For the Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined

By Natasha Moore, John Dickson, Simon Smart and Justine Toh

Christianity, depending on who you ask, is either a scourge on our society, narrow, delusive, and inevitably producing hatred and violence; or the foundation of some of the best elements of our culture and a continued source of hope, comfort to those in need, and moral inspiration. Are we talking about the same people here? Are we looking at the same history?


Crusades, witch hunts, slavery, colonialism, child abuse … the history of the church offers plenty of ammunition to its critics. And on the other hand: charity, human rights, abolition, non-violent resistance, literacy and education.


In For the Love of God, Natasha Moore confronts the worst of what Christians have done, and also traces the origins of some of the things we like best about our culture back to the influence of Jesus.


Covering episodes from the Spanish Inquisition to Martin Luther King Jr, Florence Nightingale to the "humility revolution", this book offers an accessible but wide-ranging introduction to the good, the bad, the ugly – and the unexpected – when it comes to the impact Christianity has had on the world we live in.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Centre for Public Christianity
• Release date: Nov 15, 2019
• ISBN: 9780647530368

Natasha Moore

Natasha Moore is a Research Fellow at the Centre for Public Christianity in Sydney. She has a PhD in English Literature from the University of Cambridge and is the author of 'Victorian Poetry and Modern Life: The Unpoetical Age' and 'For the Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined'. She recently discovered she is an optimist.

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PREFACE

The project this book emerges out of has been a long time in the making. In August 2008, the year after it was founded, the Centre for Public Christianity (CPX) was involved behind the scenes in an Intelligence Squared debate on the topic: Would the world be better off without religion?

The CPX team fielded one of the speakers against (the Oxford mathematics professor and Christian apologist John Lennox). Both entry and exit polls were taken: what was the general feeling of the crowd? Would they be at all swayed by the arguments presented?

The outcome was clear – an overwhelming victory for the affirmative. This audience, at least, had arrived pretty firmly convinced that we’d be better off without religion, and almost to a person they left convinced of the same thing. If sceptics once complained that Christianity was outdated, irrelevant, or holier-than-thou, the new concern was rather that it was something sinister, even harmful.

The seeds of For the Love of God: How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined were perhaps sown that night. In the years that followed, as the CPX team wrote articles, gave interviews, and spoke to audiences all over the place, we listened long and carefully, took the temperature of the culture, and began to formulate a way of approaching this objection with candidness and clarity.

The result of those many experiences and discussions was released in 2018 in the form of a documentary addressing the very mixed record of the church. Hosted by John Dickson, Simon Smart, and Justine Toh, it covers four major themes (War + Peace, Rights + Wrongs, Rich + Poor, Power + Humility) and combines stories filmed on location across four continents with interviews from leading historians, sociologists, and theologians such as Miroslav Volf, Rowan Williams, Karen Armstrong, Nicholas Wolterstorff, Marilynne Robinson, and David Bentley Hart.

We think this is an important subject, and an urgent one, so we’ve worked hard to make the material available in as many forms as possible. There’s a movie-length version, or you can watch the four full episodes, one for each theme. Plus, we’ve made all the individual segments (stories on everything from the Spanish Inquisition to the abolition of slavery) available online for free. We developed teacher resources to use in the classroom, and a course for small or large groups to work through the issues together. We created a repository for all of it at betterandworse. film, and we hope you’ll spend some time there.

But for those who prefer reading to watching – we know there are one or two of you! – we also wanted to address the same questions (does religion poison everything? would we be better off without Christianity?) in book form. The content and arguments you’ll find in here are those of the documentary, and have been developed over years of collective reading, thinking, digesting, arguing, formulating, and reformulating. This text also draws heavily on the fifty-plus expert interviews we filmed; wherever a scholar is quoted without furnishing a specific reference, their words come from this repository of material.

Still, due to the constraints of fitting huge topics like the Crusades or the origins of charity into segments five or ten minutes in length, the documentary segments represent only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the research that went into For the Love of God. As the project’s key researcher, Natasha Moore here fills in some background, fleshes out a few key debates, and even tells a few stories that didn’t quite make it into the final cut.

