We're More Christian Than We Know
Note: This is a high-level theoretical (& speculative) summary connecting scattered ideas I discovered reading Inventing the Individual, An Anxious Age, Dominion and talking further with Tom Holland. I welcome immediate reactions as the ideas are very WIP, and, since it’s such a big topic, the generalizations are often sweeping. That’s what I use this Substack for: to work through new ideas and test them off smart readers…
In other words, you could say that subsequent belief systems post-Christianity — Scientism, Communism, Liberalism, Wokeism, among others — all have Christian roots. They’ve taken the same religious architecture, but dropped the ontological assumptions. The same ethics, but without the metaphysics: Christianity without Christ.
Marriage involved a literal non-personing of the bride as she changed her last name & became “owned” by the man. Everything was by family/caste/clan; there was no individual. Instead of the private/public dichotomy, there was a domestic/public dichotomy, since there was no private sphere separate from the family.
