Glen Scrivener Is In Over His Head

“Dominionists” Are Annoyingly Vague

Yesterday I listened to Glen Scrivener and Alex O’Connor’s conversation on western civilization. The exchange, at about 96 minutes in, inspired this post. For the sake of simplicity, I’m referring to his arguments, and related arguments, as “Dominionist Arguments.” These are arguments that say that Christianity is needed to sustain the success of western institutions.

On Christianity & The West

There are historically contingent factors that led to western institutions developing as they did, and Christianity is one of many variables. Christianity changed the west, not just by preaching values, but in creating diffuse centers of power.

From the outset, the church positioned itself against the state, as opposed to other religious traditions (including Greco-Roman cults) that married themselves to the state.¹ This was accelerated during the protestant reformation. From there, Europeans waged many bloody wars over religious disagreement, and different values and norms arose as measures to manage and reduce violence. This included what we call human rights today.

The specific values Christians preached were important. If you read a history book, the religious rites of the Greeks and Romans sound more like the rites found in the east today (yes, I’m oversimplifying). Two thousand years ago, there were lots of sacrifices, local gods, and tributes on altars. Now? Not so much.

Further, Christianity’s popularized or invented church life. This form of social relationship united multiple families voluntarily under a priest and a common ethic, and probably did something to western conceptions of familial relationships and ethics over the long term. It likely better integrated separate families together, weakening familial bands as an organizing principle of society, allowing a more individualist ethos to arise.

Finally, the voluntarism of the protestant reformation was important in shaping American political culture. It was influential in the ideology of many puritan colonists and American founding fathers, complimenting other founders who were openly naturalistic and non-Christian.

Long story short, I think there’s a good historical case that Christianity changed western values and institutions over time. It created more diffuse power centers, changed familial and social ethics, and was a first mover of individualist ideology that many political, civil, and economic rights depend on today.

In my opinion, this is good. Life in the west, from our institution to culture and values is better than those held by the Roman Empire 2,000 years ago.

Is Christianity Essential For The Success of The West?

Still, I think the answer to the question “Do we need Christianity to maintain western civilization?” is obviously and easily no.

In this way, I define western civilization as the cultures and institutions that maintain and reinforce liberal democracy, human rights, and capitalism.

You Don’t Need To Agree With Your Cultural Fathers

The historical contingent circumstances that create the conditions where new beneficial norms and institutions arise are not necessary to sustain them indefinitely. You don’t need to believe exactly the same things as the progenitors of your culture to sustain that culture.

One need not be a Godless atheist to understand this. We intuitively understand this for many practices within Christianity. For example, very few westerners today have been to a ritualistic sacrifice, and the average westerner could not tell you the logic of ritualistic sacrifice. That is: making an offering to a god or gods to maintain favor; sacrificing livestock to have a meal with a god or to signal commitment to that god.

Yet countless high church Christians could explain the logic of communion/the eucharist which relies on the logic of ritualistic sacrifice. Ancient Christians were unique in what their ritualistic sacrifice entailed, while today modern Christians are unique in the west because they’re the only ones who ritualistically sacrifice at all.

Regardless of the metaphysical truth of the eucharist, it’s clear we don’t need to live in a culture that regularly makes sacrifices to Gods on altars to participate, understand, or value the eucharist.

Similarly, there’s a secular logic for many norms and morals in the west.² People don’t because they don’t want to go to jail. They are honest with each other because people generally prefer to interact with honest people, and it’s more beneficial for everyone over the long term if people are mostly honest with one another. And so on.

Christianity Isn’t Necessary To Sustain Liberal Democracy

There are certainly plenty of non-Christian, non-western cultures that don’t share liberal capitalistic values. For instance, there are plenty of places on earth where it’s hard to build a factory and manufacture goods because the culture doesn’t value showing up on time every day. Many people worry that if we discard Christianity, we’ll regress to these kinds of cultures, and everyone will suffer.

In this way, Dominion advocates could argue that even if we don’t need Christianity to relate to or create norms, incentives, and institutions, there still may be something essential to Christianity that sustains liberal democracy.

