Fact Check — Christianity, Enlightenment, Science, Violence, Slavery, and Tom Holland’s Dominion

Tags: christianity enlightenment tomholland dominion history factcheck westerncivilization scienceandreligion abolition inquisition nazism obsidianresearch

Core Question

This note fact-checks a long video-response debate over Tom Holland’s thesis in Dominion: that modern Western moral intuitions — especially dignity, equality, concern for victims, conscience, human rights, abolition, and suspicion of domination — are deeply shaped by Christianity.

The debate repeatedly turns on this issue:

Did Christianity create, inspire, distort, or merely coexist with modern Western values?

The most accurate answer is multicausal:

Christianity was one major genealogical source of modern Western moral and political ideals, but not the only source. The Enlightenment, Greco-Roman philosophy, Judaism, Roman law, natural law, Reformation conflict, scientific institutions, capitalism, state formation, abolitionist activism, enslaved resistance, and secular moral philosophy also mattered.

Executive Summary

Best Overall Verdict

The pro-Christian responder is often right against crude anti-Christian myths:

• Christianity was not simply anti-reason.
• The Middle Ages were not a thousand-year intellectual blackout.
• The Inquisition is often exaggerated in popular memory.
• The European Wars of Religion were not purely religious.
• Christianity contributed to science, education, literacy, charity, abolition, civil society, and human rights.
• Many reforms inside Christian civilization came from Christian moral critique.
• Tom Holland does not simply argue “Christianity existed, therefore good things happened.”

But the pro-Christian response also overreaches:

• Christianity did not single-handedly create modern science.
• Christianity did not straightforwardly end slavery.
• Christian institutions were not merely corrupted by power from the outside; Christian theology itself sometimes justified coercion.
• Christian exclusivism, anti-heresy theology, and church-state coercion really did contribute to persecution.
• Christian antisemitism helped shape the cultural background in which modern antisemitism developed, even though Nazism was not simply Christian.
• “Christianity caused all modern goods” is as simplistic as “Christianity caused all Western evils.”

Most Defensible Formulation

Modern Western morality is a hybrid inheritance. Christianity profoundly shaped Western ideas of dignity, conscience, moral equality, charity, victimhood, abolition, and human rights. But those ideas were filtered through Greco-Roman philosophy, Jewish scripture, Roman law, medieval canon law, Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution, Enlightenment rationalism, liberal constitutionalism, capitalism, social reform, and secular moral philosophy.

Distilled synthesis

This fact-check supplies the Christianity-and-modernity evidence layer for Was the Enlightenment a Rupture or a Development?. The current provisional judgment is in , with the long-form writing route in .

1. Joshua, Conquest Literature, and Hyperbole

Claim

Biblical conquest literature, especially Joshua, uses ancient Near Eastern hyperbole.

Verdict

Mostly accurate, but incomplete.

K. Lawson Younger Jr.’s Ancient Conquest Accounts compares Joshua 9–12 with ancient Near Eastern conquest texts and argues that biblical conquest language shares rhetorical conventions with surrounding cultures.

This supports the claim that phrases such as:

• “all the land”
• “left no survivors”
• “utterly destroyed”
• “all Israel”

may function as stock conquest hyperbole, not literal modern war reporting.

Important Qualification

This does not eliminate the moral problem.

Even if Joshua uses hyperbole, the text can still present:

• divinely sanctioned violence
• herem warfare
• conquest ideology
• religious legitimation of war

Best Correction

The conquest narratives plausibly use ancient Near Eastern hyperbolic war rhetoric. But that does not by itself dissolve the moral issue, because the text still frames violence through divine command and covenantal conquest.

Sources

https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ancient-conquest-accounts-9780567557049/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/ancient-conquest-accounts-a-study-in-ancient-near-eastern-and-biblical-history-writing-jsot-supplement-98/

2. Christianity, War, and Violence

Claim

Christianity is negatively associated with interstate armed conflict.

Verdict

Partly accurate, but too strong if treated as proof that Christianity causes peace.

Davis Brown’s article “The Influence of Religion on Interstate Armed Conflict” studies government religious preference and first use of force between 1946 and 2002. It finds that some forms of Christian government religious preference are negatively associated with initiating interstate armed conflict.

Key Limitation

The study measures Government Religious Preference, not Christianity as doctrine, piety, or population religiosity.

A careful formulation:

In Brown’s post-1946 interstate-conflict dataset, states with higher Christian government religious preference were statistically less likely to initiate interstate armed conflict after controls. This does not prove that Christianity as such caused lower violence across history.

Claim

Religiosity is negatively associated with willingness to fight in territorial disputes.

Verdict

Partly accurate, but not Christianity-specific.

Nam Kyu Kim’s work on territorial disputes and willingness to fight includes a variable for religiosity that appears negatively associated with willingness to fight in some models. But the article’s main finding is that territorial disputes increase willingness to fight.

Best Correction

Some modern political-science models suggest that religiosity or Christian government preference can correlate with lower willingness to fight or lower first use of force. These findings rebut crude “Christianity inherently causes war” claims, but they do not prove Christianity generally reduces violence.

