How Missions, not "Enlightenment," creates Democracy.

Robert Woodberry

Lately I've been reading four very different works that demonstrate the same point: how biblical teachings have liberated a huge portion of humanity, even non-Christian societies, and how the Gospel continues to have this effect.  Two of these works are contemporary mission stories: Melanie Kirkpatrick's Escape from North Korea: The Untold Story of Asia's Underground Railroad, and Brian Hogan's autobiographical There's a Sheep in my Bathtub: Birth of a Mongolian Church Planting Movement. 

The other two works are historical, and more academic.  One is a manuscript kindly sent me by Oxford historian Allan Chapman, of his new book refuting "Enlightenment" charges against Christianity about science, and showing how the Gospel midwifed the birth and nurtured the growth of modern science.  Lacking permission, I won't be quoting that book, which is due to be published next year, but I may refer to some of its contents.  The other work is a cautiously-phrased, extensively-footnoted, and mathematically-sophisticated article entitled "The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy," by Robert Woodberry, a political scientist at the University of Singapore.  (Woodberry tells me he plans to publish a more accessible book arguing the same ideas.)

All four tend to confirm, in different ways, the thesis of a fifth book that I finished a month or two ago: The Book That Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization, by my friend, the Indian philosopher Vishal Mangalwadi.  The Bible is, it seems, responsible for most of the good parts of modern civilization, the reform movements Enlightenment philosophers often take credit for, and that get discussed in text books and lectures with nary a positive mention of Christianity.  (I may deconstruct one particularly aggregious CNN smeer against Christianity in a coming post.) 

Woodberry's article will be the focus of this post, illustrated and extended by reference to the other three.  (Vishal's book, and the new book on Christianity and the history of science, will be reviewed separately, the Lord be willing, in the future.)