Thankfully, we have a very good case study countering this argument: Japan. One can concede that governments run by Christians were historically essential to establish Japan’s liberal democracy, but Japan has sustained liberal democracy for decades without having substantial Christian influence.

Put another way, the Americans haven’t been holding a gun to the head of the Japanese telling them to enable free market capitalism and democracy since the 1940s and 50s. They did not need Christian churches or societies³ to tell the Japanese to go to work, vote in elections, or protect their fellow citizens’ human rights. At this point, if Japan crumbles as a liberal democracy, it won’t be due to not being Christian.

The lesson for westerners then is this: We don’t need Christianity to sustain western culture, even if Christianity was influential in establishing western culture. Just as a Japanese person can acknowledge the important and contingent circumstances that Christian people had on influencing Japanese institutions and also sustain them without Christianity, secular westerners can acknowledge our Christian roots and also sustain our institutions without Christianity.⁴

On Scrivener

I get bad vibes from Glen Scrivener. Though he’s not like the American Christian Nationalists who emit what the kids today call “Hitler particles,” whenever I hear him talk about Christian influence on history, I get annoyed as he either isn’t smart enough to see the implications of his arguments, or he does and maliciously doesn’t talk about them.

If I were to talk to him in person, I’d bluntly ask him if he thought that non-Christians could be moral on their own, because confidently believing they can’t seems to be the subtext of his entire project.

I imagine his audience are moderate American evangelicals who politely think the non-Christians around them are secretly moral monsters, and the further retreat of Christianity will bring these barbarians to their gates. And so, they vote for Trump, and all that jazz. Anyone who has lived within ear shot of American evangelical culture knows this type of person.

As someone who has been around such people and listened to plenty of Glen Scriveners, I know when someone thinks I’m a moral degenerate and that I should have less rights than them, merely because I’m not a conservative Christian. I will admit that this comes off as insecure and a little hyperbolic, but I genuinely believe that this is the logical implication of people like Scrivener’s ideology, as I’ve written before:

Why Dominion Arguments Are Popular And Annoying

The fact that Christianity and Christian culture influenced western society is trivially true. The main point of dispute over Christianity’s influence is whether or not Christianity is necessary to sustain the goods of western civilization. As I explained above, I don’t think there’s a good argument, but people still try to salvage it.

The reason why people buy books like Holland’s Dominion of Scrivener’s Air We Breathe is because we are an increasingly post-Christian society, Christians don’t like that, and they’re grasping for secular justification for their continued outsized influence in politics and culture.⁵

In this way, if you published a book saying “Christianity is influential over western civilization” 70 years ago, no one would buy it because it was so obvious. The reason why people buy it now is because scared Christians want to find arguments against the secular left or to justify entrenching declining Christian culture within secular institutions.

These arguments and conversations are always frustrating because no one actually acknowledges the context of why they are taking place. People care about Dominion arguments not because they can’t recognize Christian influence on western culture, but because they can’t contextualize how important it is for the ongoing success of that culture.

Scrivener’s Bad Defense

The O’Connor-Scrivener conversation is a good demonstration of this dynamic. In their back-and-forth, O’Connor points out that Scrivener’s thesis is ultimately unfalsifiable. Seemingly everything good is somehow motivated by Christianity, even the things that today’s Christians don’t endorse, like abortion and gay rights.

Scrivener defends himself by saying that when we’re dealing with history, we’re not dealing with falsifiability, and so the criticism isn’t valid.

The problem with this is that we’re not talking about history, we’re talking about identifying patterns within history, labeling them, and using them to understand events in the present day and make inferences in the future. Falsification is not irrelevant for this methodology, because if we can’t falsify a methodology (a label), it renders it useless.

Put simply: If every motivation is considered Christian because it was shaped in a culture that was at least recently Christian, then the Christian label is useless.

Are All Economists Smithian?

Let’s use an unrelated historical example as an illustration.

Say we’re arguing if Adam Smith is the greatest economist of all time, as we consider his arguments about the invisible hand to be the greatest of all time. We’re arguing this so we can figure out which economic ideas we should incorporate in policymaking in the future.

