What Do Conservatives Really Mean When They Talk about “Western Civilization”?

The concept of “western civilization” has become something of a major political talking point among conservatives in the United States in recent years. Conservative commentators claim that western civilization is a glorious, wonderful thing that progressives are working tirelessly to destroy and conservatives are fighting honorably to protect.

In this article, I intend to take a deep dive into what conservatives say about “western civilization.” I’m going to examine their claims and assess how accurate these claims are. I’ll look at the things conservatives say make western civilization “unique” and “special” and see how “unique” and “special” these things really are. In the end, we will all see together what exactly “western civilization” really is.

Did the ancient Greeks think of themselves as “westerners”?

First of all, before I get into any of the claims about it, let’s talk about the history of the idea of “western civilization.” The concept of “western civilization” is actually a fairly recent invention. The ancient Greeks certainly never thought of themselves as being part of anything called “western civilization.” Indeed, the Greeks didn’t even think of themselves as living in “the west” at all, even in the geographical sense; they saw themselves as living in the middle of things.

In the philosophical dialogue Phaidon (109b), written by the ancient Athenian philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BC), the philosopher Socrates is famously portrayed as describing the Greeks as living around the Mediterranean Sea like “ants or frogs living around a pond.”

In his treatise Politics (1327b), Plato’s student Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC) says that the nations of Europe are full of spirit, but they are lacking in intelligence and skill, so they live in freedom but lack political organization and lack the capacity to conquer their neighbors. The nations of Asia, meanwhile, he says, are intelligent and skillful, but lacking in spirit, so they live in perpetual servitude to kings and despots.

The Greeks, however, Aristotle claims are a people who live in between the lands of Europe and Asia and therefore have all the things that are good about both: the intelligence and skill of the peoples of Asia and the free spirit of the peoples of Europe. The fact that Aristotle thought in these terms obviously shows that he was a something of a proto-racist, but it also shows that he clearly thought of the Greeks as an in-between people—not a “western” people at all.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing ancient Greek colonies throughout the Mediterranean Sea in around the sixth century BC

The invention of “western civilization”—in the nineteenth century

A noteworthy precursor to the idea of “western civilization” is the medieval idea of “Latin Christendom.” Medieval western Europeans thought of themselves as being part of this “Latin Christendom” which was defined as the part of the world in which people practiced Roman Catholicism and educated people spoke Latin. It was defined in opposition both to the Arabic-speaking Islamic world and to the eastern, Greek-speaking, Orthodoxy-practicing Byzantine Empire.

“Latin Christendom,” then, can be thought of as a sort of precursor to the idea of “western civilization.” The idea of “western civilization” as we know it today, though, was really invented in the nineteenth century. At first, the idea seems to have been mainly prevalent among English and German scholars, but it spread throughout the rest of the world.

One of the more influential proponents of this idea in the nineteenth century was the German scholar Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer (lived 1790 – 1861), who is otherwise mostly known today for his pseudohistorical argument that the ancient Greeks were utterly annihilated in late antiquity and that modern Greeks have absolutely no relation to them—a hypothesis that I thoroughly debunked in this article I published earlier this month. Fallmerayer wrote in his essay “Reisen in der Türkei,” originally published in 1846:

“Alle Geschichte ist seit bald achtzehn Äonen nur Resultat des Kampfes der beiden Grundelemente, in welche diese eine göttliche Urkraft von Anbeginn auseinanderging: beweglicher Lebensprozeß auf der einen Seite und formlos unausgegorenes Insichverharren auf der andern. Sinnbild des ersten ist die ewige Roma mit dem ganzen dahinterliegenden Okzident, Sinnbild des andern Konstantinopel mit dem erstarrten Morgenland.”

Here is my own translation of the German passage:

“For nearly eighteen centuries, all history has been the result of a struggle between two basic elements, which have been split apart by a primordial divine power from the very beginning: a flexible life process on one side and a formless, undeveloped stagnation on the other. The symbol of the first is the original Rome with the whole Occident lying behind; the symbol of the other is Constantinople with the ossified Orient.”

In other words, according to Fallmerayer, there are two civilizations: a glorious western civilization, which is flexible, forward-thinking, and progressive, and a barbarous eastern civilization, which is backwards, unchanging, and utterly stagnant in every way. He lists the Roman Empire as the archetypal western civilization and the Byzantine Empire as the archetypal eastern civilization.

Fallmerayer evidently regarded all culture east of the Adriatic Sea as belonging to one continuous, unchanging, and fundamentally backwards “eastern” civilization. Anyone who knows anything at all about any culture east of the Adriatic, though, knows that Fallmerayer grossly mischaracterizes the cultures that he characterizes as “eastern.” Obviously, the idea that all cultures from Greece to Japan are fundamentally the same and unchanging is completely false in every way.

Likewise, Fallmerayer grossly oversimplifies the relationship between the cultures he characterizes as “western.” Despite all of this, Falmerayer played an important role in popularizing this idea of a strict dichotomy between east and west. He is the direct intellectual ancestor of right-wing commentators like Ben Shapiro who are constantly talking about the glories of western civilization. The only difference is that now they focus mainly on how “western civilization” is supposedly so great and not on how “eastern civilization” is so backwards and stupid.

ABOVE: Photograph taken in around 1860 of the German author Jakob Philipp Fallmerayer, who helped to promote the idea of two distinct “eastern” and “western” civilizations

A close look at what the right wants people to believe about western civilization

You may have heard of an organization called “PragerU” or “Prager University.” They aren’t a real university; they have no campus or instructors and they don’t offer any courses or diplomas of any kind. All they do is make short videos, which they publish both on YouTube and on their own website. In these videos, they have guest narrators speak about particular topics from a conservative perspective.

The organization was founded by Dennis Prager, a conservative radio talk show host, with the explicit goal to turn young people into conservatives. Their videos—which are almost always wildly inaccurate in terms of their factual claims and should not be taken at face value under any circumstances—are clearly aimed at high school and college students. Their videos are short and present their claims using short, simple sentences with a lot of well-made cartoon graphics that are easy for young people to understand.

Despite being completely untrustworthy as far as factual information is concerned, PragerU’s videos are useful for analysis because they are 100%, distilled right-wing propaganda, which means they can tell us a lot about what people on the right wing in the United States want to make people believe. They offer us a sort of window that we can easily peer through into the strange, dystopian world that American right-wingers feel like they are living in.

One of the main ideas presented in all their videos is the idea that colleges and universities in the United States have all been hijacked by evil, left-wing radical ideologues who are surreptitiously indoctrinating students into their perverse, evil ideology. They have videos with titles like “I Learned More at McDonald’s Than at College,” “An Eye for an Eye: One of the Greatest Ideas in History,” and “If You Live in Freedom, Thank the British Empire.”

Another one of the most frequent recurring themes in their videos is the idea of “western civilization.” They always portray “western civilization” as the greatest achievement of the human race and claim that evil progressives are trying to destroy it. The idea of “western civilization” is present in nearly all their videos, but today I’m going to be analyzing one video in particular: a video titled “Why Has the West Been So Successful?” narrated by the conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro. The video has received nearly two and a half million views on YouTube alone since it was published on 8 April 2019.

Shapiro himself is equally as obsessed with the idea of “western civilization” as PragerU is. In 2019, he published a book titled The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. I will admit right now that I haven’t read Shapiro’s book, but I’m guessing he probably presents fuller versions of the same arguments that he makes in his video for PragerU.

Since Shapiro has written a book on the subject and seems to be seen by conservatives as something of an authority on western civilization, it seems to me that this video is a good way for us to see, in brief, what the right in general wants people to believe about western civilization.