Sources

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12292
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26651615
https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joupea/v57y2020i3p406-421.html
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343319880952

3. The Wars of Religion

Claim

The wars of religion were basically not religious.

Verdict

False if stated strongly.

A better claim:

The European Wars of Religion were not purely religious. They were religious, political, dynastic, territorial, legal, and economic conflicts at the same time.

Why the Strong Claim Fails

The Reformation fractured Europe’s religious order. Confessional identity shaped:

• political legitimacy
• rebellion
• alliance-making
• massacres
• propaganda
• toleration debates
• state-building

The French Wars of Religion and Thirty Years’ War cannot be explained without Catholic-Protestant conflict.

Why There Is a Kernel of Truth

These wars were not merely theology in arms. They also involved:

• dynastic rivalries
• Habsburg-Bourbon competition
• territorial ambitions
• taxation
• noble factionalism
• local autonomy
• balance-of-power politics

France’s support for Protestant powers against Catholic Habsburgs shows that political strategy could override confessional identity.

Best Correction

The wars were significantly religious, but not reducible to religion alone. Religion was one major causal and organizing factor among several.

Sources

https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/The-Wars-of-Religion
https://www.britannica.com/event/Thirty-Years-War
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/
https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/47505/excerpt/9780521547505_excerpt.pdf

4. William Cavanaugh and The Myth of Religious Violence

Claim

The modern category of “religious violence” is unstable and often politically loaded.

Verdict

Useful corrective, but not a knockout argument.

William Cavanaugh argues that the distinction between “religious violence” and “secular violence” is often incoherent and used to legitimate the modern state.

This is valuable because it rejects simplistic claims like:

Religion causes violence; secularism solves violence.

But Cavanaugh’s argument should not be misused to imply:

Religion was irrelevant to religious wars, crusades, inquisitions, or persecution.

Best Correction

Religious, political, economic, and social motives were often inseparable. That means religion was not the only cause, not that religion was not a cause.

Sources

https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Religious-Violence-Ideology-Conflict/dp/0195385047
https://radicalisationresearch.org/research/myth-of-religious-violence/

5. Tom Holland and Christianity’s Influence on Humanism

Claim

Secular humanism and Enlightenment values did not evolve in a vacuum.

Verdict

True.

No serious historian would say Enlightenment humanism came from nowhere. Enlightenment figures inherited, transformed, and contested Christian assumptions.

Many early modern and Enlightenment thinkers were Christian, theistic, deistic, heterodox Christian, or deeply shaped by Christian culture.

Examples:

• Francis Bacon
• George Berkeley
• John Locke
• Isaac Newton
• René Descartes
• Immanuel Kant
• Adam Smith
• Edmund Burke
• Thomas Hobbes
• Galileo
• Kepler

Important Distinction

Influenced by Christianity ≠ reducible to Christianity.

The Enlightenment was partly an heir to Christianity and partly a critique of clerical authority, persecution, inherited hierarchy, and revealed religion.

Best Correction

Christianity was a major source of modern Western humanism, but modern humanism is not simply Christianity under another name.

Sources

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
https://www.history.com/articles/enlightenment

6. Tom Holland’s Religious Identity

Claim

Tom Holland is not a Christian.

Verdict

Basically accurate, with nuance.

Holland is often described as a cultural Christian, Christian-influenced agnostic, or “Protestant agnostic,” not a conventional orthodox Christian believer.

Best Correction

Holland is best described as a culturally Christian or Christian-influenced agnostic, not a confessional theologian or standard Christian apologist.

Source

https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/can-you-really-be-a-christian-without-believing-in-god-jsrctbf5n

7. Human Rights and Christianity

Claim

Human rights owe much to Christianity.

Verdict

Substantially true, but not exclusively true.

John Witte Jr. and other scholars argue that Christianity played a major role in the development of rights language, dignity, conscience, and moral equality.

Samuel Moyn’s Christian Human Rights argues that postwar human-rights discourse was deeply shaped by Christian democratic and Christian personalist politics, especially in the mid-twentieth century.

Qualification

Moyn is not making a simple triumphalist argument that Christianity straightforwardly created liberal human rights from antiquity onward. His argument is revisionist and focused heavily on the transwar and postwar period.

Best Correction

Christianity supplied important concepts, institutions, and reform movements that helped shape human rights, while Christian societies and churches also violated or resisted many rights claims.

Sources

https://books.google.com/books/about/Christianity_and_Human_Rights.html?id=j3Uq_Y36j6IC
https://www.johnwittejr.com/uploads/9/0/1/4/90145433/a225.pdf
https://www.pennpress.org/9780812248180/christian-human-rights/
https://tif.ssrc.org/2015/05/29/christian-human-rights-an-introduction/

8. Missionaries, Democracy, Education, and Civil Society

Claim

Protestant missionary activity contributed to democracy, literacy, education, civil society, and reform.

Verdict

Mostly true, especially for conversionary Protestantism.

