[The following is a draft of an afterword that may be added to the second edition of the Return of the Dragon.]
When “La Gargouille” terrorized the town of Rouen with floods and demands for human sacrifice, the people lived in constant fear. But after the priest Romanus came, a church was built, and the dragon was defeated. When La Gargouille’s head was finally mounted to the wall, the city had peace. But does this tail reflect a reality found in the world? Will a society that builds a church instead of feeding dragons find peace? Or will it just have other problems? That is the question of the present chapter.
As we saw in Chapter 6, this shamanism that existed in almost every culture around the world was accompanied by some dark things. We talked about the brutal requests that entities encountered during shamanistic trances had for people throughout the ages. We talked about human sacrifice. And it was on the basis of this review, that I argued the entities should not be trusted. I argued that at a minimum we should be skeptical of any spiritual or life advice or direction we receive while using drugs for spiritual or enlightening purposes.
But one could push back. Even acknowledging the horrors of cultures like the Aztecs enacted, one could state that Christendom (lacking any systemic shamanistic drug use) also has horrors in our history. One could argue that it is a bit of a wash and that all societies have black marks. Perhaps it is not the drugs or the entities that are the cause of the brutality. Perhaps it is human nature.
And this challenge deserves an answer. We must ask the question: is it a wash? Do we see appreciative improvements and enlightenment when pharmakeia is removed from society? In other words, has Christianity been a force for good in the world?
One confusing aspect of this question is that every society has had their own ideas of right and wrong. And confusingly for our discussion, most western thinkers unwittingly use Christian morals to define good and evil. For example, many think that a good society would be a society that looks out for the lowest members of society. But this concept and definition are decidedly Christian. Many societies (such as ancient Rome) have no such definition. And many non-Christian philosophers such as Nietzsche explicitly reject this view of morality. Other ideas on war, charity, public care, justice, and forgiveness that seem like common sense in the world today were also unique innovations of Christian thinking.[1] Ideas developed either directly from the Christian bible or from saints wrestling with the bible in the light of social issues of their day now permeate our own thoughts. But for the purposes of this chapter, I will put this truth aside. I will take these principles as independent ideas and judge both Christendom and other cultures by the basic ideas of what a good society looks like in the eyes of most Western thinkers.
And initially at least, many might think that Christendom doesn’t do too well when it comes to caring for the weak, looking out for strangers, loving foreign nations, and caring for anyone other than ourselves. The story of the West that we often tell (in public schools and college history courses) is that Christendom has largely been a force of oppression on indigenous people throughout the world. We remember the stories we have heard of crusades, witch hunts, inquisitions, colonialism, and transatlantic slavery.
But viewing the west in this way requires having a very truncated knowledge of history. It can only be the result of knowing the sins of the West but not the sins of any other culture (including the West prior to Christianity). And when you are looking at whether something improved the world that is not a good way to do it.
To illustrate, if I wanted to know if a particular medicine improved my blood pressure, it would not do to just look at my blood pressure post medicine. We would have to first look at what my blood pressure was without any medicine. Similarly, if we wanted to know if the world would be better off with or without Christianity we need to look at places without Christianity to see what those places look like. We can look at Europe prior to the rise of Christianity and we can look at the non-Christian world as Christianity rose. We can examine if Christianity took the culture and human rights of ancient Rome and improved upon them or made them worse. We can discuss whether, at any point in history, non-Christian countries appear to have a better record of human rights and morals.
In this examination, we do not need to show that Christendom was perfect (in fact, we can all agree it clearly was not) but whether Christendom was improving the very imperfect cultures that adopted it.
Did Christianity Improve Europe and the Roman Empire?
When Julius Caesar traveled north into Gaul, he was shocked at what he saw. The people there were dirty, wild, superstitious, ferocious, illiterate, and libertine. They would fight naked (apparently simply to show bravery), and their women would come to war with them to cheer them on as they won or mock them if their courage failed. Their religious rites included human sacrifices; if they won their battles, they would take enemy heads as trophies. They would paint their faces. These people were barbarians.
These people were in stark contrast to the civilized manner of the Romans. But let us write ‘civilized’ with a small “c”. Because their civilization and what we now view as civilized are quite different things. The Romans, for all their sophistication, could not be mistaken for the cast of Downton Abbey. Ancient Rome had brutal slavery and constant war. They dealt with dissent as brutally as possible (crucifying rebels publicly). They practiced widespread infanticide. And their national pastime was watching people fight to the death. The Romans may have been in some ways more advanced than the Gauls, but they were hardly a society any one of us would call good or just.
