This is an intelligent, well-argued piece, nothing less than what one has come to expect from Frank Fukuyama. Yet, something about it left me feeling uncomfortable -- or at least vaguely dissatisfied. I am a product of a (largely) European background and education, though I have lived in the US for over 40 years. The words "Western" or "West" were hardly ever used in those years -- the 1970s and early 80s -- both at the English boarding school I attended and the university where I spent many years as an undergraduate and research (graduate) student.
Both the school and the college (within the collegiate university system) of which I was a member were Anglican foundations. We talked of an European civilization and of a Christian belief and the two were often equated.
Yet, interestingly, the European civilization of which we were heirs was always seen to have "Mediterranean" roots. It was Graeco-Roman and avowedly classical. The Christian identity was without a doubt that which drew from the New Testament. The Old Testament might have been seen a source of inspiration for great Baroque music that we heard in chapel or many of the paintings of the Old Masters from the Renaissance. But the notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization (or heritage) would have been risible. The idea of Christendom, on the other hand, would have sounded archaic but would at least have been recognizable. Somehow, this synthesis of a Graeco-Roman secular culture and a pre-Religious Wars Christian belief system was made coherent and it was called European.
Once again, the background I'm describing is High Anglican without an iota of non-conformism or evangelicalism to it. And therein lies the answer to the rantings of Vance and Rubio. The idea of the "West" is a very American one (notwithstanding Spengler) and that too is about 50 years old. Even a racial and cultural supremacist like Tom Buchanan in the Great Gatsby would talk about the European races and those that did not belong to that group, included Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and whichever other group came within his range of sight.
Why Marco Rubio had to launch into an encomium to the plundering, rampaging "West" is a mystery. He invented his own background, claiming he was of Spanish and Italian heritage, from Seville and Casale Monferrato, Kingdom of Piedmont. In the show "Finding Your Roots", the host Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Marco Rubio that his mother's side has indigenous ancestry traceable to Cuba going back around 4,000 years, saying "your family on your mother's side has been there a long, long time." (Vance too has lied about his own background, but I won't go into that here.) What is shameless was the conduct of the Europeans (the Ruttes, the Merzs and others, descendants of Mitteleuropa middle class) who were just relieved to hear that Rubio had pointed to enemies that did not include them.
Insightful comment, agree. One cannot remove Christianity from the “recipe” which created Europe and America, it was a central component.
Jefferson’s succinct quote on his own philosophy sums up the cultural and religious influence at the Founding fairly well: “Epictetus and Epicurus give us laws for governing ourselves; Jesus a supplement of the duties we owe to others.”
I am somewhat amused by the people who think they can take on Francis Fukuyama as if he were some antisocial media influencer leaking methane into the atmosphere. What he has written here needs no defense.
The same buzzwords that rang for Professor Fukuyama rang for me when I heard Rubio say them in Munich. Shared faith, heritage and ancestry coming from the mouth of an American seemed ludicrous. It might have made sense in the 18th century but not in the context of the 21st. I am sure he believes those cultural attributes belong to him and therefore makes him one of JD Vance's "legacy Americans."
Maybe I am lapsing into cultural Marxism here but I think the whole concept of "The West" and "Western Civilisation" (Kenneth Clark's spelling) while a convenient part of a larger classification system (like the Dewey Decimal System) really is not a "thing" at all. At least it is not an autonomous, organic or unified being that can be defended by launching a crusade, ethnic cleansing or kept pure from distinctly alien influences. Civilization is a tree and Western Civilization a branch of that tree. DNA has no borders just proximity and opportunity.
I am sure that Marco Rubio had some discomfort in realizing that his distinctly European ancestry was mixed with indigenous blood. Latin American Eurotrash are just as racist as North American Eurotrash can be.
The Enlightenment was the intellectual decision to choose reason over irrationality. Not to displace religion so much as to perfect what was ethically significant in religion. The ethics of religion were universal not because they came from a revealed source but because they were inherently rational. The Golden Rule is not true because Jesus (or any number of sages in many times and places) said so but because it was completely rational. Now the rabbis and theologians could argue about what it means and how that is lived out and come up with various answers. Jesus had one and Buddha had another and Confucius another but the rational truth remains unchanged.
