The Hubris of 1776

A Review of Andrew Wilson's "Remaking the World"

Andrew Wilson has opened a window on the American Revolution. He connects the values and culture of 2023 to their headwaters in 1776. “ . . . 1776, more than any other year in the last millennium, is the year that made us who we are.” (p.7)

Wilson’s work is dense, filled with evidence of years of research and reflection (the end notes are worth the price of the book). There are parts that must be read slowly. To ease the mind of its labors, there are wonderful stories to illustrate his point. But his point, to me, was clear. If you want to understand how we got to this present moment in our secularized Western culture, you will find its sources present in 1776. We are where we are, not because we abandoned the ideas of the founders, but because we carried them to their logical conclusion. America was and is the fruit of the cultural memories of Christendom co-opted and subordinated to the purpose of Enlightenment political and cultural revolution.

I have been coming to this idea on my own for years. Other books that have fed my reflections include The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Plain Honest Men, and Novus Ordo Seclorum. It does not mean I do not appreciate America as a vanguard nation in the great experiment of liberal, elected by the people government. I most certainly do. Of all the forms of government human political thinkers have developed, it is the best. But it absolutely is not the kingdom of God nor is it somehow special to Jesus.

Summary

Wilson uses the acronym of our WEIRDER culture (borrowed and modified from the book by Henrich). Each letter stands for a stream that was forming at the time, and is now merged into our culture that is Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. He devotes a chapter to each theme, showing its presence and influence in the year of the American Revolution.

His thesis explains so much. More than anything it shows how a wider view of the times in which the founders lived corrects all kinds of misinterpretations of their intent.

As I read I wondered why I had not been told previously that Thomas Paine, Edward Gibbon, Adam Smith, James Watt’s steam engine, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Captain James Cook were all active in that year. And that all of them influenced our founding and our modern world.

Along with these seminal thinkers, Wilson cites cries for the end to slavery, the disestablishment of the church, women voting, deep revival of the church, and rethinking all human ethics. On top of all that, there was even a thinker who insisted that if we throw God out and base all morals on reason, then there are no morals (the Marquis de Sade lived accordingly).

Wilson provides a wide angle view of the year of the American Revolution. He has brought good scholarship and clear example together, so much so that I think I have gained a new understanding of why I see the world as I do (to which I am blind or which I take for granted). My copy is filled with asterisks in the margins and earmarked pages.

I recommend reading each chapter carefully, checking footnotes for some excellent extras, and taking notes on every aspect of being WEIRDER. I think that if you test his thesis you will be persuaded. It may change your view of the "good old days" of 1776, and help you see that these men were on the side of the radical remaking that has come to its very strange fruition. Wilson will also force you to think about how the inherited ideas of the Bible, while not in control, permeated the whole enterprise.

My Takeaways

Here is some of what I have gained in reading and rereading this work:

Our cultural roots are complex and unique. Globalization, industrialization, free market economics, radical rejection of revelation for reason were all present. The era of the founders was full of greed, ambition, pride in human reason, moral posturing, and courage. Human corruption is everywhere, including corruption among professed Christians (the leading churchman who was known to have many mistresses and was also appalled that Hume denied the afterlife). All the seeds of the modern sexual revolution, the idea that “I am what I feel,” the notion of freedom as the absence of any restraint were present then. They are not new. They were in the founders and political philosophers that shaped the American and French Revolutions (see Carl Trueman, The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self for a complete description).

Christianity was present, the fruit of 1000 years of Christendom. But for many “Christianity” was deism or a moral order or human rights. That brand of Christianity was stripped of sin and atonement, of repentance and faith, of the supernatural re-creation of a life in Christ. Faithful Christian profession was held by some, but the dominant stream was a movement seeking freedom from dogmatism. The Christianity of many of that day was a syncretism of radical reason based living with some dusting of Christian morals and terminology.

The revolutionary stream was, to be sure, colored by the language of Scripture. Scriptural and theological ideas were part of the agreed upon talk of the day — not because those who used it were Bible affirming, Christ confessing, godly churchmen. Rather, just as most Muslims (practicing or not) use the name of God and the ideas of Islam in their daily greetings (“Peace be with you,” “if God wills”), so many of the founders spoke of divine law, Providence, and the Creator because it was the only way to talk.

Given the confluence of many streams, gone is any possibility that America is a “Christian” nation, founded on “Christian principles,” purposed to preserve “Christian” influence against the tide of the enlightenment. In its place I find greater certainty that the American revolutionaries (our founders) were riding in a stream of opposition to the rule of Scripture, the hegemony of the church, and the power of “reason” to “build a new world.” The few faithful churchmen among them were breathing enlightenment air and may not have known how much it influenced them.

Wilson does ask that must be asked: what will happen to the WEIRDER world when it abandons the basis for its view of human rights and freedoms? Christianity has become a faint and despised echo from the past. Unfortunately, the alternatives have proven themselves far more grotesque and violent than anything practiced in the church-ruled West. Is there hope?

I doubt many who think of America as Christian will find anything is this book convincing. My observation is that people who believe and teach such so so because of visceral commitment. What they hold is a sentiment, kneaded into their hearts by some experience or influence. It has more to do with being a sports fan than with the facts (makes me think of Cubs fans). What they want to hear is the reinforcement of their sentiment.

But that remark cuts both ways. There can also be an anti-Christian sentiment (the label given to the “dark ages” because they were a time when people believed God has spoken authoritatively), or the ideologically shaped radical rewriting of history (say the 1619 project)— neither of which has much to do with facts. Wilson is even-handed. He blows up many of these ideas as well. If you want to know what really happened with Galileo, check out Wilson.

I do not think I am the paragon of being “open to the facts” research. No one is. But what I do not want to do is abandon any possibility of a conclusion. That plays into the hands of demagogues and ideologues. Wilson warns about the danger of all forms of rewriting the past — citing George Orwell’s fiction in which no one remembers or cares about the past. From 1984: “History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.”

The work of men like Wilson will guard us from this.