Wilson Remaking the World

How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West
1. Auflage 2023
ISBN: 978-1-4335-8056-7
Verlag: Crossway
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 384 Seiten

How 7 Transformational Events in 1776 Paved the Way for Today's Post-Christian West With dizzying social transformations in everything from gender to social justice, it may seem like there's never been a more tumultuous period in history. But a single year in the late 18th century saw a number of influential transformations-or even revolutions-that changed the social trajectory of the Western world. By understanding how those events influenced today's cultural landscape, Christians can more effectively bear witness to God's truth in a post-Christian age. In Remaking the World, Andrew Wilson highlights 7 major developments from the year 1776-globalization, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution, the Great Enrichment, the American Revolution, the rise of post-Christianity, and the dawn of Romanticism-and explains their relevance to social changes happening today. Carefully examining key documents and historical figures, Wilson demonstrates how a monumental number of political, philosophical, economical, and industrial changes in the year of America's founding shaped the modern West into a 'WEIRDER' society: Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. This thoroughly researched yet accessible book offers a unique historical perspective on modern views of family, government, religion, and morality-giving Christians the historical lens they need to understand today's post-Christian trends and respond accordingly. - Relevant Cultural and Historical Analysis: Skillfully connects key ideas and events from the past to the present  - Comprehensive: Examines important developments from 1776, including the American Revolution, Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Edward Gibbon's The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; James Watt's steam engine; Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; and Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason - Informative: Covers key historical figures, including John Adams, Edmund Burke, and David Hume - Biblical: Equips and encourages readers to share the gospel in a post-Christian world - A Great Resource for Pastors, Scholars, and Readers of Carl Trueman's The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self

Andrew Wilson (PhD, King's College London) is the teaching pastor at King's Church London and a columnist for Christianity Today. He is the author of several books, including Incomparable; Echoes of Exodus; and God of All Things. Andrew is married to Rachel and they have three children: Zeke, Anna, and Samuel.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Wilson, Andrew

Leseproben

1

Roots

The Presence of the Past

Who controls the past controls the future.

George Orwell

We are our history.

James Baldwin

In 1776, at Weyanoke on the James River in Virginia, Mary Marot Armistead married her fiancé, John. With all that was going on in America that year, it didn’t make headlines. She was only fifteen, and John was nearly thirty, but age gaps like that were fairly normal in the thirteen colonies. In many ways, they were a classic example of rich Virginians at the time: Mary was the only daughter of wealthy parents and stood to inherit the beautiful family estate on the edge of Chesapeake Bay, while John had attended William and Mary College, shared a room with Thomas Jefferson, started practicing as a lawyer, and then served a stint in the Continental Army before being appointed as a judge.

Together they had eight children. Unusually, in an age of high infant mortality, all eight of them survived into adulthood. Although John became Governor of Virginia, the chances are that most of us would never have heard of the family were it not for their sixth child, born in 1790 and also named John. He was a frail boy, wafer thin and prone to bouts of diarrhea with which he struggled his whole life. But he followed his father into law and local politics and gradually climbed through the ranks until on April 4, 1841, John Tyler became the tenth president of the United States. Four years later, he signed into law the annexation of Texas.

Curiously, that is only the fourth most remarkable thing about him. The third is that he served the longest presidential term in history without being elected, stepping into the role after William Henry Harrison died just a month into his term. The second is that he got married in office, the first of only two presidents to do so, after his first wife suffered a stroke and died in the White House. And the first—which sounds like it cannot possibly be true for someone who predated the metric system and whose parents were courting during the Battle of Lexington—is that as of 2022, one of his grandsons is still alive.

Not Even Past

Harrison Ruffin Tyler still lives in Charles County, Virginia, where his great-grandparents were married in 1776. He is well into his nineties. Born in 1928, just before the Jazz Age and the Roaring Twenties gave way to the Wall Street Crash and the Great Depression, Harrison was in elementary school when Hitler came to power and secondary school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Like anyone of his generation, he has seen astonishing change, both technologically (televisions, atom bombs, the moon landing, the Internet) and politically (World War II, Indian independence, the Chinese Revolution, decolonization). But the social changes he has witnessed are even more dramatic. Just one year older than Martin Luther King, Harrison lived to see the election of Barack Obama and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, despite having had a father who defended the Confederacy and a grandfather who owned seventy slaves.

