Christianity is the foundation of our freedoms

If there is one underlying source from which all our other societal problems stem, it is surely this: we no longer know who we are or how we got here. Worse, we mistakenly believe our situation to be inevitable, presuming that we have arrived in this modern liberal state through something like gravity.

At the very opening of Inventing the Individual Larry Siedentop lays this problem out. People who live in the nations once described as Christendom ‘seem to have lost their moral bearings’, he writes:

We no longer have a persuasive story to tell ourselves about our origins and development. There is little narrative sweep in our view of things. For better or worse, things have just happened to us.

The problems this leads to are exacerbated by the fact that ‘we are in a competition of beliefs, whether we like it or not’. And so this extraordinarily wide-ranging, scholarly and beautifully written work sets out to answer one particular question: ‘Is it mere coincidence that liberal secularism developed in the Christian West?’

Beginning with a panorama of the Greek and Roman world, Siedentop goes on to excavate in terrain which may have been taken for granted only a generation ago, but which has currently become controversial. He points out that a major source of the modern conception of liberalism comes from Christianity.

He explains the melding of the traditions — the Greek and Roman with the teachings of Christ and St Paul — and then leads the reader through a tour of the succeeding millennia with a learning which is itself almost miraculous. Taking us through the changing sense of time, he then guides us through Tertullian on freedom (‘One mighty deed alone was sufficient for our God — to bring freedom to the human person’), Augustine, Gregory of Nyssa, Charlemagne and onward.