For centuries Christianity had only ever embraced the liberal notion of equality as something that can exist only in the afterlife. The only right a human being has in Christianity has is the right to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior and join the "right" established or orthodox church. Until the enlightenment Christians did not have the language, or rational justification for equality, the abolition of chattel slavery, the enfranchisement of women or all those things about which the Scriptures are silent, ambivalent or even opposed. Christians (using Christian Scriptures) justified slavery, then segregation and now voter disenfranchisement.
The Enlightenment has given us so much culturally, economically and politicly. It has tamed the fires of irrational religion and given us the flowering of speech and thought. It has given us market capitalism and prosperity (for some) the world has never seen before. It has given us the tools to govern ourselves with fewer civil wars and fewer autocrats and dictators. Sure it is has not given us an earthly paradise and never will.
Liberal democracy is "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". We have the Enlightenment to thank for that not faith, heritage and ancestry.
You are right that modern Western societies are defined by liberal institutions—pluralism, rights, and tolerance. But those institutions did not arise in a vacuum. They emerged within a civilization shaped for centuries by the moral and institutional legacy of Christian faith. Rubio’s reference to that tradition may be politically blunt, but it reflects a historical reality: the liberal order you describe grew out of a particular civilizational context.
You also seem to treat appeals to Western civilizational identity as unnecessary or misleading. Yet we live in a world where many of the West’s adversaries—from jihadist movements to authoritarian powers—frame their opposition in explicitly civilizational terms. In that environment, it is hardly surprising that Western leaders speak about the cultural and religious roots of their own societies.
Liberal Enlightenment values, individual rights, rights-protecting governance, and rational inquiry, are secular values and fundamentally different from the theological and collectivist framework of Christianity.
While Christianity shaped European culture for centuries, the result was a historical collapse in the standard of living from pre-Christian times, outlawing of Greek philosophy (actual Western ideas), war and atrocity. Not the sort of thing we see under Liberal Enlightenment.
The intellectual movement known as The Enlightenment emerged largely as a reaction against religious authority and dogma. Thinkers such as John Locke and Voltaire argued for individual liberty, and limits on church and state power, in order to try and address the appalling conditions in Europe caused by endless religious wars and political strife.
In this sense, Enlightenment liberalism did not grow out of Christianity, it defines itself in opposition to it.
I agree with a lot of what you write Francis, but I think you lend too much to Christianity here. Western origins of democracy happened long before Christianity. Here in my native Norway we elected kings in Viking times. The Greeks had some 500 towns/cities with some form of democracy. That was half of them in ancient times. This was long before Jesus was born.
The Romans developed the ideas of a Republic also long before Jesus. In other words I cannot see how Christianity should be credited with Democracy. All over the world in old hunter gatherer societies you had very egalitarian societies where tribal members extensively participated in decision making.
In fact some have argued like David Graeber in Dawn of Everything, that native Americans actually played an important role in pushing democratic ideas into Western civilization. Of course we had the Greeks and other with those ideas, but it cannot be discounted that naive Americans represented yet another non-Christian influence on ideas around liberty and democracy.
I just think Christianity is taking way more credit than it has earned. There is a lot of post rationalization as all these words about equality before God was there all the time. Yet nothing like it was practiced for hundreds of years in Christian dominated Europe. So how much credit should really Christianity be given?
It’s hard to attribute Western Civilization’s unique humanistic institutions of liberal democracy, modern science and a free market economy to Christianity.
Christianity existed in the orthodox countries for as long as it existed in the Catholic and later Protestant and Catholic countries of Western Europe. Yet the orthodox countries did not give birth to the great humanistic institutions
Furthermore, Christianity was dominant in Europe for a thousand years that were marked by feudalism, scholasticism and dynastic rule. It’s hard to square those institutions with a belief in the equality of all. It wasn’t until the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the atomism of Lucretius, the stoicism and republicanism of Cicero and Livy and the rediscovery of other great classical works that Western Europe started to develop its great humanistic institutions that make up the core of Western Civilization’s identity.