ABOVE: Screenshot of the opening of PragerU’s video about “western civilization” on YouTube. This should give you something of an impression of what their videos look like; they’re extremely well-made, but they’re 100% pure propaganda.

Shapiro’s introduction

Shapiro opens the video with this introduction:

“Western civilization. It’s been around for a while, but suddenly everybody is talking about it. Some are anxious to save it; others are happy to see it go.”

Even in this very first statement, Shapiro is already pulling a rather dishonest rhetorical sleight of hand by misrepresenting what his opponents believe. He portrays progressives as “happy” to see the end of western civilization. I don’t know of any progressive who would express their views in these terms, so it is clear that Shapiro is already constructing a straw man.

Shapiro continues:

“But what exactly is western civilization? Is it the great cathedrals of Europe or the Nazi concentration camps? Is it the freedoms secured in the U.S. Constitution or chattel slavery? Lifesaving medicines or poison gas? The left likes to focus on the bad: genocide, slavery, environmental destruction—but those have been present in every civilization from time immemorial.”

Shapiro is drawing a lot of false dichotomies here. For instance, he draws a false dichotomy between “the freedoms secured in the U.S. Constitution” and “chattel slavery” without mentioning the fact that the right to import enslaved Africans as chattel slaves is one of the very first freedoms protected in the original version of the U.S. Constitution.

Article One, Section Nine of the United States Constitution explicitly prohibited Congress from abolishing the slave trade until the year 1808. The Founding Fathers were rather embarrassed about slavery, so the passage in question does not use the actual phrase “slave trade”; instead, it uses the rather cumbersome euphemism “the Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit.” Make no mistake, though; all the men who signed this document knew full well that this passage was talking about the slave trade:

“The Migration or Importation of such Persons as any of the States now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be prohibited by the Congress prior to the Year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a Tax or duty may be imposed on such Importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each Person.”

It is worth noting that this is the very first restriction the Constitution places on the United States Congress. It is only after prohibiting Congress from abolishing the slave trade that the Constitution goes on to prohibit Congress from suspending the right of habeas corpus, to prohibit Congress from passing ex post facto laws, and to prohibit Congress from granting any titles of nobility. This shows just how important the members of the Constitutional Convention thought the protection of the slave trade was.

I don’t disagree with Shapiro’s statement that genocide, slavery, and environmental destruction have been present in nearly every civilization throughout history, but it is worth clarifying that, just because other people are doing something doesn’t make it ok when you do it. If you see someone murdering someone else, that doesn’t make it acceptable for you to go out and murder someone yourself.

ABOVE: Scene at the Signing of the Constitution of the United States, an extremely romanticized depiction of the signing of the United States Constitution painted in 1940 by the American painter Howard Chandler Christy

Developments supposedly unique to the west

Shapiro goes on to list the positive qualities that he believes are exclusively unique to the west and are not found in any other civilization on Earth:

“The positives are unique to the west: religious tolerance, abolition of slavery, universal human rights, the development of the scientific method. These are accomplishments of a scope and scale that only the west can claim. These aren’t the only achievements that make the west special and uniquely successful. As western thought evolved, it secured the rights of women and minorities, lifted billions of people out of poverty, and invented most of the modern world.”

None of the developments that Shapiro claims are unique to the west are actually unique to the west; in fact, all of the things he lists as supposedly being unique to the west can be found in many cultures around the world.

Religious tolerance

The idea that religious tolerance is an invention of western civilization is the most absurd of all Shapiro’s claims in this section. The Achaemenid Persian Empire (lasted 550 – 330 BC) was, for the most part, a religiously tolerant empire in which people were basically allowed to worship whichever deities they pleased in peace so long as they pledged allegiance and paid tribute to the Persian king.

Indeed, Cyrus the Great (lived c. 600 – 530 BC), the founder of the Achaemenid Empire, is primarily famous today for having liberated the Jewish people from their captivity in Babylon and allowed the Jews to return to their homeland of Judah and rebuild their Temple to Yahweh in Jerusalem. Cyrus was held in such high esteem by the Jewish people for his religious tolerance that, in the Book of Isaiah 45:1, Cyrus is even referred to as a מָשִׁיחַ‎ (māšîaḥ), which means “anointed one” in Hebrew.

It’s true that the ancient Persians didn’t have a specific word or phrase that meant “religious tolerance,” but that was because they didn’t need one; for them, religious tolerance was simply standard practice. The only reason why we have the phrase “religious tolerance” in the west is because the west has long been dominated by particularly intolerant forms of Christianity and the phrase “religious tolerance” had to be invented to describe what those forms of Christianity weren’t doing.

ABOVE: Presumed relief carving of Cyrus the Great in the form of a supernatural being from Pasargadae. Cyrus is known today for his especially religiously tolerant policies.

The intolerant aspect of Christianity has existed ever since the religion’s very inception in the early first century AD. Early Christians believed that their belief system was the One True Religion and they certainly minced no words when telling so-called “pagans” that their religion was wrong. Christian apologists and polemicists from late antiquity often railed against the evils of “paganism,” portraying all “pagans” as wicked and immoral worshippers of false deities.

Now, we should not imagine all non-Christians in the late antique Roman Empire being held at knife-point and told to convert or die, because that is certainly not how it happened for the most part. In fact, traditional Greco-Roman religion existed more-or-less peacefully alongside Christianity for many centuries.

There are some recorded incidences of violence by Christians against practitioners of traditional religion in late antiquity, but these were relatively rare and, in many cases, motivated by other factors aside from just religious differences. (For examples, you can see my article about Hypatia from August 2018 or this article from February 2020 debunking various historical misconceptions that have been promoted through Carl Sagan’s Cosmos.)

As Christianity grew, however, different sects came into fierce conflict with other sects and, as the religion itself grew more powerful, these disagreements over religious doctrine and practice became increasingly heated and even violent. Religious conflicts between Christian sects have, ironically, been far more violent and destructive than conflicts between Christians and non-Christians were in late antiquity.

Indeed, the concept of “religious tolerance” became prominent in western nations after the Thirty Years’ War (lasted 1618 – 1648), an extraordinarily bloody and destructive war that originated as a conflict between Catholics and Protestants. To this day, the Thirty Years’ War remains one of the most horrible and violent wars ever fought over religion. It is estimated to have killed somewhere around eight million people, including roughly a fifth of the total population of the Holy Roman Empire.

It was in the aftermath of the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War that many westerners came to conclude that religion needed to be kept out of politics and that religious tolerance was necessary. Religious tolerance, though, had existed in other cultures for at least two thousand years.

ABOVE: Etching by the French artist Jacques Callot of a scene from the Thirty Years’ War, one of the most horrible and violent religious wars ever fought

Abolishing slavery

The notion that the abolition of slavery is a uniquely western phenomenon is also ridiculous. The idea of abolishing slavery existed in China long before it ever existed in the west. As I talk about in this article I published in October 2019, the idea of abolishing slavery didn’t gain serious currency in the Greco-Roman world until after the rise of Christianity in the fourth century AD and, even then, at first, it was espoused only by a handful of lone individuals like Gregorios of Nyssa (lived c. 335 – c. 395 AD).

In China, though, the idea of abolition not only existed, but one emperor even tried to implement it. In 9 AD, the official Wang Mang usurped the throne of China from the Western Han Dynasty and established his own short-lived Xin Dynasty. He tried to enforce a whole series of sweeping and radical reforms in effort to gain popular support, which included a complete prohibition on the sale of slaves and the implementation of a heavy tax for owning slaves.

Ultimately, Wang Mang’s regime was toppled by the Red Eyebrow Rebellion (lasted 17 – 23 AD), which reinstated slavery. Later emperors, however, made efforts to abolish slavery as well. For instance, the Hongwu Emperor (lived 1368 – 1398), the founder of the Ming Dynasty, outlawed the personal ownership of slaves.

