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.