Erasing Christianity from history

What were you taught about Christianity in school?  For me (at a public high school in Wisconsin in the late 1990s) the narrative in world history and literature classes was generally dismissive and quite negative.  To exaggerate only a little, the narrative was something like this:  “Whether or not there actually was a Jesus, some people started a religion about him 2000 years ago.  Constantine decided to rally his troops around this new religion, and killed a bunch of pagans to successfully gain power in the Eastern part of the Roman Empire.  Later, when there weren't as many pagans around, Christians decided to go kill some Muslims in the Crusades.  Then with Islam in retreat, Christians decided to split into 2 groups and kill each other for 150 years. Fortunately, Christianity was proved wrong by Clarence Darrow in the Scopes monkey trial so now we can finally progress to a new brighter age of reason.”

Without a solid background in history or philosophy I didn't have a lot of reason to question this story, which certainly put Christianity in a bad light. I retained my faith in Christ, however, through confirming experiences elsewhere.  While in graduate school, I felt I was missing something important, and a desire sprang up in me to learn more about the progress of history.  History is often presented as names, dates, and events to be familiar with (as in my short narrative summary above).  But this sort of bullet list doesn't tell you anything about cause and effect, what were the driving forces of history, in what context did these events occur, and what is really important.  I wanted analysis and context and perspective from which to understand the past in order to evaluate the present.

I first found something that touched on my need when I stumbled upon the works of Carrol Quigley,¹ who taught at Georgetown through the 1970s.  Quigley's approach was an analytical study of growth and decline of many different civilizations throughout world history.  In many cases the patterns from past civilizations can be seen in our own and provide a framework for understanding our own situation.  I may dive into his ideas in more depth sometime, but for now I'll focus on his approach to Christianity. For Quigley, Christian doctrine led to an optimistic worldview (looking forward to the Millennium), individual rights and egalitarianism (even the most downtrodden have souls), the importance of collective human-human interaction in the material world (churches, ministry), and the idea of humbly searching for truth.  These principles together with influences from the collapsed Greco-Roman society created the “essence” of Western Civilization, which Quigley summarized with the statement “Truth unfolds in time through a communal process.”  (The Evolution of Civilizations, 1961)  From this Christian philosophical foundation emerged the unique features of Western Civilization, including human rights and the scientific method. Note that Quigley doesn’t comment on the truth claims of Christianity (or any religion), but simply evaluates the impact of these ideas on the world. Interestingly, the last part of his magnum opus, Tragedy and Hope (1966) was a long discussion of how the decline of Christian spirituality in the West would lead to the end of Western Civilization as we know it, absent a Christian revival.  The “Hope” part of Tragedy and Hope was the idea the Western Civilization had re-invented itself several times already in the course of its history, so it may well do so again - either upon a Christian foundation or otherwise. But who knows what the future of Western Civilization might look in the latter case.

Reading Quigley's works was a revelation to me for several reasons. 1) It showed me that there is an alternative narrative about the impact of Christianity on world history besides the one I had been taught at school. 2) It showed me that not so long ago scholars at elite universities could take religion seriously! Today I don’t think that is the case for the most part. 3) Carrol Quigley's analysis contends that philosophies, beliefs, and ideas play a pivotal role in guiding or limiting civilizational progress.² The unique worldview of a society provides boundaries for its eventual progression. This shouldn’t be controversial in retrospect but it hit me like a revelation at the time. 

I later learned that Quigley was building off of and refining the work of another 20th century academic, historian Arnold Toynbee. Toynbee’s analysis in his 12 volume “Study of History” (generally read through Somervell's abridgement) saw the West as the outcome of a spiritual “transfiguration” of the world through Christ, and he lamented the declining spirituality of the modern West. Without some sort of spiritual renewal, he feared our society would lose its “elan”, and fall into tyranny and decay, as have other societies. 

