On the 21st of June 1776, the longest day in the year of a pretty iconic and significant year
Thomas Jefferson sent a letter to Benjamin Franklin basically asking him to edit the
Declaration of Independence and Jefferson said basically hey I've got this version
the committee is fine with it but I wonder if you'd be happy to have a look at it and make
any tweaks you think it might need he said it in more flowery language but that was the gist he
wrote to Franklin saying with a version that is not the version that most of us know he wrote we
hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable that all men are created equal and so on and Franklin
writes back and he makes a pretty portentous edit to this incredibly famous document and he
crosses out the words sacred and undeniable and replaces them with the single word "self-evident"
and in that moment you have a remarkable parable I think for the post-Christian
West that we all now live in because what Franklin was saying was Jefferson I don't
think that this is really based on sacred and undeniable truths I don't think that
these truths that we're affirming today are fundamentally theological or sacred truths I
think they're just obvious to anybody with a brain I think they're self-evident they
are naturally obvious to anybody who's taken the time to think them through
now the obvious answer to Ben Franklin's edit is no these things are not self-evident actually like
there's hundreds of millions of people around the world today who don't believe that it's
very obvious that all people are equal or that all people should be able to boot out a government if
they don't agree with what it's doing or equally given Liberty that was not true even in 1776 a
lot of the founders hadn't believed it themselves 50 years before and many people at the time still
didn't which is partly why they were making a declaration of independence in the first place and
yet what was happening was people were beginning to say this is this should be obvious to anyone
who can think meanwhile those assumptions were themselves deeply embedded in Christian thought
you know the nation we're in where is where I'm sitting right now all around me are things our
people are expressions of culture that are deeply embedded in Christian theology that
are based on assumptions about humility or pity or charity or service or sacrifice freedom and
the dignity of the individual which are grounded in Christian anthropology and so by making the
edit he did, Benjamin Franklin was doing something of iconic significance not only for
America but for the Western World in general he was basically saying Christianity has taken us
this far and now perhaps because we all agree on those things we don't need Christianity anymore
and we're going to move on into effectively a post-Christian expression of the West
One of the most important things that's happened as it was happening in America it was
happening in Scotland with David Hume who was dying at exactly the same time and in 1776 as
he died he said yeah I don't I don't think I need God I'm happy to go into the afterlife
I don't think there is an afterlife but I don't really mind I'm quite ready to face
that and that development in America was coinciding with developments happening all
around the West that were effectively the origin story for the post-Christian West
the American War of Independence and the Declaration were not the only things happening
in 1776. In fact it was a very formative year for the West as a whole in a whole bunch of
different ways. In January, Thomas Paine had made that remarkable statement we have it in
our power to begin the world over again and it was an amazing statement of the attitude
and the posture that the West was increasingly adopting saying we really have the power now to
move into a new era in which nearly anything is possible now it's happening intellectually
in the context of the Enlightenment in France. In Germany, Emmanuel Kant is drafting his critique of
pure reason the French enlighteners are meeting in cafes and and continuing as they had been
doing for some decades beginning to think about a new way of conceptualizing knowledge and history
in such a way that Christianity could kind of be left behind and parked to one side [Music]
One of the ways in which sociologists sometimes talk about the modern world is to describe it
as using the acronym weird W-E-I-R-D. Western Educated Industrialized Rich and Democratic
and I'd slightly expand that acronym and talk about the world we're in as being
W-E-I-R-D-E-R Western Educated Industrialized Rich Democratic Ex-Christian and Romantic taking all
seven of those words 1776 was a formative year in the development of all seven and so 1776 in
many ways was the making of the weirder world in which you now live and it proves a very important
origin story I think for the post-Christian West not only in its attitude to religion and
faith but also in the entire world that we're surrounded by now the things that we buy the
things we believe the way we feel the songs we sing. I've written a book about this on 1776 and
the origin story of the post-Christian West and it's really an attempt to join together
the different narratives I've just been talking about into one coherent story and I've done that
partly because I think it's just a great story I think it's a story that should be
better known I think it's a story that will help people understand how the world came to be as it
is and I'm convinced that having understanding like that and seeing the sort of deeper causes
behind what's taking place in the modern day I actually have the power to be quite liberating
because as you describe the world as it is today and say look this is where that comes from this
is how these things came to be as they are this is how this cause overlaps with that cause draw
them together to show how an understanding of the world that we're in and an understanding of the
grace of God and the freedom that we are called not just to experience but to extend to others
can help us be rooted in God in the context of a still a very post-Christian generation.
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