It’s trivial that Smith is the one who first popularized and likely invented the invisible hand argument. But does that mean that every economic argument involving supply meeting demand is a “Smithian” argument, even the ones he himself did not make? If you were to disagree and make arguments about comparative advantage or creative disruption or monopoly being more important than the invisible hand, would it be fair of me to say “ah but that’s a Smithian argument,” in response?

No, we would consider this obviously silly.

Smith is considered one of the founders of economic theory, but there were others before and after him. His ideas were influential because they were true or demonstrable useful to understanding how political economy works, not because of something essential about Adam Smith specifically.

It would be wrong to revoke Smith credit for his discoveries, but it would also be folly to say no one, given enough time, would have made similar arguments about supply and demand. It would further be foolish to attribute every theoretical innovation after Smith to him just because he made one substantial innovation.

And this raises the question: At what point does “Smithianism” become merely “economics?”

For our purposes, at what point does the “Christianity” that Scrivener identifies become “politics,” “ethics,” or “culture?” Indeed, much as it’s more useful to categorize the insights of Smith within the field of economics, where other thinkers have come up with unrelated theories or built upon Smith’s insights, so too is it the case with Christianity politics, ethics, and culture.

Scrivener Is Wrong About Falsification And History

At a certain point, it ceases to be useful to understand factual or normative ideas solely by the person or school who came up with them first. When O’Connor and others criticize Scrivener and other Dominionists for the unfalsifability of their terminology, it’s not because they don’t understand how history works, it’s because they’re engaging with the actual substance of the topic at hand: Is Christianity essential to the success of the west?

Regardless of the answer to that question, you need to have a good theory of what Christianity is, and what Christianity isn’t. You need a good theory of history that systemically makes causal explanations - including falsifiable claims and predictions. Scrivener’s theory does not do that.

In fact, he resists falsifiability for the most misguided reasons. Here are his words, slightly edited for text:

“But you’re looking for falsifiability when we’re not talking about science…Falsifiability works brilliantly if you population A, population B, and a control group and let’s run the experiment and let’s look at the results and we’ll A/B/C test it. You cannot do that with the past…there is not A/B/C past. There is only A.”

It’s technically correct that historical theories aren’t falsifiable in the same way as a science experiment, but there is still some degree of falsifiability when forming historical theories and explanations. Historical theories need to be apportioned to the evidence of history, whether it be documents, archeology, etc.

In this way, when we say “historical theories,” we’re talking about at least two things. First, explanations about the beliefs and opinions of individual people in history, inferred from historical evidence. Second, explanations of the actions and behaviors of people and institutions, again, inferred from historical evidence.

Specific theories of history can be falsified by historical evidence. If you said the Holocaust didn’t happen, for instance, we can produce libraries and concentration camps full of documentation falsifying that theory. Similarly, if you said that Thomas Jefferson was a Hasidic Jew, there’s also an abundance of evidence falsifying that.

The Steelman Is A Response To A Strawman

The steelman of what Scrivener is saying is that we cannot establish that historical developments would have still happened had the people who invented them not done so, at least not with the same degree of certainty as scientific theories.

So, for instance, we can’t say for certain that someone would have made the invisible hand argument in the same way Smith did, had Smith not made it. We cannot say if Christianity would have still become a world religion had Paul not written epistles. We cannot say that the allies would have won World War II had Churchill not been Prime Minister of the UK or Roosevelt the President of the United States. And so on.

The problem with this defense is that it’s completely irrelevant. It’s a strawman. O’Conner and other skeptics are not saying that Scrivener’s arguments are unfalsifiable because they rely on (trivially) true accounts of history. Rather, the criticism is that Scrivener’s analyses and inferences drawn from history are unfalsifiable.

…And A Motte-And-Bailey

And so, Scrivener’s defense is a motte-and-bailey, flipping between two arguments:

1. The Historical-Factual Argument - Christianity influenced western history and thus norms and institutions.

2. The Social Argument - Christianity is needed to sustain the success of western institutions in the future.

Whenever we’re arguing about causal theories of history and making inferences about the future, we are having the social argument. Our methodology (labeling), facts, and theories are, at least to a degree, falsifiable. Whenever Scrivener signs up to be on a panel to debate dominionism, he is signing up to have that kind of conversation.

