David Bentley Hart: uncertainty

Transcript context

…If one draws a line down the middle of Europe with Orthodoxy to the right of that line, those nations seem to be much less democratic, or democratic for shorter periods of time. Is there something causal going on there? Or is that just historical accident? I don’t know if Orthodoxy, as such, is the issue, but the history of those nations is radically different in any number of ways. Some of them, in the case, say, of most of the Slavic nations, have simply retained habits of governance and habits of social organization that go back to a very pre-democratic past. I don’t know if there’s any causal relationship between the kind of Christianity because, of course, Western democratic institutions tended to go hand in hand with some degree of laicization, some degree of secularization. The whole point of the French Revolution would be the overthrow of the ancien régime, which is both state and church, and you’re dealing with absolutist Gallican Church, in a sense, that’s a way of government. My suspicion is this is mostly historical accident. The cultural tendencies towards reaction in the East mostly just have to do with the material conditions and the political histories and the relative material isolation from the huge period of Western European expansion of wealth, expansion of power, and ferment of social change and new ideas. It was simply the case that after the Middle Ages, early modernity, Western Europe was the center of economic and political power in the Western world. Let’s say Poland, Slovenia, Czechia, which have a lot of Catholicism in their backgrounds — they seem to be converging on Western norms, living standards much more than, say, the EU members to the East: Bulgaria, Romania.…

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