I don't know if this is as obvious to others as it may be to you. When I look at historically Catholic countries like Spain, Italy, France (before the Revolution), or even historically Orthodox countries like Russia and Ukraine, I see great bastions of Western civilization. And you can't deny that their Roman Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy didn't have a great role to play in that
I'd like to address this comment at somewhat greater length.
First, Western civilization is not
merely Christianity. Western civilization is an amalgam of Christianity, sitting on top of an essentially Teutonic cultural background which is itself sitting on top of a Greco-Roman cultural background - and the Greco-Roman part is mostly Roman, with the Greek influences absorbed into and diffused by Roman culture - which was in turn Christianized, which was in turn Germanized and Normanized, each of them in turn being Christianized. If you take away any of these elements - the Christian, the Teutonic, or the Greco-Roman - you don't really have Western civilization.
Side note - Rodney Stark's
How the West Won is a good and recommended read. I'm about 6 months overdue to finish up a review of it, but a spoiler: I strongly disagree with small details and also with some larger overall points, but the main thesis is sound. Western civilization is indisputably the greatest achievement in world history up to this point, and according to Stark it's primarily built on the foundation of Christian and Greek ideals (my modification is that you have to include Roman law and order and Germanic vigor to complete the recipe). Stark was, if I recall, an atheist, so his conception of Christianity falls short - but no one can seriously argue that Christianity wasn't seminal in the development of Western civilization to the high pitch it at one point attained (and from which it has since fallen very steeply).
Anyway, my main point is that not every great thing about the West can be attributed to Christianity. Before Christ, the Greeks and Romans had already developed a civilization better than anything else the world had ever seen. No, not all ancient cultures were equal. The Greeks were the first to build a civilization on an
idea, and the Romans took that idea and institutionalized it so that it could be durably and more or less permanently imprinted on a vast portion of the world. That Christianity extended this cultural achievement even farther doesn't negate the significance of what the Greeks and Romans did long before Christ was born.
Likewise, in the two thousand years of the Christian age, not every great thing is correlated with Christianity and not every bad thing is correlated with its absence. I can go farther. Not everything good is correlated with positive developments in the spiritual and doctrinal life of the church, and vice versa. The economic and demographic boom of the 1200s came as the church was cementing into dogma those fatal errors that would set the stage for the Reformation and for Rome's ultimate departure into apostasy three centuries later. As Europe recovered from climatological and epidemiological setbacks in the 1400s - as Burgundy and Italy were becoming centers of trade and industry and as France, Spain, England, and the German states were discovering the foundations of modern military power and technological advancement - the vast majority of the populace was sunk into such a deep spiritual stupor that one might almost consider the light of the gospel totally extinguished in all but a few places. Likewise, after the Reformation began, one will look in vain for a 1-to-1 correlation between economic and technological prowess and theological positioning. There are
general correlations: as Rome became more reactionary, the Protestant states eventually outperformed the Catholic ones, but it's worth noting that this basically meant England and Germany, and it's not as if France, Austria, Russia, or Italy were insignificant in their achievements. Spain is probably the clearest example of Catholic decline and America the clearest example of Protestant success, but there are other variables here that are so significant that it rules out the simple one-sentence headline. Even after 1520, these were all
Western countries with a shared heritage and considerable cultural cross-pollination, and despite the current political state of the EU bloc, it's clear that if Europe is something less than a unified force, it's also something more than a disparate collection of totally separate nations in the way that Asia and Africa are.
Now, to address the comment above more directly once more - it really does elicit an almost visceral reaction from me when someone makes a historically uninformed comment about Roman Catholicism that implies that Roman Catholicism as we know it existed before the 1500s. Roman Catholics do not get to claim that the church was Roman Catholic prior to 1500, and all western Christians have a shared heritage up to that point. Aquinas is not
their ancestor; he is
ours, and that doesn't mean we have to be proud of it or of him or of everything he said. Protestantism did not break from Tertullian, Augustine, Gregory, Lombard, Bernard, or a Kempis; though it did subject them to the authority of Scripture as illuminated not by the traditions of man but by the Holy Spirit.
Yes, Spain, France, Italy, and Austria have all had great cultural and technological achievements. This was not because they were Roman Catholic but rather because they came from a shared Christian/Germanic/Greco-Roman background - one shared with England, the Lowlands, and Germany. Frankly, it is silly to let Rome make of this a talking point in its favor, because it doesn't work. It's just not a tenable position.
As for Russia and Ukraine, again - it's really kind of silly to call these nations bastions of Western civilization. Their heritage is Slavic with Mongolian and other Asian influences. Russia borrowed Western technology to bully its way on the world scene, but Russia has never been a truly Western country. It's an Eastern Asiatic despot state with nuclear weapons and tanks, and I'd love to see some of our current crop of alt-right Putin fanboys emigrate to Russia so they can tell us how much more free they are there than here. Similarly for Ukraine, whose history is a history of subjugation to the Mongols, Poland, Russia, and the Ottomans - a wild land of nomads and Cossacks, which I suppose represents one or two steps of advancement over the Scythians and Sarmatians that Herodotus so colorfully describes. And even here, their history has been brightened by Christianity. But is this a talking point for Eastern Orthodoxy? Nonsense. Rather it's a testament to the fact that despite the rampant paganization of the Eastern Church from the 800s onward, some semblace of the light of the gospel and of the love of a Trinitarian God shone its way into the music, art, architecture, and culture of these countries. That is not a score for EO; it's a score for Christianity, such that even corrupted versions of it leave behind a better cultural legacy than Islam, Hinduism, or secular humanism.
Long story short: 1) Christianity has improved every thing it has touched - even sinful man at the individual and civilizational level. 2) Man has defiled and corrupted everything he has touched - even Christianity. 3) Neither of these two facts will ever completely cancel the other out until Jesus returns. Man's best efforts to subvert and corrupt Christ's church have not succeeded in completely effacing the mark of the divine and the faint glow of the gospel. For that matter, this is not just a New Testament phenomenon.
My Jewish conspiracy theory is that some traces of divine favor yet linger on among the Jews, which explains their continued success beyond what mere numbers would predict; and if that mark can linger 2,000 years on, then surely there can be no great surprise that the legacy of the gospel would live on in Spain or Ukraine. No serious Reformed Christian would claim the former as a talking point for the Talmud, so why would we claim the latter as a talking point for Rome or Constantinople?
I had to look up this word. Definitely adding it to my daily vocabulary