Toynbee's works were much discussed in the 1940s and 1950s. He was on the cover of Time Magazine in 1947. In the 1950s it was said that “Professor Arnold Toynbee is widely considered to be the world’s greatest living historian.”  But then something changed.  In a 2011 retrospective, Michael Lang wrote: “To many world historians today, Arnold J. Toynbee is regarded like an embarrassing uncle at a house party.” That’s quite a fall - from cover of Time Magazine to embarrassing uncle! So what happened between 1947 and today? The summary on his Wikipedia page (as of the writing of this blog post) reads “However, by the 1960s his magnum opus [“A Study of History”] had fallen out of favour among mainstream historians. Whether valid or not, there was a perception that Toynbee favoured myths, allegories and religion over factual data.” In other words, Toynbee was ostracized because he believed religious ideas are relevant to history and so took them seriously, while the "mainstream" academic culture had moved on to a new brighter age of reason. Carrol Quigley’s best work (Evolution of Civilizations, Tragedy and Hope) arrived in the 1960s, just as Toynbee was starting to receive sidewise glances from his new anti-Christian nephews at academic house parties.  Though in my opinion Quigley adds and improves significantly on Toynbee, Quigley’s works were too late to ever have been taken seriously by mainstream historians.³

In fact, it wasn’t enough for academic historians to sweep Toynbee and Quigley into the dustbin of historiography. The whole idea of analytical history, “universal history” (as it is sometimes called), or Civilization studies was so tinged with religious cooties that the whole field was purged in the 1960s. Not only that, the whole concept of Western Civilization was similarly tainted with Christianity that it also had to be pushed out starting in the 1960s, even though Western Civ had previously been a key component in a liberal arts education. On the whole, it is clear to me that starting in the 1960s, elite academia began to do everything possible to erase Christianity from the education system, even at the expense of turning the entire edifice upside down and starting it on fire. 

Why did all this take place in the 1960s specifically?  I don't know for sure.  Let me know your thoughts.  I do know that Christianity has been in decline in academic circles for a lot longer than 60 years.  This is a theme for both Quigley and Toynbee.  One hypothesis could be that by 1960 the decline in religiosity had hit a threshold point at which academics and cultural elites (always at the vanguard) were sufficiently like-minded that the academic and educational coup could finally be completed and Christianity could be dismissed in favor of other worldviews.  We can say that for some reason professors and educators tend to form a progressive monoculture in politics today - so maybe that might support this hypothesis?

Regardless of the reasons or motivations, the currently prevailing anti-Christian narrative took hold only relatively recently in the academic and educational system and it was introduced deliberately. For me, this knowledge is freeing, as it allows me to set aside popular contemporary theories and search for the truth myself on my own terms.

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1 I heard about Quigley from a colleague at work who was into conspiracy theories, and with whom I enjoyed many long conversations.  Quigley had studied (among other things) the Round Table Group, some influential British guys in the early 1900s that hoped to revitalize the British Empire and expand British influence through various diplomatic connections around the world, including within the US Council on Foreign Relations.  Some people have taken this nucleus and connected it to contemporary conspiracy theories. Whether or not there is any validity to these ideas, I am much more excited by Quigley’s historical analysis.  His approach and ideas have influenced my worldview greatly.  Incidentally, this is one of few commonalities between myself and former President Bill Clinton (see reference to Quigley near the end of his 1992 DNC acceptance speech). ^↩ 

2 Or, to put it more abstrusely, "your ethic is downstream from your metaphysic. In other words, how you act depends on what you believe" ^↩ 

3 I was happy to find in a recent Google Scholar search that sparse citations of Quigley have carried on into the 21st century, largely in Comparative Civilizations Review, the official journal of the International Society for the comparative Study of Civilizations.  The journal appears to be published by Brigham Young University, where I was an undergraduate.  One example of a prominent Civilizations scholar carrying on the unfashionable torch was Matthew Melko (1930-2010).  Within the last few years a couple of articles have appeared reviewing Carroll Quigley's work in niche journals, by Filippo Chiocchetti of the Universita del Piemonte Orientale, and by Alfred Skorupka of Polytechnika Slaska, both of whom introduced Quigley as an unknown figure they wouldn't expect their audience to be familiar with. This feels a little like Renaissance scholars digging up lost Classical works and marveling at the wisdom of a now long-lost generation.  ^↩