And when you have that conversation, you need historical data. Not just random historical facts, but also causal theories of how people and institutions work. You need to look for counterpoints throughout history, and account for them.⁶

Scrivener, for whatever reason, is ill equipped for that conversation,⁷ and so he refuses to have it, retreating to the trivial historical-factual argument that no skeptic would dispute, not Alex O’Connor or myself.

I’m frustrated with Scrivener and don’t take him seriously because he has this grand idea that he spends his career talking about, but it doesn’t stand up to the smallest bit of scrutiny. Indeed, he doesn’t seem to understand basic aspects of forming theories and subjecting them to critical feedback.

Culture Arguments Are Squishy.

In closing, there is good and bad within Christianity. There is good and bad within cultures outside of Christianity. Christianity is not the entirety of western culture. Culture is weird and multifaceted because humans are weird and multifaceted.

The people who make explicitly cultural arguments, that we must promote this kind of culture vs that kind of culture, are almost always grifters because their arguments are always motte-and-baileys and poorly defined.

If you want to protect liberalism, democracy, free speech, and capitalism, you should argue for these ideas directly and explicitly. Heck, if you believe in the necessity of Christian dominion, argue for that position explicitly, appealing to the exact goods that would be brought about by that system. You’re more likely to persuade your audience because your arguments will be clear and direct.

Don’t argue for a specific culture or sub-culture because every culture has good and bad things that no one will embrace entirely. Anyone who tells you differently, and argues like Scrivener is probably just trying to make money off your attention and grievances.

1. To be clear, throughout history, the state and Christian church have been aligned. My point here is merely that the novel idea Christianity popularized is that Church and state could be separate, with separate interests.

2. I’m not going to list all of them as you can find them in any political philosophy, economics, or philosophy classroom.) Perhaps these norms had a Christian origin that at one time relied on Christian metaphysical beliefs, but today those norms are understood in various secular terms that stand on their own.

3. Only about 2% of Japan is Christian, as far as I can tell.

4. I’m being overly charitable to the Christian position. I don’t think one needs to be Christian to invent liberal democracy, property rights, capitalism, etc. I think these institutions, norms, and ideas are discoverable by humans. I think institutions and human systems undergo convergent evolution, developing similar traits under similar environmental pressures (technological, economic, political, etc). So it’s a historical fact that Christianity and Christian peoples were essential in creating these institutions and diffusing them in places like Japan, but Christianity is both not essential to discover or sustain them. Sure, I can’t historically prove that these norms are discoverable, but what’s important is that, regardless of who discovered them, they’re clearly transferable to other societies like Japan (and South Korea) and sustainable within those societies

5. Pre-New-Atheism, Christians didn’t need to do that, as they could just make their case in the language of Christian theology, and there were enough Christians and cultural power to where that was sufficient. Post-New-Atheism Christians need to find secular justification. This is the ultimate piece of evidence to suggest the New Atheists actually won.

6. Part of the reason I brought up Japan is because it’s a slam dunk case of “western” values being easily transferable, and the dominionists don’t have a relevant response.

7. It was so annoying to listen to this Brit pontificate on the history of Christianity in the southern United States. As a native South Carolinian, I found it offensively misleading. For instance, the slave bibles he mentions were extremely rare. There’s not any evidence that southern slave holders tried to systemically distribute slave bibles. We only have three today, which makes sense because slaves couldn’t read. This supports the idea that most slaveholders probably felt vindicated by the Bible.

Indeed, part of the reason why Africans were originally justified as being “enslaveable” is because they weren’t Christian. Again, because white Anglos were able to justify that with scripture before there was mass slavery in the United States. Then something problematic happened: the non-Christian slaves became Christians. This made for an awkward situation in the Americas, and so an alternative justification for enslavement followed: that black people were morally inferior to white people and needed to be enslaved. I could go on.

In a weird way, many harmful stereotypes about black people in the United States derive from Christians coming up with weird justifications to keep African Americans enslaved. If the bible were so obviously and overwhelmingly anti-slavery, we would have less racism/stereotyping and more abolition. If I were to incorporate Scrivener’s reasoning, I could say that more vile forms of anti-black racism are a Christian invention or “value.” But because I think that’s stupid, I won’t do that.