REWIND: Christian Revolution
26:13 Share

An Undeceptions Podcast.

Well, yeah, I mean, I have a connection to our ancestors because I... Sure. Yeah, sure. Because, you know, these were men who did not know what a germ or an atom was or where the sun went at night, and that's where you're getting your wisdom. Anyway, let's not argue. I like it. I can eat a big bowl of this. This is good. It's tasty.

That's a clip from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, where Colbert is putting actor and comedian Bill Maher in the hot seat about religion. Maher is a vocal critic of the major religions. For example, in the wake of the attacks on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo in 2015, Maher stated, There are no great religions.

At other points, he's specifically gone after Christianity. In 2012, calling it war-like. Now, I don't take any offence here. For certain parts of Christian history, Ma's right. And besides, he's a funny guy.

Others take a more serious approach. A couple of months ago, New York Times opinion columnist Pamela Paul wrote these words: "For me, the Bible's primary interest is in its historical and literary influence, a work whose stories and metaphors have permeated literature. But it's also one that throughout history has inspired and abetted many of the world's most violent and deadly wars."

Many of the world's most violent and deadly wars? Eh, that's a serious charge. Now, I know Pamela Paul was really just trying to build a rhetorical case against Christian nationalism in this piece. Fair enough. I think Christian nationalism is a betrayal of Christ. But there's no need to resort to wild historical fantasies like many of the world's most violent and deadly wars. I mean, World War I? Was that a Bible war? World War II?

Vietnam? On and on we go. Anyway, one of my favorite Undeceptions episodes ever was episode 45, Christian Revolution, with perhaps the world's best known historian, Tom Holland. In 2019, Tom released his book, Dominion, The Making of the Western Mind. I set it as a text for my master's course here at Wheaton on the best and worst of Christian history.

The book is a sweeping account of the cultural impact of Christianity on our world, and it concludes basically that Christianity shaped the values we take for granted in our liberal democracies. Christianity isn't just good, he reckons. It defines what is good for most Westerners today, even for those like himself who say they're not Christians.

We're between seasons at the moment, but we're not going dark. Today, we're launching Undeceptions Rewinds, basically my favourite bits from guest interviews on Undeceptions, from episodes that might have been mostly forgotten, but hopefully not mostly misunderstood. So, without further ado, I'm John Dixon with an Undeceptions Rewind. Undeceptions Rewind

Suddenly in the middle of the first century, there's a new group in Athens and Rome known as the Christians. Can you put your good Greco-Roman hat on and tell us what a Christian looks like to you, what their vision of the good life is?

sounds like to the Roman ear? It's a kind of nonsensical superstition. I am probably aware of it because particularly after the great fire of Rome, the emperor Nero is keen to find scapegoats and he fixes on Christians and he tortures them to death very publicly and horribly for the mass entertainment of the stunned people of Rome who've seen the center of their city burned down. But

But to be honest, people are not really very interested in the details of what these wackos believe. Rome is a kind of a sink into which all kinds of barbarous superstitions come from across the empire and merge there. And so there's a constant process of anxiety on the part of the Roman elite to get these kind of deviants out of the city. And so Christians are seen as just a part of that. And

People are simply not interested in learning about them, really. The assumption is that they're practicing foul and disgusting rites, and essentially you can make up what you want about them. Yes, and yet we have really interesting evidence from the dawn of the second century. I'm thinking of Pliny the Younger's letter to Trajan.

that Christians, according to Pliny, are everywhere, in every class, in all the cities and the villages. Do you have a theory about what people found attractive in Christianity? Okay, well, I'll answer that by keeping my Roman hat on and saying, well, suppose I investigate it a little bit.

more attentively, with a slightly more open mind, what is it that is immediately going to strike me as peculiar and distinctive about this superstition? And there's no question that

What is immediately going to strike me is the paralyzing weirdness of the idea that the man who is worshipped by Christians as a god, and the idea, obviously, of worshipping a man as a god is not peculiar because, you know, we've just been talking about the cult of Augustus, this is taken for granted.

But what is peculiar is the idea that the man worshipped by Christians as a god should have suffered the death of a slave, that he should have been tortured to death on a cross. Crucifixion is the paradigmatic fate of slaves. And

That is the most propellant idea imaginable to Romans. It's simply incomprehensible. So what proved so attractive about Christianity to the Greek and Roman mind? Well, I think the appeal is that Christianity, rather like Stoicism, and rather like the sense of the divine that is articulated by the Jews, offers people in

a universal empire like Rome's, a sense of an explanation for the kind of world that they're living in. We've talked about the Stoics, but of course, the crucial influence is the Jewish one. We might be tempted to talk of there being something called Judaism.

