Mere Fidelity
Mere Fidelity
Replay: How 1776 Remade The World with Andrew Wilson (Fixed Audio)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
1776 gets treated like a patriotic shorthand, but it also works like a master key for the modern world. We sit down with Andrew Wilson to talk about Remaking the World and why one crowded year can illuminate the rise of the post-Christian West better than a thousand hot takes about the last decade.
We unpack Andrew’s “WEIRDER” framework (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex-Christian, romantic) and trace the seven shifts that propel it: globalization, Enlightenment thought, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, democratic revolution, attempts to sideline Christianity while keeping its moral capital, and the spread of romanticism into everyday life. Along the way, we wrestle with a question Christians feel in their bones: how can a culture be shaped by Christianity and still try to move past it?
—
Mere Fidelity is a podcast from Mere Orthodoxy and is listener-supported. If you would like to support this work, become a Mere Orthodoxy Member today at http://mereorthodoxy.com/membership.
Get 30% of the Baker Book of the Month, The Pursuit of Character: Recovering the Virtues, by going to: http://bakerbookhouse.com/pages/mere-fidelity
Register for Beeson Divinity School's 2026 Preaching Conference, July 14-16 in Birmingham, Alabama: https://www.samford.edu/beeson-divinity/preaching-institute/preaching-conference?utm_source=Mere+Orthodoxy&utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=Preaching+Conference+2026
New Website And Membership Offer
Ian HarberMirror Orthodoxy has a brand new website. We've completely redesigned our website with readers in mind. From the layout to dark mode, downloadable PDFs and audio articles, and a new dashboard for members that lets you bookmark articles, save quotes to a commonplace book, access your full reading history, digital editions of all past journals, site themes based on the church calendar, and more. There has never been a better time to become a member of Mere Orthodoxy than right now. Through the end of June, get 20% off of your first year of membership. Not only will you get access to an incredible online experience, you'll support the ongoing work of Mere Orthodoxy and Mere Fidelity and much more to come. Mere Orthodoxy is a reader-supported publication. We can do this work because of readers and listeners like you. Go to Mereorthodoxy.com today to see the new site and get 20% off your first year of membership. That's Mereorthodoxy.com to see the new site and get 20% off your first year of membership.
Sponsor Book Discount And Link
SPEAKER_02This episode is brought to you by Lexin Press, who publishes books that love the word, love the faith, and love the church. Luxim Press is an imprint of the Baker Publishing Group. Our June book of the month is The Pursuit of Character, Recovering the Virtues by Matthew Arbo. You can receive a 30% discount on this title and all previous books of the month by visiting Bakerbookhouse.com backslash pages backslash mere fidelity. You can find that link in our show notes to get 30% off of our book of the month from Lexum Press.
Andrew Wilson And The New Book
SPEAKER_04Alright, we are gonna dive in. I'm very excited about today's show. We have a super special guest who's actually a member of the show, Andrew Wilson with us. Andrew is, of course, well known to all of you here at Mere Fidelity. He is the author, though, of his 48th book. I think more or less. I think you're up to that about now, Andrew. Uh, the latest from the desk of Andrew Wilson, Remaking the World, How 1776 created the post-Christian West. Now, I just have to like sometimes we start these shows by mentioning endorsements. And so I'm going to mention an endorsement that out of the gate, this is an arresting book. Andrew Wilson has established himself among contemporary Christianity's most subtle and interesting thinkers. And that endorsement is in fact by me. And I feel like I have to start with that, Andrew, because on I think maybe in December of last year, one of our past shows, we had a conversation about this book, and I gave you such a hard time about writing this book. So I'm just gonna own my L's. Like I think it's right.
SPEAKER_01It was you're right. We do that thing at Christmas where we say, What are you working on? I'd forgotten about that. We did that live, yeah. Because I remember talking about it, but I'd forgotten we did that in this setting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_04Yeah. So I'm I'm publicly owning my L's. I gave you a hard time about writing this book, but you pulled it off. It's very good. Mark Knoll, who's an actual historian, called this book extraordinary in every way, which I think is um accurate, and that's higher praise than coming from me, because Mark Knoll, as a historian, knows what he's talking about. So congratulations on the book, Andrew. Thank you.
SPEAKER_01To be honest, just for the rest of your life, you're gonna have to wear around your neck the fact that you once called me subtle in print, which is which is just a word that no one who's ever met me would ever accuse me of being anything other than well, any any any subtlety whatsoever. Um, but thank you. That was very kind.
SPEAKER_04You can't you can't rip that out of context, though. I called you a subtle thing. No, I'm gonna apply it to everything.
SPEAKER_01I'm gonna say Matt Anderson says next time I'm accused of a sartorial error, I'm gonna say Matt Anderson says I'm subtle. Next time I blunder into a silence with an inappropriate joke, I'm gonna say Matt Anderson says subtle.
SPEAKER_04No one on the show has given you a harder time about your sartorial choices than I have. Let's be clear about that, which are very poor. Um, in fact, we've we've joked behind the scenes that Andrew should be kicked off the podcast for some of his pictures where he shows up wearing scarves and whatnot. We haven't taken that as up. All right, so Andrew, um this question, Derek couldn't be with
Why 1776 Becomes The Pivot
SPEAKER_04us. He was very sad that he wasn't able to join us, but he he he wanted to ask this out of the gate. What motivated you to start digging around in 1776 as a year? Was it just America freeing the world from tyranny and the glorious reality that that is? Is that what prompted you to start thinking that 1776 is the year on which everything turns?
