Is religion to blame for oppressive governments? Part 3

Many of us, when we look at the history of the West, see a timeline something like the above.

But history tells us that, rather than supressing the development of modern societies, Christianity, combined with the best of Greek thought and pagan traditions, fostered it, slowly but steadily. Some historical highlights:

• Slavery was as common in the Roman Empire as personal shrines to Vesta, and few thought twice about it; your average Roman probably rather enjoyed watching them get mauled by lions. But from early on, Christians made efforts to improve the lives of slaves and to put an end to the dehumanizing gladiatorial contests. By the 10th century A.D, when Europe began to regain some of its stability, slavery was made illegal by canon law (the law of the Church) and was reduced throughout much of Europe in the following centuries, including Eastern Europe, which had been one of the centres of the slave trade (the word "slave" comes from "Slav"). The European slave trade would, of course, return with a vengeance in the 17th century; the efforts of abolitionists, many of them deeply religious, helped bring about the end of the slavery in the British Empire in 1833, and the end of slavery in the U.S in 1865.

• Christians defied emperors by simply being Christians, and Christianity always existed in a state of tension with Imperial authority. Even after the persecutions stopped, the tensions continued, and this proved to be healthy on more than one occasion. When the emperor Theodosius exercised what he thought was his imperial prerogative to order the massacre of thousands of people after an insurrection in Thessalonica, St. Ambrose took him to task by forcing him to do public penance. And the Church frequently pushed for the power it needed to be free from government influence. Bishops were eventually exempted from civic duties so as not to interfere with their spiritual tasks, an early separation of the secular and the spiritual.

• St. Augustine further emphasized Christianity's non-political nature in his work City of God, arguing that Christians should focus on spirituality rather than earthly power (unfortunately, his words were not always heeded).

• St. Thomas Aquinas argued that it is just for people to overthrow tyrants, and that government authority should be limited by moral law; governments cannot legitimately force people to act immorally. He also elaborated on the idea, inherent in Christian theology, that the ends don't justify the means; a government can't commit unjust and violent acts to bring about some good.

• Warfare became more humane through the Middle Ages. Raping, pillaging, and plundering were no longer tolerated (though unfortunately for a long time this mainly applied to other Christian lands) and enemy non-combatants were not to be harmed. Violent people like the Vikings became less so after conversion.

• The Renaissance and enlightenment thinkers who developed the ideas of rights, liberty, and limited government were standing on a foundation built by efforts of the Byzantines, who preserved many ancient texts, and of the monks who laboriously copied ancient texts by hand, and of the scholars and theologians who engaged with the ideas of the ancients, developing many of their own in the process. It was the medievals, too, who were responsible for the universities in which many later thinkers were educated.

• The Reformers increased literacy. They pressed for the translation of the Bible into local languages, and encouraged people to learn to read it. The Puritans of New England set up the first public schools for this purpose, and generations of children were taught to read scripture by their parents. By mid-19th century, the U.S would be the most literate nation on earth.

• The Protestant spirit encouraged the kind of democracy that developed in America, the world's first and most successful modern democracy, emphasizing individuality, freedom of conscience, and a sort of egalitarianism in that all people were, in spiritual matters, on equal footing. Some even went so far as to flatten church hierarchy. The Puritans and Baptists developed a democratic form of church government that even included separation of power between the clergy and the laity that they brought with them to America; they also brought their belief in signing a contract to make authority legitimate, and set up the first representative democracy in the country.

And finally, there is that belief, expressed so eloquently in the Declaration of Independence, that our rights and our dignity don't come from any human government, but from our Creator. They can't be taken away, and if the government tries to, it is our right and our duty to defy them; the government cannot even temporarily strip these things away to bring about some good, which, even in our free democratic societies, it so often tries to do. Only time will tell if the foundation that has been built for us, and thus our freedom, can be sustained, or if it will crumble, leaving us prey to the tyrannies that have been so much a part of human history.

Is religion to blame for oppressive government? Part 2

I know this is a blog, not an academic journal, and I'm not an academic (I don't get paid for overthinking everything, I just do it for free), but this is a really fascinating topic, and there is a lot to be said, so I hope y'all don't mind the whole three part series. Put your feet up, grab a bag of Cheezies (or Cheetos, for you Americans), and indulge me in my youthful idealistic windbaggery enjoy.