Let's examine the slavery of Ancient Rome. The Romans enslaved prisoners of war en masse. It was one of the primary reasons for going to war. Bringing back slaves from their campaigns in Northern Europe would make generals such as Julius Caesar wealthy beyond compare. Julius Caesar's campaign against the Gauls and Germanic tribesmen gave him an army of slaves and made him one of Rome's richest men. And these slaves had almost zero rights. One of the primary uses for slaves was sexual. That a Roman citizen could do anything he wanted with his slaves was taken as a matter of course. It was considered quite normal to use female slaves for sex, but it was also regarded as normal to use male slaves for sex (so long as you were dominant in the relationship). But what was particularly horrifying was that pedophilia was also considered socially acceptable - anything was permissible with slaves of any age. If a slave attempted to escape, steal from, or gods-forbid kill their master, it was common for all the slaves in the house to be put to death. [2]
Until Christianity came along, Nancy Pearcy, quoting a historian's analysis of the spread of Christianity, notes that, "The most reliable index of how deeply Christianity had permeated a society was whether it outlawed sexual slavery."[3] In other words, we can track the spread of Christianity based on whether sexual slavery was legal or not!
Further, Christians also spoke out against the mistreatment of slaves. Soon, as slaves converted, Christians spoke against the enslavement of fellow Christians. Within a few centuries of Christianity coming to power in the West, slavery, once ubiquitous, had faded from the European scene.[4] As Alice Rio, King’s College London, Professor of Medieval History, states,
“Historians of antiquity generally agree that the Roman model of slavery – entailing total subjection to a master and practiced on a scale significant to warrant the label of slave society – died out sometime during late antiquity. Estimates vary from as early as the second century to no later than the fifth.” [5]
An institution that had practically defined every civilization in history was banished to the edges of Christendom. Western Civilization did what no other civilization in history had done. By the end of the 6th century, slavery was almost completely gone from Europe.
Slavery did not rear its ugly head in any substantial way again until the discovery of the New World.
But slavery was hardly Rome’s biggest sin. They also practiced widespread infanticide. A first-century Roman named Hilarion wrote a letter to his very pregnant wife,
"I ask and beg you to take good care of our baby son, and as soon as I receive payment, I shall send it up to you. If you are delivered of a child [before I come home] if it is a boy keep it; if a girl, discard it."[6]
Historian Rodney Stark argues that female infanticide was quite prevalent in the ancient world. It was so bad that the ratio of men to women in the Roman Empire grew to 7 to 5. To show the horror of it, consider a study of 600 ancient families from Delphi where only six had raised more than one daughter.[7] This is a spectacular display of misogynistic murder.
But this changed when the church began to spread through the empire. Christian families were strictly prohibited from following this practice. One of the earliest Christian documents in existence, the Didache (c 100 AD), states, “Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion nor kill them when born.”[8] And this was lived out throughout Christianity. It has been argued that this practice of not killing baby girls is one of the primary reasons Christianity grew so much over the next few centuries.[9]
The Christian world had a disproportionate number of women; this created growth in two ways. First, it had the obvious effect of a higher birth rate within Christianity. Second, many men converted simply to get a wife.
And the improved conditions for women didn’t end with the prevention of infanticide.
In ancient Rome, women were expected to remain sexually faithful to their husbands (so that the husband knew that the children that resulted were his and not his neighbor’s) but there was no expectation of the same from the husband. Whether with slaves or with prostitutes, men were not expected to remain faithful family men. But this changed with Christianity. Consider this passage from 1 Corinthians 7,
"[Each] man should have sexual relations with his own wife and each woman with her own husband. The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife."
You can see that the first half of that passage seems like the traditional ancient marriage. Women cannot cheat. But the second half is a novel change: "In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife."
The reason we now think of marriage as a way of saying, "I really love you," is this innovation. Men and women suddenly were bound not only to a contract about kids and property but covenant in which two people exclusively give their affections to each other.
