Chris Jepson: How's that working out for you?

Context is everything. Our history is largely knowable (in its broad outlines). Science fiction author Isaac Asimov wrote a series of books titled “The Foundation.” In it he imagines a recorded human history that is hundreds of thousands of years old; humanity has spread throughout the universe. So old, that much of the record is lost and forgotten.

Our recorded history, by contrast, is at best 6,000 to 7,000 years old. We’ve cave paintings thousands of years older but our ability to “put in order” historical events, based on actual words/symbols, well, our story is but a blink of an eye, historically speaking.

All of us have the ability (if so inclined) to “put in context” the human story and where we fit into the narrative. We can see the “progress” we’ve made as a species (the two steps forward/one step backwards or worse motif). Dates and historical events do have relevance to us moderns today.

In August of 490 BC for example, an army of Athenians defeated an invading force of Persians at the Battle of Marathon. But for this one battle, some historians argue, the development of the West might have been put at serious risk. If the Persians had prevailed, Greece may have been occupied and the flowering of Athenian culture that produced the great advances in astronomy, philosophy, drama and mathematics stillborn. The ripple effects to the development of the West of that loss (500 BC Athens) are hard to imagine and challenging to calculate.

The date I am interested in today, however, is Oct. 10, 732 AD. On that date two armies fought near Tours, France. A Christian army led by Charles “The Hammer” Martel defeated an invading Muslim Army, thus stopping the spread of Islam into Europe. Again, historians argue over the significance of this one battle but Islam was undeniably stopped at the peak of its military expansion and did not again threaten Europe with occupation.

Imagine how different the West would be today if Islam had become the dominant European religion. There are a lot of “what-ifs” in such speculation, but we need to look no further for the impact of theocracies on the development of nations (and cultures) than the Middle East today. Would anyone reasonably argue that the people of North Africa and the Middle East have been well served by their state religion(s)?

A Christian Europe without the Renaissance, Reformation and the Enlightenment may have remained as theocratically oppressed as today’s Saudi Arabia or Iran. Recall the Catholic Church’s abominable treatment of Galileo, or the Inquisition. To the degree that the Islamic religion facilitated or inhibited human development, again, is subject to debate. The secular changes that were required to create modern Europe (and the West), I assert, would not have occurred if the Caliphate of Islam had risen out of Rome instead of Istanbul.

In 1648, The Treaty of Westphalia, for all intents and purposes, essentially ended religious warfare in Europe. Three hundred and sixty-five years after Europeans stopped murdering one another over “a” god, religion still destroys lives daily in the Middle East.

The West has relentlessly cast off the shackles of religious dogma. We are free to pray to whomever or whatever (dollars, etc.). Or not. But for one battle, 1281 years ago this month, that might not be our experience today.

For those Americans who think more God in governance a good thing, look no further than the Middle East to see how that’s working out.