Slavery continued to be practiced in China afterwards, including in some places as late as the early twentieth century, but later Ming emperors instituted restrictions on how many slaves a household could legally own and implemented a heavy tax on ownership of slaves in attempt to discourage slave ownership.

ABOVE: Portrait of the Hongwu Emperor, who tried to abolish slavery in China in the late fourteenth century

Universal human rights

Shapiro claims that only western civilization has developed the idea of “universal human rights.” Whether or not this is true, though, depends on what exactly he means by this. The general idea that you should treat other people with respect and dignity has existed in some form in virtually every culture that has ever existed.

Now, the specific idea that every single human being is morally entitled to be treated with respect and dignity regardless of their gender, ethnicity, or allegiance because all human beings have inherent natural rights is really a fairly recent idea that first became prominent in the west in around the late eighteenth century.

Even then, the idea of universal human rights only really became widely accepted within the past century. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) was only adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on 10 December 1948. De jure racial segregation was only brought to an end in the United States in the 1950s and 60s, while Apartheid in South Africa only came to an end in the early 1990s.

I can find examples of the general concept of treating others with respect having existed in plenty of pre-modern, non-western cultures, but I haven’t been able to find any examples of the more specific idea of “natural rights.” That doesn’t necessarily mean the concept didn’t exist in any pre-modern, non-western cultures; it just means I haven’t been able to find any examples of it.

The development of the scientific method

Shapiro claims that only western civilization has developed the concept of “the scientific method.” Strictly speaking, though, there is no such thing as “the scientific method,” because science is more than just one method. The “scientific method” that we all had to memorize in middle school is a simplification of the general scientific process. In the real world, scientists use a whole variety of different methods rooted in scientific, empirical philosophy to draw conclusions about the world.

Scientific philosophy as we know it today is largely rooted in the ideas of a whole host of thinkers and philosophers. Some of the more influential contributors to the development of scientific philosophy as we know it today include:

• the classical Greek philosopher Plato (lived c. 428 – c. 347 BC)
• the classical Greek philosopher Aristotle (lived 384 – 322 BC)
• the Hellenistic Greek philosopher Epikouros of Samos (lived 341 – 270 BC)
• the Hellenistic Greek mathematician and physicist Archimedes of Syracuse (lived c. 287 – c. 212 BC)
• the Byzantine scholar Ioannis Philoponos (lived c. 490 – c. 570 AD)
• the medieval Arab philosopher Ḥasan Ibn al-Haytham (lived c. 965 – c. 1040)
• the medieval Persian philosopher Abū Rayhān al-Bīrūnī (lived c. 973– after c. 1050)
• the medieval Persian polymath Ibn Sina (lived c. 980 – 1037)
• the medieval English philosopher Robert Grosseteste (lived c. 1175 – 1253)
• the medieval English philosopher Roger Bacon (lived c. 1220 – c. 1292)
• the early modern English philosopher Francis Bacon (lived 1561 – 1626)
• the early modern French philosopher René Descartes (lived 1596 – 1650)
• the early modern Italian scientist Galileo Galilei (lived 1564 – 1642)
• the early modern English physicist Sir Isaac Newton (lived 1642 – 1727)
• the early modern German scientist and philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (lived 1646 – 1716)
• the modern British philosopher of science Karl Popper (lived 1902 – 1994)

You may notice Ioannis Philoponos was a Byzantine, Ibn al-Haytham was an Arab, and Ibn Sina and al-Bīrūnī were both Persians. Byzantines, Arabs, and Persians are usually considered “easterners,” but yet all four of these men played a vital role in the development of modern scientific philosophy and they were all highly influential on early western European scientists.

These are just some of the more notable people who have influenced scientific philosophy as we know it; there are others who have come up with similar ideas independently that haven’t had as much influence on modern scientific philosophy. The Chārvāka school of ancient Indian philosophy, for instance, was every bit as materialist and every bit as empiricist as any western philosophy. Members of this school completely rejected the validity of inference and held that empirical observation was the only way to truly know anything about the universe.

In other words, Shapiro’s assertion that the development of the scientific method has only occurred in the west is doubly incorrect; scientific philosophy as we know it today has been greatly influenced by non-western thinkers and, furthermore, similar philosophies have developed independently in non-western cultures.

ABOVE: Illustration from a fourteenth-century manuscript intended to represent the medieval Persian philosopher Ibn Sina, whose writings were highly influential on the development of the scientific method

Rights of women and minorities

It is true that the rights of women and minorities have expanded greatly in western countries over the course of the past two hundred years. The problem is that these are both extremely recent phenomena that aren’t exclusively confined to the western world. Indeed, historically, women have had greater rights in many non-western countries than in western ones.

For instance, as I discuss in this article from June 2019, horrible, misogynistic attitudes towards women were absolutely rampant in ancient Greece. Not everyone in the Greek world was a misogynist, but misogynistic ideas were certainly quite common. The freedom of women in ancient Greece was also severely restricted. It’s likely that women had more freedom than many of the primary sources might lead us to believe, but there’s no question that women in ancient Greece were more oppressed than women in many other ancient cultures.

In ancient Egypt, by contrast, women had markedly more freedom—even though ancient Greece is usually considered “western” and Egypt is usually considered “eastern.” Indeed, the ancient Greeks considered the freedom that Egyptian women possessed to be shocking and scandalous. The Greek historian Herodotos of Halikarnassos (lived c. 484 – c. 425 BC) gives a description of how the Greeks thought Egyptian women behaved in his Histories 2.35. Here is the passage, as translated by A. D. Godley:

“Just as the Egyptians have a climate peculiar to themselves, and their river is different in its nature from all other rivers, so, too, have they instituted customs and laws contrary for the most part to those of the rest of mankind. Among them, the women buy and sell, the men stay at home and weave; and whereas in weaving all others push the woof upwards, the Egyptians push it downwards. Men carry burdens on their heads, women on their shoulders. Women pass water standing, men sitting. They ease their bowels indoors, and eat out of doors in the streets, explaining that things unseemly but necessary should be done alone in private, things not unseemly should be done openly. No woman is dedicated to the service of any god or goddess; men are dedicated to all deities male or female. Sons are not compelled against their will to support their parents, but daughters must do so though they be unwilling.”

Ancient Egyptian women never had the same level of freedom as women today in, say, the United States, but they did have a lot more freedom than their Greek contemporaries.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of an ancient Egyptian kitchen model of women grinding grain, baking bread, and brewing beer. The Greeks would have usually considered such tasks to be men’s work.

Lifting people out of poverty

Ben Shapiro declares that western civilization has “lifted billions of people out of poverty,” but I’m genuinely not sure where he’s even getting this statistic from, since there’s no way to measure how many people that something as vague and amorphous as “western civilization” has lifted out of poverty.

My guess is that Shapiro is simply guessing that, since western countries generally tend to be wealthier than non-western countries, “western civilization” must be responsible. It is, of course, first worth pointing out that many non-western countries are currently quite prosperous. China currently has the second-highest nominal GDP—second only to the United States. Meanwhile, Japan currently has the third-highest and India currently has the fifth-highest.

Next, I should point out that the real reason why western countries are wealthier than non-western countries in many cases is because of western imperialism. Western countries have historically taken over non-western countries, oppressed the local populations, and exploited them for their resources. Thus, western nations have built themselves up by exploiting non-western nations. It’s no wonder, then, that western nations tend to be more prosperous.

