Part 1
Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs. For example, look at this iconic line from one of America’s founding documents:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”
This is the most famous sentence in America’s Declaration of Independence. It’s the driving intellectual force behind the nation’s constitutional belief in legal equality. Educated citizens base their commitment to American ideals on it. This commitment shows up in our theories of democracy, in which each citizen has an equal vote, and our justice system, in which all humans are supposedly equal under the law.
But there’s a problem: human equality isn’t self-evident at all.
John Locke, whose intellectual ink is tattooed all over the Declaration of Independence, knew this. His theory of natural rights is based on the idea that God owns us as property. Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted. The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. Even our most “rational” beliefs are downstream of religious thinking.
This creates cognitive dissonance for secular people who advocate for human rights. While they might not realize it, nine times out of ten, they’ve unconsciously inherited a belief in human rights and are unaware of the foundational ideas which underpin that belief. So now, they’re faced with a head-scratching dilemma: one of their central beliefs — human rights — is self-evident only if God says so.
In other words: If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.
Human Rights: A Relatively New Idea
History teaches us that until recently, people operated under a very different moral code. In the barbarian world, the weak were exploited by the strong and enslaved by the powerful. Ancient Rome provides an example. Citizens believed that neither the poor nor the weak had intrinsic value, which is why Caesar was able to kill one million Gauls and enslave a million more. It’s also why Roman infants were routinely abandoned like Moses in the baby basket. To the modern mind, these actions are repugnant.
For that, we have to credit Christianity. The historian Tom Holland has called it the “most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history.” Religious or not, every Westerner bathes in the waters of Christian ideology. Those droplets are born from Christ’s insistence that every human is a child of God and the way St. Paul urged people to “welcome one another” across all social and ethnic barriers. Until recently, in Europe, to be human was to be a believer and to be a believer was to be Christian. Yes, we credit the Greeks for shaping our view of the good life. But even they were interpreted through a Christian lens. Aristotle through Aquinas, Plato through St. Augustine.
We are desensitized to Christianity’s influence on Western thought not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s so all-consuming. Consider this: the coordinates of time and space are both measured in reference to Christ. The year at the top of every calendar denotes the number of years since Christ was born. When it comes to space, “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified.
Our mainstream notion of human rights is also a byproduct of Christianity. Human rights exist in their modern form because the Bible says that every person is made in the image of God—imago dei. In turn, each person is granted unalienable rights, and those rights can’t be taken away. But the contract breaks down if human beings aren’t special. If humans are in the same category of every other animal, there is no intellectual scaffolding to uphold either human rights or the legal equality of man. Appealing to human rights just because we say so is as baseless as appealing to astrology or the will of Zeus. Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.
Without the word of God, all we have are opinions. Morality and justice are downgraded from indisputable truths to mere preferences and shared fictions. Both of those can change on a whim. In a world of one person’s word against another, the most powerful person will control the moral landscape. This problem is one of the central themes of Dostoyevsky’s writing: in an 1878 letter, he asked why he should live righteously in a world without a god. Assuming that there is no afterlife and that the police wouldn’t catch him after a wrongdoing, he asks: “Why shouldn’t I cut another man’s throat, rob, and steal?”
Today, our answer boils down to human rights. To Dostoevsky’s point, without the hand of God to shape human morality, many people will conclude that the benefits of a righteous life aren’t worth the costs. In theory, we could base our belief in human rights on rationality and the mutual agreement that some actions are better than others. Maybe one day, people will worship the United Nations’ Human Rights charter like they worship the Bible today. Doing so would take us away from the woo-woo of religion and towards the rigor of secular reason, where we can logically discern the differences between good and evil. But in practice, no matter how much we’d like it to be otherwise, an objective and unchanging belief in human rights can be justified by faith and faith alone.
Though the intrinsic worth of every person is a keystone of Western morality, Christianity’s influence has been stripped out of the narrative. At the time of this writing, the Wikipedia page about human rights doesn’t even mention Christianity.
Maybe it’s because, as a post-Enlightenment society, we crave scientific explanations for our beliefs. But neither the laws of physics nor the principles of chemistry can serve as a foundation for human rights. In the language of David Hume, science can tell us how the world is, but not how it ought to be. Philosophy can’t save human rights either. Immanuel Kant argued that humans deserve special respect because they are rational creatures, and therefore, ends in themselves. But that argument has problems too. Why should we only respect rational beings? And as individuals, are humans only as worthy as they are rational?