The Jewish God has a kind of obvious appeal to people who are not Jewish but in a universal empire. Because the Jews say that there is only this one God and that this one God created every human being in his own image, man and woman. So that then gives to every human being an incredible dignity.

unprecedented degree of dignity. Now there is obviously a problem because this Jewish God is the creator of the entire universe and every human being within it. He's also specifically the God of Israel. So therefore there is a kind of, you know, you can kind of perhaps become a Jew, but particularly if you're a man, it involves certain sacrifices.

And even if you're a woman, it involves all kinds of laws and restrictions on your behavior that many people might not want to go through. And what Christianity effectively does is to give that God, the God who has created everyone, and make him accessible, easily accessible to everyone who's not necessarily Jewish. And Paul articulates this very successfully. That's the apostle Paul, an educated Jew, a Roman citizen, and a

a Christian. He wrote to Christians in the cities of the Roman Empire offering a new vision of what it means to be a human being. And he kind of sums it up in the idea that there is no Jew or Greek, that there is no slave or free, that there is no man or woman in Christ, and that Christ suffered on the cross so that everyone can be offered this new covenant, this new sense of a kind of treaty between humanity and this God.

And there's something in it for the very wealthy because it offers them the reassurance that if they offer charity to the poor, then they will win the favor of this God. But obviously it also offers something to the poor themselves because it ascribes to them a dignity that is simply unprecedented. Hey, if you want more on this new dignity that Christianity offered, check out this season's Religious Freedom episode.

Back to Tom. And really the only precedent really that any way approaches it is the kind of Stoic idea that there's the spark of the divine in everyone. I mean, the Stoics have the idea that the divine is in the master and the slave as well, but not in the way that the Christians do. And it's kind of telling that Paul, when he's reaching for the idea that the law of God, which previously had been given to Moses on Mount Sinai, written down on stone tablets,

recorded in lettering, that with the new covenant, the covenant brought by Christ,

this law is now written on the heart. And Paul, groping for a word to articulate what he means by this, reaches for the word synodasis, which is the spark of the divine in the Stoic conception of the human. And it comes to mean what I guess we would today call conscience, the idea that you look into your heart and there the law of God is written. And so much flows from that. I want to press you a bit on this issue because some will say that

But Greeks and Romans had their benefaction, their euergotism. The Stoics had a universalism. So really, what is new in Christianity?

It offers the idea that, as Christ said, that the first shall be last and the last shall be first. That perhaps because Christ suffered the death of a slave, therefore, in some strange way, the slave is closer to God than to the master. And the obligation then that is placed on those who are rich to care for the poor becomes a universal one.

So there are traditions within Greek cities and indeed Roman cities that you put up kind of flashy monuments to impress people. And in Rome itself, there is a kind of a corn dole, which again establishes the emperor Caesar as a kind of patron of the Roman plebs.

But these are very kind of city-specific. The Christian assumption that the rich have a duty of care to the poor is universal. And so that means that across the Roman Empire, through the centuries that follow the death of Christ, essentially you start to get this kind of strange cuckoo in the nest. And that cuckoo is basically a kind of proto-welfare state.

You have bishops who become highly significant figures within cities even before Constantine's conversion because they end up dispensing vast amounts of patronage. They're funding widows, they're funding orphans, they're helping out those who are in prison, they're helping those who fall sick. And this is seen as a kind of universal responsibility. And this is something very, very radical and new. And perhaps the measure of it is the degree to which in pre-Christian times

Roman cities, the urban fabric consists of amphitheaters, arches, the kind of things that proclaim the glory of the person who is sponsoring them.

After it, you start to get structures that simply had no place in the world of classical antiquity - hospitals, orphanages. The development of the hospital is absolutely an expression of the Christianization of the empire. Hospitals in the pre-Christian world existed in legionary camps and on the great agricultural estates where slaves were worked.

basically to make sure that the soldiers and the slaves didn't fall sick so that those who were in command of them got their full money's worth. The idea that you would open up hospitals to care for those who are absolutely the bottom of society who can't contribute is bizarre and novel. And in this year of all years,

something that we need to recognize as not a kind of natural state. The idea that we should all care for the sick and that those who are less likely to die should make sacrifices for those who are more likely to die is not in any way kind of human nature. It's culturally contingent and it's bred, you know, certainly in the West, specifically of that Christian inheritance as it emerges in the fourth and fifth century in the fabric of the Roman Empire.

