They dwarf themselves by refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants

From Civilizing the Barbarians by Alma T. C. Boykin.

Why did the Franks, Saxons, and others work so hard to copy Rome and to adopt chunks of Roman culture (as transmitted through the Christian church?) At first, they didn’t. The Franks of Charlemagne and the Franks that ran the last Romans out of what is now northern Germany and the Netherlands were 350 years apart and very different in some ways. In others, well, it took a great deal of unceasing, patient (and not so patient) work by people who still believed that the old ways were good, and that they had a mission to save the souls of the pagans, which also meant teaching them to read and write. And the pagans came to believe that the old ways could give them power and authority.

[snip]

So what was the key? What lured the new arrivals into conversion? Dogged persistence, for one thing. The western church kept sending out missionaries, and sending out missionaries, the Irish kept coming and coming, and eventually some of the Franks et al quit killing the missionaries and started leaving them alone, or listening to them, and coming around to their way of thinking. Sort of, because not all of Christian theology as espoused by Rome and Tour got adopted. Charlemagne, Holy Roman Emperor, converter of the Saxons, scourge of the Avars, had multiple wives because he was a Frankish warlord as well as a Christian. His bishops must have ground their teeth, but compared to the greater threats, well, bigamy wasn’t that serious of a problem. You wonder how many people converted just to get the priests and monks to be quiet and leave them alone.

Fair enough. It is an age-old claim and has at least some merit to it. Other forces were at work. Other circumstances. Other causes. But the role of the Church is well documented as in part a mission of cultural, epistemic and religious transmission. The Church did facilitate the transmission of religion, and indirectly of culture and civilization over time and under widely varied cirmcumstances.

Going beyond the above claim, Boykin is actually addressing a different question:

So my question is: how do you convert the modern barbarians to civilization? Because the modern barbarians – peoples who do not value the individual, who have no regard for the past and no respect for anything not based on power, peoples who consider tradition at best cute and at worst something to be actively rooted out and eliminated – are once more moving across the land. How do we convert them? How do we preserve what is vital and sacred and persuade the barbarians to see things from our point of view? We can’t wait for a Charlemagne or Holger Dansk or Prinz Eugen or Otto the Great.

Presumably she is classifying among barbarians, those who come from a non-western cultural tradition but as well, avid atheists in the West, totalitarian ideologues, postmodernists and others of that ilk.

I am inclined to be less concerned about a particular form of religion. I would tackle this somewhat differently.

I suspect that in order to sustain an advanced, humanist, Enlightenment Civilization, we do need religion as a mechanism for transmitting foundational culture as much as transmitting specific doctrine.

I suspect that one of the great risks we face in a rapidly secularizing age is that we are throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In our exploration of personal exploration and personal realization, we are ditching the whole framework that allows for a steady progression of knowledge and faith accumulation and sorting.

Without a pre-formed structure we have to learn everything the first time and effectively randomly. With a structure, you can start with knowledge taken on faith and then refine it based on learning and experience. Very few people have the capacity to build a framework and populate it with knowledge and build it from scratch. They attempt to do so but they miss critical elements that they never considered and end up dramatically less well off.

They dwarf themselves by refusing to stand on the shoulders of giants.

As Thomas Sowell has observed:

Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late.

A Church out of a western cultural tradition provides a foundation and platform for rapidly and consistently transmitting accumulated knowledge and wisdom in a fashion not performed in any other way. Omit that institution and you end where we are today, with snowflakes of great conviction declaiming on issues about they have little knowledge or experience and willing to tear everything down in order to indulge their passionate peeves.