Inventing the modern world

Shapiro claims that western civilization has “invented most of the modern world.” It’s true that many of the major inventions of the past two hundred years or so have been made in western countries, but that’s partly because western countries have been wealthier due to exploiting other countries’ resources.

Before the nineteenth century, inventions were being made in non-western countries just as frequently as in western ones. For instance, here in the west, we know the movable type printing press as having been invented in Germany in the late 1430s by Johannes Gutenberg, but movably type had earlier been invented in China in around 1040. Chinese movable type was originally made using porcelain but, later on, metal began being used.

It is likely that Gutenberg invented the movable type printing press independently without knowing about the ones that already existed in China, but many other inventions that we know today were originally made in eastern cultures and spread to the west through cultural diffusion.

ABOVE: Photograph of a page printed using movable type in 1490 by the Chinese scholar Hua Sui (lived 1439 – 1513 AD)

The pillars of “western civilization” (according to Shapiro)

Ben Shapiro declares:

“Why? Why has western civilization been so successful? There are many reasons, but the best place to start is with the teachings and philosophies that emerged from two ancient cities: Jerusalem and Athens.

It is interesting to notice that the centers of western civilization have evidently moved further east since Fallmerayer’s day. Back in the nineteenth century, Fallmerayer considered Rome the pillar of western civilization, but, for Shapiro, the pillars of western civilization are Athens and Jerusalem.

Shapiro continues:

“Jerusalem represents religious revelation as manifested in the Judeo-Christian tradition: the beliefs that a good God created an ordered universe and that this God demands moral behavior from his paramount creation, man. The other city, Athens, represents reason and logic, as expressed by the great Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle and many others.”

It is interesting how Shapiro has a very different conception of what makes “western civilization” special than Fallmerayer did. For Fallmerayer, western civilization was defined by its ability to change, while eastern civilization was defined by its supposed inability to change in any meaningful way. For Shapiro, on the other hand, western civilization is defined by the combination of Judeo-Christianity and Greek reason. Contrary to the impression a person might get from listening to Shapiro, however, neither the Judeo-Christian tradition nor Greek philosophy is actually unique to the west.

I’ll start by talking about Christianity. Believe it or not, the Roman Empire actually ruled all of North Africa and the Levant and, as the Roman Empire converted to Christianity, most people living in these regions converted to Christianity as well. By the middle of the fifth century AD, Christianity was thoroughly entrenched all across North Africa and the Levant. In fact, it was so entrenched that these regions actually remained predominantly Christian for several centuries after they were conquered by the early Islamic Caliphates in the seventh century AD.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the territories ruled by the Roman Empire at the time of the death of the emperor Constantine I in 337 AD

Even today, Maronite Christians still make up approximately 22% of the population of Lebanon. Similarly, Coptic Orthodox Christians still make up a very large minority of the total population of Egypt; although the exact percentage is not known, they may make up perhaps as much as a fifth of the total population.

There have been Nestorian and Oriental Orthodox Christians throughout the Middle East and even in East Asia since late antiquity. As early as the seventh century AD, Nestorian Christianity was already spreading throughout parts of western China. There are ruined Nestorian churches in China dating to the seventh through tenth centuries AD. Christianity never became dominant in China in the same way that it became dominant in Europe and North Africa, but it did have a significant presence. Notably, Sorghaghtani Beki, the mother of the Mongol emperor Kublai Khan (ruled 1260 – 1294 AD), was a Nestorian Christian.

ABOVE: Wall painting from a Nestorian Church in Qocho, China, dating to around the seventh century AD, depicting Nestorian Christians celebrating Palm Sunday. Nestorian Christianity has had a presence in western China since very early on.

Christianity has also had a significant influence in some parts of Africa south of the Sahara Desert since very early in the religion’s history. As I discuss in this article I wrote about ancient African civilizations, King ʿEzana (ruled c. 330 – c. 360 AD) was the ruler of the Aksumite Empire, which ruled most of what is now Ethiopia. He ascended to the throne at a very young age and was tutored by a Syrian Christian named Frumentius. Under Frumentius’s tutelage, ʿEzana converted to Christianity. Over the next century or so, most of the inhabitants of the Aksumite Empire converted to Christianity as well.

As a result of this, Ethiopia actually became predominantly Christian over a thousand years before many parts of northern Europe, which were not Christianized until the Late Middle Ages. Ethiopia is also home to some of the oldest Christian churches and monasteries in existence. One of these is the Debre Damo monastery, which was originally constructed in around the sixth century AD or thereabouts. The main church building associated with this monastery is possibly the oldest church building that has been in continuous use, that has never been used for any purpose other than as a church, and that retains fundamentally the same structure with which it was originally constructed.

Ethiopian Christianity has developed largely independent of western European Christianity and is consequently often overlooked, but it remains a very important branch of Christianity even today. Notably, the Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church is the largest of the six autocephalous Oriental Orthodox Churches.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of the main church of the Debre Damo monastery in Ethiopia

Meanwhile, ancient Greek philosophy, literature, and culture actually spread throughout the Middle East as a result of the conquests of Alexander the Great (lived 356 – 323 BC) long before Greek ideas ever became prominent in the west. Throughout the centuries-long Hellenistic Period (lasted c. 323 – c. 31 BC), most of the Middle East was actually ruled by various Greek monarchs and many people living in the Middle East adopted Greek culture.

During the time of the Roman Empire, Greek culture continued to thrive in the eastern Mediterranean, especially in Egypt. When the Rashidun Caliphate (lasted 632 – 661 AD) and later the Umayyad Caliphate (lasted 661 – 750 AD) ruled most of the Middle East and North Africa, they embraced a great deal of Greek culture and learning.

Even today, the Middle East has almost certainly been just as influenced by Greek learning as the western world has. The idea that the ancient Greek legacy is exclusively “western” is demonstrably false.

ABOVE: Map from Wikimedia Commons showing the division of Alexander the Great’s empire in 323 BC at the Partition of Babylon. All the lands shown in red were ruled by Hellenistic Greek monarchs.

Nothing “unique” about the west

The fact is, contrary to what Ben Shapiro and other conservative commentators like him argue, there is nothing really “unique” about so-called “western civilization.” You can name any aspect—good or bad—of what people think of as “western civilization” and show that that same thing exists or has existed at some point in some form in other cultures that are traditionally viewed as “non-western.”

In fact, the whole concept of “the west” is really rather problematic because no one really agrees on which cultures count as “western” and the lines of demarcation that are often drawn between cultures that are supposedly “western” and cultures that are supposedly “non-western” or “eastern” are often extremely arbitrary.

It is baffling that the ancient Greeks and Romans are always considered “western cultures,” but yet the Byzantines, who were Greek, Roman, and Christian, have historically always been considered “eastern.” If the Greeks and Romans were both “western,” I don’t see how anyone could reasonably argue that the Byzantines weren’t.

ABOVE: Mosaic from the Hagia Sophia cathedral in Constantinople depicting the Virgin Mary seated with the infant Jesus on her lap. The emperor Constantine I stands on her left holding the city of Constantinople and the emperor Justinian I on her right holding the Hagia Sophia itself.

The “Judeo-Christian religion”

In any case, Ben Shapiro goes on to elaborate on what he calls “Judeo-Christian religion” and its importance for “western civilization”:

“These two ways of thinking, revelation and reason, live in constant tension. Judeo-Christian religion posits that there are certain fundamental truths handed down to us by a transcendent Being. We didn’t invent these truths; we received them from God. The rules he lays down for us are vital for building a functioning, moral civilization and for living a happy life.”

Shapiro himself is Jewish, but he knows he is speaking to an audience primarily composed of conservative Christians, so it is obvious why he chooses to emphasize the hyphenated “Judeo-Christian religion” rather than simply “Jewish religion” or “Christian religion.”