Christianity also improved women’s lives by prohibiting divorce. Women, once past their childbearing years and as their looks faded were very vulnerable to being divorced and abandoned. But Christianity did not allow this. Only in death could a marriage be ended. Men who divorced their wives were excommunicated from the church.[10]
Women were also given a much more prominent role within Christian communities. A prayer in both the Jewish and non-Jewish world was to thank God for not being a woman.[11] Athenian men would not even let their wives outside without an escort.[12] When August Caesar's wife started to get too much influence, he had to reassure the public that she was not calling the shots.[13] But from the very beginning of Christianity, this changed. The first witnesses of Jesus' resurrection (the very heart of the Christian message) were not men...they were all women. Celsus, the second-century Greek philosopher, mocked Christianity by saying, “This faith is just based on the testimony of some hysterical women.”[14] But there they were, from the beginning, people of import and influence. As Tom Holland wrote, “Christianity gave women a dignity that no previous sexual dispensation had offered.”[15]
So the coming of Christianity improved the lives of the lowest people in society: slaves and women. But it did so much more. It also improved the lives of the poor.
Christianity also improved the lot of the destitute. Sometimes people read the primary Roman sources and get the impression that the Romans gave grain and food to the poor as a form of welfare. But they did not. They gave grain and food only to citizens. Non-citizens during times of famine were driven from the city and left to starve. There was no system to care for the truly destitute. Consider this passage from Peter Brown’s excellent, Through the Eye of the Needle,
“The benefactors of cities gave to their ‘fellow citizens’ and never to the poor. Some of these citizens might well be poor but their poverty in itself entitled them to nothing.”[16]
The poor then often starved. There was no social safety net. No system for caring for them. And little concern at all for them. This changed when Christianity came into power. Brown argues that during the 4th-6th centuries, caring for the poor was one of the primary roles of Christian bishops.
And there were so many other softening effects that Christianity had on the harsh Roman Empire they entered. Thanks to Christian efforts, orphanages took care of the bands of orphans that had previously plagued major cities of the Roman Empire. The church protected the poor and provided a check on the rich and powerful.[17] The gladiator games were abolished.[18] Hospitals were founded.[19][20]
How Did Christendom Compare to Other Cultures at Equivalent Moments in History?
We started off by asking if Christianity improved the conditions of the Roman Empire and, given the above, that answer has to be yes. So let’s examine our second question: at any given point in history, was Christendom a better place to be than in non-Christian contemporary places?
A quick tour of the world will suffice but the short answer is that all the things that Rome did much of the rest of the world did everything ancient Rome did and continued doing so as Christianity spread throughout the Middle Ages and into the modern era. Slavery, lack of concern for the poor, unjust wars, uncared-for orphans, and abuse and infanticide of women were all fairly normal throughout the world.
Everyone had slavery throughout the middle ages. China did.[21] Sub-Saharan Africa did.[22] Japan did.[23] The indigenous tribes of North America did. And the Mayan, Incan, and Aztec empires all had slavery. [24] But perhaps the most brutal of slavery was found in the Islamic world. The Islamic world imported slaves from everywhere they could. The trans-Saharan slave trade was particularly brutal. Islamic nations in Northern Africa and the Middle East imported over 14,000,000 slaves over more than 10 centuries.[25] The path across the Sahara was as brutal and predictably the death rates were much higher than those on the ships crossing the Atlantic to North America.[26] Further, Islam also took slaves from Christian Europe. Ohio State Professor of History, Robert Davis has calculated that between 1 million and 1.25 million European Christians were enslaved in North Africa from the 16th to 18th centuries.[27] And that was the tail end of the practice. Around the turn of the millennium, when Islamic forces were conquering large portions of Christendom, millions more could be added to the total.
Some would argue that the treatment of slaves in the American south was uniquely bad but there is no evidence to suggest this. In Christendom, slaves were certainly treated poorly but the treatment of slaves throughout the world was every bit as bad if not worse. “As far as daily living conditions, the Mediterranean slaves certainly didn’t have it better,” Davis wrote.[28] And remember, as Alice Rio stated, for a large part of Christendom’s history, the slave society of ancient Rome had faded in late antiquity. So for most of the middle ages, it was much more likely that one would be a slave outside of Christendom than in it. And the conditions for so many other peoples and oppressed groups were also much better.
So far, our test of Christianity holds up well. It clearly made Rome a nicer place and it clearly compares well to other civilizations at the same time.
However… there is of course a major part of European history that we have yet to discuss. It is the part that most people point to as the worst part. The colonialism and the reintroduction of the slave trade to Christendom.
