Catholic Review of: The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

To the best of my knowledge, there is no demonstrative evidence that Rodney Stark reads Pope Benedict XVI or that Pope Benedict reads Stark. On the whole, neither thing seems very likely. The similarities between them are striking all the same.

Or anyway, they’re striking right up to a crucial point.

What Pope Benedict had to say about Islam in his famous, controversial September 2006 address at the University of Regensburg got most of the attention, but his remarks about the West and the faith were arguably even more significant. In brief, he spoke of an "inner rapprochement" between biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry which, together with the heritage of Rome, supplied the driving force that "created Europe and remains the foundation of . . . Europe."

And Rodney Stark? In The Victory of Reason he pronounces "the Christian commitment to rational theology" to be the central reality that accounts for the astonishing progress achieved by Europe and the West over the past two millennia. Up to the very recent past, he notes, nothing remotely approaching this sustained burst of creative energy has been seen in any non-Christian part of the world.

This argumentative and informative book by Stark, a social scientist at Baylor University, amounts to a highly effective brief in support of the case that Christianity has been the dynamo responsible for the advance of the West. The fundamental explanation is simple: Christianity at its core holds that human beings can learn about God and the human condition and, on that basis, move ahead.

Everything follows from that. Specifically, what follows in Stark’s narrative is the emergence of political freedom, science and technology, and a wealth-producing economy based on capitalism that has made the West an object of envy and emulation by the rest of the world. Presented in summary fashion, this may seem like a very large leap of logic, but The Victory of Reason provides a convincing analysis to explain what happened and why.

No less refreshing is Stark’s curt dismissal of the conventional wisdom that prevails among scholars and intellectuals like Max Weber, author of the hugely influential The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Such people are willing to concede that Protestantism spurred the progress of the West, but they also are eager to deny that Catholicism was anything but an obstacle to it.

Calling this line of thought "academic anti-Catholicism," Stark writes, "It is as if the previous fifteen hundred years of Christianity . . . were of little matter." He goes on to detail the contributions of Catholic Christianity during those formative centuries.

Stark analyzes four "victories of reason" that, taken together, undergird the rise of the West. These are the development of "faith in progress" within Christian theology; the application of this faith to technical and organizational innovation; the emergence from the same source of the idea of personal freedom; and the introduction of reason into the field of commerce leading to the emergence of capitalism. "These were the victories by which the West won," he says.

By now it should be clear wherein the major difference lies between Pope Benedict’s analysis and Stark’s. It concerns the question of truth. The Pope is committed to the proposition that Christian faith is true—it is the definitive answer to the perennial human questions about God, man, and the meaning of life. Appropriately for a social scientist, Stark takes no position on the truth-claims of Christianity. His contention is simply that in humanistic, empirical terms, Christianity works. The two positions do not contradict each other, but they are emphatically not the same.

For the same reason, it appears, Stark has nothing to say about one of the key points made by Pope Benedict at Regensburg: that the progressive severing of faith and reason that has occurred in Western culture over the last 500 years creates a "dangerous state of affairs for humanity" that must be corrected.

But the social scientist has no sympathy with the view that modernization has passed Christianity by. "If Christianity is now irrelevant to modernization," he demands, "why is it still spreading so rapidly?" In a passage reminiscent of Philip Jenkins’s volume The Next Christendom, he cites the rapid growth of Christianity in Africa, Asia, and even China as evidence that it remains "an essential element in the globalization of modernity."

Rodney Stark’s heavily documented defense of the view that Christianity is the source and sustenance of the best elements of our secular culture makes for bracing, timely reading. Now if only the secularists could grasp that point!

- Russell Shaw (from Lay Witness magazine. www.cuf.org)

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