Christianity on Trial: An Answer to Boston Globe Attacks

The dominant traits of Christian Churches are corruption, hypocrisy and dishonesty if you believe the national media.

Globe columnist Eric Siegel once wrote, “When we hear someone talking about the living presence of God, it’s usually a fathead football player, a Gantryesque evangelist, or a reformed rapper or drug addict.”

When Christians protested the play Corpus Christi , which featured “a gay Jesus having sex with his Apostles,” the New York Times, owner of the Boston Globe, condemned their “bigotry, violence, and contempt for artistic expression.”

Small-town newspapers owned by media conglomerates are no exception. The Wall St. Journal-owned New Bedford Standard-Times allowed a sports writer, Bob Hanna, to write “The Long, Sorry History of Christian Bigotry Continues Unabated,” which blamed Christians for the murder of Matthew Shepard.

It was that article that caused Ed Pawlick to establish MassNews.

Christianity Under Attack

Christianity is under attack around the world, and militant secularists begin their assault with a distortion of Christian history.

“Christians are regularly targeted for ridicule and vilification by a significant portion of America ’s cultural elite, a situation all the more striking in view of the prevailing hypersensitivity toward other religious, ethnic and lifestyle groups,” write Vincent Carroll and David Shiflett in their new book, Christianity on Trial.

The view of the cultural elite in America is that Christianity has promoted racism, misogyny, anti-scientific ignorance, environmental destruction, and genocide. Religion has been a destructive force in history, promoting human conflict.

However, anti-Christian rhetoric is perfectly acceptable in the media. Bill Clinton’s defenders were able to attack Kenneth Starr as a “religious fanatic,” Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura says that “organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people,” the Washington Post depicts evangelical Christians as “poor, uneducated and easily led.”

These attacks have become so common that many Christians accept the argument, and are unable to defend the heritage of Christianity.

Carroll and Shiflett provide an antidote for this Christian self-doubt. Without whitewashing the sometimes shameful facts of the Christian past, they set out to tell the other side of the story. They provide a historical enchiridion for Christian Americans in a culture war being waged by “an aggressive secularism that seeks to confine all religion to a darkened sanctuary.”

New Light on “Dark Ages”

The fundamental revelation that Christianity brought to the world was the idea of the moral equality of all individuals.

The authors challenge the view that the rise of the Christian Church was the beginning of a “dark age” of backwardness and superstition, between the golden age of the pagan classical world and the modern Enlightenment of progress and science. In fact, “the Middle Ages were the incubator for some of our most cherished modern values and institutions, and the origins of those values and institutions may often be found in an earlier age of the church.”

Though Saint Paul is widely derided for advising wives to be submissive to their husbands, what was really new in his teaching was “his repeated emphasis on the obligation of husbands to wives.” Paul’s was the first affirmation of sexual equality in the Bible and in all of human history.

Of course, the first generation of Christians could not transform the world instantly. It took centuries for the Christian idea of moral equality to germinate and flower. But even in Roman times, Christianity’s influence began to turn people away from the bloody spectacles of gladiatorial entertainment and began to reduce infanticide. (Baby girls were left to die more often than boys; the Roman world had a population with 30% more males than females.)

When the Emperor Theodosius massacred seven thousand Visigoths in 390, Bishop Ambrose of Milan forced him to perform public penance, making clear that no ruler was above the moral law of God and providing a powerful check on tyranny. An independent church became one of the great forces of limited, constitutional government in Western history.

Indeed, Christianity brought the idea of individual rights to a world where the well-being of the person was indistinguishable from the well-being of the whole society. St. Augustine is usually remembered for his willingness to use the power of the state to combat heresy, but what really distinguished him was that he attempted to justify the use of state power in religious affairs, something never before deemed necessary, and that he limited and mitigated the use of coercion.

Europe developed as a place where neither the power of the Church nor of the State was unlimited, something that set it apart from the rest of the world and gave us our unique freedom. The rule of law and representative institutions of government began to flourish as Christian society took root in the second millennium.

While no part of medieval Christianity seems more backward than the monasteries, they not only saved classical learning in their manuscripts, they laid the foundation for Europe’s economic takeoff – draining marshes, clearing and planting fields, introducing the most efficient and organized agriculture of the day. As the monks colonized eastern Europe, the Christian faith displaced heathen cults that still practiced human sacrifice and worshiped the gods of war.