It is worth questioning, though, just how unified this supposed “Judeo-Christian religion” really is. Jews and Christians may share most of their scriptures, but, historically, they have been continually in disagreement.

ABOVE: Moses with the Ten Commandments, painted in in 1648 by the French Baroque painter Philippe de Champaigne

The ugly history of Christianity and anti-Semitism

Anti-Semitic sentiments are, unfortunately, present in some of the very earliest Christian scriptures. Most famously, in the Gospel of Matthew 27:11–26, the Jews are portrayed as clamoring for Jesus to be crucified. When the Roman governor Pontius Pilate declares he is innocent of Jesus’s blood, the Jews are portrayed as shouting, “His blood be on us and on our children!” This passage is obviously written specifically to portray the Romans (who actually sentenced Jesus to death) as innocent and to portray the Jewish people as solely and directly responsible for the death of Jesus.

In another famous scene from the Gospel of John 8:39–47, a group of Jews are portrayed as rejecting Jesus’s message. Jesus is portrayed as responding by telling them that they are the literal spawn of Satan and that, in rejecting him, they are doing the work of their father, the Devil. Then the Jews are portrayed as picking up stones to stone him to death. Once again, clearly this passage was written to portray the Jewish people as guilty for rejecting and killing Jesus.

Even at the best of times, Christians have historically regarded Judaism with contempt. The Christian Church Father who knew the most about Judaism was probably Origenes of Alexandria (lived c. 184 – c. 253 AD). Origenes was probably the only Church Father who actually studied Hebrew and he was far more sympathetic to Judaism than most other Church Fathers. Nonetheless, even he harbored some views that we would consider deeply anti-Semitic; namely, he held that the Jews were a confused people who did not understand their own scriptures and that Christians had replaced Jews as God’s chosen people.

Other Christian leaders throughout history have been far more anti-Semitic than Origenes. Most notoriously, Martin Luther (lived 1483 – 1546), one of the most prominent leaders of the Protestant Reformation, was also a raving anti-Semite. In 1543, he published an unhinged anti-Semitic screed titled Von den Jüden und iren Lügen (i.e. On the Jews and their Lies), in which he argued that Jewish homes and synagogues should be burned, Jewish prayer books be burned as well, money and property belonging to Jews be confiscated, Jewish rabbis be silenced, and all Jewish people themselves be banished or committed to forced labor.

Martin Luther even says that a Christian would commit no sin in murdering a Jewish person because—he implies—all Jews deserve to die because they have rejected Christ. It is no wonder that Martin Luther’s writings were used extensively as propaganda by the Nazi Party during the 1930s to win the support of Christian Germans.

I’m not saying that Jews and Christians don’t have anything in common or that there is no such thing as a shared “Judeo-Christian tradition,” but I am saying that we should be very careful not to make it sound like Judaism and Christianity have always been in perfect harmony with each other. There’s a very dark history here that Shapiro is glossing over.

ABOVE: Title page of the first printed edition of Martin Luther’s anti-Semitic screed On the Jews and their Lies, published in 1543

Only Jews and Christians can build functioning, moral societies or live happy lives?

Now, at the end of his spiel about the Judeo-Christian tradition, Shapiro claims that the commandments laid down by God in the Torah “are vital for building a functioning, moral civilization and for living a happy life.” This is plainly false.

It is self-evident that people who are neither Jewish nor Christian are fully capable of building functioning, moral civilizations. Historically, Jews and Christians have made up only a relatively small fraction of the world population, but yet functioning, moral societies have existed all over the world throughout history.

Let’s take a look at modern-day Japan. Although Judaism and Christianity have both had some presence in Japan for a very long time, that presence has never been very strong. Today only around 2.3% of people in Japan are Christians and Jewish people are so rare in Japan that I can’t even find percentages for them.

Nonetheless, I think most people would consider Japan a “functioning, moral civilization”; it’s one of the most highly developed countries on Earth, it has the third-highest nominal GDP, and the per capita income in Japan is about the same as that in the United States. Whatever Japan’s doing, it’s definitely functioning and it seems to be doing it fairly well without relying on Judeo-Christian tradition.

Likewise, it is completely false that only Jews and Christians can live happy, fulfilling lives. It is true that a global survey conducted by Pew Research Center in January 2019 found that, in nearly every country, people who were actively religious were far more likely than people who were religiously unaffiliated to describe themselves as “very happy.” Nonetheless, the same survey found that large percentages of religiously unaffiliated people still described themselves as “very happy.”

The survey found that roughly 25% of religiously unaffiliated people in the United States described themselves as “very happy” as opposed to 36% of people who were actively religious. In other words, it seems that being religious does make someone significantly more likely to describe themself as “very happy,” but people who are not religious are perfectly capable of being happy as well.

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing the results of a study that found that, although actively religious people are much more likely to consider themselves “very happy” than irreligious people, a large percentage of irreligious people do consider themselves “very happy”—proof that it is possible to be happy without religion.

A caricature of the ancient Greeks

Ben Shapiro goes on to talk about the ancient Greeks:

“Greek thinking posits that we only know truth by what we observe, test, and measure. It is not faith, but fact that drives our understanding and exploration of the universe.”

This is little more than a repetition of that old stereotype about the ancient Greeks all being super rational and scientific, which I debunked in this article from earlier this week. What Shapiro is giving here is really a description of one particular line of thought derived from the ideas of only a few Greek philosophers.

The problem is that Greek philosophers were far from always in agreement; in fact, they were actually quite fractious and they more often disagreed than they agreed. The third century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios, for instance, records that Plato supposedly hated the ideas of the earlier philosopher Demokritos of Abdera (lived c. 460 – c. 370 BC) with such intense passion that he often said he wished all Demokritos’s writings would be burned and lost forever.

Many Greek thinkers proposed ideas that I’m sure Ben Shapiro would loathe. For instance, the Greek Sophist Gorgias of Leontinoi (lived 483 – 375 BC) was notorious in antiquity for arguing in favor of nihilism and moral relativism of exactly the sort that Ben Shapiro constantly decries in contemporary society. It would be anachronistic to call Gorgias “the first postmodernist,” but the comparisons between him and contemporary postmodernists are inevitable.

Gorgias wrote a treatise titled On the Non-Existent in which he argued that nothing really exists; that, even if something did exist, it would be impossible for humans to understand; that, even if something did exist and it was possible for humans to understand it, knowledge of that thing could never be communicated; and that, even if knowledge of that thing could be communicated, it could never be understood. If this isn’t deliberate obscurantism, I don’t know what is.

Gorgias also wrote orations defending things that other Greeks considered morally indefensible. He infamously wrote an oration titled The Encomium of Helen in which he argued that Helen of Troy was not responsible for the Trojan War. He starts out by saying that Helen was either abducted or seduced; if she was abducted, then she couldn’t help it since she was just a defenseless woman and, if she was seduced, then she just following her Desire, Desire is a god, and no human can resist the power of a god. Therefore, on no account can Helen be blamed for anything.

Ancient Greek thinkers, then, were just as diverse as modern thinkers; they didn’t all believe in science and reason.

ABOVE: Helen of Troy, painted in 1898 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter Evelyn de Morgan. Gorgias of Leontinoi wrote an oration defending Helen of Troy against the charge of causing the Trojan War.

“A way to balance both religious belief and human reason”?

Ben Shapiro continues:

“Western civilization—and only western civilization—has found a way to balance both religious belief and human reason. Here’s how the balance works: The Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that God created an ordered universe and that we have an obligation to try to make the world better. This offers us purpose and suggests that history moves forward. Most pagan religions taught the opposite: that the universe is illogical and random and that history is cyclical; history just endlessly repeats itself—in which case, why bother to innovate, or create anything new?”

