Are You WEIRDER? 68 Questions

From Andrew Wilson's Phenomenal Book

I’ve just finished Andrew Wilson’s fantastic new book, “Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West.” Here’s how I would describe the book’s project. Essentially, evangelicals are hearing two narratives about the secular world we live in. I think we can take Tom Holland’s "Dominion” and Carl Trueman’s “The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self” as our respective representatives.

Tom Holland: The world is far more Christian than you realize. There would be no fight for equal rights, no democracy, no #metoo or Black Lives Matter or feminism without our common western Christian history. Even if you don’t claim to be a Christian, your entire worldview has far more in common with a 1st century Christian than a 1st Century Greco-Roman pagan.

Carl Trueman: The world is far more secular than you realize. There would be no fight for equal rights, self-expression, gender fluidity or sexual freedom without the onset of radical individualism, as promoted by secularism for the past few centuries. Your worldview is far more unique to the radical post-enlightenment secular philosophers than you could possibly realize.

So, which of these narratives is true?

Andrew Wilson contends: both. Wilson’s book is, in a sense, a drawing together of BOTH of the above narratives, as he demonstrates the ways our world has become WEIRDER over the past couple of centuries. By that, he means:

Western

Educated

Industrialized

Religious

Democratic

Ex-Christian

Romantic

You can probably already hear the nuance in this. Yes, we are both “religious” AND “ex-Christian.” In fact, a favorite term of Wilson’s to describe us is that we westerners are, essentially, protestant pagans. In other words: we hold a strange mix of protestant ethics that exist (incoherently) with pagan assumptions about the world. And so, in many extraordinarily helpful ways, this book complicates the one-sided narratives we’re being given. Sadly, that means I don’t think it will sell nearly as well, which is unfortunate for all of us, because - as Wilson says - if we’re able to clearly see both sides of history, we can effectively see the West not as a lost pagan cause nor as a darling of Christendom. Rather, Wilson suggests we see the modern West as a prodigal, which can be called back home.

This is why the book is so important. Trueman’s book will have us all squirreling away in caves, hiding from the evils of secularism. Whereas Holland’s narrative, alone, might have us naively strolling into our future, assuming we’re essentially on the same page as our pagan friends. Wilson’s book suggests a better way forward: because we live in a society of protestant pagans, we have ample materials to call the west back home. As we see the west’s impoverished version of protestantism cave in on itself, perhaps we can say, “There’s no need to eat with the pigs. Come on home.”

WEIRDER

Probably my favorite section of this book was in chapter 2, in which Wilson lays out over 100 statements about the reader. I’ve taken a few of those and reformulated them as a “test”, which I gave to some of our high school students last night, asking them to check how many applied to them. If you’d like to use it yourself, make sure you cite Wilson’s book for credit (these are also highly curated and selective).

ARE YOU WEIRDER? A TEST

• Start with the obvious: you can read. 

• You have been literate since you were a small child. ..Literacy has rewired your brain. 

• Specifically, you can read in English…The fact that you speak English means that you have certainly been Westernized. 

• You have been educated in a wide variety of subjects that make very little difference to your day-to-day life.

• For at least ten years, and probably longer, it is likely that the state paid for you to be taught various subjects (like history, chemistry, literature, and so on) that are of no vocational value to the vast majority of its citizens. 

• The state saw education as a public good in itself, a basic privilege that we expect all children to receive. So did your teachers. So do you…

• You see academic qualifications as a key indicator of social status: more important than noble blood, land, class, family connections, and perhaps even wealth…

• Because you are literate, you will continue to learn superfluous information throughout your life without thinking you are wasting your time. 

• Whatever your political views, you almost certainly regard the education of all children—not just unusually well-born, gifted, or affluent ones—as a social and moral imperative, not least because it has the capacity to promote social equality by enabling bright children from poor backgrounds to succeed. 

