Christianity and the Western Mind

This month we will be discussing Christianity and the Western Mind and asking to what extent is the way we in the West think about the world based on ideas developed by Christianity? Leaving aside belief in God, to what degree is Western culture Christian in origin?

In his book The WEIRDest People in the World, Harvard Professor of Human Evolutionary Biology, Joseph Henrich, investigated why the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous. He found that societies that are Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) have psychological features with origins in the changes to kinship and marriage introduced by the Catholic Church over the course of more than a thousand years.

Historian Tom Holland, in his book Dominion, proposed that Christianity created a unique culture in the West. He charts how ideas such as secularism, liberalism, science, and homosexuality are deeply rooted in their Christian origins. He believes that in creating these ideas Christianity transformed the modern world.

We’ll be discussing these ideas, and to what extent even a godless West is bound by a psychology and outlook that was created by its Christian origins.