Our hope is that, in whatever form you engage with For the Love of God, you’ll find its approach to the best and worst of what Christians have done in the world honest and refreshing. Too often, discussion of this history and what it means becomes bogged down in recriminations, sweeping generalisations, and defensiveness. We aim to be completely open about the darkest chapters of the church’s story, and fair in our assessment of its impact. We also think that looking closely at Jesus offers a way of breaking the stalemate – but more on that soon.

Whatever baggage, presuppositions, fears, or expectations you bring to this topic, we’re glad you’re here. We hope you enjoy the journey, and that you continue the conversation when you’re done.

The CPX Team

INTRODUCTION: DOES RELIGION POISON EVERYTHING?

In 2017, an Ipsos poll conducted across twenty-three countries found that 49 per cent of adults agree that religion does more harm than good in the world.

In Australia, the number was much higher than the average: 63 per cent of Aussies are seemingly convinced that overall, we would be better off without religion. (It was 39 per cent in America, and only 26 per cent in Japan.¹ Given that 60 per cent of the population ticked one of the religious affiliation boxes in the 2016 Australian census, it’s an intriguing figure.)

This tallies pretty closely with our experience at CPX, as a media company speaking and writing about Christian faith in the public square. We encounter plenty of interest – as well as pushback from the likes of (for example) Mitor the Bold, a regular commenter at the ABC, who wrote the following by way of response to one of our articles:

The Bible has inspired genocide, torture and murder. It has inspired cover-ups and paedophiles, race hatred, homophobia and misogyny. It continues to fuel all these things in many places around the world. There is nothing beautiful and positive about the Bible – it is a book overflowing with hatred, petty jealousy, revenge and sickening violence. And it is a book that promotes wilful ignorance.

I’m surprised there’s not more violence by the faithful within the church. Maybe there is and we just haven’t heard about it.²

Maybe not everyone would express it in just those terms – but it does seem like the comments section offers a gloves off version of a more widely felt sense that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, really might be bad for us, as individuals and as a society. It’s an idea perhaps most influentially voiced by Christopher Hitchens in his book God Is Not Great (2007):

religion has caused innumerable people not just to conduct themselves no better than others, but to award themselves permission to behave in ways that would make a brothel-keeper or an ethnic cleanser raise an eyebrow … As I write these words, and as you read them, people of faith are in their different ways planning your and my destruction, and the destruction of all the hard-won human attainments that I have touched upon. Religion poisons everything.³

Of course, there are some quite vocal defenders on the other side of the question too. In an article for The Spectator in 2015, UK parliamentarian Michael Gove hit back against the contempt for Christianity he observed in the British media. Christians, he suggested, are not simpletons or cartoon villains, but

the kind of people who built our civilisation, founded our democracies, developed our modern ideas of rights and justice, ended slavery, established universal education and who are, even as I write, in the forefront of the fight against poverty, prejudice and ignorance.⁴

Over the last couple of decades, a ream of books have appeared to counter the picture so vividly drawn by Christopher Hitchens and others, with titles like The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success (2005) and The Book that Made Your World: How the Bible Created the Soul of Western Civilization (2012).

They trace some of the most precious goods of Western culture to the influence of the Bible and those who’ve believed it; point to the continued work of Christian people in education, healthcare, poverty relief, and social justice; and, often, issue dire warnings about what will happen to us all once the long shadow of Christianity melts away. As the Australian journalist Greg Sheridan writes in God is Good for You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times:

The death of God, so long anticipated, will result in a more fundamental shift in the human personality, a bigger reconstruction of the human condition, than anything implied even in the rise of digital technology … As we cut ourselves off from the roots of our civilisation, our civilisation will be damaged.⁵

It’s not only self-professed Christians who make this kind of case. Secular social researchers such as Robert Putnam in the US and Andrew Leigh in Australia have investigated the impact of Christian faith on people’s behaviour and concluded that churchgoers, on average, do significantly better on measures of social capital such as volunteering, blood donation, and giving to charity than non-religious people.⁶ And the philosopher Jürgen Habermas – a towering intellectual and avowed atheist – has declared that

Universalistic egalitarianism, from which sprang the ideals of freedom and a collective life in solidarity, the autonomous conduct of life and emancipation, the individual morality of conscience, human rights and democracy, is the direct legacy of the Judaic ethic of justice and the Christian ethic of love. This legacy, substantially unchanged, has been the object of a continual critical reappropriation and reinterpretation. Up to this very day there is no alternative to it … Everything else is idle postmodern talk.⁷

Christianity, then, depending on who you ask, is either a scourge on our society, narrow, delusive, and inevitably producing hatred and violence; or the foundation of some of the best elements of our culture and a continued source of hope, comfort to those in need, and moral inspiration.

