WHY CHRISTIANITY IS IMPORTANT TO WESTERN CIVILIZATION

I have not often agreed with Paul Craig Roberts, who writes a regular column for the Washington Times. But this morning, Christmas morning, he has written a column which, in a few words, crystallizes something I have believed for a long time.

Christmas decorations and gifts are among our connections to a Christian culture that has held Western civilization together for 2,000 years. In our culture the individual counts. This permits an individual person to put his or her foot down, to take a stand on principle, to become a reformer and to take on injustice. This empowerment of the individual is unique to Western civilization. It has made the individual a citizen equal in rights to all other citizens, protected from tyrannical government by the rule of law and free speech. These achievements are the products of centuries of struggle, but they all flow from the teaching God so values the individual's soul He sent His Son to die so we might live. By so elevating the individual, Christianity gave him a voice.

Formerly only those with power had a voice. But in Western civilization, people with integrity have a voice. So do people with a sense of justice, of honor, of duty, of fair play. Reformers can reform, investors can invest, and entrepreneurs can create commercial enterprises, new products and new occupations. The result is a land of opportunity. The United States attracted immigrants who shared our values and reflected them in their own lives. Our culture was absorbed by diverse peoples who became one.

Read the whole thing. Roberts believes, I think correctly, that because Christianity is centered on the individual's worth, all of our freedom and prosperity flows from it. He worries, I think appropriately, that if we discard it, or it becomes diluted in a culture that takes tolerance to such a degree as to reach defenselessness, that Western Civilization, and our freedom and prosperity, will fall before the power of the ideologically-driven state.