Christianity the reason for West’s success, say the Chinese
In the West we are doing our best to destroy our Christian heritage but in China, Chinese intellectuals are coming around to the view that it is precisely this heritage that has made the West so successful.?
Former editor of the Sunday Telegraph, Dominic Lawson, in a review in the Sunday Times of Niall Ferguson’s new book, ‘Civilisation: The West and the Rest’, carries a quote from a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences in which he tries to account for the success of the West, to date.
He said: “One of the things we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world.
“We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had.
“Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system.
“But in the past twenty years, we have realised that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful.
“The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don’t have any doubt about this.”
Tags: Christianity, Religion Society
March 4th, 2011 at 12:16 pm
In hoc signo vinces
Arrived at this conclusion along time ago.
When it is fully appreciated that the undeniable truth is that Christianity is the reason why the West is so powerful it is mind blowing.
March 5th, 2011 at 5:16 am
I think that they are quite right to come to this conclusion
March 7th, 2011 at 11:12 am
In hoc signo vinces
The first part of Niall Ferguson’s Civilization: Is the West History was disappointing it appears almost as if Niall has a fixation on Thatcherite laissez-faire economics and wants to apply that retrospectively
as the driver of Western Civilization, a propaganda exercise in counterfactual history of the first order.
If money is the root of all evil and the root of Western Civilization then Niall’s ultimate assertion must be that Western Civilization is evil.