SPEAKER_01I do actually feel quite patriotic about being American when I'm when I am in America sometimes. I I found myself singing national anthems at baseball games and things. Um, but no, it was not, sadly. Um, I was reading a uh it was a main historical quirk that I was reading a book by Ian Morris, um, in which he pointed out that Watts Steam Engine and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations were kind of came out within a couple of days of each other in 1776. And I thought, I know, the American Revolution, the key invention in the Industrial Revolution and the foundational textbook of modern economics, all happening in the same year. That's really interesting. And I just kind of looked at it and thought I'd maybe one day I should just look at that a bit more. And then on the so that's one track, and then you start digging and you start finding out lots of other things which you think, wow, there's a lot more to this year than I had realized. And it's it's it's an interesting, really interesting story about the West as a whole. But then I was also getting into um sort of Jonathan Haidt and Joseph Henrich and some of those guys who'd use the acronym Weird, you know, the West Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic. And I thought that's a really interesting way of describing the the modern world. And I was running down that idea, and I don't know quite how it happened, but I was in a shower, I think. And the idea of using the year and the acronym together and saying, is there a way of telling the story of the post-Christian West in an apologetically cultural explainer kind of way, in a way that uses 1776 as the way to describe all seven of the transformations that have, I'm choosing to say, have shaped them on West. And I then had to start trying to work out to see if it could be done, but I I thought it probably could. So that's where it came from. It was a bit of a a meeting of two completely different ideas. I think that's ideas, how ideas happen, isn't it? You ideas sort of come to you sometimes and you aren't quite that you feel presented with them rather than like you've worked for them, and that's sort of what happened in this case.
Post-Christian Versus Ex-Christian
SPEAKER_04So what hangs on the difference, if any? Is there any difference between post-Christian and ex-Christian? Did you use ex-Christian? No, no, I use I use Christianity.
SPEAKER_01Turning weird into weirder. Ex-Christian starts with an E. So it makes a better acronym. That's all it is. But um, I don't think that, as we obviously in the book, I don't think that the that our culture is fully or entirely or meaningfully in that sense ex-Christian or post-Christian in the sense that it has left everything Christian behind. I think it's more that it's post-Christian rather or ex-Christian. It's a that the thing that we are trying to leave behind is explicit is very much Christianity as opposed to Islam or Chinese communism or animism or Confucianism or any other belief system, and that makes us obviously we are as we would all concede, like very shaped by the Christian legacy. So it's not saying this is done and dusted, it's more saying this is this are the roots that we have, and we have almost every facet of our lives is shaped by Christianity in some way. And obviously, there has been a move in the last 250 years to push it further into the background. But that I don't mean to say, I mean, I th I like like any Christian, I think we'd say ultimately the West is pre-Christian. Um because that's one Corinthians, you know, the R eschatology is so I I I say that, but I yes, that's the I'm trying to think about it as a uh the culture from which we have moved trying to move on in the West, and it shaped all the other six elements of culture that I look at in the book.
The WEIRDER Framework Explained
SPEAKER_04Can you give us, just for listeners who are new to this sort of taxonomy, can you just walk through the weirder framework and what happens in 1776 that makes that a reality today? Just very briefly. So tell us tell us what you're doing.
SPEAKER_01So the acronym is Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex-Christian, romantic. So the last two I've added to the psychology language that had been common for about 10 or 15 years, to talk about the ideological components rather than just the material and political components of our of our world. And the seven changes that get us there effectively are somewhat in order, I suppose. Globalization, connecting up of all the different parts of the world into one into one sort of interconnected whole, enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the great enrichment, or the people call it different things, but basically the the massive transformation in living standards and wealth and life expectancy that inflects upwards in the 1770s, really. Democratic, as in the the American Revolution, obviously introduced democracy, the attempt to leave Christianity behind, particularly by elites in the West, and the attempt to take its uh moral contribution as a sort of self-evident truth and move beyond it into well now, we don't need Christianity because we've got its moral framework. So we could just dispense with the metaphysics and keep this ethical some of its ethical commitments. And then romanticism, which is uh uh obviously uh a sort of more uh artistic um but eventually permeating through into the way that all popular movies and songs and the way people think and talk and the things they put in their fridges and all that. And that those seven transformations really all uh the 1776 is a great year to explore them all because you do have the origins of romanticism and uh the some first sort of post-Christian, you know, major post-Christian writers, many in that generation are combining together Voltaire Diderot, Gibbon, Hume, the Declaration of Independence, arguably, I think. Um, and then obviously you've got the American Revolution, the steam engine, the wealth of nations, and the enlightenment. So and James Cook turning the world, globalizing. So I all of those things I then take this year and say this is a great way of telling a story that is obviously a much bigger story about how the West became what it is.
