Christendom – The Pull Of The Land

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

In 1987, about 500 students at Stanford University gathered to protest against Stanford’s Western Culture curriculum. The invited speaker was 1984 and 1988 presidential candidate, Jesse Jackson. After his speech, he joined the students as they marched to present their demands to the faculty senate and chanted, “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

News reports led Americans to understand that what students and men such as Jackson were demanding was simply that undergraduates be exposed to other cultures such as the Sumerian or Inca civilizations or the achievements of Japan or China or the Arabs.

However, as usual, the media’s reporting was mere obfuscation.

Here is the chant again: “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Culture’s got to go!”

This was exactly what had already been happening in Stanford and universities across the land for decades, and would take on added fury thereafter: a bold attack against our culture. This attack was based on neo-Marxist and other radical doctrines (ironically derived from Western sources). And the attack succeeded.

(Paradoxically, the Western Culture class, similar to its predecessor Western Civilization, was the most popular of the classes in Stanford, and was attended by students of all cultural backgrounds. In effect, the protests were actually against fellow students who saw value in learning about their history.)

So, instead of teaching our inherited culture, universities engaged in counter-cultural warfare, teaching gay, feminist, Afrocentric, and myriad more subjects, all designed to demonstrate how such are oppressed and dominated by Western Culture. And now we see the same attacks waged by high school and elementary school teachers.

In other words, academics are now designed to relentlessly bombard upcoming generations with opprobrium against our heritage, our history, and our historical figures.

This did not start in 1987. I vividly recall a conversation in 1975 wherein a professional colleague slandered George Washington, asserting as fact something he could not possibly know and for which there is not a scintilla of evidence, outside the fervid imaginations of his college’s professoriate.

In the 1960s radicals in American colleges and universities had fully bought into the assertion that “Western Civilization” was an early 20th-century construct, taught only to justify American entry into Europe’s wars in order to defend “our civilization”. That, in fact, such teaching did not form a part of any curriculum of higher learning prior to World War I.

How intellectuals could affirm such drivel and get away with it will one day be a subject of marvel, I suppose. Akin to how their cerebral forebears fervently believed in bleeding, phrenology, and ouija boards.

A cursory review of the writings and speeches of our colonial and early republic religious and political leaders, as well as great amounts of surviving correspondence from many lesser lights of the era, clearly demonstrates their understanding of our heritage, which was first described as “Christendom” and much later as “Western Civilization”.

Just to take one example, Jonathan Edwards, the American Puritan minister most associated with the 18th Century Great Awakening in America, preached a series of over 30 sermons on God’s providential dealings with men, which he had intended to develop into book form but died before realizing that intention. Nevertheless, the sermons were published posthumously in the 1770’s as A History of the Work of Redemption, and you can find this work in Banner of Truth and Amazon, should you be so inclined.

In this work, Edward’s integrated landmark moments in the story of Christendom, such as the conversion of Constantine, the fall of Rome, the defeat of the Spanish Armada, the Guttenburg Press, the Enlightenment deism, and more, and tied these into God’s providential history of His creation. He refuted atheistic Enlightenment narratives by demonstrating God’s work through history and nations.

Edwards is just one of a great many American founding luminaries who not only possessed a deep knowledge of our heritage and culture, but also taught it to future generations. This is the heritage our academic, communications, corporate, medical, political, and other classes have so casually cast aside.

Nevertheless, as Professor Stanley Kurtz has written, “The Western tradition is the source of our founding principles and constitutional system. That is the most important reason for civic-minded citizens to study it.”

What is that “Western tradition”?

Jesse Jackson in Stanford, 1987, seeking to keep the majority of students from learning our heritage.

Jonathan Edwards, 1703-1758