Here’s an excellent comment in a Facebook thread

Peter Robert Green: First, there has never truly been a Judaeo-Christian country.

* Second, the influence of Christianity on wider society ebbs and flows depending largely on the health of the churches

* Third, the influence of Christianity, despite the shrill complaints of radical secularists, is currently quite small in most Western nations, though there is residual Christianity in most as well.

All these factors operate to create just what you identify as problems in our societies.

At the same time, the residual Judaeo-Christianity does still have an influence, probably least in the economic sphere.

I am reminded of an old Flanders and Swann routine called, from memory, “Eating people is wrong.” It’s about a cannibal feast where, in the middle of celebration, the chief’s son declares that eating people is wrong. Obviously, his father, and most of those attending, are shocked and stunned.

If a Western secularist were there, be could have a sensible conversation with the chief’s son, for the reason that centuries of Christian influence have led us in the West to believe that eating people is, indeed, wrong. But the chief himself couldn’t have such a conversation with his son because there is no such tradition in his society.

In the same way, we, in the West, bring to our conversations about democracy a thousand years of tradition that you don’t eat the opposition after you win the vote (as some European societies used to) and 200 years of belief that people who don’t own property should still have a vote, etc.

But a different set of attitudes apply in many non-Western societies…

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Peter added:

I’d really only wanted to respond to someone who pointed out some of the less attractive aspects of Western so-called Christian democracy.

I can’t remember whether the ancient Irish were cannibals, but they were certainly head-hunters (there are references in the T ƒ ¡in b ƒ ³ C ƒ ºailnge), and it was largely the efforts of Christian missionaries which ended the practice.

A friend recently shared with our Baptist Social Issues Committee a book he had been reading, John Dickson’s Humilitas. Dickinson, an historian, points out that humility was not generally considered a virtue in the ancient world, but is very much a Judaeo-Christian idea which has permeated Western thought. I would add that even those who reject its importance for themselves are still forced by residual Christianity to take humility seriously.

I mentioned in a recent sermon that the entire Western concept of time is something inherited from Judaeo-Christian thinking (Tom Holland treats this subject in his book, “Millennium”). There are many other concepts and values which would not exist apart from Christianity and which most people would not even think of as being Christian.

Perhaps we should be more informed about such matters…