In Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, Larry Siedentop argues that Christianity birthed both individualism and equality and hence modern liberalism. In doing so, Siedentop argues, Christianity exploded the ancient world’s tightly knit organic unities of family, polis (“city-state”), and ethnos (“tribe” or “nation”). George Weigel recently echoed Siedentop’s argument, contrasting the moral equality of individuals before God in Christianity with the natural inequality at the heart of pre-Christian organic institutions. Even more important is the central concept of the imago Dei in Christian and Jewish Scriptures, that is, that humans are each created in the image of God. This concept paved a long, if winding, road to the recognition that basic human dignity inheres in each person.
