Larry Siedentop is a secular liberal but unlike many secular liberals he has a benign view of Christianity and its influence on Western culture. In fact, he is willing to point out that Western liberalism and its very strong emphasis on individual freedom and equality ultimately finds its origins in Christianity. To this end, Siedentop, a retired Fellow at Keble College, Oxford, has written an intellectual tour de force called, ‘Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism [1]‘. It is a absolute must-read.
One intellectual conceit Siedentop is content to demolish is the notion that the foundations on which liberal notions of individual freedom rest are to be found in the Renaissance, and more particularly, the Enlightenment, and in order to build the liberal polity as we know it today, Christianity had first to be demolished, or at least driven into the private domain.
‘Inventing the Individual’, published in 2014, was widely and favourably reviewed. It even received a favourable review [2] in ‘The New Humanist’. This review sets out Siedentop’s case nicely.
The reviewer, Jonathan Ree, writes: “Siedentop believes that we secularists are ‘victims of our own historiography’, suffering from a strangulated and foreshortened sense of our past. We tend to think that the great anti-clerical writers of the 18th century – Gibbon, Hume and Paine – simply stumbled on some obvious truths about reason, freedom and equal human rights that had somehow not been noticed before. We then dismiss the whole world of thought preceding them as a Dark Age of immobile prejudices and irrational superstition: century after wasted century in which nothing much happened till the clouds began to part in the Renaissance and the Reformation, after which the Enlightenment happened and everything was illuminated.
“Calmly but persuasively, Siedentop argues that we have got it all completely wrong. Grand historiographical concepts like Renaissance, Reformation and Enlightenment are ‘vastly inflated’, he says, and if we set them aside we will be able to see that modern secularism, far from marking a decisive break with Christian traditions, is actually a product of them, and testimony to their energy, originality and creativity.”
Ree then sets out the book’s argument, which you can read here [2]. Or better still, buy and read this intensely stimulating book for yourself. If there was any justice, ‘Inventing the Individual’ would do away once and for all with the self-flattering myth that secular liberalism is essentially self-created when, in fact, it emerged from the Christianity many secular liberals are content to despise.
Finally, there is a question to be posed; if the Christian notion that we are all equal in dignity gave rise to Western individualism, what happens if Christianity continues to fade in the West?
As an editorial [3] in ‘The Guardian’ put it recently: “The idea that people have some rights just because they are human, and entirely irrespective of merit, certainly isn’t derived from observation of the world. It arose out of Christianity, no matter how much Christians have in practice resisted it. Although human rights have become embedded in our institutions at the same time as religious observance has been in decline, they could become vulnerable in an entirely post-Christian environment where the collective memory slips from the old moorings inherited from Christian ethics.”
In a way, that is Siedentop’s argument in a nutshell. Secular liberals would do well to pay close and serious attention.