In my last post, I reviewed Rodney Stark’s new book, The Victory of Reason.   I tried my best to summarize the book and Starks’ brilliant research, but I think I failed to do it justice.  After careful consideration, I thought the best way I could get across the main thrust of the book would be to reprint his brief conclusion.  The claims he make in this conclusion are all backed up by thorough research found throughout the body of his work, so if you find yourself intrigued, I strongly urge you to pick up a copy of his book today. 

Here is his conclusion in its entirety:

Christianity created Western Civilization.  Had the followers of Jesus remained an obscure Jewish sect, most of you would not have learned to read and the rest of you would be reading from hand-copied scrolls.  Without a theology committed to reason, progress, and moral equality, today the entire world would be about where non-European societies were in, say, 1800: A world with many astrologers and alchemists but no scientists. A world of despots, lacking universities, banks, factories, eyeglasses, chimneys, and pianos.  A world where most infants do not live past the age of five and many women die in childbirth – a world truly living in the “dark ages.”

The modern world arose only in Christian societies.  Not in Islam.  Not in Asia.  Not in a “secular” society—there having been none.  And all the modernization that has since occurred outside Christendom was imported from the West, often brought by colonizers and missionaries.  Even so, many apostles of modernization assume that, given the existing Western example, similar progress can be achieved today not only without Christianity but even without freedom or capitalism—that globalization will fully spread scientific, technical, and commercial knowledge without any need to re-create the social or cultural conditions that first produced it.  A brief assessment of these matters will properly conclude The Victory of Reason.

It seems doubtful that an effective modern economy can be created without adopting capitalism, as was demonstrated by the failure of the command economies of the Soviet Union and China.  The Soviets could get rockets into orbit, but they couldn’t reliably get onions to Moscow.  As for China, millions had to die to prove that collectivized agriculture is unproductive.  Today, with capitalism thriving in many nations recently freed from Soviet oppression, and with the Chinese having taken to heart that they have long been outproduced by Taiwan, both Russia and China now seek to build capitalist economies.  It remains to be seen whether either nation can provide freedom, without which effective capitalism, Islamic nations remain semifeudalism, incapable of manufacturing most of the items they use in daily life.  Their standards of living require massive imports paid for with oil money just as Spain enjoyed the fruits of other nations’ industry so long as it was kept afloat by gold and silver from the New World.  Without secure property rights and substantial individual freedom, modern societies cannot fully emerge.

But if modernization still requires capitalism and freedom, what about Christianity?  On the one hand, a strong case can be made that although Christianity was necessary for the rise of science, by now science has become so well institutionalized that it no longer requires a Christian warrant.  The same may be true for belief in progress.  The conviction that we can deeply penetrate nature’s secrets and achieve advanced technology may no longer need to be based on faith, since all one really needs to do now is look around.

On the other hand, if Christianity is now irrelevant to modernization, why is it still spreading so rapidly?  The fact is that Christianity is becoming globalized far more rapidly than is democracy, capitalism or modernity.  The religious revolution going on in Latin America is not merely Protestantization but Christianization—most new Latin Protestants not really ever having been Catholics.  Africa is turning Christian so rapidly that there are far more Anglicans south of the Sahara than in Britain or North America, not to mention the tens of millions of new Baptists, Pentecostals, Roman Catholics and members of Protestant sects of local origin—about half of sub-Saharan Africans now are Christians.  Even so, the Christianization of the Southern Hemisphere may be soon dwarfed by what is going on in China. 

When the Communists took power in 1949, there were perhaps 2 million Christians in China.  At the time, not only Marxists but even American liberal church leaders dismissed these as mainly “rice” Christians—people who put up with missionary efforts only in exchange for handouts.  Fifty years later we have discovered that these Chinese rice Christians were so “insincere” that they endured decades of draconian repression, during which their numbers doubled again and again—there might be as many as 100 million Christians in China today!  Moreover, conversion to Christianity is concentrated not among the peasants and the poor but among the best-educated, most modern Chinese.

There are many reasons people embrace Christianity, including its capacity to sustain a deeply emotional and existentially satisfying faith.  But another significant factor is its appeal to reason and the fact that it is so inseparably linked to the rise of Western Civilization.  For many non-Europeans, becoming a Christian is intrinsic to becoming modern.  Thus it is quite plausible that Christianity remains an essential element in the globalization of modernity.  Consider this recent statement by one of China’s leading scholars:

One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the re-eminence of the West all over the world.  We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective.  At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.  Then we thought it was because you had the best political system.  Next we focused on your economic system.  But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity.  That is why the West is so powerful.  The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics.  We don’t have any doubt about this.

Neither do I.

And neither do I.