He's basically in agreement with Vance and Rubio. This is his conclusion:
"The only way to counter reactionary ideas like those of Rubio or Vance is to have a proper understanding of how Western civilization evolved and is today defined by liberal Enlightenment values that were originally rooted in Christian belief."
As much as I dislike Rubio I think Prof Fukiyama's article is wrong. There is a clear continuation in modern liberal democratic societies from the Christian traditions. Monotheism influences our ethics and our metaphysics, and so even the scientific progress that we see as the crowning jewel of Enlightenment thinking takes place within the Christian cultural framework. Post Christian societies are going to owe a lot to Christianity. What you have in humanism is a framework that replaced God with humans. What you have in Enlightenment is replacing Hod with Science. They are negative iterations of the same framework. For the record I am an atheist.
As the enemies of the west rise up, from Moscow to Tehran, they also work to poison the minds of young Americans. Societies committed to liberal values should stick together, whether Christian or not.
The problem for Francis Fukuyama is that once Enlightenment Liberalism detaches itself from its groundings in Christianity and in "the laws of nature and nature's God," it has no grounding or foundation for human dignity (the dignity of the individual and the dignity of the human species) which is the basis of natural rights or human rights. His writings simply assume without any argument or proof that human beings have dignity that must be respected as an inheritance of the Biblical tradition. He advocates for justice without foundations - a kind of groundless moralism.
There is an excellent book that lays out the relationship of the Christian and Enlightenment origins of our founding fathers. "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic" by Matthew Stewart.
It is interesting that this (your quote) is the only reference to a God of any sort in all the documents of the American founding and the words are drawn out of Hellenistic philosophy through humanist and Enlightenment philosophy and not the language of the Christian Scriptures. Christian vocabulary was available but deliberately not used. This is born out in the further references to deity "Creator, Supreme Judge, and Divine Providence" all used with a distinctly Deist and not Christian tone. In fact most of the Americans who opposed the rebellion did so on traditional Christian principles over and against the profane Enlightenment principles of the rebels.
Our Declaration, and the French "Declaration of the Rights of Men" (which only mentions a Supreme Being) are the culmination of Enlightenment principles and the birth of the secular state.
To me the notion of rights emanating from some divinity is just as absurd as a claim to a divine right of kings. The Enlightenment places human rights in the natural law which is self evident (upon reasonable reflection) and universal and has nothing to do with revealed religion. Even these natural rights require regulation by society through the state.
From the fourth century until the early twentieth, Western civilization was not a secular project but a Christian one. Beginning with Constantine and formalized by Theodosius in 381, Europe became a theocratic civilization in which the Church governed the fate of souls and kings ruled under divine authority. Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 made this structure explicit: God ruled through the Church, and the Church crowned emperors.
Feudal society was built on this spiritual hierarchy. Every person, from peasant to noble to king, lived within a chain of obligation whose ultimate sanction was eternal salvation or damnation. The great cathedrals of Europe were raised through sacrifice of labor and wealth for the sake of the afterlife. Christianity was not an ornament of Western life; it was its organizing principle.
The Reformation fractured this unity but did not secularize the West. Protestantism sanctified work, elevated the individual conscience, and helped give rise to capitalism and the American idea of individual rights — all within a Christian moral framework.
For centuries, nearly all Europeans and Americans understood human equality as a Christian truth: all souls are equal before God. The modern secular idea of equality is a late development, not the foundation of Western civilization. On this point, Senator Rubio’s understanding of history is correct.
From the fourth century until the early twentieth, Western civilization was not a secular project but a Christian one. Beginning with Constantine and formalized by Theodosius in 381, Europe became a theocratic civilization in which the Church governed the fate of souls and kings ruled under divine authority. Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 made this structure explicit: God ruled through the Church, and the Church crowned emperors.