Let’s examine these events. First, let’s talk crusades because, in the eyes of many, they were the first colonial efforts.
The crusades are often misunderstood. They are portrayed as an offensive by Christendom against an innocent Muslim world. But the crusades cannot be understood without realizing that from the 7th century through the 11th century (the time of the First Crusade), Muslims had swept through Christian country after Christian country. They had defeated all of Northern Africa and some of the oldest and most established Christian countries. Once they took control, they enslaved and abused the Christian population. For centuries they had been threatening Europe. In the 8th century, they conquered Spain. In the 9-10th centuries, they defeated large parts of Italy. By the 11th century, many of these threats to Western Europe had subsided, but they continued to threaten the East. Constantinople was in constant danger. And the Christian minority throughout the Islamic territories was constantly abused.
Byzantine emperor Alexios I Komnenos wrote to Pope Urban II in 1095, asking for aid against the invading Turks. This sparked a call to arms by the Pope and the beginning of the First Crusade. The cause was just and understandable. The crusades themselves were fought, for the time, with relative justice, but there were certainly atrocities and horrors. But these were only horrors by Christian standards. For other cultures, sacking a city or massacring a group was not considered wrong. But when the crusaders did it, a certain shame followed. Unlike with other peoples of other religions, slaughtering innocents is hard to square with a savior that died for his enemies. As a result, the crusades are not what we typically think. Rodney Stark sums up the truth of the Crusades in the following way,
“The Crusades were not unprovoked. They were not the first round of European colonialism. They were not conducted for land, loot, or converts. The crusaders were not barbarians who victimized the cultivated Muslims. They sincerely believed that they served in God's battalions.”[29]
So if the crusades are misunderstood, what about other colonial efforts? What about the genocide the West committed on the indigenous peoples of North and South America? Anyone that took high school history knows the Europeans committed untold evils when they colonized the Americas. Through war, massacres, and the (intentional?) spreading of smallpox, the Europeans almost completely wiped out a whole race of people and stole their land. Or did they…this is another myth.
It is undoubtedly true that American Indians died in mass numbers after the appearance of the Europeans on their shores. Estimates vary on how big the population was before Columbus arrived, but it is thought that the population dropped – at a minimum- by more than half. But the cause of this horrible death was not genocide. It was a disease - smallpox specifically. And this was not intentionally spread. There are no known successful attempts to spread smallpox, and the disease swept through the Americas much faster than the Europeans did.
In "Guns, Germs, and Steel," Jared Diamond recounts stories of conquistadors showing up at cities ready for battle only to find them empty and abandoned. The fact that the small band of Europeans was able to rout the great empires of the Americas should show that there was something else going on. The Europeans had been living with smallpox for centuries. Plagues and diseases had decimated Europe, and as a result, the survivors were heartier and healthier and more likely to survive diseases when they came. Diamond argues this was probably due to the close proximity they lived with animals. Whatever the reason, Europeans showed up to a surprisingly empty New World. Far from stealing the land, they were able to settle in areas that were sparsely populated or empty. [30]
When wars did happen, it was often the American Indians that were the aggressors. In the excellent book, "The War that Made America," author Fred Anderson argues that lacking women, thanks to the horrific consequences of smallpox, Indians would raid frontier cabins, kidnap the women and children and take them back to their tribes.[31]
Now, your high school teacher might respond that the land belonged to the American Indians, and Europeans had no right to take it even if it was sparsely populated. But a few things need to be considered here. First, lumping together all American Indians as though they were a monolith is sort of racist and historically inaccurate. Many tribes lived in North America, and large areas of the land changed possession between tribal nations on a regular basis. For example, the Comanches, a tribe that lived in the region surrounding Northern Texas and Oklahoma during the 19th century, took that land (brutally) from the Utes and the Apaches. In every war that the Europeans had with indigenous peoples, it is highly unlikely that any particular tribe was the original owner of that particular piece of land.
And finally, it is worth remembering that almost every nation throughout the world and throughout history took their land from someone who was there first. This is true for virtually every American Indian tribe. True for every European nation. True for every African nation. Like it or not, wars of conquest are how the story of human existence has unfolded. Singling out Western Civilization as any worse than any other group in history in this department should not be done. And it is further important to note that the English made wars of conquest on people of all races. Ask the French. Ask the Dutch. Ask the Irish. So, the displacement of the American Indians was not the result of racism.