“Far from being a dead or stagnant time, the Middle Ages must go down as an unusually fertile, creative and even liberating era, on a variety of fronts,” the authors conclude.

Christianity and Slavery

Perhaps the greatest historical canard is that Christianity justified and defended slavery, when in fact the Christian West was the first society in the history of the world to attack and abolish slavery.

Slavery was taken for granted in the Roman world. While Christians did not and could not attack and overturn the institution all at once, it had virtually disappeared by the start of the second millennium. The Church repeatedly condemned slavery and the slave trade when it was revived in the fifteenth century, but it was ignored by secular rulers and their subjects.

The abolition crusade was led by evangelicals in England and America like William Wilberforce. (As early as the eighteenth century his opponents complained that Wilberforce was bringing religion into public life, and he predicted a day “when Christianity will be… openly disavowed…; when infidelity will be held to be the necessary appendage of a man of fashion, and to believe will be deemed the indication of a feeble mind.”) Alexis de Tocqueville credited “the philanthropic and especially Christian conscience that produced British emancipation.”

Christians also led the American anti-slavery movement. One of the first pamphleteers against slavery was Samuel Sewell, who had been one of the judges in the Salem witch trials. Abolitionism grew with the revivalism of the Second Great Awakening after 1800. While American Catholics generally remained silent and southern Protestants defended slavery, evangelical Protestantism was the core of the abolitionist movement in the North.

Though their owners were divided as to whether spreading the gospel to the slaves would make them more docile or more rebellious, the slaves embraced Christianity as a liberating faith. The roots of the Civil War were moral and religious, and it is not surprising that Abraham Lincoln, who belonged to no church and rarely made religious declarations, turned to the Bible in his unforgettable Second Inaugural Address.

Christians today are leading the effort to expose and combat slavery where it remains and where Christians are among the most often enslaved.

Christianity and Science

The Church is usually depicted as the enemy of scientific inquiry. Secularists say that the modern world had to shake off other-worldly superstitions in order to discover the secrets of nature. As one historian of science put it, people have to “check their brains at the door” of church.

Though there are plenty of examples of Christians opposing progress, Carroll and Shiflett show that, “Far from being an eternally heavy weight on intellectual progress, Christianity has frequently been its inspiration and spur.”

Western science grew out of Western culture, which had Christianity at its base. “Christianity equipped its followers with a mindset uniquely disposed to pursue rather than retreat from the scientific adventure.”

Christians believed that God provided a plan and a purpose to history, and rejected the pagan idea of endlessly recurring cycles of fate. The Christian God was a rational being who provided an order to the universe that the human mind could understand. That order was manifested in the natural law, and Christians did not attribute as many natural phenomena to supernatural forces as the pagans had.

Far from being an undeveloped swamp of poverty and backwardness, medieval Europe was in fact technologically innovative, with the monasteries experimenting in new modes of farming, putting iron to new uses, exploiting water power, and inventing machines that the world had never seen before.

Chinese and Arab civilizations may have been more technologically advanced than medieval Europe , but innovation reached a dead end in the East while it continued in the West.

“The Middle Ages formed one long training of the intellect of Western Europe in the sense of order,” philosopher Alfred North Whitehead wrote, attributing the triumph of Western science to “the medieval insistence on the rationality of God.”

The oft-told story of the Church’s condemnation of Galileo’s theory is also full of distortions. Galileo was “a controversialist, an intellectual who relished the parry and thrust of debate,” who ignored the warnings of his clerical friends not to publicize his theory so recklessly, and “pushed Pope Urban VIII beyond his limit.” The astronomer was condemned for disobedience, not his scientific conclusions. In fact, the controversy had virtually no impact on the science of astronomy, which the Church continued to promote.

The medieval belief in the harmony of religious and scientific knowledge was unanimously held until the nineteenth century. Only then did science become the enemy of religious faith, with the materialist premises of Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution. The idea that there had always been an irreconcilable conflict between faith and reason was itself an invention of the nineteenth century. No educated European believed that the earth was flat in 1492, but anti-Christian propagandists cooked up the tale that Columbus set out to prove his bold new theory that the earth was round.

A Religion of War?

A favorite anti-Christian argument is that Christians’ belief that God has revealed the truth to them leads them to kill non-believers. Forced conversions, wars, inquisitions, pogroms, and crusades are the consequences of the “absolutism” of faith.

For Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, the Crusades were “the prelude to the Holocaust.” Christians also wiped out the native population of the New World . The left-wing National Council of Churches agreed with them in its five-hundred-year anniversary apology for Columbus .

The earliest Christians were essentially pacifists. When Christianity became the state religion in the Roman Empire , that began to change. But above all, it was the conversion of the warlike Germanic tribes that brought Christians into closer contact with warfare. What is most remarkable is that Christian thinkers tried to mitigate the fierceness of war through the “just war” doctrine.

What is also remarkable is that Christendom rejected the idea of holy war by the seventeenth century. Apart from Northern Ireland (which also shows the mixed motives involved in any “religious war”), “never again would wars be fought in the name of Christian faith, let alone to impose a doctrine on unbelievers.”

The cruelty of the European conquest of the New World was nothing new in human history. What was new was the debate that it began in the Old World , as Dominicans and Jesuits led the Spanish crown to begin “an inquiry into the morality of its own empire, starting an ethical revolution that reverberates to this day.” Spain began to reform its imperial policy due to the Christian arguments of Francisco de Vitoria and Bartolome de Las Casas that Indians were children of God.

And the religion of the Aztecs (“perhaps the cruelest high civilization in history”) was so ghastly as to convince the Spanish that they had encountered Satan’s kingdom on earth.

The full story of the inquisitions undermines the “black legend” that they have been made out to be. Fewer people were tortured or executed in them than in secular courts. The first inquisitions were attempts by the papacy to moderate the harshness of secular authorities when prosecuting religious crimes. Even the worst of them, the Spanish Inquisition, executed about three people a year. And the Spanish Inquisition was really not a church instrument at all, falling under the control of the Spanish crown, which used it for state purposes, often against the wishes of the pope.

War is as universal as slavery, and it is only Christian societies that have tried to reform or to abolish it.

Christianity and Nazi Germany

The most lethal regimes of the twentieth century were founded on atheistic Communism and neo-pagan Nazism. Yet secularists have tried to blame Christian churches for Hitler. Bill Clinton told a National Prayer Breakfast audience in 1999 that Hitler “preached a perverted form of Christianity,” and the film that introduces audiences to the National Holocaust Museum blames Christianity for Nazi anti-semitism. As Maureen Dowd of The New York Times put it, “History teaches that when religion is injected into politics – the Crusades, Henry VIII, Salem, Father Coughlin, Hitler, Kosovo – disaster follows.”

Though Hitler muted the Nazis’ anti-Christian principles as he rose to power, once in power he began to harass and marginalize the German churches. An even more ruthless policy was applied in occupied Poland , where one-fifth of the Christian clergy was killed.

Nazi anti-semitism was modern and race-based, differing fundamentally from the religion-based anti-semitism of the European past, which church authorities usually did not support. A number of anti-Nazi ministers formed the “ Confessing Church ” and objected to Nazi racial policies. One of them, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, was executed for conspiring to overthrow Hitler.

The Catholic Church did attempt to come to terms with the Hitler regime in 1933, but conflicts continued to erupt. In 1937 the pope issued an encyclical that condemned Nazi racism and in 1940 and 1941 Protestant and Catholic bishops exposed the regime’s euthanasia policy and forced Hitler to scale it back and hide it. Hundreds of priests were arrested and executed for opposing Nazi policy. Dachau had become “the largest religious community in the world,” with almost three thousand clergymen.

Carroll and Shiflett also examine the attack on Pope Pius XII, which accuses him of not doing enough to oppose the Nazis or of actually assisting them (that he was, as the title of one recent book puts it, Hitler’s Pope). The Catholic Church assisted Jews throughout Europe , and quietly maintained an anti-Nazi policy.

Recovering the Christian Heritage

These distortions are possible because American schools teach a version of American history that ignores or ridicules Christianity’s role in shaping our country. The Puritan contributions to democratic and constitutional government are overlooked, while the expulsion of dissidents and trials of witches are focused on. The Great Awakening’s role in the founding of the Republic is neglected and the founders depicted as Deists. The role of evangelical Christianity in democratizing American society in the nineteenth century, the religious background of the twentieth-century civil rights movement and the pope’s role in defeating Communism all go unnoticed.

Uninstructed as to the truth of Christian history, young people have no defense against the one-sided caricature that the secular establishment provides. Christianity on Trial provides an excellent corrective.

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