CHRISTIANITY LED TO FREEDOM AND CAPITALISM

Rodney Stark’s book, The Victory of Reason, describes how Christianity shaped western civilization and the world we live in today. Some of his ideas have been raised by other writers (for example, the medieval period was not a “dark” age), but he succinctly pulls together a thousand years of history to build his case that no other religion has been able to bring progress and freedom to individuals like Christianity has been able to do.

Some ideas:

Typical intellectual controversies among Jewish and Muslim religious thinkers involve whether some activity or innovation. . .is consistent with established law. Christian controversies typically are doctrinal, over matters such as the Holy Trinity or the perpetual virginity of Mary. (8)

Jesus wrote nothing, and from the very start the church fathers were forced to reason as to the implications of a collection of his remembered sayings. . . (9)

Real science arose only once: in Europe. China, Islam, India, and ancient Greece and Rome each had a highly developed alchemy. But only in Europe did alchemy develop into chemistry. (14)

Whitehead ended with the remark that the images of gods found in other religions, especially in Asia, are too impersonal or too irrational to have sustained science. (15)

Chinese intellectuals pursued “enlightenment,” not explanations. (18)

Plato’s focus was on the polis, not the citizen. (23)

. . .the Christian stress on individualism is “an eccentricity among cultures.” (24)

Medieval Christianity ended slavery which led to an economic and technological revolution that Greece and Rome were incapable of having because slavery in those societies retarded technological development. He makes the case that Christian theology was opposed to slavery unlike Islam where the founder, Mohammad, had slaves and sanctioned slavery.

Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic stressing that capitalism and the notion of hard work and frugality grew out of the Reformation ignores the rise of capitalism in late medieval Roman Catholic Italy. Christianity does not look down on work as many traditional societies do.

Despotic states discourage and even prevent progress. (37) Despotic states produce universal avarice. (71)

People actually lived better in the medieval period than in ancient Rome and Greece.

Money. . . lies dead [when] converted into vanities. (122)

“Indolent state churches” are destructive to a society. Latin America is his example.