http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken66.html


Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

The book begins by juxtaposing pre-Christian Roman civilization with
Christian civilization. The story of the Roman Empire at the time of the
birth of Christ is one of a society with no concept of the human being as
a sovereign individual with claims against state and society. It is a time
of disposable children, disposable women, and widespread human slavery.

Any liberal arts student knows the story: Christianity, an enemy of
science, a catalyst of war, and an enslaver of men has brought mankind
nothing but misery since it rose to prominence in the Roman empire and
destroyed that gentle and enlightened civilization. At least, this is
the story you will encounter in virtually every literature, history, or
political science course that one might endure.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken66.html


Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

Encounter Books

Review by Ryan McMaken




Those things which are God's are not subject to the imperial power.

~ Ambrose of Milan

Any liberal arts student knows the story: Christianity, an enemy of
science, a catalyst of war, and an enslaver of men has brought mankind
nothing but misery since it rose to prominence in the Roman empire and
destroyed that gentle and enlightened civilization. At least, this is
the story you will encounter in virtually every literature, history, or
political science course that one might endure. Both inside and outside
the academy, however, most of the clich=E9s about the inhumanity of
Christianity generally amount to little more than vague references to
various events that the New York Times has decided are unforgivable
sins committed by Christians throughout history.

With the publication of Christianity on Trial, authors Vincent Carroll
and David Shiflett attempt to shed some light on the historical record.
The book, a collection of chapters each dealing with Christianity's
record on specific issues from slavery to science to the Third Reich is
a kind of historical Christian apologetic. Unlike an ordinary
apologetic, the book makes no attempts to engage theological questions
or to prove the veracity of the Christian religion. It is instead an
examination of historical events involving ordinary Christians, the
Catholic Church as an organization and, after the Reformation, the
Protestant churches as well. For Carroll and Shiflett, the prevailing
belief among smug non-Christians, a belief that Western history is the
history of brave "free-thinkers" working against the tyranny of
Christianity, is little more than self-satisfaction based on historical
ignorance.

The book begins by juxtaposing pre-Christian Roman civilization with
Christian civilization. The story of the Roman Empire at the time of
the birth of Christ is one of a society with no concept of the human
being as a sovereign individual with claims against state and society.
It is a time of disposable children, disposable women, and widespread
human slavery. For example, in the empire of the 1st century, it was
not unusual for a pregnant woman to receive a note from her husband
instructing her that when she gave birth: "if it is a boy keep it, if a
girl discard it." "Discarding" a baby usually consisted of leaving it
on the nearest dungheap. The baby would usually die of exposure within
a few hours, or possibly be eaten by wolves. If the baby was fortunate
it would be found by a member of one of the local Christian communities
that often kept an eye on places where babies were dumped in order to
adopt them. The discarded babies were usually girls, but deformed male
babies could suffer the same fate, and the practice was so widespread
that in many parts of the empire, men outnumbered women by 30 percent
or more.

Once grown, pagan women could rarely expect better treatment than they
had been afforded when they had been infants. Compared to Christian
women, pagan women married younger, had less choice in whom they
married, and were expected to endure frequent adultery from their
spouses since Saint Paul's admonition to men to remain faithful was
hardly the prevailing attitude among pagan men. The Christian ideal
that men and women must be held to identical systems of ethics and were
equals in the eyes of God was, to say the least, a novelty in pagan
Rome. Ironically, according to the authors, Saint Paul, the man
villainized by non-Christians as the leading misogynist of the bible
was quite possibly the most prominent proponent of "sexual equality" in
the Empire.

Carroll and Shiflett go on to describe a myriad of other revolutions
that the Christians brought to the pagan world. The restriction of
sexual behavior to marriage was certainly an affront to Roman noblemen
who kept young boys imprisoned in their private chambers for their
sexual pleasure, and the idea that the poor, the helpless, and the weak
should be treated with kindness and mercy struck many pagans as
ridiculous considering their pagan ideals of strength, heroism, and
conquest. The medieval knight's oath to protect orphans and widows
would have struck a Roman centurion as pointless and absurd.

This first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book which
presents Christians and their leaders as often the brake against war,
slavery, the domination of the weak by the strong, and the excesses of
the State in general.

