Taking our Rights and Dignities for Granted

Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor recently lost all his royal titles, plus his home, resulting from scandal related to pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Many asked why it took so long. But most people across history would instead have been amazed that it happened at all. How can a royal prince be punished for sexual exploitation? Is that not what the powerful do?

In his book, Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, Tom Holland illustrates how the example of Jesus as Savior turned voluntary innocent victim gradually but inexorably elevated across centuries those whom the ancient world disdained. Classical antiquity produced magnificent philosophy and architecture. But the strong incontestably exploited the weak. No rich Roman or Greek ever lost status by exploiting, or enslaving, anybody.

“Liberalism” has enacted an expectation of equal justice and social equality especially across the last several centuries, starting in the West. Everybody theoretically has equal rights, regardless of race, sex, wealth, ancestry, or religion. These assumptions are so pervasive that many in the West just assume they are intrinsic, natural, and universal. They fall upon all like an April rainstorm.

The secular left argues that this view of human dignity emerged only after the Enlightenment displaced Christendom. In an article called “The Golden Age of Humanity? We’re Living in It.” in The Free Press, Steven Pinker and Marian Tupy extol this view. They worry that Christendom’s superstitions and bigotries are now reviving. “Christian Nationalists,” post-liberals, and anti-Semites like Nick Fuentes, platformed by Tucker Carlson, want to overthrow liberalism in favor of legally privileged Christianity.

Pinker and Tupy rightly deride delusional nostalgia that exalts the past while ignoring the blessings of the present. Catholic integralists romanticize Medieval France. Christian Nationalists wanting Protestant confessional statism romanticize John Calvin’s Geneva. Many post-liberals romanticize the 1950s when supposedly every factory worker had a nice house with a well-dressed stay-at-home wife.

But Pinker and Tupy deeply undermine their argument by demonizing Christianity and effectively equating it with Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, who, amid their enormities, profess to be Christian. Christianity is the father and ally of the “liberalism” of human rights and human dignity for all. Non-religious people benefit from this legacy and can (like Tom Holland) affirm it without subscribing to Christian doctrine.

Continue reading at WORLD here.

Mark Tooley is president of the Institute on Religion and Democracy and editor of IRD’s foreign policy and national security journal, Providence. Prior to joining the IRD in 1994, Mark worked eight years for the Central Intelligence Agency. A lifelong United Methodist, he has been active in United Methodist renewal since 1988.