One reason we underestimate how much Christianity has influenced our thinking is that we’ve removed religious education from our schools. The same people who tout the virtues of being well-read skip right past the Bible, the most popular book in human history. To my amazement, I made it through 16 years of schooling without ever reading the Gospels. That thinking continues into adulthood, where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ.
Recognizing the Influence of Religion
I’m not saying that we should force people to be religious. After all, I’m a tepid non-believer myself. But being secular doesn’t give you a hall pass to ignore your Christian influences. We should study religion not to dogmatically accept faith, but to understand the foundations of our worldview. As we do, we should ask ourselves: “Is Christianity true?” And if you think it’s bogus, then: “Why do I let these ideas influence my worldview so strongly?”
Even humanism, which prides itself on a kind of rationality that can only be achieved without the dogmas of religion, was seeded inside the soil of Christian ideas. Given that, it’s no coincidence that all the biggest international humanist conferences (except one) take place in cities inside of Christian countries: Oxford, London, Oslo, Washington D.C., Brussels, Hannover, London, Mumbai, Boston, Paris, and Amsterdam. If you investigate the intellectual lineage of humanism, you’ll see how it grew out of the seeds of Christ and how they were nurtured with the teachings of the Bible.
Ever since the Enlightenment, the march of intellectual progress has followed the compass of empiricism. Intellectuals in particular have tried to silence religious explanations for the creation of the world, and the decline of religious affiliation shows that their ideas are catching on. Look, I get it. The “Man in the Sky” idea of God seems ancient. Comical, even. Centering your life around a book written 2,000 years ago seems like the antithesis of progress. Even if old ideas tend to stick around because they’re true or useful, embracing all those old Biblical philosophies is lunacy in our fast-changing world. But something about this argument is unsatisfying.
Becoming an educated citizen starts with understanding the lineage of your beliefs. For example, look at this iconic line from one of America’s founding documents:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal.”
This is the most famous sentence in America’s Declaration of Independence. It’s the driving intellectual force behind the nation’s constitutional belief in legal equality. Educated citizens base their commitment to American ideals on it. This commitment shows up in our theories of democracy, in which each citizen has an equal vote, and our justice system, in which all humans are supposedly equal under the law.
But there’s a problem: human equality isn’t self-evident at all.
John Locke, whose intellectual ink is tattooed all over the Declaration of Independence, knew this. His theory of natural rights is based on the idea that God owns us as property. Human equality is self-evident only if you assume, as Locke did, that God has given us the natural rights that modern Americans take for granted. The original Constitution says that our “unalienable rights” are a result not of secular rationalism, but rather an omnipotent God who endows us with those rights. To that end, the pillars of American law rest as much on the Bible as on the writings of Enlightenment thinkers. Even our most “rational” beliefs are downstream of religious thinking.
This creates cognitive dissonance for secular people who advocate for human rights. While they might not realize it, nine times out of ten, they’ve unconsciously inherited a belief in human rights and are unaware of the foundational ideas which underpin that belief. So now, they’re faced with a head-scratching dilemma: one of their central beliefs — human rights — is self-evident only if God says so.
In other words: If you believe in human rights but don’t believe in God, you need a logical explanation for why they’re self-evident.
Human Rights: A Relatively New Idea
History teaches us that until recently, people operated under a very different moral code. In the barbarian world, the weak were exploited by the strong and enslaved by the powerful. Ancient Rome provides an example. Citizens believed that neither the poor nor the weak had intrinsic value, which is why Caesar was able to kill one million Gauls and enslave a million more. It’s also why Roman infants were routinely abandoned like Moses in the baby basket. To the modern mind, these actions are repugnant.
For that, we have to credit Christianity. The historian Tom Holland has called it the “most enduring and influential legacy of the ancient world, and its emergence the single most transformative development in Western history.” Religious or not, every Westerner bathes in the waters of Christian ideology. Those droplets are born from Christ’s insistence that every human is a child of God and the way St. Paul urged people to “welcome one another” across all social and ethnic barriers. Until recently, in Europe, to be human was to be a believer and to be a believer was to be Christian. Yes, we credit the Greeks for shaping our view of the good life. But even they were interpreted through a Christian lens. Aristotle through Aquinas, Plato through St. Augustine.
We are desensitized to Christianity’s influence on Western thought not because it’s irrelevant, but because it’s so all-consuming. Consider this: the coordinates of time and space are both measured in reference to Christ. The year at the top of every calendar denotes the number of years since Christ was born. When it comes to space, “The West” is any place to the West of where Christ was crucified.