There was no genocide of the American Indians by the Europeans. The massive shifts in land ownership and populations were the results of a combination of the tragic spread of disease and smaller wars of conquest. None of this was done perfectly. Many bad things were done along the way. But this hardly sets Western Civilization's history as uniquely evil.
Okay, but what about the transatlantic slave trade? Perhaps Christian Europe largely abandoned the slave trade so common in the Middle Ages but they certainly reintroduced it after the discovery of the New World.
And this is true. When Columbus and other Europeans discovered the New World, there was suddenly a renewed interest in slavery. The reasons for this are unclear, but one reason might be that farmers, unlike those in Europe, had huge arable properties but minimal labor. These landowners were willing to examine options that were previously not needed. Further, it is worth noting that those in North America were further away from the eyes of the church or authorities that might restrict or oppose the trade. While we often think of the early settlers of America as devout Puritans, a large majority of those who came to settle in what would become the United States did so for financial, not religious reasons. Church membership in the early days of the colonies was very low. Historians Roger Fink and Rodney Stark argue that in the early days of North America's settlement, the percentage of people adhering to a religion was below 20%. They write that it was not until the Great Awakenings of the 18th and 19th centuries that Christianity started to be widely adhered to and practiced.[32]
So, perhaps it is not a surprise that when, in this age of exploration, a solution presented by traders visiting the coasts of Africa appeared, it was greeted with receptivity. Farmers realized that there was a thriving slave trade in Africa and countless hands that could, for a price, help tend those large farms. Slaves could not be bought in Europe, so Africa became the source of most of America's slaves.
Despite the common misconception (wrongly portrayed in the miniseries Roots), Europeans did not go raiding through African villages kidnapping and killing. Instead, they simply went to the market and bought slaves from an already well-established slave trade. North Americans would bid alongside Africans for the slaves in coastal slave markets. The fact that the slave trade was already in place, of course, does not excuse what those North American farmers did. Reintroducing the slave trade to Western Civilization after it had faded centuries earlier was shameful and terrible. Slave traders were almost without exception monsters. The trade was bloody, abusive, and murderous. But the existing slave trade in Africa shows that the Western slavers were not doing something uniquely evil in the world but merely mimicking an evil already ubiquitously practiced across the globe, including in Africa.
But, thankfully, Christians almost immediately started speaking out against the slave trade. The Catholic Church made several statements against slavery. Pope Paul III in 1537 declared that enslaving American Indians was not allowed. In the 17th century, as the African slave trade was ramping up, Pope Innocent XI declared the African slave trade immoral. But it was the evangelicals in England that had the most significant impact in the world on slavery. Starting in the early 18th century, evangelicals led by William Wilberforce and John Wesley (among others) led one of the most remarkable campaigns in human history - one that would have effects far beyond England and far beyond the Christian world. At the time, the United Kingdom was the largest and most powerful empire on the planet, and English colonies employed countless slaves. But Wilberforce and company appealed to the Christian morals of loving your neighbor, caring for the stranger, and doing unto others as we would have done to ourselves to convince England's government to ban the slave trade and then eventually slavery outright from every province and colony under English control. This remarkable campaign would be singular in itself but what is shocking is what happened next. At great national cost, England spent much of the 19th century actively working to end slavery throughout the world. They pressured trading partners. They used their military to hunt down slave ships. They fought and fought both literally and politically to end slavery in every nation they came in contact with. Christian countries. Non-Christian countries. Over the next 120 years, almost every nation on earth would give up their slaves. This was the fruit that came from the seed that Wilberforce planted. [33]
Okay, you might respond, but what about the obvious history of racism? We all watched the videos of Martin Luther King Jr.'s inspiring 'I have a Dream' speech. We all have seen the photos of 'whites only' pools and drinking fountains. We have all seen the horrible photos of lynchings. We cannot deny that Western Civilization has a dark history of racism, can we? Can we?
Racism is not new. Stereotyping people based on ethnicity is not new. Beating. Banishing. Killing. None of this is new. Every society in all of history has this record of using race and ethnicity as an easy way to judge, exclude, and scapegoat the people around them. You see it on every continent and in every nation that had more than one ethnicity in all of history.
