Beating the World
Rodney Stark (an agnostic, by the way) says Christianity put the West ahead of the rest of the world. He explains the reasons in The Victory of Reason, an excellent little book that I'm part-way through (woulda finished it by now, but I got side-tracked by a research project). Michael Novak has written a good overview of it. Excerpt:
Near the end of his book, he quotes from a study group of Chinese scholars who have been trying for at least two decades to figure out the success of the West, as compared with China itself and Islamic culture:
"One of the things that we were asked to look into was what accounted for the success, in fact, the pre-eminence of the West all over the world. We studied everything we could from the historical, political, economic, and cultural perspective. At first, we thought it was because you had more powerful guns than we had. Then we thought it was because you had the best political system. Next we focused on your economic system. But in the past twenty years, we have realized that the heart of your culture is your religion: Christianity. That is why the West is so powerful. The Christian moral foundation of social and cultural life was what made possible the emergence of capitalism and then the successful transition to democratic politics. We don't have any doubt about this."
