"You can't understand the human race without understanding its passion to have gods." David Marr on religious belief in Australia
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2020 Summit: Will the Best Ideas Spring from Faith?

Greg Clarke

Trying to identify the origin of ideas is a tricky business. There are always strong arguments that some of the best ideas about how to live as human beings in the world are pre-historical, or perhaps innate; in other words, no single worldview or philosophy or thinker can lay claim to being the source of a good idea.

Take for example the notion that it is a good thing to care for other people. It would be hard to attribute the concept of care for others to one particular religion or philosophy. Most of the world’s religions have some notion of care for others.

 However, this can be overstated. There are major differences across worldviews in the attitudes a person is encouraged to take towards his or her neighbour, towards foreigners, towards the disabled, or towards the opposite sex. It is simply untrue to claim that there is a natural human position on such things (a ‘law of nature’ or a ‘common humanity’). It is, therefore, better to seek out the origins of ideas wherever possible, so they can be attributed properly to the teacher or worldview or movement that propagated them.
  There are major differences across worldviews in attitudes towards one's neighbour, towards foreigners, towards the disabled, or towards the opposite sex.
 
 
 

As Australians approach the 2020 Ideas Summit, there will no doubt be many ideas that are unoriginal. In fact, I certainly hope there are, since an original idea is not in anyway guaranteed to be a better idea than one that has gone before. As these unoriginal ideas are proposed, it would also be worthwhile to assess where they come from—what philosophy, ideology, religion or worldview—and give credit where credit is due.

One contestable view is that many of the ideas held most dear by Western nations are derived from the Christian, or sometimes Judeo-Christian worldview. To make this claim is not to suggest that people of other religions or no religion never have any good ideas! Rather, it is an attempt to ask the question: ‘what pre-conditions; what prior concepts and principles need to exist in order for good ideas to emerge?’ In the case of the West, many of the good ideas require knowledge of Christianity if they are to be understood.

In his fascinating new book, British academic Graeme Smith argues that the West has entered not a post-Christian age, but a new Christian age in which secularism is the ‘latest expression of the Christian religion’. ‘Secularism,’ he writes, ‘is not the end of Christianity nor is it a sign of the godless nature of the West…Secularism is Christian ethics shorn of its doctrine. It is the ongoing commitment to do good, understood in traditional Christian terms, without a concern for the technicalities of the teachings of the Church.’

For instance, much of Western thinking gives a very high position to the individual, but understands that this position is modified by the needs and desires of the ‘society’. Or, put differently, individuals who are free to make moral and ethical choices, will generate a new set of social relations. We in the West often take for granted this high status afforded to the individual, but it only takes a small amount of historical and cross-cultural education to recognise that it is far from universal. Rather, the idea that an individual has a moral will and ought to be free to exercise it has emerged from Christian re-thinking of the ancient Greek understanding of persons and the Jewish notion of conforming to God’s own will.
  Christianity introduced the notion that we are all radically equal …  This was not the case in classical society.
 		 
 

Individual ‘rights’ that we hold dear as Westerners—acting on our conscience, assessing what is true for ourselves, making personal moral judgements—are not universal truths, but outworkings of the Christian concept of the will in relation to God. Rather than saying, with Americans, that it is a self-evident truth that all (men!) are created equal, we ought to say that this idea of equality emerges from the Christian worldview. ‘Christianity introduced the notion that we are all radically equal,’ writes Smith. ‘People are children of God. This was not the case in classical society’.

Theologian Timothy Gorringe claims that the Gospel story of God’s incarnation in Christ is in fact the key to the Western notion of human equality:
  According to this, in taking ‘flesh’, God assumed all human beings—black, white, female and male, Dalit and high-born, cognitively disabled and others—into a full filial relation, and therefore into equality.
 

Similarly, in his recent controversial lecture, Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, seeks to establish the foundations of the legal rights of the individual. He identifies two significant features of such a foundation, that a human being is in some way related to God, and that same human being has a degree of individual freedom:

  [B]oth of these things are historically rooted in Christian theology, even when they have acquired a life of their own in isolation from that theology.  It never does any harm to be reminded that without certain themes consistently and strongly emphasised by the 'Abrahamic' faiths, themes to do with the unconditional possibility for every human subject to live in conscious relation with God and in free and constructive collaboration with others, there is no guarantee that a 'universalist' account of human dignity would ever have seemed plausible or even emerged with clarity.
 

It would be easy to misunderstand the claim here: it is not that only Christians today hold the view that all people are equal; rather, it is the assertion that in the history of ideas, the notion of personal equality has emerged as a result of Christian teachings. It is, in my view, wonderful that such a teaching is widely accepted now by people of many faiths, or no faith; it is also important, I think, to give credit for the idea to its originators.

In his recent book, Discovering God: the Origins of the Great Religions and the Evolution of Belief, American sociologist Rodney Stark outlines the social benefits of the Christian faith.  He describes the social moral imperatives of Christianity—loving your neighbour, doing unto others as you would have them do to you, and being more blessed by giving rather than receiving—as ‘truly revolutionary’.  Furthermore, he examines the different responses that Christians and pagans made to the plagues that struck the Roman Empire in 165 and 251. Whereas most pagans—wealthy business people, priests, political leaders—fled to the safety of the countryside, the Christians (both the wealthy, who could have left, and the poor, who had less choice) stayed to nurse the sick, whether Christian or pagan.

  Whereas most pagans fled to the safety of the countryside, the Christians  stayed to nurse the sick, whether Christian or pagan.
 
 

Stark identifies the social good that Christianity does as a key reason for the rise of Christianity in the first few centuries after Jesus:
  It has often been suggested that Christianity compensated people for their lives of misery by promising them a glorious life to come (often denigrated as ‘pie in the sky’). Possibly so, but it seems far more significant that Christianity actually made life much less miserable in the ‘here and now’!
 

Again, the idea of loving one’s neighbour, does not emerge from nowhere and does not receive universal acclamation; rather, it is a revolutionary idea that seems to emerge from Jesus’ interpretation of the commands of the Jewish Scriptures’ to express love for those around you. It is certainly not the case that only Christian or Jewish people express any love for their neighbour in need! But when we look at where this particular value or ethic has come from, we are lead back to the distinctive teachings of Jesus.

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