Cite, please. Looking at the most obvious cultural artifacts, such as movies, pop musics, etc…, I’m not seeing much that would stamp the culture of the US as “very Christian”. Quite the opposite, in fact. Strongly Christian groups in the US tend to be subcultures.
The fact that human rights protections in 16th-century England had not yet been elevated and solidified at the level we expect today, should not be used to dismiss the historical fact that the concept of rights was much more developed in England and other parts of western Europe than in the rest of the world.
A couple points.
First, the Arabs may have been under political control of Rome or Persia but they were never significant elements in either empire. The Arabs did not assimilate the culture of the Romans or Persians when they were subjects. So when they later conquered territory from those empires, they essentially did so as outsiders.
The second point is that Europeans used Rome under the Caesars and Greece under Alexander as models for what an empire looked like. And the foundation of these empires pre-dated Christianity. So Europeans knew that religion was an outside force that was added to an empire rather than a necessary element needed to make an empire. Other people did not have this example; their historical empires had all been built up around a state religion and the precedent seemed to be that a state religion was a core element of an empire.
This meant that European rulers could envision themselves as acting independently of religion in a way that rulers in other places could not. A European king could tell himself “If Alexander and Augustus could rule without some Pope looking over his shoulder telling him what to do, so can I.”
OTOH, we have a higher percentage of regular churchgoers than they have in Europe.
The abolition of slavery in the West was mostly driven by Christianity, specifically the Great Awakening, so that aspect of human rights is pretty much an outgrowth of Christian values.
Regards,
Shodan
In exactly the same way that chattel slavery itself was an outgrowth of Christian values.
Chattel slavery predates Christianity. Abolition of slavery doesn’t.
Regards,
Shodan
Really? Manumission didn’t happen anywhere before 1820?
This doesn’t quite hang together for me. The Great Awakening is largely a phenomenon of American Protestant Christianity, yet the US was one of the last western countries to abolish slavery. Slavery was abolished in England, for example, in 1569; in Poland in 1347. So we can hardly attribute the abolition of slavery in the west to the Great Awakening.
More to the point, if we confine our enquiry to “the West” then almost anything we care to study is going to turn out to be an outgrowth of Christian values, since Western culture is so profoundly marked by Christianity. Slavery was abolished in Japan by 1200, in India several centuries earlier (though it was later reinstated in some European colonial possession in India).
This was because the United States was one of the few countries where areas slavery flourished weren’t just colonies but had significant representation and power in politics. The Northern states of the United States were some of the first jurisdictions in modern times to abolish slavery in the immediate aftermath of the American Revolution however,
Those were primarily driven by economic rather than moral factors and in the latter case at least was simply because it was supplanted by serfdom.
Erhm…
It’s interesting to note that some of the staunchest opponents of slavery in the early Republic were hardline Covenanter Presbyterians who also urged a quasi-theocratic government based upon a national “covenant” with God and as a result opposed the US Constitution and refused participate in the US State due to its condoning of slavery and refusal to acknowledge God: https://books.google.com/books?id=wnI_CgAAQBAJ&pg=PA90&lpg=PA90&dq=covenanters+slavery&source=bl&ots=S3ZZ_olTa3&sig=0Ul8OZH7Fbv3VKRie2Betc8_ZuE&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CE0Q6AEwCGoVChMI3IqyqMiJyAIVyHs-Ch1bHgvo#v=onepage&q=covenanters%20slavery&f=false
Wait, who said Islam doesn’t have the concept of human rights?
Sharia law provides a number of rights. It’s not a particularly well balanced set of rights, it’s not always followed, and it doesn’t measure up to modern standard, but it’s not nothing.
Sharia law provides rules regarding marriage and inheritance that provide women with some rights to inherit property, something that many contemporary societies didn’t. It provides children with certain rights to be cared for financially. It requires that men support their wives equally, and that money that a woman earns is hers and hers alone to spend. It allows women to refuse to live with their in-laws. It prohibits forced and child marriages. It allows women to propose marriage.
It provides limited civil protections for some religious minorities. It provides protections for prisoners of war. It provides some rights to slaves.
Again, not up to modern standards. I’m not saying it’s okay at all. But it’s not no rights at all. I’ve been to parts of the world where Islam is considered positively progressive for women, because the traditional religions allow one to literally buy and sell wives like cattle, and women were sick of being “sold as wives” for just long enough to be forced to work the fields for no pay in harvest season.
Don’t forget that Christianity was on the wrong side of history when it came to women’s suffrage.
Was it? I’m not aware of much religious opposition to women’s suffrage.
I think, come to think of it, that you might have a stronger case if you argued that Christianity was on the wrong side when it came to suffrage, period. Organised religion tended to be reactionary when confronted with the horrors of the French Revolution, and that’s something which marked it for at least a century. Throughout the nineteenth century it generally tended towards royalism rather than republicanism, and saw no inherent value in the extension of the suffrage by, e.g., dropping property qualifications.
How do you know which side history is/was on?
What does “on the right side of history” mean?
How does “on the right side of history” differ from “sqweels’ prefered social outcomes”?
1 Timothy 2:11-12English Standard Version (ESV)
11 Let a woman learn quietly with all submissiveness. 12 I do not permit a woman to teach or to exercise authority over a man; rather, she is to remain quiet.
LOL. WFT is ‘Timothy’.
It doesn’t matter … it means “Christianity was on the wrong side of history”.
What ever the fuck that means.
Don’t be disingenuous. Obviously his premise is that “universal suffrage is a societal good.”
Sure, but the US is not “the West.”