The One Edit That Changed History

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Andrew Wilson: On the 21st of June 1776, the longest day in the year of a pretty iconic and significant year, Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Benjamin Franklin, basically asking him to edit the Declaration of Independence. And Jefferson said, basically, hey, I’ve got this version, the committee is fine with it. But I wonder if you’d be happy to have a look at it and make any tweaks you think it might need. He said it in more flowery language. But that was the gist. He wrote around and saying, with a version that is not the version that most of us know he wrote, We hold these truths to be sacred, and undeniable that all men are created equal and so on, Ben Franklin writes back, and he makes a pretty portentous edit to this incredibly famous document. And he crosses out the word sacred and undeniable and replaces them with the single word self evident. And in that moment, you have a remarkable parable, I think, for the post Christian West that we all now live in. Because what Franklin was saying was Jefferson, I don’t think that this is really based on sacred and undeniable truths. I don’t think that these truths that we’re affirming today are fundamentally theological, or sacred truths. I think they’re just obvious to anybody with a brain, I think that’s self evident, they are naturally obvious to anybody who’s taken the time to think them through.

Now, the obvious answer to Ben Franklin’s edit is no, these things are not self evident, actually, like there’s hundreds of millions of people around the world today who don’t believe that it’s very obvious that all people are equal, or that all people should be able to boot out a government if they don’t agree with what it’s doing, or equally given liberty, that was not true. Even in 1776. A lot of the founders hadn’t believed it themselves 50 years before, and many people at the time still didn’t, which is partly why they were making a declaration of independence in the first place. And yet what was happening was people were beginning to say, this is this should be obvious to anyone who can think meanwhile, those assumptions were themselves deeply embedded in Christian thought, you know, the nation we’re in where is where I’m sitting right now, all around me all things. All people are expressions of culture that are deeply embedded in Christian theology that are based on assumptions about humility, or pity or charity, or service or sacrifice, freedom and the dignity of the individual, which are grounded in Christian anthropology. And so by making the Edit he did, Benjamin Franklin was doing something of iconic significance, not only for America, but for the Western world in general. He was basically saying Christianity has taken us this far. And now perhaps, because we all agree on those things. We don’t need Christianity anymore. And we’re going to move on into effectively a post Christian expression of the West.

One of the most important things that’s happened, as it was happening in America, it was happening in Scotland with David Hume, who was dying at exactly the same time. And in 1776, as he died, he said, I don’t, I don’t think I need God. I’m happy to go into the afterlife. I don’t think there is an afterlife, but I don’t really mind I’m quite ready to face that. And that development in America was coinciding with developments happening all around the West that were effectively the origin story for the post Christian West.

Strange as it may seem, the American War of Independence and the declaration were not the only things happening in 1776. In fact, it was a very formative year for the West as a whole in a whole bunch of different ways. In January, Thomas Paine had made that remarkable statement, we have it in our power to begin the world over again. And it was an amazing statement of the attitude and the posture that the West was increasingly adopting, saying, we really have the power now to move into a new era in which nearly anything is possible. Now what’s happening intellectually in the context of the Enlightenment, in France, in Germany, Immanuel Kant is drafting his Critique of Pure Reason, the French and lightness and meeting in cafes and continuing as they have been doing for some decades beginning to think about a new way of conceptualizing knowledge and history in such a way that Christianity could kind of be left behind and part to one side.

One of the ways in which sociologists sometimes talk about the modern world is to describe it as using the acronym weird, w e, IR, D, Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic. And I slightly expand that acronym and talk about the the world we’re in as being weird, a Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic, ex Christian, and romantic, making all seven of those words 1776 was a formative year in the development of all seven. And so 1776 in many ways was the making of the weirder world in which you now live and it proves a very important The origin story, I think, for the post Christian West, not only in its attitude to religion and faith, but also in the entire world that we’re surrounded by now the things that we buy the things we believe the way we feel the songs we sing. I’ve written a book about this on 1776, and the origin story of the post Christian West. And it’s really an attempt to join together the different narratives I’ve just been talking about into one coherent story. And I’ve done that partly because I think it’s just a great story. I think it’s a story that should be better known. I think it’s a story that will help people understand how the world came to be as it is. I convinced that having understanding like that, and seeing the sort of deeper causes behind what’s taking place in the modern day, actually have the power to be quite liberating. Because as you describe the world as it is today and say, Look, this is where that comes from. This is how these things came to be as they are, this is how this cause overlaps with that cause, draw them together to show how an understanding of the world that we’re in and an understanding of the grace of God and the freedom that we are called not just to experience but to extend to others can help us be rooted in God in the context of a still a very post Christian generation.