I might add that the dichotomy between Christian civilization and secular civilization is also largely an intellectual house of cards. Western secular modernity is the outgrowth of a Judeo-Christian world view (for reasons I won’t list now) and not something clearly distinct from it. And that lack of a black and white historical rupture is why we have all these contrived evolution vs. creation debates from people who cannot accept that there is not some clear-cut historical distinction between Christianity – the religion which minimizes the difference between god and man to the point that it almost erases the difference between the religious and the secular – and secular modernity. Judeo-Christianity is radically different from other religions because it reveals the sacrificial processes by which the other religions work; and in doing so, it makes sacred the person, which is key to understanding how a secular, free market modernity evolved from out of the ritualized social hierarchies of the classical world.