Feudal society was built on this spiritual hierarchy. Every person, from peasant to noble to king, lived within a chain of obligation whose ultimate sanction was eternal salvation or damnation. The great cathedrals of Europe were raised through sacrifice of labor and wealth for the sake of the afterlife. Christianity was not an ornament of Western life; it was its organizing principle.
The Reformation fractured this unity but did not secularize the West. Protestantism sanctified work, elevated the individual conscience, and helped give rise to capitalism and the American idea of individual rights — all within a Christian moral framework.
For centuries, nearly all Europeans and Americans understood human equality as a Christian truth: all souls are equal before God. The modern secular idea of equality is a late development, not the foundation of Western civilization. On this point, Senator Rubio’s understanding of history is correct.
It is not true that 'early natural scientists were engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Catholic Church; it was only with the separation of empirical inquiry from religious dogma that modern natural science, and the economic world it made possible, emerged'.
See, for example:
'Whether one adapted a natural philosophy or devised a new one, the aim was now to produce a symbiotic union. This development found its clearest expression in theories of the earth, but the idea that natural philosophy is a means of seeking evidence of God’s activity in nature would become widespread in the 1680s and 1690s, particularly in England, and Newton for example would consider the stability of planetary orbits to be evidence of God’s constant intervention. . . . . But both in effect treated natural philosophy and the interpretation of revelation as being ultimately part of the same enterprise, for better or worse. . . . . At that point, a ‘scientific culture’ developed in the West that was very different from anything that had gone before, as the Enlightenment heralded a wholly new conception of the world and our place in it.'
p 505
Gaukroger, Stephen (2006) The emergence of a scientific culture. Science and the shaping of modernity, 1210-1685, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
I get why you felt the need to respond to Rubio, given the dig. This is a thoughtful piece. However, Rubio‘s characterization of western civilization is no more reactionary than those of, say, John Adams. With all the crazy on the right these days, it’s weird that you should attack him on this ground.
I just read the first sentence and could not continue. I kind of wish I could interrogate Francis like ChatGpt. When did the West begin to define itself through Christianity? What is the first recorded instance where any western thinker claimed otherwise? Is there a single historian who disputes that Enlightenment values arouse directly out of Christianity?
Ok, I did. It’s not too bad. Reminiscent of those who want 90s leftism back, while rejecting the inevitable extension of those ideas into wokeness. I know nothing, but it’s plain as day that the post-war effort to eliminate common religious values and heritage is a total failure. A vague notion of shared values, which are no longer taught in schools, is too weak to defeat the alternatives, including Islamism and cultural Marxism. See Return of the Strong Gods, etc. etc.
I don’t disagree with you about the Christian roots. What’s changed for me is that the Enlightenment depended on a metaphysics of the rational subject, and I no longer believe that metaphysics. Liberalism still works, but only as a fragile, managed project. That’s why I’m uneasy — not because I want to restore a lost religious foundation, but because the Enlightenment’s own foundation has dissolved.
I’m not convinced liberalism is fragile simply because the Enlightenment’s original foundation has weakened. In three centuries, it has had plenty of time to develop its own roots as a moral and political tradition, one that does not require Christianity as a permanent companion.
Liberalism has never existed without pressure or opposition. That is not a new condition. The real question is whether liberal societies can still defend human dignity, freedom, and pluralism when illiberal movements return—as they always do—without retreating into a different kind of authoritarianism.
Agree. We can and always should do better at cultivating civic trust and participation. A lot of factors go into that. My only additional point is that the bar for a civic core of democratic subjects need not be a supermajority--only enough that can promote liberalism and protect against populist movements that seek alternatives.
This is an intelligent, well-argued piece, nothing less than what one has come to expect from Frank Fukuyama. Yet, something about it left me feeling uncomfortable -- or at least vaguely dissatisfied. I am a product of a (largely) European background and education, though I have lived in the US for over 40 years. The words "Western" or "West" were hardly ever used in those years -- the 1970s and early 80s -- both at the English boarding school I attended and the university where I spent many years as an undergraduate and research (graduate) student.
