Ages. Yeah. And it’s this incredibly Christian and then Protestant, mythos, not saying that many aspects of the story aren’t true, but just that they resonate with us at a gut level, that here here is this person who stands up against the priests brings us from darkness into light, and all the old must be rejected, the old is gone, the new has come. And that starts to be not just a description of a poor theology of salvation, it becomes a wholesale rejection of of hierarchy, a wholesale rejection of institutions a wholesale rejection of of that, that way that we, you know, so that now, medieval is just, you know, a terrible word. And I can think of other icons that sort of come, you know, maybe 100 years later, you think of something like a Galileo and I mean, Protestants loves the Galileo story, because he was this other man who stood up against the priests who and and again, the mythos around the story really needs some myth busting, in terms of the the details of the story, but we resonate with the story of one man standing against the instance Shoo, shoo. Good not to be true, isn’t it? Yeah, yeah, the truth. And he, and you know, you’ll hear people like serious people and intellectuals even say, you know, he was burnt alive for what he said, wasn’t burnt alive. What are you talking about? He was in gaged in a titanic battle of ego with the Pope, and they used to be friends, and it all fell apart. But we thrilled to the story of this one man overturning the darkness and moving into the light. And then I wonder, we come into the Enlightenment period. And once more, you know, we’ve got a new batch of heroes that are bringing us and it’s not just Luthor taking us out of medieval Catholicism. It’s now the Enlightenment figures bringing us out of Christianity wholesale.

Andrew Wilson
Yeah, so you have. So the first time somebody uses the term, the middle age in English is in the same year as the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 protection for non British listeners is, really, we still celebrate it, I don’t know what quite Australian probably thing is very weird, sort of celebrates it by you know, sometimes burning effigies in a town quite near us, but mainly just having fireworks and bonfires. But so it’s, it’s, you know, five is a sort of plot to destroy the Catholic plot to destroy the Protestant government effectively, and in that, and that’s the year that you first hear that in the middle age surrounded by a love the way they write thicky. Fog is of darkness and ignorance, you know, and they’re sort of all in this way. And it’s a term really to describe there was a middle age of Catholicism between the early church and the what for the writer is the Protestant period. But within 100, odd years, maybe 150 years, it’s become, and I talk a lot about this in my book on 76, because that’s the year that Edward Gibbon published the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And he’s now using middle age as the Christian periods between the ancient world and the modern, which would, we would now call it the Enlightenment world. He wasn’t yet calling it that. But that’s the idea. So what he’s done is he’s taken the shape of the story that he got from the Protestants, which is you have early church, Catholicism, bad Protestantism good. And he’s transposed it into an enlightenment story that we would now all recognize, which is ancient world of paganism, sunny, happy chipper, then medieval Christendom, who, and then the storm

Glen Scrivener
clouds of things, all that 70 Castle.

Andrew Wilson
And then the modern world in which light science reason and all the rest, which I know we’ll come on to in subsequent conversations. But what he’s what Gibbon has done, and many others, like him, but given was particularly good at it, is to take a Christian shape of the story, the Protestant shape of story, and just change the characters. Yes. And it’s a very reassuring narrative, because it means that people like you and me, and all our neighbors and friends are on the right side of history. We’re sitting here today going, we’re actually the heroes of the story. And the bad guys are the ones who tried to destroy, you know, reason and understanding and where the where the light ones. And that story’s got, as you say, that’s why we tell the Galileo story and the length of story the way we do because we’re very keen to see ourselves in that mold as the heroic figure. Yeah, challenging the the darkness and switching the lights on.

Glen Scrivener
And yet it’s such a Christian story.

