Stark and missionaries

As you can tell, I really like Rodney Stark's book How the West Won. By the way, he has other great books that make people realize how often we accept a version of history that has been twisted for political purposes. Sad but true. Let's get back to this book that shows how often the rise of the West has been misunderstood (deliberately, in some cases) by many historians.

Stark sums up the next chapter much as he did earlier chapters. The rise of Western modernity, according to him, was a function of freedom – freedom to innovate and freedom from confiscation of the fruits of one's labors. When the Greeks were free, they created a civilization advanced beyond anything else in the world, but when Rome imposed a huge Imperial iron fist over the West, progress ceased for a long time. The fall of Rome again unleashed creativity, and the fragmented and competing Europeans soon outdistanced the rest of the world. Why? They were possessed not only of invincible military naval might but also superior economies and standards of living.

I wish this message would get to voters today in the United States. They elected a man who wants huge government bureaucracy. As government gets bigger, the individual citizens get smaller. That's what we are seeing today.

In the last section of his book (How the West Won), Rodney Stark notes other important things that have come out of the rise of the West. For one thing, Christian missionaries have done much good in the non-Western world. They took on crimes against women such as foot binding, female circumcision, the stoning to death of rape victims on false grounds of adultery, and the custom of suttee, in which widows were burned to death as they were tied to their husbands' funeral pyres. Missionaries argued against tyranny and slavery. They fought  high infant-mortality rates, illiteracy, the castration of young boys.