Our mainstream notion of human rights is also a byproduct of Christianity. Human rights exist in their modern form because the Bible says that every person is made in the image of God—imago dei. In turn, each person is granted unalienable rights, and those rights can’t be taken away. But the contract breaks down if human beings aren’t special. If humans are in the same category of every other animal, there is no intellectual scaffolding to uphold either human rights or the legal equality of man. Appealing to human rights just because we say so is as baseless as appealing to astrology or the will of Zeus. Even if a group of people can agree on how to treat people in the moment, consensus can change at any moment. Today’s virtues can become tomorrow’s vices. Like a sand castle, the tenets of morality can be destroyed by the tide of public opinion.
Without the word of God, all we have are opinions. Morality and justice are downgraded from indisputable truths to mere preferences and shared fictions. Both of those can change on a whim. In a world of one person’s word against another, the most powerful person will control the moral landscape. This problem is one of the central themes of Dostoyevsky’s writing: in an 1878 letter, he asked why he should live righteously in a world without a god. Assuming that there is no afterlife and that the police wouldn’t catch him after a wrongdoing, he asks: “Why shouldn’t I cut another man’s throat, rob, and steal?”
Today, our answer boils down to human rights. To Dostoevsky’s point, without the hand of God to shape human morality, many people will conclude that the benefits of a righteous life aren’t worth the costs. In theory, we could base our belief in human rights on rationality and the mutual agreement that some actions are better than others. Maybe one day, people will worship the United Nations’ Human Rights charter like they worship the Bible today. Doing so would take us away from the woo-woo of religion and towards the rigor of secular reason, where we can logically discern the differences between good and evil. But in practice, no matter how much we’d like it to be otherwise, an objective and unchanging belief in human rights can be justified by faith and faith alone.
Though the intrinsic worth of every person is a keystone of Western morality, Christianity’s influence has been stripped out of the narrative. At the time of this writing, the Wikipedia page about human rights doesn’t even mention Christianity.
Maybe it’s because, as a post-Enlightenment society, we crave scientific explanations for our beliefs. But neither the laws of physics nor the principles of chemistry can serve as a foundation for human rights. In the language of David Hume, science can tell us how the world is, but not how it ought to be. Philosophy can’t save human rights either. Immanuel Kant argued that humans deserve special respect because they are rational creatures, and therefore, ends in themselves. But that argument has problems too. Why should we only respect rational beings? And as individuals, are humans only as worthy as they are rational?
One reason we underestimate how much Christianity has influenced our thinking is that we’ve removed religious education from our schools. The same people who tout the virtues of being well-read skip right past the Bible, the most popular book in human history. To my amazement, I made it through 16 years of schooling without ever reading the Gospels. That thinking continues into adulthood, where we’ll binge-read biographies about some hot new tech CEO while skipping the one about the most important figure in Western history: Jesus Christ.
Recognizing the Influence of Religion
I’m not saying that we should force people to be religious. After all, I’m a tepid non-believer myself. But being secular doesn’t give you a hall pass to ignore your Christian influences. We should study religion not to dogmatically accept faith, but to understand the foundations of our worldview. As we do, we should ask ourselves: “Is Christianity true?” And if you think it’s bogus, then: “Why do I let these ideas influence my worldview so strongly?”
Even humanism, which prides itself on a kind of rationality that can only be achieved without the dogmas of religion, was seeded inside the soil of Christian ideas. Given that, it’s no coincidence that all the biggest international humanist conferences (except one) take place in cities inside of Christian countries: Oxford, London, Oslo, Washington D.C., Brussels, Hannover, London, Mumbai, Boston, Paris, and Amsterdam. If you investigate the intellectual lineage of humanism, you’ll see how it grew out of the seeds of Christ and how they were nurtured with the teachings of the Bible.
Ever since the Enlightenment, the march of intellectual progress has followed the compass of empiricism. Intellectuals in particular have tried to silence religious explanations for the creation of the world, and the decline of religious affiliation shows that their ideas are catching on. Look, I get it. The “Man in the Sky” idea of God seems ancient. Comical, even. Centering your life around a book written 2,000 years ago seems like the antithesis of progress. Even if old ideas tend to stick around because they’re true or useful, embracing all those old Biblical philosophies is lunacy in our fast-changing world. But something about this argument is unsatisfying.
