How WEIRD Values Became Normal

You’ve heard this before:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

But for most of human history, those truths would have been anything but “self-evident.” Those ideas were actually pretty new, and they were thoroughly Christian, yet today most Westerners hold these values. How did this happen?

Glen Scrivener wrote The Air We Breathe: How We All Came to Believe in Freedom, Kindness, Progress, and Equality to answer that question.

Scrivener says we all believe what have been called WEIRD values, that is, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich and Democratic. And he says those values came from Christianity. Using the popular maxim that fish don’t know they’re wet, Scrivener says, “if you’re a Westerner—whether you’ve stepped foot inside a church or not, whether you’ve clapped eyes on a Bible or not, whether you consider yourself an atheist, pagan or Jedi Knight—you are a goldfish, and Christianity is the water in which you swim.”

How did we go from a world where “steep moral hierarchies were the norm” to a place where we believe we should fix any inequalities we find?

How did compassion for the weak become a virtue when it was once considered a weakness?

When powerful men were once free to possess the bodies of whomever they pleased, how did we come to see that as abuse?

How did education, once a luxury for the rich, become a necessity for all? And how did science become based on objective standards instead of the assertions of authorities?

Once everyone assumed certain classes of people should be enslaved. Now we consider that blasphemy. How did that transformation take place?

And how did the idea that history was a descent from a golden age of civilization give way to the notion that the arc of history “bends, or should bend, towards justice”?

Scrivener says the answer to those questions is, in a word, Christianity. He shares how that came about in the case of each of those modern values.

If this sounds a little familiar, it may be that you’re thinking of another book that made quite a splash, Tom Holland’s Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Yes, Holland covers a lot of the same ground, but his 600+ page book is more than many are willing to take on. Scrivener basically gives us the abridged version of the story, weighing in at less than 200 pages.

This book is good for anyone who wants to understand where our WEIRD values came from. It would also be helpful to any who find themselves defending against claims that Christianity is a moral dinosaur. To borrow a phrase, this book shows how modern critics have to sit in God’s lap to spit in his face. They assume Christian values to criticize Christianity. They can’t help it.

I encourage you to let Scrivener take you on a journey from Genesis to George Floyd to discover how Christian values became the very air we breathe.


Image via Unsplash