Robert Woodberry’s “The Missionary Roots of Liberal Democracy” argues that conversionary Protestants influenced stable democracy by promoting:

• religious liberty
• mass education
• printing
• newspapers
• voluntary organizations
• colonial reforms

Qualification

This evidence is strongest for conversionary Protestant missionaries, not Christianity as a whole.

It should not be generalized to all Catholic, Orthodox, colonial, imperial, or state-church contexts.

Best Correction

There is serious empirical scholarship linking Protestant missionary activity to democracy, literacy, education, print culture, and civil society. But this cannot be generalized without qualification to Christianity as a whole or to every missionary context.

Sources

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/missionary-roots-of-liberal-democracy/3D96CF5CB2F7FEB19B1835393D084B9A
https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc%3Acup%3Aapsrev%3Av%3A106%3Ay%3A2012%3Ai%3A02%3Ap%3A244-274_00

9. Christianity and Science

Claim

Christianity was crucial for the development of modern science.

Verdict

Partly true, but too strong if treated as the sole or necessary cause.

Christianity contributed to the rise of modern science through:

• medieval universities
• monastic and cathedral schools
• scholastic logic
• natural theology
• belief in an ordered creation
• belief that nature is intelligible
• the idea that a free Creator made a contingent world that must be investigated
• theological motivations for studying creation

Important Qualification

Modern science also depended on:

• Greek natural philosophy
• Hellenistic mathematics
• Roman institutions
• Islamic science
• Indian numerals and mathematics
• Babylonian astronomy
• Renaissance humanism
• printing
• commerce
• instrumentation
• state patronage
• craft traditions
• early modern experimental culture

Best Correction

Modern science emerged in Christian Europe, and Christian theology and institutions helped shape that emergence. But Christianity was one major contributor among several, not the sole or sufficient cause.

Sources

https://jamescungureanu.com/2013/05/16/myths-about-science-and-religion-that-christianity-gave-birth-to-modern-science/
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1085064.The_Foundations_of_Modern_Science_in_the_Middle_Ages
https://www.medievalists.net/2010/04/the-nature-of-natural-philosophy-in-the-late-middle-ages/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt284vbb

10. Augustine and Natural Inquiry

Claim

Augustine’s warning against curiosity shows Christianity opposed science.

Verdict

Mostly false.

Augustine’s quote from Confessions Book 10 concerns disordered curiosity, spectacle, magic, and demanding signs from God. It is not a simple condemnation of natural inquiry.

Augustine’s Peacock-Meat Example

In City of God, Augustine tests the claim that cooked peacock flesh resists decay. This shows empirical curiosity and checking of claims.

Qualification

Calling Augustine’s peacock example a “modern scientific experiment” is overstated. It lacked modern controls, replication, measurement, and scientific community standards.

Best Correction

Augustine was not anti-nature-study in a simple sense, but he subordinated curiosity to moral and theological ends. His peacock-meat observation shows empirical checking, not modern science.

Sources

https://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.xxxv.html
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120121.htm

11. Greek, Islamic, and Christian Science

Claim

The Greeks already had science, so Christianity cannot be credited.

Verdict

Too simplistic.

Greek science was not modern experimental science, but it was far more than casual speculation.

Greek contributions included:

• Aristotle’s biology
• Hippocratic medicine
• Euclid’s geometry
• Archimedes’ mechanics
• Eratosthenes’ measurement of Earth’s circumference
• Ptolemaic astronomy
• Galenic medicine

Islamic civilization also made major contributions to:

• algebra
• optics
• medicine
• astronomy
• translation
• philosophy
• mathematics

Best Correction

Greek and Islamic science were indispensable predecessors. Medieval Christian Europe built upon them through universities, scholastic method, and theological frameworks that helped shape modern science.

12. The “Dark Ages”

Claim

The Dark Ages were a thousand-year period when Christians suppressed learning and science.

Verdict

Mostly false as a popular myth.

There was real disruption after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, including lower urbanization, loss of access to some Greek texts, weaker institutions, and reduced trade in parts of Western Europe.

But the crude idea of a millennium-long Christian blackout is false.

Medieval Christian Europe preserved and developed:

• classical learning
• universities
• logic
• astronomy
• medicine
• natural philosophy
• law
• theology
• manuscript culture

Best Correction

There was post-Roman disruption and uneven decline, followed by recovery and intellectual growth. The idea of a thousand-year Christian blackout is obsolete.

Sources

https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/57094233-the-light-ages
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1085064.The_Foundations_of_Modern_Science_in_the_Middle_Ages

13. Leo the Mathematician and Preservation of Learning

Claim

Leo the Mathematician invented a new script that helped preserve ancient literature.

Verdict

Mostly true but overstated.

Leo the Mathematician was a ninth-century Byzantine scholar associated with mathematics, astronomy, philosophy, and the transmission of ancient texts.

He was involved in transcribing texts from majuscule into minuscule script.

Qualification

He likely did not personally “invent” Greek minuscule. It developed within broader Byzantine scribal culture.

Best Correction

Leo the Mathematician was important in the Byzantine revival of learning and transmission of ancient texts, but saying he personally invented a new script is probably overstated.

