Western Civilization: Christianity as a Unifying Force Within a Secular State Part One; Religion in the Colonies

While there is continued debate over whether the United States is a "Christian Nation" (with debate even over what the term itself means) or whether its founders were Christians and whether it was founded upon "Christian principles", it is not arguable, however, that the majority of people in the United States identify as Christian and that Christian values, broadly defined, have shaped our culture. The European colonizers were overwhelmingly Christian, although there were Enlightenment-influenced strains which merely gave lip service to Christianity. There were small numbers of colonists and their descendants who were of other faiths, and of course there were the religious traditions of the native peoples, but Christianity was by far the religion of the majority. So, in some respects, the United States could be viewed as a Christian nation and Christianity could be viewed as a unifying force and foundational to our culture. But only if these terms are defined broadly.

There is some disagreement regarding just how Christian the early colonists were. The popular image of pre-Revolutionary War Americans largely comes from what we know of the Puritan and Pilgrim settlers. The areas that they colonized in New England were founded as religious refuges and were self-consciously religious in character. There was no separation of church and state - the church was the state. This image of the ultra-religious super-Christian early colonist is engraved in our consciousness, but the other colonies, despite some of them having established churches, were not as devoted to their faith as an everyday part of life as were those in Massachusetts and the other New England settlements. There was also the matter of disagreement, often violent disagreement, over what precisely constituted Christianity and who was a Christian. To the majority of Protestants, the Catholics practiced a false religion, Quakers were subversive due to their pacifistic views; various denominations anathematized other denominations and the Puritans thought everyone else was wrong and would gladly have a government that enforced that view.

Looking back over 300 years we sometimes mistake what people meant when they used the words "God" or "Creator". Actual atheists were rare back then, non-religious people, including those who rejected or ignored Christian ritual and mythology, often still believed in a creator of some sort, even when disbelieving in that creator's intervention in human affairs. Some of these people were the Deists, who formalized the language of disbelief and gave it a philosophical basis, but many more simply ignored religion altogether, while still vaguely acknowledging a "God".

There were undoubtedly a lot of Christians in the early days of European settlement, surely a majority, but many of them were Christians in name only, and even among the committed, there was such disagreement that one could hardly call it a unifying force.

Western Civilization: Individual Liberty Part Two; North America Origins

Founded by a bunch of people who didn't want other people telling them what to do, the people of the United States, soon joined by more people who didn't like other people telling them what to do, had what seemed like unlimited opportunity to actually get away from people who were telling them what to do. Of course many of these early Americans were unaware of the irony of shouting "freedom" at every opportunity while enslaving black Africans, putting various other people into indentured servitude and killing off native people (or at least forcing them off their land) - but, you know, freedom is for white people (male, landowning white people!) While Enlightenment principles undoubtedly influenced European nations which in turn influenced the American colonists, it was in North America where the opportunity to really be free from other people telling you what to do could be realized in practice. What North America had that Europe didn't was a vast, unexplored (by whites) continent where a man could strike out on his own and make his own way, free from little or any government interference.

Settlement by England of North America was spurred by two main reasons: religion and commerce. England had a policy of mercantilism, i.e. the goal of colonies was the enrichment of Britain itself. Various companies and individuals were given rights within the areas that the British government claimed. These rights were utilized to set up profitable enterprises, including cash crop plantations in the southern areas. Religious freedom was the other incentive to colonization. In Europe the religious wars were still raging; even in England the favored state religion could easily change if a monarch professed a different faith than his or her predecessor. Pilgrims and Puritans, the former who advocated separation from the Church of England and the latter whose goal was to reform and "purify" it, both were early settlers unhappy with the status quo of the state church. The early colonies were very much a haven for those who wanted to get out from under the control of "the man", secular or religious. As far as they were from London, eventually local governments began to resemble governments everywhere and  started to infringe on individual freedom as some envisioned it; even the religiously founded colonies, ostensibly birthed as cradles of religious tolerance, weren't so tolerant of other religious views, spawning other colonies, allegedly to escape the intolerance of those who preached tolerance.