And like slavery, it is incredible how few people even considered that this might be wrong. It was considered a matter of course. Never, as you read Aristotle speculate on the natural slavery of some of the barbarian peoples do you pick up a hint of an idea that he viewed what he was saying as shameful. No. It was considered a simple fact to almost all people in all of history that their own race was in some way superior to the races around them.
So why do we now view racism as such a bad thing?
Like so many elements of Western Civilization, this idea goes back to the morals found in Christian reflections.
In the first-century world of the New Testament, racial and ethnic dislike was as prevalent as it was anywhere. The Romans thought they were better than the Jews; the Jews thought they were better than the Romans. The Greeks thought they were better than everyone. And everyone thought they were better than the Samaritans. And in this context, a man named Saul of Tarsus (known to us today as St. Paul the Apostle) wrote the following,
"There is neither Jew nor Greek, neither slave nor free, no male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus." (Galatians 3:28)
This was revolutionary stuff. And it was not a single line pulled out of context. Paul lived his life moving from city to city associated with every ethnicity. A big part of his ministry was demanding that they all eat together (a sign of unity). And Paul was, in many ways, echoing what Jesus himself demanded. Jesus famously went through Samaria in his travels (Jews of that day usually went around to avoid association with them) and even stopped to care for and befriend a Samaritan woman (John 4). Throughout his ministry on earth, Jesus associated with Jew, Gentile, and Samaritan and made it clear that his mission was not just to the Jews (as most people thought the messiah would be) but to the entire world.
At its core, Christianity was a religion that was for everyone. Identity ceased to be about your ethnicity or nationality and became about your submission (or lack thereof) to Jesus. A Jewish Christian was brothers with a Greek Christian in a way that he was not with unbelieving members of his own ethnicity. A central part of the faith was welcoming strangers and treating the lowly as though they were Christ himself.
Through the centuries, the church viewed outreach to every nation as a central part of their commission (as Jesus commanded in Matthew 28), and so this idea of a certain level of equality remained. While our modern-day abhorrence to almost any stereotyping was never fully realized within ancient Christendom, there was an acceptance of foreign peoples as equals before God that was truly unique in human history. [34]
But this general goodwill was largely theoretical not often tested in practice. Unlike Paul, who traveled throughout the Mediterranean and regularly met many ethnicities, most humans (including Christians) did not travel much in their lifetimes. Most would travel no more than a few miles in their entire life. And there were also many influences outside of the bible. The non-Christian thinker Aristotle was very popular among the learned, and Aristotle, as we have seen, did not share this egalitarian ethic.
Further, Christianization only went so far. Even at the height of Christendom in the Middle Ages, scholars think that only a small percentage of people were willing and able to make it to church on a weekly basis. Stark writes, "Given their attitudes and their lack of church attendance, it is hardly surprising that most medieval Europeans were completely ignorant of the most basic Christian teachings.” [35]
Given that racial animosity appears to be deeply ingrained in human nature, it is not surprising that Western Civilization was far from perfect in its treatment of the few ethnic minorities that they did interact with. Throughout the span of the post-Roman era, the Christian West has a mixed record on its treatment of ethnic minorities within its borders. For significant periods, Jews and "Moors" were treated civilly, but when times of trouble, plague, war, or famine came, there would often be the same sort of violence and hatred that you would expect in every other part of the world at the time. But interestingly, in these shameful moments, it was the church that came to the defense of the Jews. For example, during the second crusade, Christians traveled from their homelands to foreign lands, heavily armed, and found themselves encountering Jewish communities and threatening them. But the great monk, Bernard of Clairvaux, spoke on their behalf,
"The Jews must not be persecuted, slaughtered, nor even driven out. Inquire of the pages of Holy Writ. I know what is written in the Psalms as prophecy about the Jews. "God hath commanded me," says the Church, "Slay them not, lest my people forget."[36]
Over and over, popes and saints demanded restraint and protection of the Jews and other minorities inside Christian borders. Where violence erupted, it rarely came from those knowledgeable and trained in the bible.
Then came two innovations within Christendom that brought a more widespread change in the average European's thinking on race. The printing press and the Protestant Reformation. The printing press made it possible for an average person to afford a bible. And the Protestant Reformation included a demand that your average person owns one and read it. For the first time in history, you had farmers, bakers, and fishermen reading the words of St. Paul the Apostle, "In Christ, there is neither Jew nor Greek..."
