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Christianity inhabits a strange space in American life. It is by far the predominant religion in the most religious country in the industrialized world, with more than 90 percent of its citizens professing belief in God and a large majority claiming allegiance to a Christian denomination or sect. Yet 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. When a presidential aide in the Clinton administration sought to discredit an independent prosecutor, for example, he instinctively denounced the churchgoing attorney as a “religious fanatic”—a career-ending insult had it been directed at a devout Jew or Muslim. The fact that the aide kept his job while the White House refused to issue even a perfunctory apology illustrates the impunity that surrounds casual bigotry against Christians.
In isolation, such put-downs are relatively harmless. The problem is that similarly harsh judgments have become so commonplace and are asserted so aggressively that they threaten to distort Christians’ own view of themselves and their past. Perhaps this has already happened. How else to explain the largely passive reception of a sound-bite version of history in which Christians’ religious forebears are considered notable mainly for intolerance, superstition and oppression?
Even mainstream news stories, to the extent that they address Christian history at all, often dwell on conflict and controversy. For instance, the 900th anniversary of the Crusaders’ conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 occasioned a spate of stories reflecting on Christian culpability in that blood-soaked adventure. The quincentenary of Columbus’s first voyage to the New World provoked an even more damning torrent of articles and commentaries on Christian complicity in the demise of America’s natives. Allegations against Pope Pius XII regarding his behavior during the Holocaust, no matter how vitriolic, qualify as major news stories more than half a century after World War II. Americans who have scarcely ever cracked a history book are likely to have heard a great deal in the mass media about the church’s suppression of Galileo and the horrors of the Inquisition, but next to nothing about Christianity’s role in ending infanticide and slavery.
Even the apparent good news of an agreement between Lutherans and Roman Catholics in 1999 to resolve their nearly five-hundred-year doctrinal dispute became, in more than one report, yet another opportunity to recapitulate in grim detail the body count of the Wars of Religion. Perhaps this should not be surprising, since interfaith conflict is probably the most common theme in news coverage of religion. According to a 1999 study by the Garrett-Medill Center for Religion and the News Media in Evanston, Illinois, such conflict “was the main news value” in half of the page-one stories in the four newspapers examined (New York Times, Chicago Tribune, USA Today and Chicago Sun-Times). Overall, conflict “was found in 25 percent of the stories about religion, spirituality, or values in daily newspapers, television news, and weekly news magazines.”
The moral failings of the clergy, especially Catholic clergy, are also a staple of the media. In early 2000, for example, a widely reprinted series in the Kansas City Star asserted that priests were four times more likely to contract AIDS than the general population —a conclusion based on a paltry response to a mail survey that was a laughable parody of social science. Yet because the series vented against such fundamental church policies as priestly celibacy, its empirical defects were largely overlooked by the editors who selected it. Derogatory depictions of Catholic priests have become stereotypical in our media culture. In a 1998 article about a sexual predator among the Catholic clergy (to cite just one of many examples), the New York Times permitted the sole expert it quoted to assert that “there’s a deep systemic problem in Catholic culture,” without so much as raising an editorial eyebrow.
A recent study by the Center for Media and Public Affairs confirms the popularity of that kind of reporting. In a review of religion coverage in the major news magazines, network evening newscasts and the New York Times and Washington Post, researchers found that the most frequently discussed topic in the 1990s was sexual morality, while a remarkable one in fourteen stories concerned “crimes or other wrongdoing” involving churches or clergy.
It is true that many news organizations have consciously increased their coverage of religion and spirituality in recent years. Some articles on Christianity’s role in history have been complex and first-rate, such as U.S. News & World Report’s cover story in January 2001 entitled “The Year One A.D.” It conveyed not only the cultural distance between Roman society and our own, but also of the timelessness of many ancient concerns, and it provided reasons why Christianity might prosper in such a world. But when a major story breaks the mold—for instance, when the New York Times reported on Professor John L. Heilbron’s revelations about the medieval church’s unappreciated support of astronomy—it often has a man-bites-dog tone of wonderment. What, forward-looking Christians?
In mainstream news these days, the word “Christian” most often appears in connection with politics. Because the “Religious Right” provides many of the shock troops for one side of today’s “culture wars,” it encounters sharply abusive rhetoric in return. Politics being what it is, some of this abuse is inevitable, and is relevant to this book only insofar as it veers into a wholesale condemnation of Christians or a large subset of them—and it often does. Minnesota governor Jesse Ventura’s gibe that “organized religion is a sham and a crutch for weak-minded people” who “stick their noses in other people’s business” was prompted (his office later tried to explain) by animosity toward the religious right in particular. The shower of insult directed in recent years at evangelical and fundamentalist Christians is typified by the Washington Post’s sneer that they are usually “poor, uneducated and easily led.” Such pronouncements apparently resonate with a large segment of the population: according to a study published in Public Opinion Quarterly in 1999, a remarkable 37 percent of highly educated white Americans hold “intensely antagonistic feelings” toward fundamentalists.
This book is not about the Religious Right and its agenda. Nor is it about the Religious Left, as represented by, say, the National Council of Churches. Christian ethical thinking draws no well-marked map for the great bulk of public policy questions—whatever some Christians, of both the Right and the Left, occasionally suggest. Christian opinion on such provocative issues as the teaching of evolution, prayer in school and the death penalty spans a wide spectrum of conviction. Let future historians assess the impact of Christians on contemporary politics; our purpose here is to rectify the common distortions of Christianity’s role in history and tell the neglected story of its contributions, particularly where these have been most maligned.
For that reason, our discussion is necessarily both broad and selective. It covers a much ground, but is not intended to be a condensed history of Christianity, or anything close to it. Rather, it focuses on the favorite topics of Christianity’s fiercest critics. They say that Christians have spent the better part of two thousand years suppressing freedom, individual rights and democracy, while choking off science and most other forms of intellectual inquiry. They say that Christian intolerance has been a major cause of war and oppression, and Christian disdain for the natural world a primary force behind environmental degradation.
That such an indictment goes largely unchallenged is surprising, especially when its particulars are either plainly false or so stripped of context as to be purposefully misleading. We refute this sophistry not by whitewashing the past, but by reminding readers of the overlooked side of the ledger: the wide-ranging achievements and works of mercy that are rarely acknowledged in contemporary discussions of Christianity. We also take the provocative step of making comparisons, where appropriate, with other religions and cultures. Thus we argue that the world is better off in many ways for the rise of Christianity, without whose influence the past two millennia quite probably would have been crueler, poorer and more provincial, as well as less democratic, creative and informed—in a word, less civilized.
Anti-Christian bigotry relies on forgetfulness and loss of perspective. Its antidote is historical memory.
