What’s 1776 got to do with it?
Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West by Andrew Wilson. Crossway, 2023. 384 pp., $29.99
Do we need another book about 1776? There is a glut of books about this momentous year in American history, but Andrew Wilson’s new book Remaking the World stands out nevertheless. It is the work of a Christian looking at history, yet it manages not to be the sort of largely irrelevant hagiography that sometimes passes for Christian history and is deservedly panned by Christians and non-Christians alike. Furthermore, this is a 1776 book by a Briton, not an American. Prospective readers can rest assured that their time will be well spent even if they, like me, are not quite convinced at the end by Wilson’s arguments.
For Wilson, 1776 serves as a sort of culmination of civil, intellectual, religious, and social developments of the mid-eighteenth century. He proposes that 1776 made the modern West—which he defines as Western Europe and Anglophone North America—into a “WEIRDER” society: Western, Educated, Industrial, Rich, Democratic, ex-Christian, and Romantic. It’s an intriguing argument, but the essential problem with Wilson’s work is that the western world did not become all those things because of 1776 or the era surrounding it.
In fact, the nineteenth century has often been seen as a century of reaction—particularly in the aftermath of the French Revolution. Western intellectuals and theologians of the time maintained their connection to Christianity in ways that their Enlightenment-era predecessors would have found infuriating. Teenaged Rousseau, for example, left Geneva in 1727 for Turin and then Paris precisely because those Roman Catholic courts and their society had thrown off much of Early Modern conservatism by the 1720s. A century later, Piedmont-Sardinia and France were ruled by reactionary sovereigns—the Savoyards and Bourbons respectively—committed to restoring the power of the Roman Catholic hierarchy, aristocracy, and monarchy. While Rousseau’s ideas certainly affected the generation of intellectuals associated with 1776 in Europe and North America, it is perhaps a bit much to say 1776 changed Europe. If it did, the period from 1789 to 1815 undid many of the changes. The European settlement created by the Congress of Vienna of 1814-15 lasted largely unchanged until the outset of World War I, a century later.
Wilson is careful not to make this a book about the United States. And yet the only way to make his argument work is to attach particular importance to the year 1776, and that is a particularly American thing to do. But even the United States, so vaunted for its celebration of human liberty, was never as committed to being “WEIRDER” as Thomas Jefferson or Thomas Paine might have wanted it to be.
Modern historians have repeatedly argued that the agrarian South and chattel slavery not only survived 1776 but in many ways flourished. Twentieth-century conservative intellectual Russell Kirk argued in his The Conservative Mind that the American Revolution was “a conservative reaction, in the English political tradition, against royal innovation.” Harvard history and government professor Eric Nelson takes a somewhat different intellectual trail to reach a similar conclusion in his The Royalist Revolution. He argues that far from being an en masse embrace of democracy, the American revolution was a rejection of democratic parliamentary innovation that curtailed the rights of Americans in favor of a return to royal government. Neither Kirk nor Nelson found the goings-on of 1776 to be either democratic or ex-Christian in any significant ways. If church attendance statistics are to be trusted, nineteenth-century US was, whether measured by percentages and raw numbers, a far more churched and actively religious society than eighteenth-century colonial North America.
Portraying the rise of Romanticism as an outgrowth of 1776 also presents a problem, not so much because Romanticism didn’t rise—it did—but because it had so many violent intellectual enemies and proved less durable than its devotees hoped. Most high Victorian intellectuals, essayists, and poets rejected Romanticism. Prominent English poet Matthew Arnold served as a sort of high priest of anti-Romanticism. In the United States the situation was similar. The Transcendentalist movement peaked in the 1830s, only to see some of its disciples heatedly reject the movement’s principal ideas. Nathaniel Hawthorne’s fiction, particularly his autobiographical Blithedale Romance, served as the literary anchor for the anti-Romantic tradition in the United States.
Wilson is on firmer footing in his discussion of the rise of industrialism, which undeniably revolutionized Anglophone societies in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The massive urbanization on the island of Great Britain—Birmingham grew from 42,000 in 1780 to 525,000 in 1900—profoundly affected British politics, religion, and society. Similarly mind boggling population growth characterized cities in the industrial northern United States. Likewise, Wilson is right to note that changes in education, and particularly the beginnings of a democratized education regime, left an undeniable legacy in the years that followed 1776.
Remaking the World is a worthwhile read that posits a narrative of how the world changed. Still, I remain unconvinced that much changed in 1776, particularly in the realms of public Christianity and democracy. Many of the changes we associate with modern politics and religion are more likely to lie downstream from the Progressive Era at the beginning of the twentieth century or even with Supreme Court decisions of the mid-twentieth century. Andrew Wilson isn’t wrong to think the world changed in the aftermath of 1776. It just didn’t change that much.
Miles Smith is assistant professor of history at Hillsdale College. His research interests are nineteenth-century United States and the Atlantic World.
Image Spirit of ’76Â by Archibald MacNeal Willard, 1875