The idea that the western world alone has found a way to balance both religious belief and reason is, of course, wrong. There have been many non-western societies in which religion and science have coexisted peaceably. Once again, I’m reminded of China and the lands ruled by the Arabs during the Middle Ages.

Shapiro’s claim that “most pagan religions” taught that “the universe is illogical and random” is also wrong. The ancient Babylonians, for instance, wholeheartedly believed in an ordered universe created by a single intelligent deity. They even had an epic poem called the Enûma Eliš, which describes how the great creator-deity Marduk slew the primeval dragoness Tiamat and used her dismembered corpse to fashion the whole universe.

The Enûma Eliš predates the Creation story in the Book of Genesis by several centuries. Furthermore, it is divided into seven tablets and many modern Biblical scholars believe that the seven-day creation narrative found in the Book of Genesis 1:1–2:4a is probably based on the creation narrative in the Enûma Eliš.

ABOVE: Image of the Babylonian creator-deity Marduk from an ancient Babylonian cylinder seal. The ancient Babylonians believed in an ordered universe created by Marduk and, in fact, the Hebrew Bible may very well have gotten this idea from the Babylonians.

It is also worth noting that the ancient Greeks were neither Jews nor Christians, but yet much of ancient Greek thought was rooted in the traditional idea that the universe is governed by νόμος (nómos), which means “law” or “custom.” For instance, in his Rhetoric, Aristotle quotes a couple lines from a poem written by the early Greek poet Empedokles of Akragas (lived c.  494 – c. 434 BC) declaring that the universe is governed by natural laws. Here is the quote in the original Ancient Greek:

“ἀλλὰ τὸ μὲν πάντων νόμιμον διά τ᾿ εὐρυμέδοντος
αἰθέρος ἠνεκέως τέταται διά τ᾿ ἀπλέτου αὖ γῆς.”

Here is my own translation of the passage into English:

“But [there is] a law of all things, which extends throughout the wide-ruling
heaven continuously and throughout the boundless Earth.”

This idea of natural law that was so prominent in early Greek thought did come to be challenged by various Sophists, philosophers, and thinkers by the late fifth century BC. Nevertheless, it remained a fairly foundational idea to much of Greek thought for long thereafter. Aristotle himself based much of his philosophy on this idea of natural law.

We have good reason to think that the ancient Babylonians and Greeks were far from alone in believing that nature was governed by laws. Shapiro is taking what is actually a fairly common belief found in many cultures throughout the world and falsely presenting it as being uniquely Judeo-Christian.

ABOVE: Fictional seventeenth-century imagining of what Empedokles might have looked like. In reality, no one knows anything at all about what he looked like.

“Nearly every society in all of history” believed the strong should subjugate the weak”?

Shapiro goes on to declare that, prior to Judeo-Christianity, nearly everyone believed that it was only natural for the strong to subjugate the weak and that it was only Judeo-Christianity that brought an end to this belief. He says:

“Second, Judeo-Christian tradition teaches that every human is created in the image of God. That is, each individual’s life is infinitely valuable. This seems self-evident to us now, but only because we have lived with this belief for so long. The far more natural belief is that the strong should subjugate the weak, which is precisely what people did in nearly every society in all of history. Only by recognizing the divine in others did we ever move beyond this amoral thinking towards the concern for human rights, democracy, and free enterprise that characterize the west.”

I do think that there is a grain of truth here, but only a very small one. Many people in pre-Christian societies have, in fact, regarded it as morally wrong for the strong to subjugate the weak. The ancient Athenian historian Thoukydides (lived c. 460 – c.  400 BC) includes in Book Five of his Histories of the Peloponnesian War an account of what the Athenian emissaries supposedly told the people of the island of Melos during the siege of the island in 416 BC. The following line in Ancient Greek is perhaps the most famous line spoken by anyone in all of Thoukydides’s history:

“…ἐπισταμένους πρὸς εἰδότας ὅτι δίκαια μὲν ἐν τῷ ἀνθρωπείῳ λόγῳ ἀπὸ τῆς ἴσης ἀνάγκης κρίνεται, δυνατὰ δὲ οἱ προύχοντες πράσσουσι καὶ οἱ ἀσθενεῖς ξυγχωροῦσιν.”

The most famous translation of this passage comes from Richard Crawley’s translation, which reads as follows:

“…you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”

We know that this line is almost certainly not a verbatim report of what the Athenians actually said, but rather a line made up by Thoukydides to reflect what he thought the Athenians might have said. It is also clear that Thoukydides deliberately wrote this line to be a shocking and horrible illustration of just how far the Athenians had sunk by this point from their originally high-minded democratic ideals. Readers were meant to be absolutely horrified to see the Athenians espousing such a barbaric philosophy.

Indeed, we know that readers were shocked and horrified by these words; we have a surviving book review of Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War written by the much later Greek historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos (lived c. 60 – after c. 7 BC), who expresses shock and disbelief that the democratic Athenians could have said such words, saying that such a statement was more befitting of a Persian tyrant than of the great Athenians.

Here we have undeniable proof that at least some people in the pre-Christian world found the notion that the strong should be permitted to subjugate the weak and do whatever they want to them abhorrent. The problem, of course, is that, while many people certainly would have found this idea abhorrent when reading it written on a page, many people probably did not feel quite the same way when they themselves were in positions of power. In other words, most people in pre-Christian times seem to have recognized that subjugating the weak was wrong; some people just didn’t always live up to their society’s own moral standards.

ABOVE: Fictional illustration intended to represent the historian Dionysios of Halikarnassos, who responded to a quote attributed by Thoukydides to the Athenians about the strong doing whatever they want to the weak with absolute astonishment that the great Athenians could say such a horrid thing

The real difference between Christian and “pagan” moralities: a matter of emphasis

I do think Shapiro is actually right about there being differences between ancient pre-Christian moral systems and Judeo-Christian moral systems. Nonetheless, I think the differences are far more subtle that Shapiro makes them out to be. The difference, I think, is not a matter of the moral systems themselves being fundamentally different, but rather a matter of the moral systems merely having different emphases.

For instance, while Christian morality and ancient Greek morality generally tend to preach very similar things, they have different focuses. The ancient Greeks had a strong focus on doing what was “honorable.” Doing things like breaking your word, fleeing from battle, and abducting and raping women were considered morally wrong because they brought shame and dishonor upon a man and proved him unworthy of his reputation. Meanwhile, doing things like defending the innocent were seen as good mainly because they were honorable.

Christian morality, though, generally tends to focus on what is harmful or helpful to others. In the Gospel of Matthew 7:12, Jesus is portrayed as saying that treating others the way you would want to be treated is the epitome of everything that is written in the entire Hebrew Bible. He says, as translated in the NRSV, “In everything do to others as you would have them do to you; for this is the law and the prophets.”

The exact same concept of treating others how you would want to be treated certainly existed in ancient Greek thought as well; for instance, the Athenian orator Isokrates (lived 436 – 338 BC) uses an expression almost identical to the one that the Gospel of Matthew claims was used by Jesus in his oration Nikokles, or the Kyprians. Isokrates writes, as translated by George Norlin:

“Manifest your good will towards me in deeds rather than in words. Do not do to others that which angers you when they do it to you. Practice nothing in your deeds for which you condemn others in your words. Expect to fare well or ill according as you are disposed well or ill toward me. Be not satisfied with praising good men, but imitate them as well.”