As slavery returned to the Christian world through the New World, it
was Jesuits and Popes in the Spanish world and Methodists and Quakers
in the British world that fought against slavery and eventually forced
its end. Drawing upon Paul's directive to slaveowners that they "do
not threaten [the slaves], since you know that he who is both their
Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him."
The Methodist John Wesley and his followers concluded that if slaves
are equal to their masters in heaven, why must things be different on
earth? Indeed, the Catholic Church came to the same conclusion and
condemned slavery repeatedly in 1462, 1741, 1815, and 1839.
Unfortunately, all too often, slave traders paid little attention. For
Carroll and Shiflett, the story of the abolition of slavery is a
veritable who's who list of Protestant and Catholic leaders.
Ironically, it was the non-Christian philosophers like David Hume and
Thomas Jefferson who spent their time constructing pseudo-scientific
justifications for slavery. While David Hume was comparing slaves to
parrots, Christians like the Quaker activist George Fox would have none
of it: "Christ died for all, for the Taiwanese, and for the blacks, as
for you that are called whites."

But what of the Christian record on science? Every pundit in America
knows that Christianity has crippled science and supported ignorance
among the Western world. One word is all that need be said: Galileo!
Carroll and Shiflett dispose of this stereotype with ease. After all,
it is not just a coincidence that the most technologically advanced
civilization on earth emerged not from the Far East or from the
Americas, but from Christian Europe. Unlike the centralized
bureaucracies of China that stymied novelty and innovation, heavily
decentralized Europe did not contain a bureaucratic class powerful
enough to stop innovation, and thus new technologies were introduced,
spread about Europe and contributed to the birth of a technological
society. The Christian monasteries maintained libraries, copied ancient
manuscripts, employed astronomers and preserved the knowledge
accumulated through the centuries of western civilization. The
Franciscan monk Roger Bacon wrote in the eleventh century that "it is
the intention of [natural] philosophy to work out the natures and
philosophies of things." He encouraged his fellow scientists to adopt
empirical methods using controlled experiments and observation. These
experiments would come to be carried out in the Christian universities,
the main centers of science and philosophy in Europe. Christians were
the finest astronomers in the world with the most accurate calendars
and the most accurate instruments. Carroll and Shiflett give one of the
best short explanations of the Galileo affair available today and they
point out that Galileo, that patron saint of modern Christian bashers
was never disciplined for any crime against theology, but was censured
for disobedience to the Catholic authorities. No official proclamation
was made drawing conclusions on his observations from a theological
perspective, and even if such a proclamation had been made, it would
not have mattered since Christian philosophers, monks, and Catholic
Cardinals went right on supporting and performing scientific
experiments using the knowledge of Galileo, Copernicus, and countless
other Christian scientists.

Of course, no book entitled Christianity on Trial would be complete
without a discussion of the role of Christianity in the rise of the
Third Reich. Naturally, Carroll and Shiflett illustrate that if
Christian organizations had any role in the rise of Nazism, it was one
of resistance. The most popular myth of Christians and the Third Reich
batted around today is the story of Pope Pius XII as Nazi collaborator.
How this myth got started is interesting since Pius was almost
universally accepted as an anti-Nazi hero following the war. Pius had
given Jews shelter inside the walls of the Vatican and had even taken
part in a plot to depose Hitler in 1939. This approving attitude toward
Pope Pius changed in 1960 with the play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth.
Since then, the image of Pope as Nazi collaborator has never been
allowed to die thanks to the publication of books like 1999's
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Regardless of the wild
accusations, Pius worked closely with bishops like the vehemently
anti-Nazi Cardinal Konrad von Preysing and often ordered his bishops to
intercede with secular leaders to bring to an end some of the more
brutal policies being carried out by Nazis and Communists alike.

Protestant Christians were also hard at work in pre-war Germany trying
to prevent Hitler's de-Christianization of the German people. Hitler,
an occultist and a supporter of a neo-pagan religion based on the idea
of a sacred German nation of conquering heroes made great pains to
drain Christianity from German culture and took numerous steps like
requiring the use of the word "Yuletide" in place of "Christmas" and
prohibiting any public displays of Christian ceremonial activities. It
was in response to this subjugation of the Christian churches to the
Nazi State that Martin Niemoller formed the "Confessing Church" which
would become the primary Protestant resistance to Hitler's regime. In
1934, Niemoller took a delegation to see Hitler about his attempts to
take over the churches. Niemoller personally admonished Hitler and
declared, "you told us that you would take care of the German people.
But as Christians and men of the church, we too have a responsibility
to the German people, laid upon us by God. Neither you nor anyone else
can take that away from us." Not surprisingly, Niemoller was later
tried on trumped up charges and spent the duration of the war in Dachau
where he was later joined by thousands of fellow ministers, monks,
nuns, and priests, many of whom would not survive.