Source

https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/leo-mathematician

14. Witch Hunts and Early Medieval Christianity

Claim

Early Christians did not believe witchcraft was real, and witch hunts arose later from other factors.

Verdict

Partly true, but too broad.

Early medieval Christian law and canon tradition often rejected popular witch-killing and denied some spectacular claims about witches.

Examples:

• Lombard law forbade killing women as witches.
• The Canon Episcopi treated women’s claims of night-riding with Diana as demonic delusion, not literal physical events.

Qualification

Christians did not deny demons, magic, sorcery, divination, idolatry, or illicit ritual altogether.

Causes of Later Witch Hunts

The witch-hunt explosion was caused by multiple factors:

• late medieval demonology
• legal procedure
• torture
• local panic
• village conflict
• confessional conflict
• state-building
• climate stress
• misogyny
• plague and demographic crisis
• print culture

Best Correction

Early medieval Christian authorities were often skeptical of popular witch accusations, but Christianity did not deny all magic or demonic activity. The later witch hunts developed from a complex convergence of theology, law, crisis, and social fear.

Pinker’s Chapter 4 supplement — an unfalsifiable accusation becomes a killing system

Pinker adds a mechanism to this multicausal account. Witchcraft allegations could explain otherwise random misfortune, settle disputes with in-laws or rivals, remove isolated or burdensome neighbors, and deter suspected enemies whose supposed “nonphysical” agency could never be disproved. Once denunciation became a test of loyalty, failure to accuse could itself look suspicious. Torture then manufactured confessions and names, creating an evidentiary feedback loop in which prior allegations generated new ones.

He illustrates the failure with a Milanese judge who obtained a false confession from his own servant and with the Duke of Brunswick, who had a tortured woman implicate the two Jesuits supervising her case. One of them, Friedrich Spee, later attacked witch prosecutions in print. The strongest reusable point is the interaction of bad causal models, unfalsifiable evidence, social incentives, and coerced testimony. Pinker’s numerical estimates reflect the atrocity literature available to him in 2011 and should not replace a current specialist estimate of executions. Chapter 4 synthesis · Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release) · Attachment (file not included in this release)

Sources

https://www.cbeinternational.org/resource/witchcraft-in-the-middle-ages-and-its-impact-today/
https://dr.lib.iastate.edu/server/api/core/bitstreams/b329c0b7-1f0c-420e-ba39-d8bd852dbc18/content

15. The Inquisition

Claim

The Inquisition lasted 800 years and made free inquiry impossible.

Verdict

Misleading.

There were multiple inquisitions, not one monolithic institution doing the same thing for 800 years.

The Spanish Inquisition began in 1478 and ended in 1834. It likely executed thousands, not hundreds of thousands.

Important Qualification

Lower death tolls do not make the Inquisition morally minor.

The Inquisition still involved:

• religious surveillance
• coercion
• censorship
• imprisonment
• forced conformity
• punishment of heresy
• executions

Best Correction

Popular myths often exaggerate the scale of the Inquisition, but the Inquisition was still a real institution of religious coercion.

Sources

https://www.bates.edu/news/2021/12/02/read-real-case-files-of-the-spanish-inquisition-thanks-to-a-bates-professors-new-website/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition

16. Galileo

Claim

Galileo was locked up for science.

Verdict

Oversimplified, but not baseless.

The Galileo affair involved:

• heliocentrism
• biblical interpretation
• papal authority
• Aristotelian science
• court politics
• Galileo’s personality and rhetorical choices
• disobedience to prior church orders

Galileo was not tortured or burned. He was placed under house arrest.

Important Correction

He was not punished merely for “doing science,” but neither was it merely because he insulted the pope.

Best Correction

Galileo was condemned because he defended heliocentrism in a way church authorities judged contrary to prior orders and dangerous to scriptural/theological authority. The affair was about science, theology, authority, and politics together.

Sources

https://galileo.library.rice.edu/bio/narrative_7.html
https://famous-trials.com/galileotrial/1018-keyfigures

17. Giordano Bruno

Claim

Bruno was burned for science.

Verdict

Mostly false, but still evidence of religious coercion.

Bruno was executed by the Roman Inquisition in 1600. His cosmological views mattered, but his trial concerned broader theological charges, including issues related to:

• the Trinity
• Christ
• Mary
• transubstantiation
• eternal damnation
• metempsychosis/reincarnation
• heresy

Best Correction

Bruno was not straightforwardly a martyr for experimental science, but he was executed by a Christian ecclesiastical system for heresy. The case is not simple anti-science, but it is evidence of lethal religious coercion.

Source

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bruno/

18. Aquinas, Augustine, and Coercion

Aquinas on Heretics

Claim

Aquinas approved capital punishment for heretics.

Verdict

True.

In Summa Theologiae II-II, Question 11, Article 3, Aquinas says obstinate heretics deserve not only excommunication but death.

Best Correction

Aquinas represents a major medieval Christian position, not all Christian thought. Later Christian traditions rejected or revised this view. But his position shows coercive anti-heresy doctrine was not peripheral in medieval Christianity.