Both the school and the college (within the collegiate university system) of which I was a member were Anglican foundations. We talked of an European civilization and of a Christian belief and the two were often equated.
Yet, interestingly, the European civilization of which we were heirs was always seen to have "Mediterranean" roots. It was Graeco-Roman and avowedly classical. The Christian identity was without a doubt that which drew from the New Testament. The Old Testament might have been seen a source of inspiration for great Baroque music that we heard in chapel or many of the paintings of the Old Masters from the Renaissance. But the notion of a Judeo-Christian civilization (or heritage) would have been risible. The idea of Christendom, on the other hand, would have sounded archaic but would at least have been recognizable. Somehow, this synthesis of a Graeco-Roman secular culture and a pre-Religious Wars Christian belief system was made coherent and it was called European.
Once again, the background I'm describing is High Anglican without an iota of non-conformism or evangelicalism to it. And therein lies the answer to the rantings of Vance and Rubio. The idea of the "West" is a very American one (notwithstanding Spengler) and that too is about 50 years old. Even a racial and cultural supremacist like Tom Buchanan in the Great Gatsby would talk about the European races and those that did not belong to that group, included Jews, blacks, Mexicans, Asians, and whichever other group came within his range of sight.
Why Marco Rubio had to launch into an encomium to the plundering, rampaging "West" is a mystery. He invented his own background, claiming he was of Spanish and Italian heritage, from Seville and Casale Monferrato, Kingdom of Piedmont. In the show "Finding Your Roots", the host Henry Louis Gates Jr. told Marco Rubio that his mother's side has indigenous ancestry traceable to Cuba going back around 4,000 years, saying "your family on your mother's side has been there a long, long time." (Vance too has lied about his own background, but I won't go into that here.) What is shameless was the conduct of the Europeans (the Ruttes, the Merzs and others, descendants of Mitteleuropa middle class) who were just relieved to hear that Rubio had pointed to enemies that did not include them.
Insightful comment, agree. One cannot remove Christianity from the “recipe” which created Europe and America, it was a central component.
Jefferson’s succinct quote on his own philosophy sums up the cultural and religious influence at the Founding fairly well: “Epictetus and Epicurus give us laws for governing ourselves; Jesus a supplement of the duties we owe to others.”
I am somewhat amused by the people who think they can take on Francis Fukuyama as if he were some antisocial media influencer leaking methane into the atmosphere. What he has written here needs no defense.
The same buzzwords that rang for Professor Fukuyama rang for me when I heard Rubio say them in Munich. Shared faith, heritage and ancestry coming from the mouth of an American seemed ludicrous. It might have made sense in the 18th century but not in the context of the 21st. I am sure he believes those cultural attributes belong to him and therefore makes him one of JD Vance's "legacy Americans."
Maybe I am lapsing into cultural Marxism here but I think the whole concept of "The West" and "Western Civilisation" (Kenneth Clark's spelling) while a convenient part of a larger classification system (like the Dewey Decimal System) really is not a "thing" at all. At least it is not an autonomous, organic or unified being that can be defended by launching a crusade, ethnic cleansing or kept pure from distinctly alien influences. Civilization is a tree and Western Civilization a branch of that tree. DNA has no borders just proximity and opportunity.
I am sure that Marco Rubio had some discomfort in realizing that his distinctly European ancestry was mixed with indigenous blood. Latin American Eurotrash are just as racist as North American Eurotrash can be.
The Enlightenment was the intellectual decision to choose reason over irrationality. Not to displace religion so much as to perfect what was ethically significant in religion. The ethics of religion were universal not because they came from a revealed source but because they were inherently rational. The Golden Rule is not true because Jesus (or any number of sages in many times and places) said so but because it was completely rational. Now the rabbis and theologians could argue about what it means and how that is lived out and come up with various answers. Jesus had one and Buddha had another and Confucius another but the rational truth remains unchanged.