For the last twenty centuries, Christians have been ubiquitous in
Western history, and Carroll and Shiflett bring the controversies over
slavery, science, the role of government, the Third Reich and many
other subjects to the reader in an accessible and engaging work
intended for all audiences. The book is most certainly about
Christians, but is not necessarily intended just for Christians. In
other words, it is a genuine attempt to set the historical record
straight and is not simply a feel-good book for Christians. The book
also stays out of interdenominational conflicts and makes no attempts
to benefit Protestants at the expense of Catholics or the other way
around. Credit is simply given where credit is due. Above all, it seems
that the authors want their readers to understand that human history is
a complex thing, and the attempt to oversimplify matters is often the
cause of much anti-Christian bigotry since it is often easier to simply
repeat widely accepted mantras about the sins of Christians rather than
to engage in serious historical inquiry. Nevertheless, these mantras
are repeated time and time again in newspapers, classrooms, and coffee
houses.

Usually at this point in a book review, it would be apropos to sum up
the arguments made by the authors and attest to their veracity, or lack
thereof. I have had to conclude, however, that this book does not
really offer any theory, per se. This is not necessarily a problem
since the criticisms of Christianity that the authors are addressing
contain no theory either but are simply tired clich=E9s that have been
repeated until people believed them. Carroll and Shiflett do not claim
to be historians, but have contented themselves with condensing many
interesting and valuable bits of information on the history of
Christianity into a single volume. Obviously, the authors have
concluded that Christians receive a bum rap based on anti-Christian
misinformation, but they leave most of the theory up the historians
whom they aggressively quote in this book while presenting manageable
breakdowns of complex subjects. Carroll and Shiflett's work is a
recognition of the fact that as long as Christians are held up as the
villains of the past, they will continue to be regarded as the villains
of the present. This is an astute observation, and one that George
Orwell endorsed when he observed that those who control the present
control the past, and that those who control the past control the
future.

September 14, 2002
=20
=20
Ryan McMaken is editor of the Western Mercury.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/mcmaken/mcmaken66.html

Christianity on Trial: Arguments Against Anti-Religious Bigotry

Encounter Books

Review by Ryan McMaken

Those things which are God's are not subject to the imperial power.

~ Ambrose of Milan

Any liberal arts student knows the story: Christianity, an enemy of
science, a catalyst of war, and an enslaver of men has brought mankind
nothing but misery since it rose to prominence in the Roman empire and
destroyed that gentle and enlightened civilization. At least, this is
the story you will encounter in virtually every literature, history, or
political science course that one might endure. Both inside and outside
the academy, however, most of the clichés about the inhumanity of
Christianity generally amount to little more than vague references to
various events that the New York Times has decided are unforgivable
sins committed by Christians throughout history.

With the publication of Christianity on Trial, authors Vincent Carroll
and David Shiflett attempt to shed some light on the historical record.
The book, a collection of chapters each dealing with Christianity's
record on specific issues from slavery to science to the Third Reich is
a kind of historical Christian apologetic. Unlike an ordinary
apologetic, the book makes no attempts to engage theological questions
or to prove the veracity of the Christian religion. It is instead an
examination of historical events involving ordinary Christians, the
Catholic Church as an organization and, after the Reformation, the
Protestant churches as well. For Carroll and Shiflett, the prevailing
belief among smug non-Christians, a belief that Western history is the
history of brave "free-thinkers" working against the tyranny of
Christianity, is little more than self-satisfaction based on historical
ignorance.

The book begins by juxtaposing pre-Christian Roman civilization with
Christian civilization. The story of the Roman Empire at the time of
the birth of Christ is one of a society with no concept of the human
being as a sovereign individual with claims against state and society.
It is a time of disposable children, disposable women, and widespread
human slavery. For example, in the empire of the 1st century, it was
not unusual for a pregnant woman to receive a note from her husband
instructing her that when she gave birth: "if it is a boy keep it, if a
girl discard it." "Discarding" a baby usually consisted of leaving it
on the nearest dungheap. The baby would usually die of exposure within
a few hours, or possibly be eaten by wolves. If the baby was fortunate
it would be found by a member of one of the local Christian communities
that often kept an eye on places where babies were dumped in order to
adopt them. The discarded babies were usually girls, but deformed male
babies could suffer the same fate, and the practice was so widespread
that in many parts of the empire, men outnumbered women by 30 percent
or more.