Why Deep History Helps The Church
SPEAKER_00So your writing as a pastor, and a lot of your work to this point has been more um apologetic in its flavour, um but the more familiar forms of apologetics that we might have, or practical applied theology. Um this study of a particular uh historical uh historical narrative is to my knowledge a departure for you and your typical writing. What is it about history that you find so relevant and applicable to the life of the church today? And why did you choose to explore these ideas within a historical frame within the historical framework that you did, giving them the unity within a particular year rather than just exploring the ideas in their own in their own right?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think in some ways the answer to those two questions is probably the same, which is I reason the reason I wrote about it is because I found it so interesting. So I think the reason I found it the reason I find it helpful Partly I think we're storytelling creatures, so we're always gonna operate with a functioning, whether it's it might be utterly inaccurate in all of its detail, but we're always gonna operate with a functioning narrative with goodies and baddies and plot and character and development and a sense of eschatology or ending. And that we either have a good one or a bad one, or we we, you know, we have to varying degrees better or worse stories of how we came as we are. And I think one of the things that's happened in the West, even in the last 10 years, is that that I imagine this is true in every generation, but certainly while I've been observing it and thinking about it, there is a very contested narrative of the West in Western culture. That you know, there's the sort of you've got a very obvious left version of that story, a very obvious right version of that story. Um, and the heroes and villains are different in some ways, they are each other's the heroes and villains on one side are the villains and heroes on the other. And that that actually it becomes a very interesting way of trying to triangulate in a way the the two most obvious ways of telling that story in the West. And particularly when you go back further. So rather than saying here's the story about what's still this last couple of years, look really high-selling books written by Christians, all with often quite noble objectives, but really saying this is where it all went wrong, it's this thing that happened in the 80s, or this thing that happened in 2016, or this thing that happened in the 50s, or and and obviously to a to a degree, you can always go, Oh, well, actually, if you go back further, you can make it more complicated, which is a slightly tedious game to play if that's all it is. But I think by going back 250 years, you really you really are going the there are there are two threads, I particularly the two I try to bring together in the book are the sort of you know, the the Truman doctrine and the Tom Holland take on things. So Karl Truman's Rise of the Modern Self, Rise and Tribe of the Modern Self, and Tom Holland's Dominion are two different ways of trying to tell the ideological story of the the last seven or eight years, going these weird, what would seem to be weird developments in the way we think about the self and uh ethics and identity and that sort of thing is really remarkable, but where's it come from? And Holland and others are saying that's come from Christianity, and Truman is saying that's come from romanticism. I think of course the answer is they're both true, and they're both true in interesting and interlap overlapping ways. And I think, but but you can't tell that story if you just start in 1970 or 1950. So going back a long time was a really helpful way of doing it, I think. The other thing, if I can just be indulged just for one other observation on why I think a a deeper history reading is helpful, is because it enables you to bring in material factors and to tell a, and we had some banter about this on our WhatsApp group, I think, a few months ago, um, actually to get the best of the Marxist read of what's going on, which is to, you know, to read and say material factors shape ideas much, much more than evangelicals typically concede, or much, much more than those of us who are embroiled in debates culturally about what is a person and what is a self and that sort of thing would normally concede. And so if you go back to the 1780s and say, look, or 1770s, look how much has changed materially, and now look and see how that shapes the way people think about the you know, the way you you the way you use technology or how much can be achieved by a human person, how independent we are, and all those sorts of how you can make things rather than just receive things and all that sort of stuff, which is related to Joe Minich's stuff that we talked about a few weeks ago on the podcast as well. So I think that sort of material meets ideological is another benefit of doing deep history.
Prosperity Tradeoffs And Hidden Costs
SPEAKER_04Yeah, I I think that's right, Andrew, though it seems to me that it could be disconnected from the timeline, right? That really what you have is a methodology, a historical methodology, that takes ideas seriously and the material realities seriously. I mean, one reason why I love this book so much was because it offers a non-idealist account of history, which doesn't diminish the importance of the ideas. There are a couple moments in the book where you say the ideas here were actually really distinct. Like, why is it that the West triumphed over so many different places? And if you don't account for the geography of Europe and the ways in which Europe is unique, but you also don't account for particular types of ideas that maximized those geographical advantages, um, then you you're not telling both stories. So I guess you know, you know, and like when we had Carl on the show, I I went pretty hard at him because his is an idealist history. It's an it's a history that's actually just strictly about things that people wrote without any sort of story about how those ideas get embedded in real communities or the technological changes that make those ideas plausible. And I think that's a real limitation. It seems like one of the one of the advantages of doing history in a non-idealist way that takes ideas seriously is that it doesn't allow you to cover or it doesn't allow you to weaponize the history in quite the same way. Right? It doesn't allow you to instrumentalize this historical story because you encounter things that cut against your uh own ideological commitments, because there are certain things that might have become, might have happened that you would look at today and think, well, you know, I don't I don't like that that happened, but that affected my own community, my own way of thinking, and I've incorporated that in ways that I haven't quite realized. Did you experience that at all? Like I felt like the book, there are a couple of points where you're like, you talk you talk about the weaponization of history, and you say that you know, this isn't this is gonna cut against a lot of things and a lot of different people in ways that no one's going to like.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think definitely. And and there would there would be, I mean, particularly when you're writing about industrial technology or economics, you're you're saying, wow, so the phenomena what I want is I want to have my cake and eat it. I want to have the the prosperous the benefits of not even just for me personally, but for the world. I want people to live longer and live more comfortable lives and be less likely to lose a child and less likely to die in intense pain and all of those benefits, but I don't want there to be AK-47s or atom bombs or even the fragmentation of communities and the disintegration, even the drop in church attendance, which is is to me is is obviously connected to those other developments that prosperity does make communities less interdependent and does make people more private and ultimately does lead to diminishment of religious observance, which I think is a bad thing. But I also want to, and so some of those, I think the more I got into it, the more I thought, wow, this is you really can't don't, it doesn't seem like these things are extricable from each other. Like you, you it's a package deal, and it and it can make you if you only tell a materialist story, it can make you feel quite, really quite powerless, I think. And that I think is at its is at its worst. What stranger, what Marxism does, is sort of implies that there is a wound-up story, there's a sense of inevitability about this. This is always where history was gonna go. But I think the opposite problem is that you can feel like you have too much agency to shape, and an idea or a concept or a book or a thought has more agency or power than it really does. And so, yeah, you're right. I mean, I think of these seven central chapters, probably three or four of them are leaning to the material, and three or four of them are leaning in the are more ideological, and there's obviously overlap between the two. But yes, in if the question is, was that challenging for you in places and where you're like, oh my goodness, absolutely it was, particularly, I would say, around economic growth and industrial technology, where you say, Okay, so the thing that got me the flush toilet also got me the atom bomb. And while at one level that's a very trite comment, you do then think, okay, but so I can't really stand here and say what we really need is to go back to, you know, is agrarian living and deep community and the parish and all that. You think, well, obviously that's quite a that is quite a sort of Miro thing, and it's quite a but at the same and and many of each of us in different ways would feel quite you know zealous for it in some ways, but you go, I just but you do you go there, that that carries with it all of these other retrograde moves, which I don't think would be for the good of human flourishing. And so I've got various I don't haven't added on many of those things, obviously. I I I but I think you definitely there was a complicatedness to the interconnection of those stories as I was telling it.
