How the West Got WEIRDER
For Americans the year 1776 has legendary status. It is, of course, the year that the Continental Congress declared the United States independent from the colonial power of Britian.
As it turns out, the year was actually globally significant in a number of other ways. The Industrial Revolution was getting into full swing, there were a number of significant philosophical movements afoot whose effects we are still discovering today.
Andrew Wilson’s book, Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West is an attempt to bring many of those streams together to help explain how the world got turned upside down.
Explaining the Big Picture
There have been a number of attempts at explaining the malaise of our day. Charles Taylor looks at our secular age and finds that the buffered self comes out of disenchanted materialism. Carl Trueman follows Philipp Reiff and others in an attempt to find the philosophical roots of modernity.
Each of these authors in many of their works is looking at the wasteland of culture, seeking a key to better explain why things don’t feel right anymore. What are the forces at play that undermine some of the apparent coherence of a more Christian age?
Wilson argues that the world has become and is becoming WEIRDER, which stands for: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. This acronym is not entirely original with him. He is building off Jospeh Henrich’s The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.
Remaking the World is a story of modernity told from someone affected by it, but who is also saturated with a biblical worldview. He sees both the benefits of the age—after all, so many things did improve with the Industrial Revolution—but also recognizes the social and spiritual challenges that have arisen as a result of the increasing strangeness of our day.
Nuanced Narrative
Bay of New York, Sunset, by Thomas Chambers. Public Domain. Image from National Gallery of Art: https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.54127.html
Some Christians, especially some pastors, tend to approach modernity from a “Hulk Smash,” sort of way. They argue that everything is wrong with the world, that there is godlessness woven irredeemably throughout our culture, and that if we simply rolled back the clock to an earlier age then everything would be better.
Wilson’s version of the narrative is much more careful. He notes, citing Tom Holland’s thesis from Dominion, that though in some ways our age is post-Christian, it bears indelible marks of Christendom.
Many of the things that are presumed to be true about the world—the dignity of every human, the importance of conscience, the concept of human rights––are the direct result of Christianity on a culture that valued none of them. As a result, modernity’s worst excesses contain the ghosts of the gospel.
Wilson manages to weave all of the themes together with explanatory power. Though he is not a professional historian, the restraint he shows along with the depth of research, is reflected in multiple positive endorsements from scholars like Mark Noll and Thomas Kidd. The generalist has written a book that is compelling to some significant specialists.
Gospel Application
A strength of Remaking the World is that it goes beyond many of the other explanatory books. Some of them leave the reader in the mire of modernity. At the end, we may understand better how we got here, but we have little recourse to make things better. Other integral histories of modernity offer a call to action to destroy the evil in modernity in hopes of bringing back and earlier order.
Though he does not offer a programmatic solution to the ills of modernity, Wilson does provide some suggestions for a way forward. In balance, they seem more likely to succeed than the violent iconoclasm of some similar books.
The solution, Wilson suggests, is for Christians to continue to live out the gospel graciously in this world. Because our modern culture is filled with the aroma of Christianity, we can use the remnants to point back toward the reality that is best explained in Christianity. We can explain the desperate desire for freedom and individualism rampant among us to offer the true liberty found in Christianity.
Wilson’s book has explanatory power. Though it weighs in at nearly 300 pages of text, it is an engaging read. In a world where many books are about 100 pages too long, I was left wishing I could keep reading. Remaking the World is the sort of book that belongs on a pastor’s shelf, that could be fruitfully discussed in book clubs, and would be a good resource for a capstone course for high school seniors or college students trying to make sense of the strangeness of our world.
NOTE: I received a gratis copy of this book from the publisher with no expectation of a positive review.
God of All Things thus deepens our experience of the world as we study and live. Its short chapters and engaging prose are suitable for a wide audience. The many connections with real, physical object lessons have deepened my appreciation of God’s efforts to ensure that the message of his greatness is available for all.