Once grown, pagan women could rarely expect better treatment than they
had been afforded when they had been infants. Compared to Christian
women, pagan women married younger, had less choice in whom they
married, and were expected to endure frequent adultery from their
spouses since Saint Paul's admonition to men to remain faithful was
hardly the prevailing attitude among pagan men. The Christian ideal
that men and women must be held to identical systems of ethics and were
equals in the eyes of God was, to say the least, a novelty in pagan
Rome. Ironically, according to the authors, Saint Paul, the man
villainized by non-Christians as the leading misogynist of the bible
was quite possibly the most prominent proponent of "sexual equality" in
the Empire.

Carroll and Shiflett go on to describe a myriad of other revolutions
that the Christians brought to the pagan world. The restriction of
sexual behavior to marriage was certainly an affront to Roman noblemen
who kept young boys imprisoned in their private chambers for their
sexual pleasure, and the idea that the poor, the helpless, and the weak
should be treated with kindness and mercy struck many pagans as
ridiculous considering their pagan ideals of strength, heroism, and
conquest. The medieval knight's oath to protect orphans and widows
would have struck a Roman centurion as pointless and absurd.

This first chapter sets the tone for the rest of the book which
presents Christians and their leaders as often the brake against war,
slavery, the domination of the weak by the strong, and the excesses of
the State in general.

As slavery returned to the Christian world through the New World, it
was Jesuits and Popes in the Spanish world and Methodists and Quakers
in the British world that fought against slavery and eventually forced
its end. Drawing upon Paul's directive to slaveowners that they "do
not threaten [the slaves], since you know that he who is both their
Master and yours is in heaven, and there is no favoritism with him."
The Methodist John Wesley and his followers concluded that if slaves
are equal to their masters in heaven, why must things be different on
earth? Indeed, the Catholic Church came to the same conclusion and
condemned slavery repeatedly in 1462, 1741, 1815, and 1839.
Unfortunately, all too often, slave traders paid little attention. For
Carroll and Shiflett, the story of the abolition of slavery is a
veritable who's who list of Protestant and Catholic leaders.
Ironically, it was the non-Christian philosophers like David Hume and
Thomas Jefferson who spent their time constructing pseudo-scientific
justifications for slavery. While David Hume was comparing slaves to
parrots, Christians like the Quaker activist George Fox would have none
of it: "Christ died for all, for the Taiwanese, and for the blacks, as
for you that are called whites."

But what of the Christian record on science? Every pundit in America
knows that Christianity has crippled science and supported ignorance
among the Western world. One word is all that need be said: Galileo!
Carroll and Shiflett dispose of this stereotype with ease. After all,
it is not just a coincidence that the most technologically advanced
civilization on earth emerged not from the Far East or from the
Americas, but from Christian Europe. Unlike the centralized
bureaucracies of China that stymied novelty and innovation, heavily
decentralized Europe did not contain a bureaucratic class powerful
enough to stop innovation, and thus new technologies were introduced,
spread about Europe and contributed to the birth of a technological
society. The Christian monasteries maintained libraries, copied ancient
manuscripts, employed astronomers and preserved the knowledge
accumulated through the centuries of western civilization. The
Franciscan monk Roger Bacon wrote in the eleventh century that "it is
the intention of [natural] philosophy to work out the natures and
philosophies of things." He encouraged his fellow scientists to adopt
empirical methods using controlled experiments and observation. These
experiments would come to be carried out in the Christian universities,
the main centers of science and philosophy in Europe. Christians were
the finest astronomers in the world with the most accurate calendars
and the most accurate instruments. Carroll and Shiflett give one of the
best short explanations of the Galileo affair available today and they
point out that Galileo, that patron saint of modern Christian bashers
was never disciplined for any crime against theology, but was censured
for disobedience to the Catholic authorities. No official proclamation
was made drawing conclusions on his observations from a theological
perspective, and even if such a proclamation had been made, it would
not have mattered since Christian philosophers, monks, and Catholic
Cardinals went right on supporting and performing scientific
experiments using the knowledge of Galileo, Copernicus, and countless
other Christian scientists.