• The room in which you are reading this is a microcosm of industrialization and economic prosperity, however wealthy (or not) you are in relative terms. 

• You are sitting or lying on a piece of furniture that was not built in your house, and perhaps not even in your country. It was selected because it was the best available item at the cheapest available price. 

• Numerous products within a few feet of you were designed in one country, built in another, sold in yet another, and have reached you by means of a complex web of container ships, railways, delivery vans, and retail outlets. 

• The room has at least one window and a door. 

• It has electric lighting, mobile phone signal, and perhaps Wi-Fi. 

• The building you are in contains more timepieces than the average medieval country. 

• The presence of central heating and air conditioning means that you are neither too hot nor too cold at the moment. 

• There is a toilet within thirty seconds’ walk of you. 

• You are wearing at least one piece of clothing made of cotton, and probably several. 

• There is a device nearby, no larger than a human hand, that gives you instant access to more information than has been printed in the history of the world. 

• Equally striking are the things that you are not experiencing. You are not at war. 

• You cannot smell livestock or their excrement from where you are sitting. 

• You are not hungry or thirsty. 

• You almost certainly do not work on the land, and even if you do, your produce will not generate the vast majority of the calories you consume in a day. 

• The clothes you are currently wearing were not made by you, and they do not express a particular regional or cultural identity; the shirt, trousers, and shoes you have on look roughly equivalent to what people your age are wearing in Beijing, São Paolo, Istanbul, Mumbai, and Los Angeles.

• You do not owe a proportion of your labor to a master, lord, or family member. 

• You do not barter, and you do not store most of your available wealth in physical form. 

• You may never have seen a dead body. 

• You have never offered an animal sacrifice. 

• You are not married to one of your blood relatives, and you do not personally know anyone who is. 

• By law, you’ll someday have the right to vote. 

• You take it for granted that your governments have the right to tax you, and that you have the right to boot out your officials if you disapprove of them. 

• It seems natural to you that businesses, charities, voluntary organizations, religious groups should take into account the views of the people they represent, whether expressed through formal elections or informal consent—and that if they do not, the appropriate response is to withhold your support from them. 

• Fundamental to your understanding of human freedom is the capacity to make choices. From breakfast cereals to career paths, fabric softeners to family size, marriage partners to religious commitments, you expect to be able to choose for yourself rather than acting out of legal compulsion or familial obligation. Remarkably, all of these things are true regardless of whether you are male or female. 

• Your view of the world is Ex-Christian in a variety of ways, even if you believe in God and go to church every week. You doubt. Some days it is harder to believe than not to believe: in miracles, in the goodness of God, in the idea that he can hear your prayers, even in his existence. 

• You distinguish sharply between the sacred and the secular, even when trying not to. 

• You probably regard the language of faith as inappropriate in certain contexts.

• You spend a substantial portion of your leisure time consuming media—articles, songs, newspapers, websites, television shows—whose ideology is either post- or anti-Christian. 

• You accept religious pluralism as a reality in your society. Even when pressing for Christian ethical commitments in the public square, you would be careful not to articulate them using biblical arguments alone. 

• You operate on a secular rather than a religious calendar: your year starts in January and/or September rather than Advent, and your week starts on Monday rather than Sunday. 

• You think religious commitment is a choice that each person should make for themselves. 

• You reject theocracy, believing in the separation of church and state. 

• You see lightning bolts as atmospheric phenomena rather than acts of God…You live in a universe rather than a cosmos: a disenchanted world of impersonal laws rather than a divinely indwelt temple. 

• At the same time, you hold all sorts of Christian assumptions about the world, even if you do not believe in God. It is clear to you that there are such things as human rights, such that a certain level of dignity belongs to all people simply because they are members of the human race, and laws and customs should reflect this in practice. 

• You reject polygamy. 

• You believe in limitations on the power of the state and that the rule of law is essential to a healthy society.

