Christianity's civilizational track record

The honest concession. The Crusades (especially the 1099 Jerusalem massacre, the 1204 sack of Christian Constantinople) included real atrocities. The Spanish Inquisition (~1483 onward) executed roughly three to five thousand people and used torture. The Wars of Religion (especially the Thirty Years War, 1618 to 1648) killed perhaps eight million in central Europe. European colonialism after 1492 frequently invoked Christian justification for conquest. The Atlantic slave trade was conducted in nominally Christian societies. The site does not minimise these.

The honest engagement. Atrocities have been committed under every worldview. The twentieth century's atheist totalitarian regimes (Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot) killed approximately one hundred million people in roughly fifty years. Steven Pinker (Better Angels, 2011) presents the data; the death toll comparison is not in dispute.

The relevant question is what the religion teaches, not what every nominal adherent has done. A Christianity that produces Hitler also produces Bonhoeffer. A Christianity that produces Torquemada also produces Bartolomé de las Casas, the Dominican who denounced Spanish atrocities in the New World. The same tradition produces both. Christ commands love of enemies. Paul condemns vengeance. Atrocities were committed despite the central teaching, not because of it.

Christianity has been the engine of much of what modern people consider moral progress. Abolition: William Wilberforce, the Clapham Sect, the Quakers, the wider British and American abolitionist movements were predominantly Christian driven. The hospital system: Basil of Caesarea's Basiliad (~370 AD) was the first organised hospital. The university system: Bologna, Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, all Christian foundations. Modern science: Boyle, Newton, Faraday, Maxwell, Mendel, Lemaître. Equal human dignity as a category: Tom Holland (Dominion, 2019), a non Christian historian, argues at length that the Western moral commitments most modern secular people take for granted trace specifically to Christian origins.

The site's argument: the historical record is mixed. There is genuine evil and disproportionate good. The mixed record is what one would expect if Christianity were a true religion taught to fallen humans, who sometimes obey it and sometimes betray it. It is not what one would expect if Christianity were primarily a tool of power; tools of power do not produce abolitionists, hospitals, universities, and modern science.

Reading

• Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind, 2019.
• Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God, 2003.
• David Bentley Hart, Atheist Delusions, 2009.
• James Hannam, God's Philosophers, 2009.