Andrew Wilson
Because it’s a story of Jesus is the story of the old is gone, the new has come and the light shines in the darkness and the darkness hasn’t overcome it, right. But we’ve just we’ve changed not just the characters now but also the timeline and it’s at the turning point of history is the 18th century ish, rather than at 30. Or whenever it right,

Glen Scrivener
I always live so Thomas Paine who again lived in a town very, very near us fro for a bit,

Andrew Wilson
we’re just covering everything important happened. And

Glen Scrivener
so he he wrote the age of reason and you know, to supersedes this, this darkened age of faith, we are now living in an age of reason. And he describes the previous 1000 years as a sandy plane in which no no shrub can be seen. Right. And that is behind us. And we are moving towards the sunny uplands. And you’re like, well, that that is so incredibly biblical. Can you can you think of a people who are moving out of the out of the desert to time into a promised land? And even as we try to escape Christianity, we can’t help but do it in Christian terms, which is the great irony isn’t that, that the Enlightenment is basically transposing a Christian story. Yeah. And we are now the Messiah. Yes, you know,

Andrew Wilson
I’m in pain my dog again in 1776 in his document common sense, which is that we’ll be very well known to American listeners he compares us again to like Noah stepping out of the frog. Oh, here we go. We’ve got we can start the world again. Because it’s almost like the old world has been destroyed in a flood. And now here we go. Right, let’s re begin. We have it in our power to begin the world over again. Right. It’s such a Western statement is just the way modern people think about our our agency, our individuality and our our importance, to be honest. We

Glen Scrivener
are the ones we’ve been waiting for. Yes, we are the Messiah, and hence your book, remaking the world and that’s taken from Thomas Paine kind of quote. So we we’ve done a history of the world up until 1776, the year of our Lord 1776. Shall we just finish with I loved the bit in your book, where you draw attention to the debtor ation of independence in 1776. Thomas Jefferson says We hold these truths to be now I’ll say it, I’ll say it the way everybody knows it, and then you can correct me. We hold these truths to be self evidence that all men are created equal and have been endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Something about the consent of the governed. Yeah, right. That’s how it’s very good for an American. That’s that’s how we all know, the phrase, and yet Jefferson did not write We hold these truths to be self. No,

Andrew Wilson
it’s really interesting. So Jefferson’s Jefferson wrote to Franklin in late June, to Benjamin Franklin, and said, I, here’s my draft, I wonder if you could make any comments. Basically, he said it in a more ponderous, flowery way. And he wrote down what he had originally written, and you can see the drop. There’s pictures of the draft online, it’s fascinating to see what what he written is We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable. Wow. And Franklin, among many, many edits, that wasn’t the only edit he made, but you just just puts a line through sacred and undeniable and replaces it with self evident. And it’s just such a powerful metaphor for what the West has done, which is to take hold of truths that are essentially sacred in nature. They’re grounded in religion, not in reason. They’re grounded in Christian assumptions about the world. And you can see that if you see where Jefferson got his phrasing from, because Jefferson gets it from John Locke and John Locke gets it from Hookah and hookah gets it from the code of Justinian and Matthew’s Gospel, and you can see the sort of the origin story of that phrase and all the things that are in it. But Franklin says, No, it’s not because we say it’s sacred, that implies that it’s somehow transcendent. And that’s not the kind of document we want to write. We want to write one in which this is just obvious to all reasonable people. And surely anyone who thinks long and hard enough about it can conclude that it’s, it’s clear that they are self evident. Now, the obvious responses, no, it’s not so evident that the reason you’re writing this document and arguing with Britain about it, and it’s a lot of people in the world, even today, don’t still don’t believe that I don’t think I don’t think it’s obviously true. Right? So Jefferson was actually right. He said, No, these are sacred truths. But they’ve been so thoroughly baked into western society. By the time even Ben Franklin wrote his letter. Yeah, that he could say self evident, and everyone would go, Yeah, sounds about right. Right. Which is a just a fascinating, I think parable for the way in which the post Christian Western said, we’re going to keep the Christian assumptions. And we’re going to gradually try and remove the foundations that got us there.