What 1776 Thinkers Expected Next
SPEAKER_00Looking back through a history like this, it's very easy to have a sense of inevitability that things with such a beginning must arrive at such an end. And I wonder how did things look like to someone in those early years around 1776 as they saw these developments in their world? What were they thinking? What were they imagining the future projected out from those initial developments would look like? I mean, I think of Wordsworth's statements about the enthusiasts about the French Revolution at its dawn. Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven. That sense of promise and possibility of old ways being overturned, and the sense that a utopia is going to arise out of this. Um, what were some of the views of people in that year and the years following it regarding the developments that you've commented upon?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, that's really that's a great question. And obviously, it's a ridiculously large sweeping one as well. I'm just not qualified to comment on how you would aggregate those thoughts. I I think you probably have there's two particular threads that I think you can unpick fairly clearly from each other within or and this is limited to European elites. I think first of all, worth saying that the vast majority of people are not thinking about the future trajectories of any of these different transformations, really. Uh they're they'd be aware of some of them, much less aware of others. Even Adam Smith wasn't aware that the world was about to become dramatically richer in his own lifetime. It he So even experts didn't know where the changes were going to take them. But I think the two threads that you can see really clearly uh in terms of what do we think about the future here. I think there is the sort of the the death of the ancient regime moving beyond it into a new way in which human beings are more equal than they were, and a a potentially not necessarily post-hierarchical, but a certainly radically redrawn hierarchy of humanity in which old powers and entitlements were diminished. And obviously, you see a particular version of that in America, you see another very different version of it in France. But I think a lot of the young romantics were certainly talking about that kind of thing as being that's what's that's what's heady for Wordsworth, that's what's heady for many of them, is like this is a new way of being in which the the way in which the world has always been stratified is being unsettled. But I think that's quite distinct from the more Enlightenment y version. Um the two are connected, um, they feed into each other. Whereas the Enlightenment version is much more we have now reached a period where human beings are able to think for themselves, and this is going to be great for human wealth and but great for human knowledge, particularly, and probably going to be bad for belief traditional belief in God. And so the way in which someone like um Dalombert or Diderot or Kant would tell the story about where things were going would be quite different in its tone and in its expectations to the way in which the more politically motivated, both in America and in the and in Europe, would write about the same thing. But I think those are two, those are the two groups of people who it seems to me are projecting forward and saying the world is never going to be the same again, either for effectively political class reasons or for ideological intellectual reasons, and the two might well have been connected as well. Whereas I think on things like technology, you just don't get people, you've got lots of people saying we can make money out of this, but you don't get someone saying, hey, this mixture of this canal being built and this factory being built and this, you know, steam engine being built, this is gonna make everyone in the world ten times richer in 150 years of time. No one's talking like that. No one realizes how significant those inventions will become and quite what a feedback loop they will produce. Um, so I think there's I think on the more industrial and technological side, I'm not sure people are aware of where it's going at all.
SPEAKER_00Trying to recall, wasn't Ned Ludd supposed to be in the late 1770s? Um but but even then mythical start of the Luddites.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, but but exactly, but even then it doesn't really get going until the 1810s. And um and so and I think so. I think by and large, people are not that in to the extent that they they see new technologies emerging, no one can foresee this country's going to be covered in railways in 50 years' time. It just it just seems unimaginable to them, just as it would have to us if you told us in the 1980s about smartphones, it it is covered with and covered with removed railways as well, a wistful remark about the death of the British Railway, how very allocate.
New Contradictions That Still Shape Us
SPEAKER_00I do I do wonder, um, as you've remarked there, there are different histories or different futures that could be envisaged. Is there a way of seeing these um new movements and starts of um new technologies and new political um movements, etc., as the introduction of a series of new contradictions in addition to something that has a sort of unified force to it? What are some of the distinct maybe antagonisms and contradictions that you see being introduced in 1776 that weren't so operative beforehand?
SPEAKER_01That's a really good question. I mean, the the ideological the the an obvious one to pick on is probably the the the very brainiac, the left brain-right brain divide, I suppose we would now call it in terms of you know in a very modern way. But the sort of yeah, the brainiac analytical divide everything up, cut it up, and say, look, this now we've got mastered human knowledge, and this and the almost immediate reaction to it that just as that is reaching its apex is developing this sort of strong reaction, particularly in Germany, uh, and then it quickly spills into France, of what we would now call, I suppose, romanticism is the easiest one-word description for it. And the the two are bridged quite a lot. Um, and and a number of writers, including Adam Smith, would be actually quite sentimentalist in their way of thinking about ideas. But I do think that there is an almost immediate tension that gets introduced there between people who say you can't knowledge is that which you can um understand and predict and analyze and you know come up with you know that a more sort of almost modernist ep epistemology of science mingled with a for goodness sake, this is just going to destroy all the things that were most meaningful in life love, God, nation, and all of those sorts of and and actually that tension, that instability, is still being played out in almost every election today. It's it's not just a political issue, but it is, and the way that people conceptualize what is most valuable in their life. Is it is it economic health and knowledge and education? Is it the the intangible, deeper things that make us feeling animated humans? So I think that's probably quite an obvious one at a level of ideas. Um I think that the probably another one that would occur to me is the the tension between universalism and particularism. So you you end up with, in some ways, nations becoming more universalized through globalization and through the sense that there is a collective common project, even in Europe at least, but globally increasingly being joined up. But actually, a lot of the ideas that are being generated, a lot of the decisions being made by those European countries, in the end create nation states, and communities that are much more distinctly different from one another over the next hundred years than they were before. In the end, universalism probably wins. I mean, maybe it's too soon to say, I don't know. Um, in the sense that you and I are now wearing the same kind of clothes that people our age are wearing in Mumbai and you know, Santiago, whatever. But I think there is still a much more a sort of the particularism also gets intensified in a way um by some of even by some of the ideas and the practices and habits and the insistence on distinctiveness of particular religions and regional identities and obviously nationalism, which grows very much out of these ideas. So I think you end up with both of those things. There's probably others as well, but it's a really good question.
