Our last post concluded with a rhetorical question: What is that “Western tradition”?
Although that is a mouthful, so to say, we can at least acknowledge one fact which, although incontrovertible, is ridiculously controversial today: our “Western tradition” is essentially a Christian tradition. The fact that the West used to be known and called “Christendom” is not right-wing propaganda. It is fact, as any perusal of older histories and essays makes abundantly clear. In fact, as recently as the mid-20th Century, that term, although in great decline by then, was still used by luminaries such as Winston Churchill.
Most histories of the United States practically begin with the Declaration of Independence of 1776. And such histories, in great measure, interpret the Declaration in the light of modern, Enlightenment tenets, including the oft-repeated but easily refuted axiom that our Founders were a bundle of deists straining against the constraints of organized religion and superstition.
Easily available primary sources and earlier histories demonstrate that the modern standard narratives are simply not so.
Furthermore, in past generations, our histories did not begin with the Declaration of Independence; they began with our colonial era and the background to that experience, which can only be understood by knowing what impelled our Pilgrim and Puritan fathers to come to these shores. And it was not the “1619” narrative.
In other words, our histories required an understanding of Christendom, now known as Europe, and the religious traditions which produced the legal traditions which Americans eventually inherited.
These are truths which are not only neglected but loudly disparaged and shut down today. Indeed, they are denounced as insensitive, misogynist, racist, and worse.
But they are none of those things. Rather, they are true. And a glorious truth, at that. However, the truth requires study and effort beyond what is required to read bumper stickers and memes.
The late Harvard Professor, Harold J. Berman, wrote in his magisterial Law and Revolution (1983):
“The traditional symbols of community in the West, the traditional images and metaphors, have been above all religious and legal. In the twentieth century, however, for the first time, religion has become largely a private affair …. The connection between the religious metaphor and the legal metaphor has been broken.”
Is it any wonder that bonds of race, religion, soil, family, class, neighborhood, and work community have dissolved into abstract and superficial nationalisms? “It is impossible not to sense the social disintegration, the breakdown in communities, that has taken place in Europe, North America, and other parts of Western civilization in the twentieth century,” Berman wrote in 1983.
So when our “culture” is denounced and demands are made to toss it into the trash, such as was done by Jesse Jackson and a minority of the Stanford student body (Hey Hey, ho, ho), what is actually being called for is the abolishment of our Christian heritage. A heritage whose history includes the fact that, for example, 8 of our 13 original states had state supported churches until well after the US Constitution; all state constitutions acknowledged “Almighty God” or “God” and more.
Berman goes on to state, “For many centuries, [the West] would be identified very simply as the people of Western Christendom.”
What does that mean with regards to our history?
Chartres Cathedral, France (1194-1220; built atop the site of four cathedrals dating to AD 400)
Published in 1983