For centuries Christianity had only ever embraced the liberal notion of equality as something that can exist only in the afterlife. The only right a human being has in Christianity has is the right to accept Jesus as their Lord and Savior and join the "right" established or orthodox church. Until the enlightenment Christians did not have the language, or rational justification for equality, the abolition of chattel slavery, the enfranchisement of women or all those things about which the Scriptures are silent, ambivalent or even opposed. Christians (using Christian Scriptures) justified slavery, then segregation and now voter disenfranchisement.
The Enlightenment has given us so much culturally, economically and politicly. It has tamed the fires of irrational religion and given us the flowering of speech and thought. It has given us market capitalism and prosperity (for some) the world has never seen before. It has given us the tools to govern ourselves with fewer civil wars and fewer autocrats and dictators. Sure it is has not given us an earthly paradise and never will.
Liberal democracy is "the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time". We have the Enlightenment to thank for that not faith, heritage and ancestry.
You are right that modern Western societies are defined by liberal institutions—pluralism, rights, and tolerance. But those institutions did not arise in a vacuum. They emerged within a civilization shaped for centuries by the moral and institutional legacy of Christian faith. Rubio’s reference to that tradition may be politically blunt, but it reflects a historical reality: the liberal order you describe grew out of a particular civilizational context.
You also seem to treat appeals to Western civilizational identity as unnecessary or misleading. Yet we live in a world where many of the West’s adversaries—from jihadist movements to authoritarian powers—frame their opposition in explicitly civilizational terms. In that environment, it is hardly surprising that Western leaders speak about the cultural and religious roots of their own societies.
Liberal Enlightenment values, individual rights, rights-protecting governance, and rational inquiry, are secular values and fundamentally different from the theological and collectivist framework of Christianity.
While Christianity shaped European culture for centuries, the result was a historical collapse in the standard of living from pre-Christian times, outlawing of Greek philosophy (actual Western ideas), war and atrocity. Not the sort of thing we see under Liberal Enlightenment.
The intellectual movement known as The Enlightenment emerged largely as a reaction against religious authority and dogma. Thinkers such as John Locke and Voltaire argued for individual liberty, and limits on church and state power, in order to try and address the appalling conditions in Europe caused by endless religious wars and political strife.
In this sense, Enlightenment liberalism did not grow out of Christianity, it defines itself in opposition to it.
I agree with a lot of what you write Francis, but I think you lend too much to Christianity here. Western origins of democracy happened long before Christianity. Here in my native Norway we elected kings in Viking times. The Greeks had some 500 towns/cities with some form of democracy. That was half of them in ancient times. This was long before Jesus was born.
The Romans developed the ideas of a Republic also long before Jesus. In other words I cannot see how Christianity should be credited with Democracy. All over the world in old hunter gatherer societies you had very egalitarian societies where tribal members extensively participated in decision making.
In fact some have argued like David Graeber in Dawn of Everything, that native Americans actually played an important role in pushing democratic ideas into Western civilization. Of course we had the Greeks and other with those ideas, but it cannot be discounted that naive Americans represented yet another non-Christian influence on ideas around liberty and democracy.
I just think Christianity is taking way more credit than it has earned. There is a lot of post rationalization as all these words about equality before God was there all the time. Yet nothing like it was practiced for hundreds of years in Christian dominated Europe. So how much credit should really Christianity be given?
It’s hard to attribute Western Civilization’s unique humanistic institutions of liberal democracy, modern science and a free market economy to Christianity.
Christianity existed in the orthodox countries for as long as it existed in the Catholic and later Protestant and Catholic countries of Western Europe. Yet the orthodox countries did not give birth to the great humanistic institutions
Furthermore, Christianity was dominant in Europe for a thousand years that were marked by feudalism, scholasticism and dynastic rule. It’s hard to square those institutions with a belief in the equality of all. It wasn’t until the Renaissance and the rediscovery of the atomism of Lucretius, the stoicism and republicanism of Cicero and Livy and the rediscovery of other great classical works that Western Europe started to develop its great humanistic institutions that make up the core of Western Civilization’s identity.
Christianity made the West.
Fukuyama is ignorant on history.