Nonetheless, the idea of treating others the way you would like to be treated never quite seems to have occupied the same level of importance in ancient Greek morality as it usually does in Christian morality.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the great Athenian orator Isokrates, who used an expression almost identical the rule used by Jesus in the gospels about how people should treat others the way they would want to be treated

That comment about “free enterprise”

It both baffles and amuses me that Ben Shapiro says that “free enterprise (i.e. a euphemism for capitalism) is the result of people “recognizing the divine in others” and moving beyond a system in which the strong exploit the weak. Does he not realize that capitalism itself often tends to entail the strong (i.e. the wealthy) economically exploiting the weak (i.e. the poor)?

I’m not saying that capitalism is inherently bad or that we should abandon it, but I am saying that it needs to be tamed. It’s a system that, when left unchecked, ends up destroying more than it creates and causing more harm than benefit. There do need to be some precautions and regulations in place to keep the wealthy and business leaders from taking advantage of their workers.

Ben Shapiro’s comment about capitalism developing as a result of people “recognizing the divine in others” sounds like a joke a stand-up comedian might tell: “You know, back in the old days when people were living under feudalism, the strong used to oppress the weak. Thankfully, we don’t live under feudalism anymore; now we live under capitalism and the strong still oppress the weak.”

ABOVE: Illustration from an English manuscript dated to c. 1310 depicting a reeve overseeing a group of serfs

More talk about the Greeks

Shapiro goes on to say this about the ancient Greeks:

“But Judeo-Christian religion alone didn’t build our modern civilization. We also required Greek reason to teach us objective observation, that man has the capacity to search beyond revelation for answers. Greek reason brought us the notion of the natural law, the idea that we could discover the natural purpose—the telos—of everything in Creation by looking to its character. Human beings were created with the unique capacity to reason, therefore our telos was to reason.”

Here Shapiro is bizarrely undercutting his own claim from just a few seconds earlier that “most pagan religions taught… that the universe is illogical and random,” but we’ll ignore that and look at what he actually says.

Shapiro doesn’t say this, but, right here, he is mainly talking about one Greek thinker in particular: Aristotle. The concepts of natural law and telos were discussed by other Greek thinkers aside from Aristotle, but Aristotle is the main one who was interested in these things and he is the one from whom Shapiro is getting the argument about humans being intended for the purpose of reasoning.

Apart from failing to mention that he is mostly talking about Aristotle, Shapiro makes a few other mischaracterizations. Most notably, he uses the word “Creation,” which is not a term that the ancient Greeks would have normally used when talking about the universe. The ancient Greeks would have been far more likely to use words like φύσις (phýsis), meaning “nature,” and κόσμος (kósmos), meaning “universe” or “cosmos.”

For the most part, though, this is a fairly accurate summarization of the basic idea behind much of Aristotle’s philosophy: teleology. Teleology is basically the idea that things are the way they are because they were intended or designed to be this way. Aristotle really believed in teleology, even though it is objectively a silly and backwards way of thinking.

All teleology rests on the fundamental assumption that things were meant to turn out the way they are now. The problem is that there is no reason to assume this. Human beings have the ability to reason not because we were designed to reason, but rather because random mutations gave some of our distant ancestors greater abilities to reason and, since the ability to reason made them more likely to survive and produce offspring in their respective environments, those who possessed greater reasoning capacities passed down those capacities on to their offspring and, over time, these abilities grew.

Aristotle, in other words, was wrong about why humans have the ability to reason; the reason why we have the ability to reason is a historical one, not a teleological one. The present is the product of the past; the past is not the product of the present. There’s a lot of stuff that Aristotle got right, but this is one of the things he definitely got wrong.

ABOVE: Photograph from Wikimedia Commons of a bust of the Greek philosopher Aristotle of Stageira, who believed in teleology

The American Revolution as the perfect example of Greek thought and Judeo-Christian practice coming together?

Here is the point where Shapiro enters his next argument: that the United States is particularly special and successful because it is founded on the ideals of Judeo-Christianity and Greek philosophy:

“By investing reason with so much power, Greek thought became integral to the western mission. Nowhere is this more perfectly expressed than in the American Revolution, in which the Founding Fathers took the best of the European Enlightenment, with its roots in Greek thought, and the best of Judeo-Christian practice, with its roots in the Bible, and melded them into a whole new political philosophy.”

It is highly unlikely that the Founding Fathers intentionally drew inspiration from Judeo-Christian tradition in any way in the drafting of the United States Constitution. Although the Founding Fathers were mostly liberal Protestant Christians, they had thoroughly learned the lesson of the Thirty Years’ War and they all pretty much agreed that religion was best kept out of politics. Any influence Christianity had on their drafting of the Constitution was probably subliminal.

The idea that the United States was founded as an explicitly Christian nation and that the Founding Fathers did not intend for separation of church and state has been vigorously promoted by the American evangelical Protestant author and self-described “Christian nationalist” David Barton, who has published multiple books on the subject. Barton is wrong, though, and so is Shapiro. The primary sources are abundantly clear that the United States was supposed to be a secular state from the beginning.

On 1 January 1802, the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson wrote a letter to the Danbury Baptist Association in Connecticut in which he declared:

“Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. Adhering to this expression of the supreme will of the nation in behalf of the rights of conscience, I shall see with sincere satisfaction the progress of those sentiments which tend to restore to man all his natural rights, convinced he has no natural right in opposition to his social duties.”

Similar statements about religion and government being kept separate are found in the writings of other Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers believed that religion was a private matter and, when they were drafting the Constitution, they were very much trying to keep religion out of it.

It is also worth noting that, although the Enlightenment certainly did have roots in Greek philosophy and it is certainly true that the Founding Fathers drew heavily on Enlightenment thought when drafting the Constitution, they also drew on other sources.

Most notably, the Founding Fathers drew a lot of inspiration from the constitution of the Roman Republic and from the British constitution. They may have even drawn some inspiration from the “Great Law of Peace,” the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy. The United States Constitution, then, is a rather eclectic creation born from a fusion of many different traditions.

ABOVE: Portrait of the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson, painted in 1800 by the American painter Rembrandt Peale. Thomas Jefferson famously spoke of “a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Ben Shapiro demonizes atheists as communist murderers

Shapiro declares:

“Without Judeo-Christian values, we fall into scientific materialism, the belief that physical matter is the only reality and, therefore, also fall into nihilism, the belief that life has no meaning, that we’re merely stellar dust in a cold universe. Without Greek reason, we fall into fanaticism, the belief that fundamentalist adherence to unprovable principles represents the only path toward meaning. The Soviet Union, communist China, and other socialist tyrannies rejected faith and murdered one hundred million people in the twentieth century.”

Shapiro makes it sound like the Soviet Union murdered so many people specifically because the country was run by atheists and all atheists are deranged, amoral psychopaths who just want to murder people for fun. This is, of course, ridiculous. There are millions of atheists around the world who have never felt a strong desire to murder anyone, let alone actually done such a thing.

The real reason why the Soviet Union murdered so many people is not because the state was run by atheists and all atheists automatically have an innate, natural desire for murder, but rather because the state happened to also be run by a brutal totalitarian regime. Atheism doesn’t automatically lead people to become maniacal killers, but totalitarian regimes do tend to rely on violence and threats of violence to achieve their goals. We should blame totalitarianism for the murders of communism, not atheism.

I understand why so many people believe that atheism inevitably leads people to go out raping and murdering people; they love their God more than anything else in the whole world and they can’t even imagine a world in which He doesn’t exist. To them, God is the source of all morality and they can’t comprehend how anyone could behave morally in a world without God. The empirical evidence, though, shows that atheists are just as capable of behaving morally and living happy, fulfilling lives as theists.

ABOVE: Propaganda photo of Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. Being an atheist doesn’t automatically make you a Stalinist.

