Specific ideas innate to Judaism and Christianity played a pivotal role in enabling the West to make and sustain political, legal and economic breakthroughs that eluded other civilizations.

Christianity: Foundation of Western Success

by Samuel Gregg

In his famous critique of John Stuart Mill, Mill and Liberalism (1963) the Cambridge historian Maurice Cowling underscored just how much the views advanced by self-identified liberals were underpinned by the conviction that their conception of the historical background to any number of events is more-or-less universally accepted. Sometimes they are right in making that assumption about others. Medieval Europe, for instance, is invariably understood as a period of unmitigated darkness—so much so that words like “feudal” are used today, even by many well-informed Catholics, as synonyms for backwardness.

Occasionally, however, a book comes along that exposes gapping holes in the prevailing narrative. That can certainly be said of Rodney Stark’s latest offering, How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (ISI Books). Beginning with the blunt warning, “This is a remarkably unfashionable book” (p. 1), Stark sets out to critique, and, in some instances, demolish several widespread mythologies about the West’s development.

In many cases, Stark is not presenting arguments that have not been previously stated. Max Weber’s theory about particular forms of Protestantism and capitalism has, for instance, been thoroughly discredited. Likewise the studies of the English historian Jonathan Riley-Smith have illustrated that the Crusades are severely miscast as an exercise in profit-seeking by poor illiterate barons and that these events need to be understood against a background of a militarily-expansionist Islam.

What makes Stark’s book different from these and other studies are two things.

• First, he weaves his arguments about pre-Christian Europe, the medieval period, the Crusades, and the development of capitalism (to name just a few) into an account which dissolves many prevailing conceptual divisions between the pre-modern and modern worlds. Many secular-minded people—but also many Christians—will be surprised at the high degree of continuity, for instance, between minds like Saint Albertus Magnus and Sir Isaac Newton. Sometimes this occurs by Stark pointing to evidence that has hitherto escaped most people’s attention. In other instances, it is a question of looking at the same evidence but through a more plausible interpretative lens.

• The second distinctive feature of How the West Won is how Stark shows how particular historical myths have less to do with the facts than with efforts to paint Christianity as a backward regressive cultural force. To give just one example, Islamic Spain is regularly portrayed, Stark notes, as an oasis of tolerance compared to a repressive Christendom, despite the undeniable evidence of the widespread and long-term persecution and subjugation of Jews and Christians by the Moors.

In making these points, Stark is happy to engage in the deeply politically-incorrect exercise of comparing developments in the West to that of other civilizations. His analysis suggests that if a culture does not embody a robust conception of reason and free will—not to mention a conception of God to whom these characteristics are also attributed—then it’s road to freedom, economic prosperity, and human flourishing is going to be very difficult indeed. Espousing such views won’t win you tenure in the contemporary academy. That, however, doesn’t weaken the saliency of such perspectives.

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