• You think those with much should provide for those with little, whether this is expressed through a redistributive state, charitable giving, or both. 

• You affirm the fundamental equality of all people before the law. 

• You abhor slavery. 

• You do not seek to justify inequalities in wealth or status as part of the natural order of things, and to a greater or lesser degree you seek to reduce them. 

• You think the central unit in human relations is the self, the sovereign individual, rather than the group to which the self belongs. 

• You think all people are equally endowed with free will, reason, and moral agency. 

• Humility in others is more attractive to you than pride.

• Love is more appealing to you than honor. 

• You think colonialism is morally problematic, and that those who have benefited from it have obligations (however defined) to those who did not. 

• You think of time as an arrow rather than a wheel: you believe that we are gradually making progress toward a better world rather than declining from a previous Golden Age or recurring in an endless series of cycles, and as such you would think “behind the times” is an insult and “ahead of her time” is a compliment. 

• You admire people who forgive their enemies. 

• You long for transcendence and are likely to describe yourself as spiritual, open to the supernatural, and even as praying sometimes. 

• Finally, you see your identity as something you choose and construct for yourself rather than something you are given. The true “you” is not imposed on you from the outside, by your ancestors or your community; it is something internal, and only you get to say exactly what it is, even if you describe it using categories strikingly similar to the ones your peers use. 

• You choose different self-definitions in different contexts (so your TikTok, Snapchat, BeReal, and Instagram profiles may vary from one another, and indeed from what they each said five years ago, depending on what aspects of yourself you want to emphasize). 

• Authenticity is far more valuable to you than conformity. 

• You shudder at the thought of being in an arranged marriage.

• It seems natural to you that people can choose their sexual orientation, gender, and pronouns, or it might seem absurd—but either way, you almost certainly see your own sexuality as an integral part of what it is to be you, and regard sexual intercourse as a context for self-expression, not just procreation or marital union. 

• You make all kinds of decisions based on your gut feeling. 

• You used to watch Disney movies where the lead characters had to “find themselves,” “follow their hearts,” or “be true to themselves,” and perhaps you still do. 

• You have taken at least one personality test. 

• You see dancing as an opportunity for expressing individuality rather than aligning yourself with what everyone else is doing.

• You find wild and remote landscapes more beautiful than meticulously manicured gardens and would use words like “inspiring” or “breathtaking” to describe them. 

• More of the songs on your playlist are about romantic relationships than anything else. 

After the test was finished, most of these students agreed that they’d checked over 90% of the above statements.

Then I unveiled the big shocker (spoiler ahead!) from Wilson’s chapter: every single one of these statements would NOT have been true for almost everyone before 1776.

So, I told them, “You’re WEIRDER. You’re Western, Educated, Industrialized, Democratic, Ex-Christian and Romantic. And that means your thoughts, assumptions, values and experiences are far more culturally specific than you realize.”

It was a great moment, and we had many spin-off conversations from it. We’re going through a series where we’re critiquing the idea of looking within ourselves to find our purpose, and our truest selves. This week, we used Wilson’s book to illustrate that our inner worlds aren’t shielded from our culture, like we commonly believe. Our inner world isn’t like an insect with a hard exoskeleton, but rather like a sponge (Charles Taylor’s “buffered self” vs. “porous self.”) Because of that, the first problem with looking within ourselves to be true to ourselves is…the things we find inside of us are highly culturally conditioned.

When we look within, in other words, we find a world inside of us that is highly specific to our time, place and culture: a WEIRDER world.

Andrew Wilson’s book is the best thing I’ve read in the way of equipping Christians to properly engage our pagan-protestant culture through an accurate, holistic historical lens. Secularism isn’t simple, it’s complex. That means it requires a nuanced, complex response, which Wilson equips us with. He’s also a really fun writer, who sprinkles humor and cultural allusions throughout, and tells the stories of history in a fun and engaging way.

I’d highly recommend you pick it up here.