Augustine on Coercion

Claim

Augustine supported coercion against heretics.

Verdict

True.

Augustine defended coercion against Donatists and appealed to “compel them to come in.” He often opposed execution, but he did not endorse modern religious liberty.

Best Correction

Augustine helped generate later distinctions between church and state, but Augustine himself defended coercion against heretics while often opposing killing them.

Sources

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3011.htm
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102093.htm

19. Luis de León, Tyndale, and the Oxford Martyrs

Luis de León

Verdict

Luis de León was imprisoned by the Spanish Inquisition for several years and later acquitted.

His acquittal matters, but it does not make the case benign.

Imprisoning a scholar for years over biblical translation, Hebrew learning, Vulgate criticism, or intra-Christian suspicion remains evidence of coercive religious control.

William Tyndale and the Oxford Martyrs

Tyndale, Latimer, Ridley, and Cranmer show that Christians killed other Christians over doctrine.

Best Correction

These cases show both sides of Christian history: reformers pushed for scripture, conscience, and renewal, while Christian authorities used coercion and execution to defend orthodoxy.

Sources

https://www.augnet.org/en/history/people/4337-luis-de-leon/
https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-Tyndale

20. Enlightenment Thinkers: Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau

Claim

Voltaire, Hume, and Rousseau were morally compromised, racist, sexist, or entangled with slavery.

Verdict

Mostly accurate, but not a full rebuttal of Enlightenment moral progress.

Voltaire

Voltaire held racist views and flirted with polygenist race theory. His relationship to slavery was contradictory: he criticized some cruelties of slavery but was entangled in colonial-commercial structures.

Hume

Hume wrote an explicitly racist footnote in “Of National Characters.” Recent scholarship also argues he had some involvement in the slave economy, though the scope is debated.

Rousseau

Rousseau was anti-slavery in abstract political theory but not a major practical abolitionist against the transatlantic slave trade. His views on women were deeply patriarchal.

Best Correction

Voltaire, Hume, and Rousseau were not pure moral heroes. This exposes a double standard if someone condemns Christianity by Aquinas and Augustine while sanitizing the Enlightenment. But their flaws do not discredit Enlightenment moral progress any more than Aquinas’s flaws discredit all Christianity.

Sources

https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac025/6693575
https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anti-racism/crush-the-despicable-voltaires-enlightened-racism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217231157516
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/scot.2023.0468
https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/63742/1/JCU_63742_Daquin_2020_thesis.pdf

21. Christianity and Nazism

Claim

If Christianity gets credit for the Enlightenment, it must also get credit for Nazism and fascism.

Verdict

Weak argument.

This only works if Holland’s argument is merely environmental:

Christianity was around, therefore Christianity caused X.

But Holland’s argument is genealogical: he tries to trace specific moral concepts through Christian history.

Hitler and Christianity

Hitler was baptized Catholic and used Christian language publicly. But Nazism was often hostile to traditional Christianity and independent church authority.

Nazism also promoted distorted forms such as “Positive Christianity,” which rejected core traditional doctrines and tried to de-Judaize Christianity.

Best Correction

Nazism was not simply Christian, but it did exploit Christian language, inherited Christian anti-Judaism, and church complicity. It was a racial-totalitarian ideology with both Christian collaborators and Christian resisters.

Sources

https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_mit_uns

22. Catholic Church, Pius XII, and the Holocaust

Claim

The Catholic Church was complicit in the Holocaust.

Verdict

Partly true, but complex and contested.

The wartime record includes:

• Catholic accommodation and collaboration in some contexts
• German bishops failing to clearly oppose the war
• Vatican diplomatic caution
• Pius XII’s public silence
• Catholic rescue efforts
• Catholic institutions hiding Jews
• Catholic resistance networks
• postwar controversies over baptized Jewish children

Best Correction

Catholic responses to Nazism included resistance, rescue, silence, compromise, and complicity. A one-line verdict is inadequate.

Sources

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/vatican-documents-show-secret-back-channel-between-pope-pius-xii-and-adolph-hitler
https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/MCHVEARCHVS1021
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/pius-and-the-holocaust.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_orphans_controversy
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/missing-0

23. Matthew 27:25 and Christian Antisemitism

Claim

Matthew canonized antisemitism through “His blood be on us and on our children.”

Verdict

Historically important, but interpretively contested.

Matthew 27:25 had a catastrophic reception history. It was used for centuries to support collective Jewish guilt for Jesus’ death.

But saying Matthew intentionally “canonized antisemitism” is stronger than the evidence allows.

Best Correction

Matthew 27:25 was not Nazi antisemitism, and its original meaning is debated. But its later Christian use as a proof-text for Jewish collective guilt is undeniable and historically consequential.

24. Separation of Church and State

Claim

Separation of church and state comes from the Christian tradition.

Verdict

Partly true, but incomplete.

