In a really fascinating chapter (2, 'Quirks', p17ff) of Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West (Crossway 2023), Andrew Wilson shows that we are WEIRDER*, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian and Romantic.
Our experiences are significantly different from those of most people who have ever lived. And our thinking and values are shaped by a strange mixture of Christianity, Romanticism and Ex- Post- or Anti-Christianity.
"Even if the God of Abraham is dead to you, your language, legal framework, moral imagination, and senses of self are all haunted by his ghost." (p22)
We can see all this in some of our slogans and the motifs of our culture. Characters find themselves or follow their hearts or must be true to themselves (p22). Cf. also "don't be evil" and "just do it".
He fascinatingly charts how WEIRDER values might be seen in:
- Hamilton
- The West Wing
- Harry Potter
- 1917
- Hilary Mantel's Cromwell trilogy
He adds that he avoided more obviously Christian examples like The Lord of the Rings, Beyonce's Lemonade, Scorsese's Silence or Marilynne Robinson's Gilead.
He also mentions The Revenant and Inception, Adele's 21, Breaking Bad, Black Panther and There Will Be Blood.
Wilson locates successor ideology, intersectionality, wokeness, identity politics, cultural Marxism, social justice etc. as WEIRDER, owing much to Christianity (Matthew 20:16l Luke 1:52; Philippians 2:8) as well as Marx and Freud (p35f).
Therapeutic expressive individualism and liquid modernity are in a revolt against the givenness of things (pp36-38)
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* WEIRD was coined by Henrich, Heine & Norenzaya, 'The Weirdest People in the World?' Behaviour and Brain Science 33 (2010), 61-83. See also Henrich, The WEIRDest People in the World (Allen Lane, 2020)
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