At the heart of this Christian revolution in the Western world was the crucifixion of Jesus. More than some preachers I know, Tom reckons the cross changes everything. The cross was seen as the worst death imaginable. And it's seen as the worst form of death, not only because it's agonizingly painful, not only because it's protracted,

but because it's public. And therefore, all the humiliations and agonies that you suffer as someone fixed to a cross is providing entertainment and sport to those who watch you. So as a bird pecks out your eyes, you will hear people laughing. The last thing you see will be people pointing at you. And that's why, for the Romans, it's the paradigmatic fate for rebels against imperial authority

so out in the provinces, and for slaves. The idea that someone who suffers death on a cross is tainted both by basically being a rebel against imperial power and by being of servile character means that it's absolutely the last thing that you could imagine associating someone who suffered that fate with divinity.

I think that we have basically become immune to the shock of that. Shortly after I began writing the book in 2016, I made a film about the Islamic State and went to Sinjar, a city in northern Iraq where the Yazidis, a religious minority, had been brutally targeted by Islamic State fighters, lots of women taken into sexual slavery.

lots of men massacred and crucified. And the Islamic State were basically behaving as a Roman legion would have done, enslaving and crucifying their enemies. And to stand in the rubble of this shattered city and know that people had

had been crucified and suffered death there. And worse, the people who'd done it were kind of a couple of miles away across flat and open terrain, so very, very near. And that they had no comprehension of what the cross means. And I think that in the modern West, even if you are not a Christian, even if you've never thought about Christianity, you do have the vague sense that, in a sense, that the person who's tortured

is privileged over the torturer and the person who suffers in some ways is greater than the person who inflicts suffering. And I realized standing there that that is pretty much entirely down to the role that the crucifixion has played over the course of the centuries and the millennia in what becomes Christian civilization. I think that it absolutely stands at the heart of it. And basically that is why the cross

fittingly serves as the emblem of Christianity. That said, the cross has also been used as a symbol of power and violence, whether by Emperor Constantine in the 4th century or the Crusaders in the 11th century. Constantine took the cross or a shape like the cross and put it on his Roman standards. The Crusaders

took a cross and conquered and killed in the name of that crucified one. What do you make historically about these great pivots where the cross now is a war symbol? Okay, so there's a huge paradox that lies at the heart of the Christian message of universalism, and it's there right from the very beginning. So looking again at that famous Pauline tag, there is no Jew or Greek, which

essentially is the ideal that underpins modern multiculturalism. There's no Jew or Greek. There's no black or white. We're all one. Kind of, you know, the Benetton ad ideal.

Who could possibly object to that? Isn't that great? But of course, there are lots of people who object to it. Jews, in Paul's day, who don't want to have their distinctiveness kind of dissolved into what they see as a universal mush. And so to Paul's great disappointment, his fellow Jews, by and large, don't accept the message that he's preaching. And so right from the beginning, you have this sense that what becomes Christian universalism is rubbing up against

perhaps particularly and most darkly the fact that Jews do not want to be absorbed into this and the relationship between Christianity and the Jews is the kind of I guess the darkest strand in Christian history and the longest of those strands but it focuses a problem that Christians are

face throughout the course of their history, which is basically, what do you do with people who do not want to be absorbed into this universal message that is being preached? What do you do? And it becomes more and more of a problem the more powerful Christianity becomes. So that when Constantine makes Christianity...

legitimizes Christianity. Then over the course of the fourth century, as the emperors become more and more aggressively Christian, it starts to become this faith which valorizes those who are at the bottom of the pile.

comes to occupy the commanding heights of a rather oppressive imperial structure. That's essentially a kind of temptation and a problem for Christians that has shadowed them ever since. It's kind of manifest in all the kind of bogeymen that the people are very hostile to Christianity will always bring up, of which I guess crusaders and inquisitors would be the archetypes. However, I

I think it's important to recognize that, by and large, when atheists who are opposed to Christianity mention the Crusades or mention the Inquisition, they tend not to interrogate why they see these as problematic. And the answer, of course, is clearly that the anxiety about military conquest is

is bred of the fact that it emerges from a culture that has at its heart someone who said, "Put up your sword," to his followers and willingly went to death. And the fact that we have problems with the idea of the Inquisition torturing innocent people to death is because at the heart of the Christian faith is the image of someone being an innocent person being tortured to death.