Christian roots include:

• “Render unto Caesar”
• Augustine’s two cities
• medieval papacy-versus-empire conflicts
• canon law
• Investiture Controversy
• Reformation conflict
• Anabaptist and Baptist dissent
• Protestant toleration arguments
• Locke

Qualification

Modern American separation also depends on:

• Enlightenment political theory
• religious pluralism
• Madisonian constitutionalism
• fear of sectarian conflict
• pragmatic federal politics
• colonial religious diversity

Best Correction

Modern church-state separation developed partly from Christian theological and institutional conflicts, but also from Enlightenment liberalism, religious pluralism, and American constitutionalism.

Sources

https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-i/interpretations/264
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/establishment-clause-separation-of-church-and-state/

25. Christianity and the Roman Empire

Claim

Christianity transformed Rome, or Rome transformed Christianity.

Verdict

Both are true.

Christianity transformed Rome through:

• charity
• bishops as patrons of the poor
• opposition to infant exposure
• sexual ethics
• manumission reforms
• changes to public morality
• reduced gladiatorial culture over time

Rome transformed Christianity through:

• imperial patronage
• legal coercion
• church councils as imperial affairs
• bishops as political authorities
• orthodoxy enforced through law
• heresy as public disorder
• wealth and institutional power

Best Correction

The Constantinian settlement was reciprocal: Christianity gained institutional reach, while Roman imperial structures reshaped Christianity into a public, legal, and sometimes coercive force.

Sources

https://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2000/2000.10.10/
https://theopolisinstitute.com/leithart_post/constantine-and-constantinianism/

26. Constantine’s Reforms

Claim

Constantine made Christian-influenced humanitarian/legal reforms.

Verdict

Mostly true, with qualifications.

Constantine expanded episcopal courts, encouraged charity, facilitated manumission, and altered some laws affecting women, slaves, and the poor.

Qualification

He did not abolish slavery, create modern equality, or end coercive imperial rule.

Best Correction

Constantine made real Christian-influenced social and legal reforms, but his regime remained a late Roman imperial monarchy with hierarchy, coercion, slavery, and brutal punishments.

27. Christianity and Slavery

Claim

Christianity ended slavery.

Verdict

Substantially true in part, but overstated.

Christian abolitionists were crucial, especially:

• Quakers
• evangelical Anglicans
• Methodists
• Baptists
• British abolitionists
• American abolitionists

Christian arguments included:

• image of God
• common descent
• brotherhood in Christ
• equality before God
• spiritual unity
• moral concern for the oppressed

Major Qualification

Christianity was also used to defend slavery through:

• Leviticus 25
• Pauline household codes
• curse of Ham interpretations
• appeals to social order
• pro-slavery churches
• Christian slave societies

Best Correction

Christian abolitionists played a decisive role in ending Atlantic slavery, but Christianity was also used to defend slavery. Abolition emerged through conflicts inside Christian societies, aided by enslaved resistance, Enlightenment rights language, economic change, political mobilization, and humanitarian activism.

28. Ancient Slavery and Moral Development

Claim

Ancient people generally could not imagine a society without slavery.

Verdict

Mostly true as a broad generalization, but too absolute.

Slavery was nearly ubiquitous in the ancient world and usually treated as natural, necessary, or unavoidable.

Some thinkers criticized abuses of slavery, but full abolitionism was rare.

Gregory of Nyssa is often cited as one of the earliest clear Christian critics of slavery as an institution.

Best Correction

Ancient societies generally took slavery for granted; clear abolitionist arguments were rare. Christianity eventually produced important anti-slavery arguments, but most Christians tolerated slavery for many centuries.

29. Colonialism, Disease, and Missionaries

Claim

Disease caused much Indigenous depopulation, not merely Christian colonial violence.

Verdict

True but easily misused.

Epidemic disease was the largest demographic killer in many regions after European contact.

But disease interacted with:

• conquest
• forced labor
• famine
• displacement
• enslavement
• warfare
• sexual violence
• social disruption
• destruction of food systems

Missionaries

Missionaries sometimes opposed colonial abuses. Examples include Bartolomé de las Casas and some Protestant reform missions.

But missionaries were also sometimes complicit in:

• forced assimilation
• cultural destruction
• boarding schools
• collaboration with colonial authorities
• denigration of Indigenous religions

Best Correction

Disease was central to Indigenous demographic collapse, but colonial systems intensified mortality. Missionaries sometimes resisted colonial abuses, but they were also often entangled with empire.

Sources

https://www.oah.org/tah/rethinking-encounters/disruption-then-disease-contextualizing-colonization-and-disease-in-indigenous-north-america/
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/missionary-roots-of-liberal-democracy/3D96CF5CB2F7FEB19B1835393D084B9A

30. The Bible and Moral Interpretation

Claim

The Bible can be made to say almost anything.

Verdict

Exaggerated, but contains a real point.

Responsible hermeneutics constrains interpretation. The Bible cannot simply mean anything.

But Christians have historically used biblical texts to defend opposed positions on:

• slavery
• monarchy
• women
• war
• religious coercion
• toleration
• hierarchy
• abolition
• justice

Best Correction

The Bible cannot responsibly be made to say anything, but its diverse texts have been used by Christians to support both hierarchy and liberation. Interpretation depends on canon, context, theological priority, and moral development.

