Kulturkampf

[benji]

increasingly I'm feeling the influence of some of the core tenets of christianity: caring for the old or infirm, attempting to deal fairly with others and valuing honesty, a healthy and productive application of shame for violating those tenets

I'm not saying everyone should be christians, I'm saying it's baked into western society in a deep way and has brought many benefits for centuries, it's what richard dawkins means when he talks about being a cultural christian, and that being worth something outside of religion

almost everywhere without a christian baseline (china, africa, india) are cesspools of trying to screw over each other and doing literally anything to get ahead, to the detriment of social cohesion, unless an overwhelming power structure (china) can wrangle it and wield that lack of morals as a weapon against the culturally christian nations

The problem is that what you identify as "some of the core tenets of Christianity" are major parts of what you identify as places without a Christian baseline. The post about Izzat could be construed as describing dealing fairly with others and a shame for violating the tenets. We don't see that it way, but centuries of Indian culture does. It's also something that was in lots of Christian cultures, the post itself references Italy, but also notoriously so in places like the Balkans or the antebellum American South.

If you want to identify any significant difference in the Christian cultures versus the rest of the world it's mostly in that Christianity nurtured, despite the efforts of the Church, the free will of the individual that eventually manifested through the Enlightenment the concept of secular liberalism. All the liberals were Christians, it was never divorced from Christianity in its time because it didn't reject existing institutions for a Year Zero new starting ground. That came later on, and in my opinion is just as Christian because it's essentially the concept of Original Sin reformulated. We need to remove the tainted sin in our souls, whatever it is, be it religion, gender, capitalism, etc. It's very natural for someone to want to reform their society, begin looking at it and believing the task is so difficult they need an apocalypse so they can start from scratch. From there they begin to advocate for it as it's so clearly true. Christianity has plenty of this in people who literally want to bring about the End Times because of the Heaven promised on the other side, with no guarantee but their own faith that they'll survive to experience it.

Christianity got lucky, it spread in a world that was itself informed by the Greeks and Romans. Those cultures were imperfect for sure, but even as they fell to depotism they had components of republican thought that placed limits on secular power. Most of the rest of the world never had this and has spent most of the time since going through other forms of one absolute ruler without any checks on his power.

America got lucky, it was English. The English monarch, even in his "absolute" days was never so, more than most any continental one he relied on consent from below. The Magna Carta is really long ago, almost a millennia. Everybody to our south came through the Spanish Monarchy and Catholic Church, so they've been more inclined, even in "democracy" to empower a single leader absolutely with the only form of check at all being popular mass election.

This all informs our culture and in a way the rest of the world really hates: Americans don't know their place. We never "read the room" or truly respect unspoken status. (Aussie culture is probably most similar and it has the very same kind of English and far away from the home lineage. Like Canada it just never broke and so didn't have to ever truly reimagine itself as a separate culture, also the colonial period was much shorter.)

But to bring it back to your point about Christianity, there's a reason America was so anti-Catholic for so long. (Other than WASP bigotry I mean.) Catholicism was seen as complete submission to someone far away. We have so many Christian sects not only because they were exiled here but because they've never stopped splitting since they got here. Almost all other Christian places are dominated by a single Church lineage, maybe two like Germany.

Arguably you don't get any of this without Protestantism, not just Christianity. Martin Luther himself didn't say it but the logical continuation of his protest was that everyone is entitled to interpret the faith in their own way. You can't do that without a liberal and ultimately democratic society.

I like asking questions using Donald Trump, like if he should run Steam, because he's so perfect for creating this kind of skepticism. Would you put your eternal soul in the hands of Donald Trump? For most of human history, and especially in places outside the West's republican lineage and before it rose in the 19th century, everyone's answered "yes, absolutely."