At a recent public debate on whether our civilization can be saved without a return to biblical values, I outlined three institutions that conservatives typically regard as foundational:
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the traditional family
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the political nation
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individual liberty
(For my part, I would rank science and rational inquiry even higher—but let me set that aside for now.)
All three of these institutions do, in fact, draw on conceptual frameworks inherited from Christian thought. And yet, it is equally true that each of them took recognizable shape only after the temporal power of the Church had been broken—after the rise of a distinctly secular intellectual life, and after Christian symbols ceased to dominate the public sphere. Europe paid dearly for this transition, enduring profound suffering and making immense sacrifices along the way.
Before the Enlightenment, Europeans knew neither the traditional family in its modern sense, nor the political nation, nor the ideal of individual liberty.
It is almost as if Christianity exerts its most constructive influence precisely when it is no longer hegemonic—when it recedes from the center of public life and occupies a more peripheral position.
If that observation holds, then a large-scale return of overtly Christian symbolism to public life would likely do more harm than good to each of these institutions, rather than strengthening them.
Notably, none of my fellow panelists offered a substantive objection to this line of argument.