31. Paul as Founder of Christianity

Claim

Paul was the real founder of Christianity.

Verdict

Mostly false or at least badly overstated.

Paul was enormously influential, especially for Gentile Christianity. But he did not invent Christianity from scratch.

Evidence against the strong claim:

• Paul quotes earlier creeds and traditions.
• 1 Corinthians 15 contains pre-Pauline resurrection tradition.
• Philippians 2 likely contains earlier hymn material.
• Mark, James, John, and other traditions are not reducible to Paul.
• Paul interacted with earlier Jesus-followers.

Best Correction

Paul was a decisive architect of Gentile Christianity, not the sole founder of Christianity.

32. Christianity and Hellenism

Claim

Christianity was born in Hellenistic waters and absorbed Greek concepts.

Verdict

True, but not a refutation of Holland.

Christianity was deeply shaped by:

• Second Temple Judaism
• Greek language
• Hellenistic philosophy
• Stoicism
• Platonism
• Roman imperial culture
• Jewish scripture
• Persian and apocalyptic traditions

The Gospel of John’s use of Logos is a clear example of engagement with Greek philosophical vocabulary.

Best Correction

Christianity did not arise in a vacuum. It transformed inherited Jewish, Greek, Roman, and Near Eastern concepts into a new moral and theological synthesis. Holland’s stronger claim is that Christianity reordered the moral hierarchy of the ancient world.

33. Christian Moral Innovations

Core Holland-Style Claim

Christianity did not invent every moral concept, but it elevated and universalized certain values in ways that reshaped Western morality.

Examples

Christianity emphasized:

• love as the highest virtue
• mercy as a virtue, not weakness
• dignity of the poor
• moral authority of victims
• equality before God
• spiritual equality across ethnic and status boundaries
• care for children
• condemnation of sexual exploitation
• consent in marriage
• charity as an institutional duty
• critique of domination

Qualification

These values were often inconsistently applied by Christians themselves.

Best Correction

Christianity did not invent morality, but it reordered Western moral priorities around love, mercy, humility, victimhood, charity, and spiritual equality.

34. Marriage, Consent, and Women

Claim

Medieval Christianity developed a radical idea of marriage based on consent.

Verdict

Substantially true, with qualifications.

The medieval church increasingly emphasized consent as necessary for valid marriage, pushing against purely patriarchal or family-controlled marriage arrangements.

Qualification

This did not create modern gender equality. Medieval Christian society remained patriarchal.

Best Correction

The church’s consent doctrine was a real development in individual rights and marriage law, but it existed within a deeply patriarchal society.

35. Internal Reform in Christianity

Claim

When Christians did horrible things, other Christians often came along and called for reform.

Verdict

Mostly true, but incomplete.

Christianity supplied internal resources for critique and reform.

Examples:

• Las Casas against Spanish brutality
• reform movements against clerical corruption
• Protestant reformers
• Quakers against slavery
• evangelical abolitionists
• civil rights leaders using Christian moral language

Qualification

Reform was often resisted by other Christians. Sometimes Christian institutions produced both the abuse and the critique.

Best Correction

Christianity has powerful internal resources for reform, but these resources were contested, delayed, and often opposed by other Christians.

36. Tom Holland as Historian

Claim

Tom Holland is not a historian.

Verdict

Mostly unfair.

Holland is not a conventional academic historian in the narrow sense, but he is a serious popular historian/classicist with historical training and publications. The University of Buckingham lists him as a Senior Research Fellow in Ancient History.

Best Correction

Holland is best described as a popular historian and classicist, not a conventional academic historian. That does not by itself discredit his arguments.

Source

https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/directory/dr-tom-holland/

37. Final Evaluation of the Debate

The Anti-Christian Critique Gets Right

• Christian institutions often coerced belief.
• Christian theology sometimes justified persecution.
• Aquinas and Augustine supported coercive anti-heresy policies.
• The Inquisition, Crusades, forced conversions, and religious censorship were real.
• Christianity was used to defend slavery, patriarchy, antisemitism, and colonial domination.
• Many Enlightenment values were reactions against Christian institutional power.

The Anti-Christian Critique Gets Wrong

• Christianity was not simply anti-science or anti-reason.
• The Middle Ages were not a thousand-year blackout.
• The Inquisition is often exaggerated in popular memory.
• The Wars of Religion were not purely theological.
• Christianity did not spread only by the sword.
• Missionaries and Christian reformers often opposed abuses.
• Human rights and secular humanism did not emerge from nowhere.
• Holland does not simply argue “everything good is Christian.”

The Pro-Christian Response Gets Right

• Christianity deeply shaped Western morality.
• Christian abolitionism was crucial.
• Christian institutions contributed to education, literacy, charity, and civil society.
• Christianity supplied ideas important to science and human rights.
• Enlightenment thinkers were morally compromised too.
• Critics often apply double standards.

