The Civilizing God

National Review, July 28, 2003 by David Klinghoffer

A "cryptogram set by the Almighty." This is a beautiful thought, rightly depicting science and religion as twinned disciplines, both seeking to find out God's secrets.

As a final instance of what religion has wrought in the West, Stark gives us an economically rendered history of anti-slavery activism. Here, Jewish Scriptures were the first in the ancient world to set down laws so restrictive of the slave owner as effectively to make slavery as it was known impossible. The owner was obliged to treat the "slave" with many of the considerations you would extend to a guest in your home, being forbidden, for example, to give his slave cheap wine while he himself enjoyed a more expensive variety. If the owner drinks fine wine, so must the slave. But as an advocate of total abolitionism, the Catholic Church was far ahead of everyone. "In the thirteenth century, Saint Thomas Aquinas deduced that slavery was a sin, and a series of popes upheld his position, beginning in 1435 and culminating in three major pronouncements against slavery by Pope Paul III in 1537."

Muslims could muster no such outrage at the practice since Muhammad himself "bought, sold, captured, and owned slaves." So Muslim slavery was perpetuated (and still is not entirely stamped out), though the current, physical evidence of its history is not as apparent as that of slavery in the Americas. Muslims preferred to import African women, not men, and the children of these slaves by their owners were often killed at birth, which is why you don't see many blacks today in Islamic countries.

Believers in other non-Biblical faiths similarly find little support in their traditions for opposing enslavement. In their forms familiar to Western adherents, Buddhism, Taoism, and Confucianism posit no personal deity at all but rather an impersonal universal "essence" underlying the universe but possessing no will, no ability to command human beings in any way about their treatment of others. This "essence" cannot take a view, one way or the other, about slavery. It's natural to wonder what Stark himself believes. He writes as a sociologist and historian, not a theologian, and is careful to say nothing about his own faith except that he is not a Catholic. The very last sentence in his book is intriguing: "In these ways, at least, Western civilization really was God-given." He means that, for all the basically structural reasons he lays out in For the Glory of God, religious faith made our culture what it is, namely the envy of the world. But, read another way, the sentence may convey a truth that Stark chooses not to state unambiguously.

As I was reading this book I thought of a rather cryptic teaching from rabbinic tradition. It's said that when God started to create the universe He first looked in the Torah, like an architect consulting a blueprint. Is this supposed to mean that somewhere in the Pentateuch we should find a little map of North America that the Lord was gazing at when He made the California coastline? No, the point is that Scripture gives its readers the key to understanding how the world works. In that sense it's a blueprint. If you understand the Bible, you understand the world. A corollary is that the civilization that possesses such a key is bound to flourish beyond the advancements of rival cultures. It's no coincidence that Biblical civilization developed as it did. Happily for those other cultures, the key can be duplicated: The fortune enjoyed by Christians and Jews is fully transferable. If Rodney Stark is right, it would follow that introducing the Bible to other peoples is indeed to impart a gift. Whether others are ready to accept the gift is another question.