Preaching Conference Announcement
Ian HarberThis year's Beast and Divinity School Preaching Conference will be held January 14th through 16th at Stanford University in Birmingham, Alabama. This year's theme is Manifold Wisdom: the Riches of Preaching Across Christian Traditions. We will celebrate the contributions each of five Christian traditions: African American, Anglican, Baptist, Reformed, and Wesleyan. Bring to the preaching of God's word and will learn from one another for the sake of preaching the gospel more compellingly. The conference includes preaching services, breakout sessions, and a concert by act of Congress. Visit the link in the show notes to learn more and register.
Protestantism And The Secular Common Space
SPEAKER_04Andrew, one of the things that you talk about is Protestant paganism. And there is, of course, a narrative about modernity that has been in the post-Christian West that just hangs the whole thing on Protestantism. Uh, you don't quite do that, but you do describe a couple of phenomena and you talk about this blending of Protestantism and paganism. And you one of the things that you emphasize or you underscore following Alec Ryrie is the expansion of doubt uh that happens because you have the social divisions, the religious divisions at the Protestant uh at the Reformation, and that that sort of destabilization of the intellectual culture, of the sort of systems of uh trust and so on, like that gets merged with this pagan theory. So the question is, how much is Protestantism to blame for the post-Christian West?
SPEAKER_01I mean, I don't think you would have the post-Christian West without Protestantism. So if you want to put it that way, Protestantism is in a way to blame a lot. Um now, I think there's a much more, there's a much more um Protestant-y way of making obviously mainly imagine got a Protestant audience. But I think I'd start by saying that because I think if you we and we think we touched on this in a previous episode actually a few months ago, but but if you if you don't have the both the the divisions, as you say, the ecclesial and then and not just the sort of social and national divisions, but if you don't have the theological division, you the idea creating what we now think of as a secular common space for society would be inconceivable. You enormous Protestantism or something very like it would have had to have been the stepping stone from Roman Catholic Christendom in the 1400 to uh the sort of secularism of today. I don't think you could jump from what you can't get there from here in that you know, the old Irish joke about like I want to get to Dublin, but I can't do it from here, I need to get there from over there. I think Protestantism became that. Now that makes it sound like it's all Protestantism's fault. I but I I think blame and fault are just the wrong words to use, at the certainly at the level of historical causes like that. Because I think, um sorry, we I know we've just sort of mentioned our you know, we've got some differences from Carl Truman on this, but this is where a line from him is just his his response to Brad Gregory when Brad Gregory's book was like, hey, you guys screwed up first. Like he's like actually the the the response of Protestantism was a response to divisions that were already deeply baked into late medieval Christendom. And I think to say, oh, therefore, this is a so at a rather trite level, there is a version of this story which um which just say, yeah, basically Protestants introduced and destabilized and introduced division and questions where there weren't any before. No, no, that's not true at all. And Ryrie's book makes that case very well. And I think that's at a at a shallow level, the Catholic critique, this is all the Protestants fought, is a is uh there's a very bad version of that argument because you say these the Protestantism is simply raising to the surface some critiques that are the the the problem of the late medieval Catholic Church and its failure to deal with many of the problems it was raising through areas of incompetence, corruption, or and its own divisions. So I don't want to wouldn't blame Protestantism, I think, but I think it has grown out of Protestantism in some quite obvious ways that that that sort of latent low-level paganism, which may never have gone away in the West, I think is you were to teleport to the 13th century or the 9th century or the 19th century, you would find pagan practices and assumptions on the ground in ordinary villages and towns in the West. They still to this day still are baked in in pretty important ways. But I think without Protestantism being added, I don't think you would have had what we now think of as a secular world or a post-Christian world. So if you I don't I don't think of that as blaming Protestantism, but I definitely think you can't account for it without seeing Protestantism as a big part of what happened.
America’s Democratic Example And Its Limits
SPEAKER_00When people see the um year 1776, they will think of a number of the different associations that you've mentioned, but the overriding one will be the American Revolution. And it seems that the Americas had always represented a new world to Europe, which was the old world relative to the other side of the Atlantic. Now, this podcast started out initially as casting across the pond, exploring in some ways differences across the Atlantic, and both of us have spent, all of us have spent a lot of time on both sides of the Atlantic. And I'll be curious to hear your thoughts on maybe the American Revolution as the new world coming of age and leaving its father and mother and going out on its own? Um, is there a way in which the um new world that you see the dawn of in 1776 is one experienced differently on different sides of the Atlantic? And uh how does the birth of America as a distinct polity represent something that has a broader um, I suppose, a globalized significance because you've been exploring also that significance of globalization. How what does America represent relative to that novelty for the rest of the world and how does that differ on both sides of the Atlantic?
