I suspect she’d agree - maybe all the way up to the part about ‘help you to master yourself’. That part could probably use more unpacking, since to some extent, I think she’s saying we can’t even master ourselves. But in another sense - as in cultivating self-control, yeah. All the way.
Another teaser from earlier in the book … (the bulk of which is about trying to layout a ‘secular’ appeal for many of these fruits since ‘church’ and ‘religion’ is so off-putting to so many by now.)
Most ancient societies, of which we know most about the Greeks and Romans, did not believe all humans were equal. It was the claim of the tiny nation of Israel, and later the steadily spreading Christians, that painfully, centuries-slowly, via myriad personal and institutional screwups, embedded the idea that being a human was the baseline measure of value. It has become utterly foundational in many civilizations, to the extent that its origins are now largely invisible. The French and American Revolutions may have claimed it to be “self-evident,” the authors of the International Declaration of Human Rights may have excised the religious underpinnings, but they were building on a framework laid by medieval monastic scholars interpreting Scripture. Seidentop concludes that “the Christian conception of God became the means of creating the brotherhood of man . . . that both required and justified the equal moral standing of all humans.”
Secular humanism, while it has made a land grab for the brand, is actually a cousin of Christian humanism, drawing deeply (and often wisely) from Christian anthropology. Even though there may be family squabbles, and some secular humanists could be accused of stealing the family silver, I’d want to say, like the Bishop in Les Misérables to Jean Valjean, take it. Take it all. Spread it. Use it. I don’t know how you ground a belief that all humans are equal outside of some kind of faith, but that’s ok. The belief is so important and so liberating I just want more of it in the world.
Oldfield, Elizabeth. Fully Alive: Tending to the Soul in Turbulent Times (pp. 136-137). Baker Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
To me, Oldfield’s carefree cutting loose of the grounding for these important beliefs - a grounding which so many apologists of recent centuries have championed Christianity as being so necessary for, is itself an interesting challenge. In contrast, I remember a Jewish Rabbi (in conversation with Catholic Bishop Barron on an interview by David Rubin) referred to all this as “cut-flower ethics”. Meaning - yes - go ahead and pretend that you can have all these great values sans the religious underpinnings that gave them to you, and maybe you will prize them successfully enough in your own lifetime; but what about your children? And their children? Will it be good enough for them that this just happened to be grand-dad’s preference? His answer to his own rhetorical question there being - probably not. Like a beautiful flower that’s been cut and removed from its nourishing soils - yes - it’s still beautiful for the moment, but its beauty will now fade much more quickly.
And that all sounded convincingly reasonable to me as an analogy. Maybe even still does. But Elizabeth’s appeal - isn’t so much (I think) to exorcise Christianity as it is to convince people to take another look at it peaking in through the back door as it were. Will have to think about this more, though, as I’m suspecting the cracks are showing in this so-called apologetic too.