Ben Shapiro demonizes Muslims as fanatics

Having finished demonizing atheists as communists, Shapiro goes on to demonize Muslims as fanatics:

“Much of modern Muslim world has embraced faith, but rejected reason. It’s noteworthy that, when the Muslim world did embrace Greek reason from the eighth to the fourteenth centuries, it was a leading center for scientific advancement.”

It is worth pointing out that here Shapiro admits that Muslim world was, at one time, a “center of scientific advancement,” which ironically contradicts his own claim from just a little bit earlier in the video that only the western world has ever managed to balance science and faith.

I agree with Shapiro that there are a lot of Islamic fanatics out there, but I think I should emphasize that most Muslims are not delusional fanatics and, in fact, militant groups like Al-Qaeda, ISIS, and Boko Haram are not representative of the majority of Muslims. Finally, I also think it’s important to point out that there are a lot of fanatical Christians out there as well and fanaticism is by no means a phenomenon exclusively confined to the Islamic world.

Ben Shapiro demonizes progressives as unthinking savages who want to destroy western civilization

At the very end of the video, Shapiro finally reaches his true purpose, the whole reason he made this video, which is to demonize progressives as unmitigatedly evil savages incapable of even the slightest intelligent thought who are seeking foolishly to utterly destroy the greatest achievement of humankind: western civilization. He declares:

“So, again, we need both: Jerusalem and Athens, revelation and reason. And yet many want to reject both. These people call themselves “progressives.” Ironically, they want to take us backwards to a time when man was governed neither by reason nor faith, but by feeling and therefore back to a time of moral chaos and disorder—of feeling over fact. It would be a fatal mistake to follow the progressives. Stick with Athens. And Jerusalem.”

If I am interpreting Shapiro correctly, it seems he is arguing that progressives are even worse than communists or Islamic fanatics because, while communists and Islamic fanatics only reject one of the two pillars of western civilization, according to him, progressives want to reject both.

This technique of portraying western civilization as being about the Judeo-Christian tradition and Greek philosophy and science and then claiming that progressives are monsters who want to destroy all of both of these things is stunningly effective. There’s a reason why his book The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great immediately became the #1 non-fiction book on both Amazon and The New York Times Best Seller list within less than a week after it was published.

Everything Ben Shapiro says about progressives, though, is a complete misrepresentation of what progressives really want. I don’t know of any progressive who wants to get rid of scientific philosophy. If anything, conservatives are the ones who want to reject science, since there are many conservatives who reject well-supported scientific findings such as biological evolution and climate change.

Likewise, I don’t know of any progressives who want to bring back slavery, get rid of universal human rights, get rid of religious tolerance, or reinstate the oppression of women and minorities. If there is anyone out there who supports these things, they are far more likely to be conservative than progressive.

Meanwhile, the overwhelming majority of all progressives in the United States are actually theists. A survey conducted by Pew Research Center in 2019 found that 52% of all self-identified “liberals” (and by “liberal” they actually mean “progressive”) in the United States identified as members of some Christian denomination; 19% identified as Roman Catholics, 13% identified as evangelical Protestants, 12% identified as mainline Protestants, and 6% identified as historically black Protestants. An additional 3% of liberals identified as religiously Jewish. Only 36% of all self-identified liberals identified as religiously unaffiliated.

The same survey also found that 45% of liberals said they were “absolutely certain” that God exists, 24% of liberals said they were “fairly certain” that God exists, 8% said they believed in God but weren’t very certain. Four percent of liberals said they weren’t sure if they believed in God. Only 19% of self-identified liberals said they definitively did not believe in God.

This means that approximately 77% of self-identified liberals in the United States have some level of belief in some form of deity. That’s the overwhelming majority. Clearly, the vast majority of liberals are not atheists.

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing that the majority of liberals in the United States belong to some form of Christianity

ABOVE: Chart from Pew Research Center showing the overwhelming majority of self-identified liberals in the United States actually believe in some form of deity

Even if we look at individual cases of politicians generally seen as being very left-wing, in most cases, we find that they are also religious. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, for instance, whom right-wing media outlets constantly use as a sort of bogeyman figure representing radical socialist ideas, is a devout Roman Catholic. She has been photographed wearing ash on her forehead for Ash Wednesday. She even wrote an article in June 2018 for the progressive Catholic magazine America: The Jesuit Review talking about her Catholic faith and how it has informed her policy positions.

Elizabeth Warren, meanwhile, who is also seen as a radical progressive, is a devout Methodist. She has quoted the gospels in her speeches and, according to an article fromThe Boston Globe, religious leaders who have known her say, “her Christian faith is a constant, if quiet, presence in her life, that it is deep and authentic, and informs her work as a senator.”

Even Bernie Sanders, who is not actively religious, said at a CNN town hall in February 2020 that his Jewish upbringing has greatly influenced his moral development and that being Jewish is one of the two things that he thinks has had the most impact on the person he has become. Clearly, Shapiro’s claim that progressives are godless heathens who want to utterly reject the Judeo-Christian tradition is, for the most part, not accurate.

All the evidence I’ve presented so far lines up with my own experience; I was raised as a member of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), a progressive mainline Protestant denomination and I can tell you that many of the ideas progressives support were preached by the minister at the pulpit every Sunday morning: ideas like charity, kindness, acceptance of others, support for the rights of women and minorities, support for peace and goodwill throughout the world.

ABOVE: Photograph from March 2019 of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez wearing ash on her forehead for Ash Wednesday

What conservatives really mean when they say progressives are “destroying western civilization”

What is “western civilization,” then? Clearly, the things that conservatives say define “western civilization” and set it apart as special and unique are not exclusive to western cultures. Furthermore, most of the supposed “western ideals” that conservatives say progressives are attacking aren’t really under attack. What, then, it is that progressives are attacking that conservatives are trying to protect by calling it “western civilization”?

Around 80% of the time, when conservatives talk about “western civilization” and say that progressives are intent on destroying it, they are really using this phrase as a dog whistle for “the supremacy of white Christian men.” We know this not just because of how they use the term “western civilization,” but also because sometimes they slip up and say what they really mean.

For instance, Steve King, a Republican representative from Iowa in the United States House of Representatives, loves talking about the glories of “western civilization,” but, when he does it, he has a habit of saying out loud what most conservatives are only thinking privately in their heads. Back in 2016, for instance, he attracted controversy after he said this:

“I’d ask you to go back through history and figure out, where are these contributions that have been made by these other categories of people [i.e. people who are not white Europeans] that you’re talking about, where did any other subgroup of people contribute more to civilization? […] Western civilization itself. It’s rooted in Western Europe, Eastern Europe and the United States of America and every place where the footprint of Christianity settled the world. That’s all of Western civilization.”

Here he is very clearly insinuating that people who are not white have not made any notable contributions to civilization and that white people are the only ones who have ever accomplished anything for the sake of mankind.

Steve King made another revealing comment to reporters in January 2019 in which he explicitly equated western civilization with white supremacy. He said:

“White nationalist, white supremacist, Western civilization — how did that language become offensive? Why did I sit in classes teaching me about the merits of our history and our civilization?”

Upon being confronted over this remark, Steve King insisted that he was just “defending western civilization.” This is what many conservatives really mean when they talk about “western civilization”; if you just substitute the phrase “western civilization” with the phrase “the supremacy of white Christian men,” you get the exact same meaning.

Conservatives are mad that progressives are trying to give more rights to people who aren’t white, male, or Christian because they think this is diminishing their own position in society. They can make up all the clever euphemisms they want, but it’s easy to see what they really mean.

ABOVE: Republican representative Steve King from Iowa has repeatedly used the phrase “western civilization” as an obvious dog whistle for white supremacy—and he is far from alone.