SPEAKER_01That's a really good question. And it it pains me to admit that I think it does represent that in a very paradigmatic and important way. Um because obviously the fun of this podcast would be to completely downplay the significance of anything that happened in America, and was the rest of history recently did an episode on it, didn't they? And said losing America was less important than losing Gibraltar, which made a lot of Americans very angry at a at a purely at a mercantile level for the empire at the time. There's probably something to be said for it, but no, but I think um no, the the American Revolution is enormously important in its and paradigmatic for um political developments in the rest of the world. And as you can see from the fact, I mean, I have this line at one point in the book where I say in nowadays seven billion of the world's people live in countries that purport to be democracies or republics. In 1775, there were none. And that they that the United States is obviously a huge part of why that spread so quickly. It was a mixture of the fact that it survived as a democracy, which many, of course, many of the democratic experiments in the early 19th century did not, let alone the late 18th century, but America did, and it had, I think Washington's transition of power is enormously important there for it, not so much that other people imitated it, because many of them didn't, but because it gave the American constitution a sticking power that has continued to have it as a an exemplar of how to do this. And I think the soaring rhetoric, which was they both had the sort of, I mean, my my slightly overdrawn caricature is that you have your sort of slightly fussy federalist types going, we must make sure we get the separation of powers right, and you have your apocalyptic zealot, wild-eyed, hey, this is the entirely new world and we're going to remake everything, Tom Payne, and actually it it is best, I think, Jefferson. But the combination of those two groups, dispositionally so I mean, John Adams and Thomas Paine are just so dispositionally different. But the combination of those two meant that America was able as an as a nation was able to both have the idealism and the pragmatism, which most other experiments to form a new kind of constitution didn't have. Obviously, in Britain we had much more of the pragmatism, but the idealism got suppressed and squashed and didn't surge up in anything like that way for well, some would argue it still hasn't. Um, but certainly took another 100, 150 years before it came through like it does now. And then of course in France you have the opposite, where you have enormous idealistic fervor, but the pragmatism gets thrown under the bus straight away and everyone loses their heads. Whereas what the Americans do is to somehow, through good fortune or providence or whatever you want to call it, they have both and they just about in the 1790s hold together and avoid splintering, and that becomes very important for the way that future nations will think about themselves and choose to try and govern themselves. Uh, even those who despise the American model in certain ways, even in Britain, where that's regarded as a a cul-de-sac, it has clearly shaped us in in enormous ways. So I think there's obviously lots of other ways in which America becomes the ideal country in the 19th or 20th century, it becomes the land of you know, place of you know wide open skies and empty space, although of course not that empty, um, and technological growth and wealth and all those sorts of things. But I think in the 1770s those things are less apparent, and what really matters is this sort of fusion of a good system, a logical, pragmatic system of government with some wisdom and some conservatism built in, with some very radical ideas about equality and a new kind of world. And I think it's the fusion of those two that makes America such a harbinger of the kind of political world we live in now. Does that sue you, Matt? Do you think that's fair? Does America was an American gonna wear that or American gonna go, he can never overstate the importance of America? But I remember you previously saying that you're a loyal subject of her majesty, so I wondered how you felt about that.
SPEAKER_04I um you know, I I feel as mixed as I do about my American identity as someone who is a loyal subject of his majesty the king by convenience. Or by you know, by by birth and opportunity, shall we say. I, you know, I yeah, I I honestly I yeah, my take on America and overstating, understating America's role and the role of the revolution, I'm not historically informed enough to make that sort of judgment. Um I'm patriotic enough to want America to still be the most significant.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, I I think if I put the my short version then would be if they'd done what France had done, if if it had imploded under its own weight like the French one did, and the French, of course, their their their current constitutional settlement's only what 60 years old. So they they less than that, no, just over 60. Um the then the then the whole political map of the West would probably not have been changed in in anything like the way that it has. It's because it survived, it's because it was just about ideological and practical enough to work. Um, and I think that's what's so striking about them. I don't think it's anything to do with some of the big things that people talk about now, freedom of expression and church and state. I I don't think it's those ideas as such. I think it's that unusual combination of yes, the sort of the Adams Washington Brigade and the Jefferson Payne Brigade, I just think is a remarkable group of people. And that really is where ideas do play a part. I don't think it could have happened in a in a less wealthy nation, but I do think the ideas and the individuals were really significant. And if George Washington had acted completely differently to what he did, or John Adams hadn't been there, or Jonas Jefferson hadn't been there, I think we might well have a very different political setup, not just in America, but worldwide, even today.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, one of the things you point out with respect to that is English wiggery prior to the American Revolution is very different than what you get in the American Whigs, right? Like that those that difference itself is really significant. Although it is, I was thinking about that because I just finished Trollope's Marion Faye, which of course is significantly later, you know.
SPEAKER_01So Can I just say I'm just gonna interrupt and say that the phrase of course is excellent because you know very well that I haven't read Trollope's What Did You Just Say? And that many of our readers, listeners will not have Alistair. Have you read it? I haven't read it. No one. If Alistair hasn't read it, then how far from the pack have you strayed? Um so anyway, that of course was just delightful. Um but carry with.
SPEAKER_04Well, no, the course was of course I'm reading trollop because everyone on the podcast knows that I am reading lots of trlop. Uh, and I'll that I'll finish the trollop canon this year. But Marion Faye has a uh, you know, an English aristocrat who's really dislikes his aristocratic privileges and tries to escape them and wants to overturn the hierarchy, but is also making use of the his status and privilege in order to do that. And so you do have this sort of like very American sense of the hierarchy is bad in a way that that reading your take on this wouldn't have existed a hundred years ago, a hundred years prior to that, you know, at the time of the American Revolution and English wiggery. So, you know, the combination of things that happen in America with respect to the ideas, the economy, the people, it really is it's it's it's it feels like a miracle in in many ways. And and you know, I guess that's a real you know, like it's a real source of patriotic attachment and pride, I think, for an American who really looks at that and thinks, well, the history, it's all ambivalent and it's mixed, but on balance, I think I'll take that.
