caffeine writes:
While it's probably overkill to provide evidentiary support or elaborate your argument every time you present a standard piece of common knowledge, if you want to advance an unusual and controversial position (that there is no such thing as Western Christian civilisation) it might help to use a few more words.
I guess it is because it is a topic I have discussed here at EvC at length and so basic that I am always amazed when it gets challenged.
When Christianity was the State Religion of Rome it might be reasonable to talk about a Western Christian civilization, one imposed on a significant part of the world by force of arms and economy. But once Rome retreated Western Christianity split up unto a whole herd of disparate factions. There was the Holy Roman Empire (hardly holy or Roman or even as extensive an empire as before) but also the various other cultures. Then there was the split from Roman Catholicism into Protestant and Protestant into all the different flavors of Protestantism. The civilization of England was quite different than Spain or the Dutch or the Belgians or France or Italy or Austria or Russia or Greece or Prussia. And so much of what we call Western Civilization was the product of inventions and technology and it was theology that was the defining difference while technology and invention were the unifying factors.
Often we tend to use language in its more imprecise form. "Western Civilization" is a great example. If we look at the actual history and at what divides Western Civilization from Eastern Civilization religion is certainly one major factor but only one, and in reality what was considered "Christianity" varied far more in the West than in almost any religious example outside the West. Even the Shia, Sunni, Sufi split in Islam was more uniform in beliefs than what was found in Christian cults. What was pretty much common in Western Civilization was technology and the reliance on technology.
We can see a reflection of the varieties of Western Civilization in the Early North American intrusions; New England and Pennsylvania and New York and Maryland and Georgia and Virginia and the Carolinas were each quite different from the others and in turn, quite different from the Spanish settlements in Florida or the French settlements north and south. Each of these represented similar splits that existed in the macrocosm called Western Civilization.