How the West Won--continued

I just saw a review of How the West Won in Salvo, a great magazine. Hope you get a copy and enjoy it when you have the chance. The book got a glowing review. That's why I'm spending so much time summarizing the book--so you can make a case for the values of the Western world and all the good it has done, thanks to its foundational ideas, including Christianity.

The author, Rodney Stark, moves to a discussion of the Reformation. And he claims this name is not exactly true. There were several independent and quite different  reformations involving Lutheranism, Calvinism, and Anglicanism. The backbone of the most famous of these, the Lutheran Reformation, was provided by urban middle and upper middle class people – the merchants, bankers, lawyers, physicians, manufacturers, schoolmasters, shopkeepers, and bureaucrats. They were effective because many German towns and cities had sufficient autonomy to make Lutheranism the only lawful faith without suffering outside interference. So, once again Stark goes back to his key idea – small, local governments foster more creative ideas than do large empires. 

As a side note, Stark takes on myths dealing with Puritans, who arose during this time. He says many have spread the idea that the Puritans initiated an era of extreme sexual repression which has lived on to disfigure modern life. He quotes Bertrand Russell: "Puritanism consisted of the determination to avoid the pleasures of sex." But Stark points out that this is a malicious myth; the Puritans were very frank and enlightened about sex. Whenever I teach a class on American literature and we are reading Puritan authors, I feel like I have to discuss this and other unfair stereotypes about Puritans with my students. I have a talk that focuses on the benefits of the Puritans to American culture--education, science, free enterprise, hard work, morality, giving, etc. It's so sad that today's students know so little about these people.