But in the face of these innovations, there came a new school of thought that was much less friendly to racial minorities: the Enlightenment. Thinkers like David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Voltaire challenged the whole idea of Christianity. They questioned the bible and doubted the morals contained therein. And one of the things they challenged was the idea of equality for all men.
David Hume wrote,
“I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men to be naturally inferior to the whites. There never was any civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent in action or speculation.”[37]
Immanuel Kant wrote, “This fellow was quite black from head to toe, a clear proof that what he said was stupid.”[38] Voltaire rejected the biblical creation story. He proposed polygenism and speculated that each race had entirely separate origins. In short, this new way of thinking advertised itself as the enlightened way that every intellectual should adopt, though that the biblical ethic of ethnic equality was wrong. [39]
And the reach and influence of the Enlightenment were great. Soon, it became customary to speak of people as inferior based on their skin color. This was a significant counterforce to the historic Christian ethic. Some "enlightened" Christians tried to synthesize the two ideas (as many had done with Aristotle before the Enlightenment) and used faulty biblical arguments to suggest that maybe certain races were cursed by God. But these efforts tended to be rejected both by Enlightenment thinkers and by devout Christians.
As slavery rose and then was questioned by church leaders, the Enlightenment ideas of inherent racial superiority, mixed with the ingrained human tendency to see one's own race as superior, provided a very convenient justification for the ongoing slave trade. Aristotle's idea that some people are born natural slaves was resurrected, and soon it became common to think of black people as inferior to whites and natural slaves. Many slave owners with Christian tendencies attempted to put a Christian wash on this, but rarely were their arguments convincing too many people. As I wrote above, much of the West became convinced slavery was wrong and ended it.
But the race theories raised by the Enlightenment and supported by slave owners were not stopped when slavery ended. The significant cultural differences between slaves and most people of European descent exacerbated these views. In the wake of the civil war, racism grew and flourished in the United States. Jim Crow laws were enacted, and blacks were kept separate from whites. For the next century, these laws, in various forms, remained in place.
These laws were terrible and unjust. But the racial theories of the Enlightenment lost their hold with time. Christianity reasserted its influence through a series of "Great Awakenings" in the 19th and early 20th centuries. But, for a while, Jim Crow laws remained. Thomas Sowell of Stanford (incidentally a black man), in his "Black Rednecks and White Liberals," argues that the laws were kept primarily due to cultural differences, not prejudice based on skin color. Sowell provides a convincing argument suggesting that where black people adopted the social and cultural norms of the white community surrounding them, Jim Crow laws were lessened or removed. [40]
Regardless of Jim Crow's effects, the church increasingly expressed reservations about the laws. And the church was instrumental in the ending of these laws.
The leaders of the Civil Rights movement were all leaders in the church. When Martin Luther King Jr. wrote his letter from a Birmingham Jail, he addressed it to white Christian pastors and appealed to Christian values. To the extent that southern Christians did not help the civil rights movement, Martin Luther King argued it was a failure to follow Christianity close enough, not the result of Christianity itself.
One other interesting observation on the fall of Jim Crow laws is to track the church attendance numbers in the USA over her history. Roger Fink and Rodney Stark argue that these numbers crept up throughout the 19th century and reached a peak in the middle of the 20th century.[41] Some of the highest numbers for church attendance in the history of our nation came at the very moment that the Civil Rights movement was having the most significant impact and Jim Crow laws were being repealed. I don't think this correlation is coincidental. So far from being a force for racism, the church was the very means of bringing an end to this racist practice.
As a society, not only did we reject Jim Crow, we took an intense look at the whole idea of racial stereotyping (that was deeply ingrained in human nature and highly promoted by the Enlightenment) and said, 'we need to stop that altogether.' This was a shocking and new thing - and it was a thing that was proposed, for the first time in the history of the world, by Western Civilization - first, as Christianity grew and finally with the fall of Jim Crow and the enacting of civil rights laws.
Western Civilization, much as it did with slavery, took something common in every nation for all of history, called it immoral, and demanded the world change. Western Civilization is the reason we view slavery as unthinkable and racism as intolerable.
