From a friend in response to last night’s post :

Hey, Jonah, Nice post. If you weigh in again, you might mention that certain beliefs like, say, equality of rights among men (especially the distaff half of the race), are in fact consequences of the Judeo-Christian worldview. It is literally impossible to see a democracy rising out of a Hindu culture. That said, obviously Hindus can sustain a democracy, as can the Muslims of Turkey, Indonesia, Bangladesh, with slightly more mixed success. Still, their laws have done just fine at outlawing the slavery, second-class citizenship for infidels, etc., which the Qur’ân appears to give divine sanction to. But, again, given Islam’s patrimony, it’s highly unlikely that democracy and liberalism would have come from such a root (not that there haven’t been some very decent Muslim societies by the standards of the day—you could argue that sixteenth-century Istanbul was probably the best, freest place in the world to live, even for non-Muslims, by many criteria). Indeed, as a Catholic it pains me to say that while most of the roots of democracy and liberalism go back to the Middle Ages and the Church, the Protestant revolutions certainly fast-tracked them, and may have been necessary conditions for their flourishing.

Update: From another reader:

…seems to have missed something, though — democratic and republican
structures as we know them have initial inspiration from Greek and Roman
sources, both of which weren’t Judeo-Christian in origin! The idea that
’most of the roots’ just go back to the Middle Ages is very strange. (And
indeed, is the closest anything in the Bible gets to functioning democracy
as such the era of Judges [insert reference to extremist judiciary here]?)
I’m not saying that the resultant fusion of strands hasn’t been useful —
both Greek and Roman societies were, putting it mildly, imperfect, and
there’s a case to be made (rather, I’m sure it has been made) about how
equality before God must tie into equality before the law for all. But
let’s not oversimplify!