SPEAKER_01I by the by, I when I watched Hamilton after I'd started on this project, I thought the way that people applaud when Washington sings one last time is a really fascinating. People are clapping for the singer and they're clapping for the writer, but they're also clapping for the man and clapping for the ideal it represents, the idea that somebody would there is something so nobly, you know, and and patriotically American about it that it's funny, it's not like the way they clap for The Room Where It Happens, which is a better song, but it just has this sort of resonance for an American watching it, that probably doesn't in the same way in London at all. It was just really, really fascinating, I think, to see this. This goes very deep, and I don't think it would have happened. I think there's literally two or three individuals you could say, if they hadn't been there and acted the way they did, the political settlement of the West would be different from what it is. And that is there's not many people of whom that could be said.
SPEAKER_04Having neither seen nor heard Hamilton, I have no idea what you're talking about, but I'll take I'll take your word for it. Too busy reading troll.
Hymns Grace Freedom And Abolition
SPEAKER_00So, Andrew, the period that you're talking about is also a significant one in church history as um between the first and second Great Awakening, it's a time of flourishing for Methodism. It's a time in which there are significant changes in the world of the church as well. Uh be curious to hear your thoughts on the sort of Christian movements that were developing and maturing at that time, and how they represent an accommodation or a way of negotiating and grappling with this new world that's arising, and what they might have to teach us about the way that we. Engage with the world that has been created by those events and ideas.
SPEAKER_01And so that's that's where I try and go in the last two chapters of the book because obviously I I am a pastor. I'm still, you know, I'm fascinated by history, but I ultimately want to try and help people. How do you live and thrive in a world like this? Um I don't want to just rehash what I do in the book because I but I think the answer to the one of the what one good answer to your question is the way that if you look at the way that the age of sentiment and what then became romanticism was imitated in some way and then perfected by hymn writers, particularly British hymn writers. So this would be an example, a good example where if where when you read the kinds of novels that are beginning to be written and the kind of way poems that people are writing who are not writing as Christians as such, and then you see the way that people write hymns, you see a strong correspondence and the way in which people's personal experience of and I highlight in the book, the grace of God, is I'm not saying it wouldn't clearly people have highlighted their experience of the grace of God throughout church history, but they do it in a different way, in all sorts of different all sorts of ways, from in the late 18th century, as a result of the kind of world they're in. And I think that's a really important thing to learn. I I the way in which we articulate and champion grace in the modern world is need needs to, it's needs to preserve the same doctrine, but probably needs to be expressed in solution to a different problem than the way the reformers did, because the the the average person in London is not walking around going, gosh, how do I please a holy God? That doesn't mean they don't need to, means that that's not their primary question, their primary question, but they're prime they have lots of primary questions that do actually point towards the need for grace, it's just they aren't quite the same. Um, I do the same with the issue of freedom, particularly talking about abolitionism and the religious liberty. Uh obviously, abolitionism initially in Britain and religious liberty more in the states. And again, talk about how that is that grows out of some of the democratic and enlightenment convictions that people had at the time. But that any and you and I actually in the book we wrote Echoes of Exodus, Alex. I mean, we talked quite a lot about this in various ways in the book, the way that this sort of both-hand vision of freedom is so important for modern people trying to reach contemporary unbelievers or non-Christians is so important that you both have freedom from external powers, but also freedom from the powers that enslave within or from spiritual powers, so that you don't only go, yeah, we are pro-freedom, which simply means we're just very politically progressive about everything, which is not the whole story, because what you also need is to be liberated from your sin. You need to be liberated from, and that that is that's a very John 8, you know, if you sin, you're a slave to sin, and if the sun sets you free, you'll be free indeed. So I think that again is something that clearly in that in the 1770s you do see the heads are begin to appear above the parapet, uh, certainly in Britain and and beginning elsewhere as well, to call for you know freedom from slavery and freedom from which you think, wow, the church has in some ways had taken steps in that direction and then steps back and so on for hundreds and hundreds of years, but it really broke through starting around then. Um, and so I think there's a whole load of things to learn. I won't get into Harman because he's very difficult to explain with it. You just have to read the book for that because but he's probably my favorite. He is definitely the most interesting person I met while writing the book that I knew nothing about, and came away thinking, I am so glad I got introduced to this guy's thought because I found him so compelling and helpful. But that's that's a not an easy thing to explain in the last couple of minutes of a podcast. That's a little teaser.
Evangelicalism Raising The Bar
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's nice. That's it's a nice segue too to what I was wanting to ask, Andrew. I mean, when we had Carl on the show, I pointed out to him that evangelicalism and romanticism both share a same geographical locus within the UK, right? Keswick as a place that's it's you know, the Keswick School of Theology is doing evangelical theology. Have I said this wrong?
SPEAKER_01No, I no, no, no. I'm not laughing at the pronunciation the pronunciation of Keswick is perfect. Um no, I just forgotten that you said it, and I think it's a really interesting comment.