At this point, we must step back and ask our second question again. At any given point in history, was Christendom a better place to be than in non-Christian contemporary places? And again I think that the answer is undeniably yes. Throughout the Middle Ages, Christendom was not a slave society like so much of the rest of the world. Christendom did not have the human sacrifice and infanticide so commonly present in so much of the world. Christianity had cared for the poor which was unparalleled in the rest of the world. Christianity educated the masses in a way that the rest of the world simply did not. Christendom was not perfect and many individual cases of abuse, cruelty, and injustice can certainly be pointed to but as a whole, its track record on human rights was substantially better than the rest of the world.
The subject at hand is the issue of pharmakeia – the use of drugs for spiritual purposes – and whether their use inspires horrible action. In this chapter, I have tried to show that the largest society to reject pharmakeia, Christendom, not only abandoned the worst results of shamanism (human sacrifice) but also generally had a better society. It is not the argument of this chapter that all these improvements were the result of abandoning pharmakeia. The other teachings of Christianity certainly effected many of the improvements and developments we have reviewed. But the challenge to the thesis of this book prompted the discussion: every society does bad things so maybe pharmakeia is not the cause that must certainly be taken in light of the facts we have reviewed here.
When St. Romanus mounted La Gargouille’s head on the wall the city of Rouen didn’t become a perfect place. There were certainly still fights between families. Certainly there was a theft here and there. Perhaps even an occasional murder. But it was certainly a better place than when the beast was terrorizing them. In the same way, Christendom has not been perfect. Many horrible things have taken place within the lands where the dragon has been banished. But it is a better and more peaceful place than it would have been.
[1] See Tom Holland’s Dominion for a great explaination of this
[2] See Tom Holland’s “Dynasty The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar” that provides helpful commentary and stories about the use of slaves in Ancient Rome. He writes, “'No sense of shame is permitted a slave.”
[3] Pearcey 2018, pg 72
[4] Stark 2004, pg 291
[5] (Rio, 2017), 1.
[6] The Child in the Bible, 2008, pg 203
[7] Stark, 2009, pg 320-321
[8] Christian Classic Ethereal Library
[9] See Stark, The Rise of Christianity: How the Obscure, Marginal Jesus Movement Became the Dominant Religious Force in the Western World in a Few Centuries, 1997
[10] Consider this passage from the Gospel of Matthew 19:8ff "Jesus replied, “Moses permitted you to divorce your wives because your hearts were hard. But it was not this way from the beginning. I tell you that anyone who divorces his wife, except for sexual immorality, and marries another woman commits adultery.”
[11] See the Siddur prayer that many Jewish men pray to this day, “God, I thank you that I am free and not a slave. God, I thank you that I am a man and not a woman.”
[12] Campbell, 2014, pg 49
[13] Holland, Dynasty: The Rise and Fall of the House of Caesar, 2016
[14] Flew, 2009, 206-207
[15] https://scroll.in/article/953904/christianity-gave-women-a-dignity-that-no-previous-sexual-dispensation-had-offered-tom-holland
[16] (Brown, 2012), 68
[17] Brown, 2013
[18] Christian influence helped end Roman games, 2010.
[19] Smith, 2008, pg 142
[20] Brown, 2013
[21] (Wyatt, 2021).
[22] (Slavery before the Trans-Atlantic Trade)
[23] (Nelson, 2004).
[24] (Peppas, 2005), 8-11.
[25] (Davis R. C., United Kingdom)
[26] (Segal, 2002) 57.
[27] (Davis R. C., United Kingdom)
[28] (Davis R. C., United Kingdom)
[29] Stark, Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History, 2016.
[30] Diamond 1999
[31] Anderson 2006
[32] Finke 1992, pg 289
[33] Shiflett 2002, See chapter 2
[34] Two excellent books that demonstrate these effects of Christianity on the world are Rodney Stark’s “The Rise of Christianity” and Tom Holland’s “Dominion”.
[35] See Stark, The Triumph of Faith: Why the World is More Religious Than Ever 2015
[36] Eales 1896, pg 910
[37] Davis 2008, pg 75
[38] Varga 2015, pg 219
[39] Harris 2001, pg 87
[40] See for example, Sowell 2005, pg 76
[41] Finke 1992, Pg 289
Lovely Writing, well written. Much Appreciated. However, Christ and Christendom is not represented by Catholicism. The Catholic Church is highly Politicised. The Vatican is a Country and the Vatican Bank is embroiled in much corruption in my view. -Read Operation Gladio.
The Civil Rights Act and Movement was not how it's been portrayed. More like a wolf in sheep's clothing.