Category: Civilization, History, and Anthropology

This is correct. (As usual.) We could retrace the steps back to around seven hundred to further reinforce the argument.

More for those that are interested:
The insight that protestantism was reactionary is a bit painful to admit but it’s true that while the church’s corruption was pervasive and against the interests of the northern localities, doubling down on fundamentalism took protestantism away from the natural law program and the use of dogma and theology instead. The family structure of northern europe, it’s restoration of trade, the independence of the cities, the weakness of the holy roman empire (federation), and the rise of literacy were more important in the re-ascendence of europe than was protestantism. In other words, Max Weber had it backwards.
In America the protestant church was highly participatory, and essentially a debate forum for the construction of consensus. This was probably useful. And unfortunately the tradition was lost. Because it was lost, we failed to produce a competitor to the postwar capture of education by the marxist sequence.
But we are still suffering from the combination of the failure of the catholic church to produce another Aquinas during the industrial revolution and fully transform once again with more emphasis on natural law and its harmony with christian ethics and morality and thus complete the transformation to a european religion – and the doubling down of american protestant christian fundamentalism that is preventing a synthesis, and the capture of the academy by the marxist sequence of seditions against christianity as well as the philosophical traditions.

In other words, Rudyard is pretty much always right. 😉

Cheers

Reply addressees: @whatifalthist @MattRosendin @WKahneman