The Pro-Christian Response Gets Wrong

• Christianity did not simply produce modern science.
• Christianity did not straightforwardly end slavery.
• Christian violence cannot be dismissed as merely “power corruption.”
• Christian exclusivism really did contribute to persecution.
• Catholic responses to Nazism were mixed, not simply heroic.
• Protestant missionary findings cannot be generalized to all Christianity.
• “Christianity gave us modern values” is too broad unless carefully specified.

Final Best Summary

The best historical account is neither anti-Christian polemic nor Christian triumphalism. Christianity profoundly reshaped Western moral imagination, especially around dignity, equality before God, charity, conscience, victimhood, abolition, and reform. But Christian institutions also justified coercion, hierarchy, persecution, slavery, antisemitism, and colonial domination. The Enlightenment did not emerge from a vacuum; it inherited and transformed Christian moral categories while also rebelling against Christian authority. Modern Western values are therefore not simply Christian or secular. They are the result of centuries of conflict, synthesis, critique, and reform across Christian, classical, Jewish, legal, scientific, Enlightenment, liberal, and activist traditions.

Master Source List

Joshua / Conquest Hyperbole:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/ancient-conquest-accounts-9780567557049/
https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/themelios/review/ancient-conquest-accounts-a-study-in-ancient-near-eastern-and-biblical-history-writing-jsot-supplement-98/
 
Religion and War:
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jssr.12292
https://www.jstor.org/stable/26651615
https://ideas.repec.org/a/sae/joupea/v57y2020i3p406-421.html
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0022343319880952
 
Wars of Religion:
https://www.britannica.com/topic/history-of-Europe/The-Wars-of-Religion
https://www.britannica.com/event/Thirty-Years-War
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/toleration/
https://assets.cambridge.org/97805215/47505/excerpt/9780521547505_excerpt.pdf
 
Cavanaugh / Religious Violence:
https://www.amazon.com/Myth-Religious-Violence-Ideology-Conflict/dp/0195385047
https://radicalisationresearch.org/research/myth-of-religious-violence/
 
Enlightenment:
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/enlightenment/
https://www.history.com/articles/enlightenment
 
Tom Holland:
https://www.thetimes.com/comment/columnists/article/can-you-really-be-a-christian-without-believing-in-god-jsrctbf5n
https://www.buckingham.ac.uk/directory/dr-tom-holland/
https://historyforatheists.com/2020/01/tom-holland-dominion/
 
Christianity and Human Rights:
https://books.google.com/books/about/Christianity_and_Human_Rights.html?id=j3Uq_Y36j6IC
https://www.johnwittejr.com/uploads/9/0/1/4/90145433/a225.pdf
https://www.pennpress.org/9780812248180/christian-human-rights/
https://tif.ssrc.org/2015/05/29/christian-human-rights-an-introduction/
 
Missionaries and Democracy:
https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/article/missionary-roots-of-liberal-democracy/3D96CF5CB2F7FEB19B1835393D084B9A
https://econpapers.repec.org/RePEc%3Acup%3Aapsrev%3Av%3A106%3Ay%3A2012%3Ai%3A02%3Ap%3A244-274_00
 
Science and Religion:
https://jamescungureanu.com/2013/05/16/myths-about-science-and-religion-that-christianity-gave-birth-to-modern-science/
https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/1085064.The_Foundations_of_Modern_Science_in_the_Middle_Ages
https://www.medievalists.net/2010/04/the-nature-of-natural-philosophy-in-the-late-middle-ages/
https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt284vbb
 
Augustine:
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/augustine/confess.xi.xxxv.html
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/120121.htm
https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1102093.htm
 
Aquinas:
https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3011.htm
 
Inquisition:
https://www.bates.edu/news/2021/12/02/read-real-case-files-of-the-spanish-inquisition-thanks-to-a-bates-professors-new-website/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition
 
Galileo and Bruno:
https://galileo.library.rice.edu/bio/narrative_7.html
https://famous-trials.com/galileotrial/1018-keyfigures
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/bruno/
 
Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau:
https://academic.oup.com/hwj/article/doi/10.1093/hwj/dbac025/6693575
https://www.historyworkshop.org.uk/anti-racism/crush-the-despicable-voltaires-enlightened-racism/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/hume/
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00323217231157516
https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/abs/10.3366/scot.2023.0468
https://researchonline.jcu.edu.au/63742/1/JCU_63742_Daquin_2020_thesis.pdf
 
Nazism, Pius XII, and the Churches:
https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/the-german-churches-and-the-nazi-state
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/show/vatican-documents-show-secret-back-channel-between-pope-pius-xii-and-adolph-hitler
https://www.ushmm.org/online-calendar/event/MCHVEARCHVS1021
https://www.yadvashem.org/articles/academic/pius-and-the-holocaust.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_orphans_controversy
https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/missing-0
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gott_mit_uns
 
Church and State:
https://constitutioncenter.org/the-constitution/amendments/amendment-i/interpretations/264
https://firstamendment.mtsu.edu/article/establishment-clause-separation-of-church-and-state/
 
Colonialism and Disease:
https://www.oah.org/tah/rethinking-encounters/disruption-then-disease-contextualizing-colonization-and-disease-in-indigenous-north-america/
 
Leo the Mathematician:
https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/leo-mathematician