So essentially, Christianity defines the moral assumptions, by and large, of those who criticize it. It's an interesting thought, isn't it? Tom thinks that Christianity provided the ethical basis for the Western world's criticisms of the church itself.

It wasn't until the early 20th century that a philosophy arose in the West that actually sought to overturn the whole Christian way of looking at the world, where the first are last and the last are first. So the French Revolution and the Russian Revolution had targeted the church, but it had not targeted the fundamental teaching of Christianity that the first would be last and the last would be first. It was indeed...

an attempt to kind of make that manifest on the kind of political dimension. The Nazis, however, absolutely despised the fundamental values of Christianity. They completely thought that Jew and Greek were separate, were racially separate. And they completely scorned the idea that the weak might in any way have some status of privilege over the strong. They utterly repudiated that.

And fascism was basically, as the name suggests, an attempt to resurrect the kind of the martial pre-Christian values of classical antiquity and to fuse it with a kind of futuristic sense that had emancipated itself from that kind of sentimental concern for the weak and the poor and indeed, as they saw it, the racially inferior.

In a sense, if you want a sense of what a truly post-Christian world would look like, fascism offers the best example that we have in European history. It was the most decisive attempt to exorcise Christianity. Do you think we need a living Christianity in our society, thriving churches?

to sustain these Western ideals that you say come from Christianity? Well, I think it's too early to say. What I do think is that we are currently living through a process of cultural and moral and spiritual change that can only really be compared to the Reformation. So I think we're living through a new Reformation. And I think that the 1960s will be seen as a

a period transformational in the history of Christendom, analogous to the 1520s. I think a crucial part of the process of change that the 60s really kind of kicked off

is the legacy of the Nazis in the Second World War. Because I think it's not a coincidence that it's as the kind of dawning realization of what exactly the Holocaust had been, that you start to get kind of precipitous decline in church attendance across Western countries. And one of the reasons for that is that basically, in a sense, you don't need the Christian story anymore to be taught Christian values because the Nazis do it for you.

Because the Nazis are so decisively opposite to Christian teaching that in a way they kind of provide an incredibly potent morality story. So whereas before the Second World War, people in the West would say, you know, they wanted to know what to do, what would Jesus do? And then they'd do it. Now people in the West say, what would Hitler do? And do the opposite.

So instead of Satan, you have Hitler, and instead of the devils, you have the Nazis, and instead of hell, you have Auschwitz. And I think that basically serves to kind of instill Christian values.

That you should care for the unfortunate, that you should care for those who are not like you, that racism is the ultimate evil. These are ultimately Christian values, but because they're mediated through the history of the 30s and 40s, they've taken on a kind of new incarnation. Is that sufficient?

To maintain Christian values as kind of living things, I'm not sure. I mean, I think that the history of the past decade suggests that it's actually rather coming under strain and that we've seen again and again that people kind of saying, you're a Nazi or you're Hitler. I mean, it's a law of diminishing returns. It becomes less and less successful. And if in due course people turn around and say, yeah, I'm a Nazi, what of it? How then do you argue against them? The thing that Christianity provides is a sense that

this is a story that is true, that it's a story that permeates the entire sweep of history, the entire sweep of the cosmos, that there is a God and that therefore the values that Christianity has taught are not just culturally contingent and not just bred of kind of historical happenstance, but are fundamentally true. A post-Christian society doesn't have that reassurance.

And while of course it's perfectly true that atheists have morals, it doesn't alter the fact that those morals are basically Christian. And that if you lack the theological, the supernatural explanation for why these values should be held, where do you get them? And I think the intellectual history of the past few decades has basically been a kind of a gathering attempt to try and explain

Christian values and Christian teachings in ways that do not depend upon Christianity being true. And I think it's proving to be a struggle, personally.

Hey, I hope you enjoyed our very first Undeceptions Rewind. If you like what you heard from Tom, just go to episode 45, Christian Revolution. If you can't find it in your podcast feed, just go to undeceptions.com and you can easily search for it. See ya. An Undeceptions Podcast.