He's basically in agreement with Vance and Rubio. This is his conclusion:
"The only way to counter reactionary ideas like those of Rubio or Vance is to have a proper understanding of how Western civilization evolved and is today defined by liberal Enlightenment values that were originally rooted in Christian belief."
QED.
Claim it is the same thing really.
That’s a standard debating technique.
Rubio is really a NeoCon in hiding.
Vance is more genuine but cannot hold the line on his own.
As much as I dislike Rubio I think Prof Fukiyama's article is wrong. There is a clear continuation in modern liberal democratic societies from the Christian traditions. Monotheism influences our ethics and our metaphysics, and so even the scientific progress that we see as the crowning jewel of Enlightenment thinking takes place within the Christian cultural framework. Post Christian societies are going to owe a lot to Christianity. What you have in humanism is a framework that replaced God with humans. What you have in Enlightenment is replacing Hod with Science. They are negative iterations of the same framework. For the record I am an atheist.
Maybe it’s time we stopped confusing people with the term “western”
https://songerie.org/p/reimagining-the-world-organizing
As the enemies of the west rise up, from Moscow to Tehran, they also work to poison the minds of young Americans. Societies committed to liberal values should stick together, whether Christian or not.
https://substack.com/home/post/p-190744578
The problem for Francis Fukuyama is that once Enlightenment Liberalism detaches itself from its groundings in Christianity and in "the laws of nature and nature's God," it has no grounding or foundation for human dignity (the dignity of the individual and the dignity of the human species) which is the basis of natural rights or human rights. His writings simply assume without any argument or proof that human beings have dignity that must be respected as an inheritance of the Biblical tradition. He advocates for justice without foundations - a kind of groundless moralism.
"the laws of nature and nature's God,"
There is an excellent book that lays out the relationship of the Christian and Enlightenment origins of our founding fathers. "Nature's God: The Heretical Origins of the American Republic" by Matthew Stewart.
It is interesting that this (your quote) is the only reference to a God of any sort in all the documents of the American founding and the words are drawn out of Hellenistic philosophy through humanist and Enlightenment philosophy and not the language of the Christian Scriptures. Christian vocabulary was available but deliberately not used. This is born out in the further references to deity "Creator, Supreme Judge, and Divine Providence" all used with a distinctly Deist and not Christian tone. In fact most of the Americans who opposed the rebellion did so on traditional Christian principles over and against the profane Enlightenment principles of the rebels.
Our Declaration, and the French "Declaration of the Rights of Men" (which only mentions a Supreme Being) are the culmination of Enlightenment principles and the birth of the secular state.
To me the notion of rights emanating from some divinity is just as absurd as a claim to a divine right of kings. The Enlightenment places human rights in the natural law which is self evident (upon reasonable reflection) and universal and has nothing to do with revealed religion. Even these natural rights require regulation by society through the state.
https://mwstewart.com/books/natures-god/
From the fourth century until the early twentieth, Western civilization was not a secular project but a Christian one. Beginning with Constantine and formalized by Theodosius in 381, Europe became a theocratic civilization in which the Church governed the fate of souls and kings ruled under divine authority. Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 made this structure explicit: God ruled through the Church, and the Church crowned emperors.
Feudal society was built on this spiritual hierarchy. Every person, from peasant to noble to king, lived within a chain of obligation whose ultimate sanction was eternal salvation or damnation. The great cathedrals of Europe were raised through sacrifice of labor and wealth for the sake of the afterlife. Christianity was not an ornament of Western life; it was its organizing principle.
The Reformation fractured this unity but did not secularize the West. Protestantism sanctified work, elevated the individual conscience, and helped give rise to capitalism and the American idea of individual rights — all within a Christian moral framework.
For centuries, nearly all Europeans and Americans understood human equality as a Christian truth: all souls are equal before God. The modern secular idea of equality is a late development, not the foundation of Western civilization. On this point, Senator Rubio’s understanding of history is correct.