SPEAKER_04One of the things that I was really taken by was your description of Boswell as someone who was a philanderer, engaged in lots of affairs with married women, chronically drunk, but also thought of himself as a lifelong Christian. And you use Boswell as a sort of instance of what it means that we live in the post-Christian West, where we don't actually have characters like that anymore. You have this weak affiliation, shall we say, with Christianity, or even a strong social identification with Christianity, but are engaged in a type of lifestyle that we would look at and say that has nothing in common with the teachings of scripture? There's a way in which actually people could say a certain strand of evangelical people in the states are actually like that, where you have strong evangelical identification, but low church attendance, and you know, like there's they seem like Boswell in that respect at least. My question is something like Did evangelicalism and its strictures around moral purity and it raising the bar for what constituted being a real Christian, Wesley's sermon, Real Christianity, that he gives in Oxford, which as Fred Sanders tells it, you know, points around the looks around the room and is like, here's real Christianity. Are you a real Christian? Are the students real Christian? No. Are the teachers real Christians? No. Turns out no one in Oxford was a real Christian any longer, right? So they're raising the bar. They does that get rid of Boswell and does it hasten the post-Christianness of the West? Is evangelicalism as a movement part of the explanation here?
SPEAKER_01So not only is it the Protestant's fault, is it the Evangelicals' fault? And British evangelicals particularly. Um I I love that question.
SPEAKER_00Southern British Evangelical, please.
SPEAKER_04The right answer, Andrew, is it's the Oxford Evangelicals problem. It was Wesley that totally, totally.
SPEAKER_01Umangelicals were great. Um we had Charles Simeon at the time, you know. Exactly. So I mean, I think the most Boswell, just to take the most Boswell-like character in modern British life today is Boris Johnson. I just think he's a, you know, the sort of just loves loves writing, loves making jokes, loves living a wants to pretend that he's part of this Merry England tradition, wants to pretend, wants to hold some some sort of legacy past. I I don't think Boswell's completely died, but what I think is interesting about Boswell, and that I think you're right that that kind of person has died, in the sense that the anxiety that Boswell experiences when he meets someone who genuinely doesn't believe in God is very un you would never find that today in a in a Boris Johnson. You might find people today saying, Oh, yeah, yeah, I'm a Christian, and I'm, you know, got all no one knows how many children I have. That sort of or I'm happy to lie to Parliament. But what you don't have is someone who says, I'm a Christian to the extent that if I meet someone who isn't, I get very worried about it and don't really understand, and try and get Dr. Johnston, Dr. Johnson to sort him out. That's what's unusual about Boswell, is he can't make sense of unbelief. And that is clearly something that we do not have now. I think it's interesting the parallels between your question and what Charles Taylor does with Protestantism in general, which is, you know, and and others do too, which is by effectively saying no, we're the reform movement in the 13th, 12th, 13th, 14th centuries, the Hildebrandine reforms as they percolate out, end up saying no, we're not going to allow some people to live a holy life and the rest of us to live not a holy life. We're going to say everyone lives a holy life and it leads to the Reformation. And I think you're asking a modern version of the same question, which is do you, by making it harder to be a very lax, badly behaved Christian, make Christianity just a much smaller thing? I think the answer is probably yes at a level of historiography. I mean, I think if you just read the historians and go, yeah, I think you'd have to see a connection. I think the the question that it would really be interesting to discuss when we had more time is is that a good or a bad thing? Like, is it better for the church to be zealous and small or large and corrupt? Now, obviously, I've framed it using adjectives that show my hand. Um, but I would say that as a non-conformist, non-conformist, you know, charismatic church pastor. But I'm sure that you could, from our sort of state church brethren, uh, make a different case. And I think that's a is it better to have 90% of the people go into church on Sunday when only 10% of them believe it? Or is it better to have the 10% going and being markedly distinct? And then that goes back to very deep instincts we have about how countercultural the church is and how large the church is and the nature of baptism and all sorts of things, which I think would be interesting to explore on other occasions. But so I think the answer is probably yes. Um, but I'm not sure that that's always a bad thing.
SPEAKER_04Yeah, that's a terrific answer. I look forward to winning you to my cause of reclaiming mediocre Christianity. Uh make Christianity rubbish again. Make it okay for rubbish people again, shall we?
SPEAKER_01Well, yeah, yeah. Yeah, but it but it isn't just that though, because the evangelicals were very good at that. I think they did, they were very big on human, obviously, human depravity and the you know, I told the stories I tell Newton and Ecriano and those. So I don't think it's just you've got to make it easy for broken people to come into church. It's it's it's more a question of what do you do with James Boswell? Do you tell him to sort himself out and say, no, you've got to you've got to leave the church. What would Paul do? Paul would say, This guy's a complete joke. He you can't have that. A little leaven leavens the whole lump. I think that's what Paul would say. Um, but of course, that does come bring with it a sort of de-christianization of the culture as a whole over the long view, which is fascinating.
Final Thoughts And Patron Offer
SPEAKER_04Well, that's a terrific answer. Great conversation. Andrew, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for the book, for this conversation. It's been great to have you back on the show. We've got to do this more often. For those of you who have been listening, the book is Remaking the World. We are gonna do a plus one with Andrew because we had one more question come in. So, Andrew, we're gonna take a little bit more of your time. Remaking the world, how 1776 created the post-Christian West. It's available everywhere now, and it is really terrific. I strongly encourage you to pick this one up and read it. Uh, I think you will benefit immensely from it. We are going to be back in the weeks to come with other conversations about the world, faith, how we navigate the times. Um I don't know what's on Temp. I haven't looked at the schedule, but I'm sure it's gonna be great. Um uh and if you do want to get a copy of Andrew's book, you can become a patron member, a member of the Merry Band. At $10 a month, we're sending copies to everyone who signs up. So make sure that you do that. Uh, we are grateful for all of your support, and thanks as well to Lex and Press for sponsoring this episode. As I say, we'll be back in the weeks to come with other conversations. Until then, though, this has been Mirror Fidelity.