The effort by secularists to teach our children hostility to religion, and specifically to Christianity, is especially strange considering that Western civilization was built by Christianity. Don't take my word for it. This, from the world's leading social theorist, Jurgen Habermas-
Christianity and nothing else is the ultimate foundation of liberty, conscience, human rights and democracy, the benchmarks of Western civilization. We continue to nourish ourselves from this source. "Time of Transitions"
The problem is not that our young people know too much about Christianity, but that they know too little. In America we do not have the problem of the Muslim madrassas, where only the Koran is studied. Rather, we live in a religiously illiterate society in which the Bible is rarely taught. Consequently many people in America and the West cannot name five of the Ten Commandments or recognize Genesis as the first book of the Bible. There's no point in even asking about the meaning of the Trinity. One in ten Americans apparently believes that Joan of Arc was Noah's wife. Ignorance of this kind has made many Westerners aliens in their own civilization, as they no longer know the literature, history, and philosophy that made the West the civilization it is today.
There is also a second type of person, who is in a way more dangerous than the first, that I seem to run into more often. This is the person who thinks he knows the foundations of Western civilization but doesn't. Such people are usually the product of self-education, or cursory reading, or tidbits they have picked up over the years. They have not read Edward Gibbon, but they have somehow absorbed his anti-Christian prejudice. Thus they confidently assert that Greece and Rome represented the high point of ancient civilization. The classical world, they sigh, was then destroyed by Christian barbarians who plunged the world in to the Dark Ages. Fortunately, they go on, civilization was saved by the Renaissance, which was a return to classical learning. Then came the Enlightenment, which opened our eyes to the wonders of modern science, the market system of creating wealth, and modern democracy.
When the drafters of the European Union's constitution excluded any mention of Christianity from their account of Europe's identity, they did so because they wanted to emphasize the degree to which Europe had broken with its Christian past. As George Weigel writes in The Cube and the Cathedral, secularism is now one of the banners behind which modern European man wishes to march.
This is a shallow understanding of history. Christianity is the very root and foundation of Western civilization. It is responsible for many of the values and institutions secular people cherish most. Consequently, the desire to repudiate the Christian roots of Western culture is not only an act of historical denial, but it also imperils the secular person's moral priorities.
The West was built on two pillars: Athens and Jerusalem. By Athens I mean classical civilization, the civilization of Greece and pre-Christian Rome. By Jerusalem I mean Judaism and Christianity. Of these two, Jerusalem is more important. The Athens we know and love is not Athens as it really was, but rather Athens as seen through the eyes of Jerusalem.
Slowly and surely, Christianity took the backward continent after the fall of the Roman Empire and gave it learning and order, stability and dignity. The monks copied and studied the manuscripts that preserved the learning of late antiquity. Christopher Dawson shows in Religion and the Rise of Western Culture how the monasteries became the locus of productivity and learning throughout Europe. Where there was once wasteland they produced hamlets, then towns, and eventually commonwealths and cities. Through the years the savage barbarian warrior became a chivalric Christian knight, and new ideals of civility and manners and romance were formed that shape our society to this day. If Christianity had not been born out of Judaism, Rodney Stark writes, we might still be living in the Dark Ages.
Christianity is responsible for the way our society is organized and for the way we currently live. This is not to say our society is the ideal of Christianity, but that our society would not be as it is today without it. So extensive is the Christian contribution to our laws, our economics, our politics, our arts, our calendar, our holidays, and our moral and cultural priorities that historian J. M. Roberts writes in The Triumph of the West, "We could none of us today be what we are if a handful of Jews nearly two thousand years ago had not believed that they had known a great teacher, seen him crucified, dead, and buried, and then rise again."
Perhaps in this season of discontent, as we head into the Christmas season of hope, this is the precise cultural understanding we should learn anew and teach our young people.
 
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