Glen Scrivener
Right. And Peter Berger has has called Christianity, its own grave digger in that sense that it has become so obvious to us that we don’t need us. Yeah. Self evidence. Yeah. And yeah, I have found so should we think about something practical to finish with? I have found it really fruitful in my evangelism, to press into, hey, you know, the Human Rights thing? Like how evident is it really, and to say, I think actually, as Westerners, we’re sort of living in a castle in the air. And it’s been built by Christianity, Christianity, but without the Christian foundations. It’s not like we need to take a leap of faith up there. Yeah, we believe in the Inviolable worth and equal dignity of every member of the human family. Why? Because if I look at any two people, and I measure them, according to any one metric, well, this guy is going to be smarter than that guy, this guy is going to be tougher than that guy, this guy is going to be more economically viable in this guy. In what sense? Are they equal? Yeah, like equal? How equal in what? And people start to see oh, yeah, it’s a belief, isn’t it? I am a believer. It’s it’s not actually evidence that has led me to just a foundational way that I orient myself in the world. Yes, we’re all living by faith. And I think just just taking people on that one step in their journey has been helpful for me. Have you discovered something similar? Hugely,

Andrew Wilson
because I think in the end, it’s easier to say to somebody, you believe this. And here’s why you’re right. Than here’s you believe this, and here’s why you’re wrong. Now, of course, all of us have beliefs that need to be affirmed and challenged in light of the gospel, including including Christians. But it’s it’s just so much more of an appealing approach to be able to say these convictions you hold a very dear to you. But actually, they only hold up on Christian premises. And Yuval Noah Harare has his books, you know, sapiens, and many other holidays and other books have been huge bestsellers. Barack Obama, Bill Gates, endorsements 30 million copies are big words. And he is fascinating section in his book where he says in the end, that’s not what biology teaches us at all. In fact, evolutionary biology would say, animals are not remotely equal. And we’ve only got a couple of inalienable commitments and those are to have as many kids as we can and try to minimize the amount of pain we suffer. That’s really what that’s what self evidence if you look at the world, the natural world, right, the convictions that were expressed in the declaration and that everyone listening to this holds to some degree are ultimately only come from Christianity. And Harare is saying this is someone who’s thoroughly opposed really to Christian values in many ways, but he’s completely willing to grant that that is really what they are. off, and quite how he squares the circle and how many of our neighbors and friends square the circle is still to be seen. Yeah. So yeah, I think it’s a very good way of approaching discussions with people.

Glen Scrivener
Yeah. And so we’re not we’re not inviting you to believe something you don’t believe in this particular part of the conversation. We’re inviting you to have some foundations for the thing that you say you do believe that. Yeah. You know, and I just think of a friend who wrote to me and said, of course, you realize, Glenn, I could never be a believer. And it was so bizarre because she’s, she’s a much better person than I am, and lives her life. And she actually encounters people as though they have inviolable worth and dignity, whereas me not so much. But it’s like she she clearly believes this stuff. And, and showing showing people that it’s not self evident, but that it’s actually a commitment of faith. And it’s an incredibly Jesus shaped thing means you can then introduce the substance of Jesus as as the one who gives you the ground beneath your feet, rather than one who just impels you to leap I think, yes. Should we leave it there for now? Let’s okay. That was that was episode one of post Christian, and we would love Christianity, or whatever. You said, post Christian

Glen Scrivener
Post Christian. Yes, Christianity, question mark. And the question marks important because we want to we want to figure out like how post are we as post Christians and in future episodes, we’ll figure out what that means. We’ll figure out all sorts of caveats to what we’ve said in this episode, but we would love to know what you think and we would love it. If you could please subscribe to us. On the podcast, we are a production of the Keller Center for Cultural apologetics, which is the ministry of the gospel coalition. And if you could like and subscribe to this on YouTube or share it around on your social media of choice, subscribe to us on your pod catcher of choice. Give us a rating and review that would really help us to get seen. We’re going to do about eight episodes on the US and we’ve got some very exciting guests coming up including Kyle Hapa, who we have mentioned in this episode. Andrew, thank you so much. Thank you so much.