The war for independence fought  by the thirteen colonies was in large part about "stopping other people from telling us what to do". Even after independence from England, there was a great resistance to a central government; it was only the chaos and weakness engendered by the Articles of Confederation setup that spurred the writing of a constitution with a strong central government, but even then there were challenges to its ability to "tell people what to do" up to at least the Civil War. Even then, there was for a long time a safety valve for those who were extreme individualists: the frontier.

"The frontier" was, up to possibly the late 1800's, an alternative for those who just had to live totally free of authority - Daniel Boone settling in Kentucky, the Mormons settling Utah, the English-speaking settlers of Texas, the gold-rush in California and Alaska, the uncounted pioneers throughout the West...until civilization finally caught up with them. The initial borders of the United States were continuously expanded through negotiation and through conquest, new areas opening up one after the other. All of this set a pattern for an American attitude that persists to this day. Based on Enlightenment principles, but with a uniquely American stamp.

Western Civilization: Individual Liberty Part One; The Enlightenment

One of the hallmarks of Western culture is the emphasis on the individual rather than the group, tribe, nation or religion. Or so we like to think. I reality, our culture is a mixture of individualism and adherence to societal norms, varying in degree among different Western nations and even within each nation.

It is evident that the rights of individuals was something that evolved and was not the state of early societies. In tribal society, too much individualism could kill off the tribe. "I'm sorry chief, but I don't want to be a hunter, I'd rather study theater" - gives a more literal meaning to "starving artist". While some aspects of individual rights date back to the era of Greek city-states, we will start by looking at some of the ideas of The Enlightenment as the basis of the Western idea of individual liberty.

In the 1600's, the rule of monarchs in the secular realm and of established churches in the spiritual was the norm. The monopoly by the Catholic Church had been broken by the Protestant Reformation in the mid 1500's, although the various Protestant denominations claimed the same authority within their territories that the Catholic Church previously did. In general, each reigning monarch decided which brand of Christianity would be "established' in his realm. This changed slightly with the Peace of Westphalia, which although it codified the right of monarchs to decide which church would be established in their territory, individuals received the right to choose a different denomination. Between Westphalia and the Reformation the hold that authoritarianism exercised over Western civilization and culture was weakened.

The next phase of the move toward individualism in Western thought was the broad movement called The Enlightenment. Pioneered by philosophers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Voltaire, Rene Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, the overarching ideas of The Enlightenment was an establishment of a society based on science and reason, rather than religious faith. Some, like John Locke and Isaac Newton sought an accommodation between science and religion. There were several subcategories that were addressed as part of this movement:

• Science: the scientific method, whereby ideas were tested by experimentation, grew to be the scientific standard during this time. 
• Law & Politics: the idea of a "social contract" between the rulers and the governed, as opposed to the "right" of the rulers to rule was promulgated; the idea that for power to be legitimate, it must be representative of the people; the essential equality of all citizens; the idea that that which was not explicitly prohibited by law was allowed; separation of powers in government
• Religion: separation of church and state saw its first stirring during this time; as did the idea of Deism

The ideas of The Enlightenment were at their peak during the colonial period and were expressed in several of the founding documents of the United States. It can be seen in the section in the Constitution that forbids religious tests for public office and the prohibition on a national established church. The amendments referred to as "The Bill of Rights" codified Enlightenment ideals regarding individual freedoms. 

One of the ideas set forth by John Locke was the idea of "natural rights". These are not rights that spring from laws or a culture, but rights that are, as the term implies, natural to the state of man, and therefore universal and inalienable. He posited that no one can lawfully infringe on another's natural rights, since every man is equal and has the same natural rights. 

These ideas had widely different applications in different European nations and in the eventually independent colonies that they founded. In France, a bloody revolution overthrew the old order, in Great Britain a gradual eroding of the privileges of the kings, in other places it took until the aftermath of the First World War for the monarchies to be replaced by representative republics. Ironically, while Western nations at least gave lip service to the idea of individual rights and equality, this ideal was not extended to the areas which they still clonized: much of Africa, India-Pakistan, Southeast Asia and, after the breakup of the Ottoman Empire, the Middle East.