In some places and some times, the answer to this question is yes. It is evident to the whole world that is still reeling from shock from the brutal deaths of innocent people in Iran for simply raising their voices against a theocratic regime that has worked for so long to suppress them. And in the majority of societies throughout history, where rulers were either made into gods or endowed by their gods with divine authority, allowing them to do pretty much whatever they liked and woe to anyone who had the chuztpah to incite his, and occassionally her, displeasure. If their authority was challenged, it was done violently.


But for us to hold religion as a whole as being responsible for government oppression, rather than looking at particular cases, is to fail to take into account the role of humans. We don't need religion as a tool for oppression; there are plenty of other weapons to be used. Political ideology was used to justify the oppression and murder of millions of people in the last century alone. It is also to take for granted our own free, democratic societies and the rights they uphold by forgetting just how they came into being and how much work went into building them, for they are not our default state.


After all, for most of human history, people didn't think in terms of concepts like that of the individual and of rights and freedoms and equality under the law. A person was thought of as a member of a people, a tribe, and a clan, not an individual. He had a certain status in society and a set of obligations that went along with that status. The rules might be much less complicated and the hierarchies less rigid in some societies, but it was mainly due to the fact that those societies were themselves simple, like a band of 100 hunter-gatherers. Our modern ideas would have been foreign to all of these people.

To know this, then, is to know just how much Judaism, which taught that all people were fallen and thus none all powerful or all wise, stood out for its time. Hebrew rulers didn't shy from acknowledging their weaknesses, and the people held rulers accountable to God; the Old Testament is full of skepticism towards earthly power. Christianity was even more radical. Christ was expected to be a political messiah, but His ministry was anything but political, focusing instead on inner change. Moreover, He taught that God's love and favour were not restricted to one tribe or people, but extended to everyone. After His death, identity as a follower of Christ was more important than identity as a member of a group. The idea laid out in Genesis that humankind was made in the God's Image was further developed so that everyone, from emperor to slave, had eternal worth. Respect for authority was preached by Jesus Himself, but because Him rulers could destroy only the body and not the soul, and so His followers were given tremendous inner freedom.

Humans being the stubborn and flawed creatures we are, these ideas did not effect societal transformation overnight; it took centuries, and it would take a whole book to document how it happened, but in part 3 I'll go over some of the highlights.

Hamlet as a Facebook news feed

Utterly delightful.

h/t: Dawn Eden

Is religion to blame for oppressive governments?

If you're looking for in-depth coverage of the swine flu pandemic and other disease outbreaks that is both technical and accessible, you can do no better than Effect Measure, a blog on public health whose editors, interestingly enough, go by the name of Revere in honer of Paul Revere's service on the first local board of health in the U.S. When discussing issues like epidemiology and public health policy, they write with deep knowledge and clear passion; their concern for their fellow human beings seems to motivate them as much as their interest in science. And then there are their commentaries on religion.

Every Sunday, they post what they call a Freethinker Sunday Sermonette, which is for the most part very much in line with New Atheist thought and not really a big deal; usually I just skim it over and concentrate on the rest of the week's posts. But this last Sunday's sermonette caught my attention, because it is a good example of of an idea that, like so many ideas of our age, seems to make sense on the surface but contains deep contradictions: the idea that religion is to blame for oppressive governments.

Because there is so much that can be said in response to this, I have decided to do it in a two part series. In the meantime, I wouldn't really suggest checking out the video on religion included with the sermonette, both because it is not really amusing and because there is a pretty graphic drawing towards the end, but I do think it was funny that this line was spoken without a trace of irony: "The great thing about religion is, once you get it, you can feel the need to tell everyone you know who doesn't have it how miserable and useless they are and how much less useless and miserable they could be if only they were as smart as you and believed in stuff." It's a legitimate criticism of the attitude that we religious people sometimes have, but just change a few words around, and you've pretty much captured the essence of the New Atheist movement.

God as Architect of the World

Much has been said of the unity between faith and science in the Middle Ages, but this illustration from an early 13th century moralized Bible, from an unknown artist, is a beautiful example of how Medieval Christians conceived that unity.