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Chapter 15:
The Worldwide Explosion of Pentecostalism
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American philosopher Lee Harris tells us with surpassing clarity what is going on when Christianity erupts somewhere in the world. It means that a people has declared itself ready for self-government, just like the burghers of Germany around 1500 who
Had learned to handle an enormous complexity of human interactions without the continual appeal to the decision-making authority of some outside agent… What happened was that one day, in their great pride as their achievement, they noticed what they had done, and they decided to turn their spontaneously evolved ethos into a consciously articulated and explicitly confessed principle. (Harris 2004 p187)
What they had discovered was conscience. This Protestant conscience was the faith of people who had learned to control their behavior into an ethos of professional respectability. It is the autonomous self-regulator in a man whose well-being depends upon his reputation as one who can be trusted. It is what makes sense of the priesthood of every man that would seem to be a recipe for anarchy. “If the ultimate law was God’s Book, and the ultimate authority on this law was you, who was in a position to contradict you?” Only your conscience.
The problem with a trustworthy, self-governing middle class is that it leaves no role for powerful political leaders. That is why it has been necessary for left-wing activists to drill with inexhaustible ferocity into the edifice of bourgeois trustworthiness. In The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels punch all the buttons. Not only were the capitalists shamefully oppressing the proletarians but they were swapping wives and dishonoring their female servants. This accusation is a constant theme of the war on the middle class. Businessmen are exploiters, they are robber barons, they are monopolists, they are price fixers, they are unsafe at any speed, they are killing little birds, they are raping the earth, they are exporting jobs, they are exploiting Third World peasants.
Every coin has two sides. Capitalism is built upon the notion of buying low and selling high. That means giving jobs to young teenage girls just off the farm at very low wages (but indoor work that is much easier than planting rice in all weathers). But capitalism is also the world of the self-governing, conscientious, creative team. It worships the aggressive, creative, reliable individual who can leverage his skills across a team and deliver services to the world. Entwined with world capitalism is world Protestantism. Together they form the road to the middle class.
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©2005 Christopher Chantrill
Faith & Purpose
“When we began first to preach these things, the people appeared as awakened from the sleep of ages—they seemed to see for the first time that they were responsible beings...”
Finke, Stark, The Churching of America, 1776-1990
Mutual Aid
In 1911... at least nine million of the 12 million covered by national insurance were already members of voluntary sick pay schemes. A similar proportion were also eligible for medical care.
Green, Reinventing Civil Society
Education
“We have met with families in which for weeks together, not an article of sustenance but potatoes had been used; yet for every child the hard-earned sum was provided to send them to school.”
E. G. West, Education and the State
Living Under Law
Law being too tenuous to rely upon in [Ulster and the Scottish borderlands], people developed patterns of settling differences by personal fighting and family feuds.
Thomas Sowell, Conquests and Cultures
German Philosophy
The primary thing to keep in mind about German and Russian thought since
1800 is that it takes for granted that the Cartesian, Lockean or Humean scientific and
philosophical conception of man and nature... has been shown by indisputable evidence to be
inadequate.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Meeting of East and West
Knowledge
Inquiry does not start unless there is a problem... It is the problem and its
characteristics revealed by analysis which guides one first to the relevant facts and then,
once the relevant facts are known, to the relevant hypotheses.
F.S.C. Northrop, The Logic of the Sciences and the Humanities
Chappies
“But I saw a man yesterday who knows a fellow who had it from a chappie
that said that Urquhart had been dipping himself a bit recklessly off the deep end.”
—Freddy Arbuthnot
Dorothy L. Sayers, Strong Poison
Democratic Capitalism
I mean three systems in one: a predominantly market economy; a polity respectful of the rights of the individual to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; and a system of cultural institutions moved by ideals of liberty and justice for all.
In short, three dynamic and converging systems functioning as one: a democratic polity, an economy based on markets and incentives, and a moral-cultural system which is plural and, in the largest sense, liberal.
Michael Novak, The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism
Action
The incentive that impels a man to act is always some uneasiness...
But to make a man act [he must have]
the expectation that purposeful behavior has the power to remove
or at least to alleviate the felt uneasiness.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action
Churches
[In the] higher Christian churches… they saunter through the liturgy like Mohawks along a string of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it every minute.
Annie Dillard, Holy the Firm