Harrison’s father, Lyon Gardiner Tyler (1853–1935), lived through an even more seismic period of world history. He learned to read and write before the US Civil War, in a state where people owned slaves but not light bulbs. China was in the midst of the Taiping Rebellion, in which thirty million people died. Japan was a feudal society under the shogun and the samurai. Karl Marx was working on Das Kapital in the reading room of the British Museum, and David Livingstone was exploring the Zambezi River. Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species when Lyon was six. The vast majority of the world’s population worked on the land, with an average life expectancy of twenty-nine. By the time Lyon died, the Second Industrial Revolution had swept across the world, bringing electricity and indoor plumbing, telephones and movies, factories and skyscrapers, planes, trains, and automobiles. Global life expectancy was above forty and rising rapidly. Women in dozens of countries were going to university, gaining equality under the law, and voting.

Lyon’s father, John (1790–1862), would have struggled to cope with the world of his children, let alone his grandchildren. They, and we, would have struggled to live in his. John came into the world on a slave plantation, a few weeks after George Washington’s first State of the Union, and nine months into the French Revolution. He was a toddler when Beethoven was first commissioned to write music and when Mary Wollstonecraft published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman. As John grew up, his days were continually punctuated by revolution—from the Reign of Terror in France (1793–1794) to the Latin American wars of independence (1808–1833) to the overthrow of nearly all European governments in 1848—not to mention the even more significant “revolution” which was emanating from the mines and mills of Northern England. The speed of transformation was dizzying, as we can tell from the rapid evolution of the English language. Dozens of terms that we cannot imagine a world without—including industry, factory, scientist, journalism, nationality, railway, working class, middle class, statistics, capitalism, socialism, and photograph—were coined during John’s lifetime.1

The world in which John Tyler’s parents were married in 1776 seems almost unimaginably different from ours. It feels more like a period drama or a theme park than a place where our ancestors actually lived: a land of duels and harpsichords, where people took snuff and talked about “Providence” and “victuals,” wearing wigs on their heads, frock coats on their backs, and smallpox scars on their faces.

Yet we are separated from it by only a couple of generations.1 The legacy of that world lives on in our ideas and institutions, our race relations and sexual relations, our ambitions and maps. Grandparents are like that. Their influence lingers on in the lives of their grandchildren, shaping their prospects and their values long after they are gone. “The past is never dead,” wrote Faulkner. “It’s not even past.”2

A Forgetful Age

Ours is a forgetful age, though. Lots of us do not remember the names of our great-grandparents; perhaps it is unsurprising that we do not remember their world either. The rate of change in the last two centuries makes the past feel much further away than it actually is, which inclines us to fawn over the future, and either patronize the past or ignore it altogether.

Our technology does not help us here. We spend much of our lives on devices that are designed to need replacing every three years, accessing social media platforms that amplify the sense of a continuous present and an absent past. A huge number of well-educated people, for example, marked the end of 2016 by lamenting it (quite unironically) as “the worst year ever,” despite having marked the one-hundredth anniversary of The Battle of the Somme just six months before. Mainstream media outlets are no different. The Coronavirus pandemic of 2020 was repeatedly described as unprecedented in its impact, despite the Spanish flu (or for that matter, the Black Death). More amusingly, I think of the European correspondent for Reuters in the 1970s who, apparently unaware of World War II, claimed that “Relations between Britain and Germany fell to an all-time low today over potato quotas.”3 In an era of instant news, amnesia is baked in. And amnesia has consequences.

One is confusion. The dizzying number of social changes in the anglophone West from 2014 to 2017 alone—gay marriage, Brexit, Trump, #BlackLivesMatter, transgender rights, Antifa, #MeToo, and so forth—left many people reeling, punch-drunk, even fearful about what would happen next. For obvious reasons, periods of social upheaval are always disorienting. But they can be particularly distressing when we do not know our history. Everything feels unexpected, as if it is coming out of nowhere. Developments appear unconnected to the past, and indeed to each other. In the absence of a plausible historical narrative, people retreat into tribalism or conspiracy theories (perhaps both) to help them make sense of the pace of change, because the deeper currents that shape society over decades and centuries—what James Davison Hunter calls the cultural “climate,” as opposed to the “weather”—are invisible to them.4 The results can be painful.

Another result of amnesia is arrogance, and it is available in both conservative and progressive flavors. In the progressive version, our current mores are self-evidently correct, which means that anyone who thought differently a hundred years ago, or even ten years ago, must have been either stupid or evil (or both). In the conservative version, the only reasons for a person’s success are their own ability and effort, which means that anyone who highlights the importance of...