From the fourth century until the early twentieth, Western civilization was not a secular project but a Christian one. Beginning with Constantine and formalized by Theodosius in 381, Europe became a theocratic civilization in which the Church governed the fate of souls and kings ruled under divine authority. Charlemagne’s coronation in 800 made this structure explicit: God ruled through the Church, and the Church crowned emperors.
Feudal society was built on this spiritual hierarchy. Every person, from peasant to noble to king, lived within a chain of obligation whose ultimate sanction was eternal salvation or damnation. The great cathedrals of Europe were raised through sacrifice of labor and wealth for the sake of the afterlife. Christianity was not an ornament of Western life; it was its organizing principle.
The Reformation fractured this unity but did not secularize the West. Protestantism sanctified work, elevated the individual conscience, and helped give rise to capitalism and the American idea of individual rights — all within a Christian moral framework.
For centuries, nearly all Europeans and Americans understood human equality as a Christian truth: all souls are equal before God. The modern secular idea of equality is a late development, not the foundation of Western civilization. On this point, Senator Rubio’s understanding of history is correct.
100%
It is not true that 'early natural scientists were engaged in a prolonged struggle with the Catholic Church; it was only with the separation of empirical inquiry from religious dogma that modern natural science, and the economic world it made possible, emerged'.
See, for example:
'Whether one adapted a natural philosophy or devised a new one, the aim was now to produce a symbiotic union. This development found its clearest expression in theories of the earth, but the idea that natural philosophy is a means of seeking evidence of God’s activity in nature would become widespread in the 1680s and 1690s, particularly in England, and Newton for example would consider the stability of planetary orbits to be evidence of God’s constant intervention. . . . . But both in effect treated natural philosophy and the interpretation of revelation as being ultimately part of the same enterprise, for better or worse. . . . . At that point, a ‘scientific culture’ developed in the West that was very different from anything that had gone before, as the Enlightenment heralded a wholly new conception of the world and our place in it.'
p 505
Gaukroger, Stephen (2006) The emergence of a scientific culture. Science and the shaping of modernity, 1210-1685, Clarendon Press, Oxford.
I get why you felt the need to respond to Rubio, given the dig. This is a thoughtful piece. However, Rubio‘s characterization of western civilization is no more reactionary than those of, say, John Adams. With all the crazy on the right these days, it’s weird that you should attack him on this ground.
I just read the first sentence and could not continue. I kind of wish I could interrogate Francis like ChatGpt. When did the West begin to define itself through Christianity? What is the first recorded instance where any western thinker claimed otherwise? Is there a single historian who disputes that Enlightenment values arouse directly out of Christianity?
Keep reading. He gets you.
Ok, I did. It’s not too bad. Reminiscent of those who want 90s leftism back, while rejecting the inevitable extension of those ideas into wokeness. I know nothing, but it’s plain as day that the post-war effort to eliminate common religious values and heritage is a total failure. A vague notion of shared values, which are no longer taught in schools, is too weak to defeat the alternatives, including Islamism and cultural Marxism. See Return of the Strong Gods, etc. etc.
I don’t disagree with you about the Christian roots. What’s changed for me is that the Enlightenment depended on a metaphysics of the rational subject, and I no longer believe that metaphysics. Liberalism still works, but only as a fragile, managed project. That’s why I’m uneasy — not because I want to restore a lost religious foundation, but because the Enlightenment’s own foundation has dissolved.
I’m not convinced liberalism is fragile simply because the Enlightenment’s original foundation has weakened. In three centuries, it has had plenty of time to develop its own roots as a moral and political tradition, one that does not require Christianity as a permanent companion.
Liberalism has never existed without pressure or opposition. That is not a new condition. The real question is whether liberal societies can still defend human dignity, freedom, and pluralism when illiberal movements return—as they always do—without retreating into a different kind of authoritarianism.
We’ve done a poor job of cultivating the democratic subjects Habermas says we need.
Agree. We can and always should do better at cultivating civic trust and participation. A lot of factors go into that. My only additional point is that the bar for a civic core of democratic subjects need not be a supermajority--only enough that can promote liberalism and protect against populist movements that seek alternatives.
He’s a has been leftist grifter