Of course, no book entitled Christianity on Trial would be complete
without a discussion of the role of Christianity in the rise of the
Third Reich. Naturally, Carroll and Shiflett illustrate that if
Christian organizations had any role in the rise of Nazism, it was one
of resistance. The most popular myth of Christians and the Third Reich
batted around today is the story of Pope Pius XII as Nazi collaborator.
How this myth got started is interesting since Pius was almost
universally accepted as an anti-Nazi hero following the war. Pius had
given Jews shelter inside the walls of the Vatican and had even taken
part in a plot to depose Hitler in 1939. This approving attitude toward
Pope Pius changed in 1960 with the play The Deputy by Rolf Hochhuth.
Since then, the image of Pope as Nazi collaborator has never been
allowed to die thanks to the publication of books like 1999's
Hitler's Pope: The Secret History of Pius XII. Regardless of the wild
accusations, Pius worked closely with bishops like the vehemently
anti-Nazi Cardinal Konrad von Preysing and often ordered his bishops to
intercede with secular leaders to bring to an end some of the more
brutal policies being carried out by Nazis and Communists alike.

Protestant Christians were also hard at work in pre-war Germany trying
to prevent Hitler's de-Christianization of the German people. Hitler,
an occultist and a supporter of a neo-pagan religion based on the idea
of a sacred German nation of conquering heroes made great pains to
drain Christianity from German culture and took numerous steps like
requiring the use of the word "Yuletide" in place of "Christmas" and
prohibiting any public displays of Christian ceremonial activities. It
was in response to this subjugation of the Christian churches to the
Nazi State that Martin Niemoller formed the "Confessing Church" which
would become the primary Protestant resistance to Hitler's regime. In
1934, Niemoller took a delegation to see Hitler about his attempts to
take over the churches. Niemoller personally admonished Hitler and
declared, "you told us that you would take care of the German people.
But as Christians and men of the church, we too have a responsibility
to the German people, laid upon us by God. Neither you nor anyone else
can take that away from us." Not surprisingly, Niemoller was later
tried on trumped up charges and spent the duration of the war in Dachau
where he was later joined by thousands of fellow ministers, monks,
nuns, and priests, many of whom would not survive.

For the last twenty centuries, Christians have been ubiquitous in
Western history, and Carroll and Shiflett bring the controversies over
slavery, science, the role of government, the Third Reich and many
other subjects to the reader in an accessible and engaging work
intended for all audiences. The book is most certainly about
Christians, but is not necessarily intended just for Christians. In
other words, it is a genuine attempt to set the historical record
straight and is not simply a feel-good book for Christians. The book
also stays out of interdenominational conflicts and makes no attempts
to benefit Protestants at the expense of Catholics or the other way
around. Credit is simply given where credit is due. Above all, it seems
that the authors want their readers to understand that human history is
a complex thing, and the attempt to oversimplify matters is often the
cause of much anti-Christian bigotry since it is often easier to simply
repeat widely accepted mantras about the sins of Christians rather than
to engage in serious historical inquiry. Nevertheless, these mantras
are repeated time and time again in newspapers, classrooms, and coffee
houses.

Usually at this point in a book review, it would be apropos to sum up
the arguments made by the authors and attest to their veracity, or lack
thereof. I have had to conclude, however, that this book does not
really offer any theory, per se. This is not necessarily a problem
since the criticisms of Christianity that the authors are addressing
contain no theory either but are simply tired clichés that have been
repeated until people believed them. Carroll and Shiflett do not claim
to be historians, but have contented themselves with condensing many
interesting and valuable bits of information on the history of
Christianity into a single volume. Obviously, the authors have
concluded that Christians receive a bum rap based on anti-Christian
misinformation, but they leave most of the theory up the historians
whom they aggressively quote in this book while presenting manageable
breakdowns of complex subjects. Carroll and Shiflett's work is a
recognition of the fact that as long as Christians are held up as the
villains of the past, they will continue to be regarded as the villains
of the present. This is an astute observation, and one that George
Orwell endorsed when he observed that those who control the present
control the past, and that those who control the past control the
future.

September 14, 2002


Ryan McMaken is editor of the Western Mercury.