The stark contrast between these two views prompts the question: Are we talking about the same people here? Are we looking at the same history?

How to judge the church

Clearly the church’s detractors have a point – or a multitude of them. Crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, support of slavery, colonial exploitation, the cover-up of child abuse in recent decades … the history of the West has, in important ways, been Christian, and that history features all kinds of violence, corruption, and oppression.

Equally, the story isn’t all bad. There are your William Wilberforces and Mother Teresas, your Florence Nightingales and Martin Luther Kings. Christian faith has inspired heroic self-sacrifice and advocacy for the poor and needy, alongside the hypocrisy and self-righteousness and abuses of power. Any account that only looks at one side of this equation is going to be of limited use – more polemical than historical.

Whatever our instincts about the record of the Christian church, most of us can probably concede that there’s been both great good and terrible evil done in the name of Jesus. What then? What does it look like to acknowledge that the truth is somewhere in the middle? Do we just throw up our hands and abandon the attempt to fit these puzzle pieces together? Do we conclude that the good and bad cancel each other out? Do we proceed to count up instances of each, and haggle over the scorecard?

It would be easy to simply dismiss the religion of Jesus Christ on account of the manifold failings and offences of his followers; but perhaps there’s a better way. Here’s a musical analogy to help us navigate the superabundance of examples on either side of this debate, and fit them into some kind of framework.

The Cello Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach are generally agreed to be among the most beautiful, mathematically sublime pieces ever composed. To hear a master cellist play them is, for many, to feel the spirit soar and be moved even to tears.

But imagine that a complete novice sits down to play them – someone who’s never touched a cello before in their life. This person draws the bow across the strings … and the result is far from pretty. Yet their lack of skill doesn’t make Bach any less of a genius!

Our argument in For the Love of God is that Jesus wrote a beautiful tune – love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, do not judge, where your treasure is, there your heart will be also – and that when Christians have played in tune with the one they claim to follow, that’s been of great benefit to the world. When they’ve played Jesus’ tune atrociously, it has caused great harm. But that doesn’t change the tune itself, or the worth of the tune.

When we listen to music, we know to distinguish between a good and a bad performance of the same composition. Going back to the founder of the Christian faith, and measuring the deeds of his followers against his teaching and example, offers a way forward through the labyrinthine complexity of the history we’re looking at.

How to read this book

Fortunately for both you and me, this book does not attempt to cover all the relevant history. That would be an impossible task! The selection of stories you’ll read about here isn’t comprehensive, but it’s not arbitrary either.

The subtitle of this book – and the documentary it’s based on – is How the church is better and worse than you ever imagined. There’s a balance of positive and negative stories about the church in here, but even sorting out which counts as which isn’t straightforward. As the Russian writer Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn famously observed, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being – and what’s true of each person is true of history as well.

Often the good that we do as humans jostles up against the evil, and some of our most cherished heroes have all-too-clayey feet. Some of us want to explain away the faults of our favourites; others jump to wholesale condemnation of those who fail to meet the standards of our own time or particular subculture.

This book seeks to be candid and clear-eyed about the failures of the church, nuanced when it comes to historical context, open to those points where the academic consensus contradicts our comfortable assumptions, and willing to follow the research wherever it leads. It’s unlikely to be completely successful at that! We all have our blind spots and unconscious biases, and the sweep of history covered here is larger than any one person can be expert in. But the aim is to be rigorous, unflinching, and fair. And, of course, interesting – a consideration that has also influenced the choice of material covered in the following chapters.

The content is arranged loosely by its significance – what does it demonstrate about the best and worst of the history of the church? – rather than chronologically or topically. One of the consequences of this is that you can dip in and out; if you’d just like to read a bit about the Spanish Inquisition, or the history of slavery, or Father Damien, the leper priest of Molokai, you can go straight to that section and get something out of it.

If you do want to read straight through, though, you’ll find that each section builds on the last, so that by the end I hope you’ll have a greater sense of why the modern West is the way it is, what Christianity has had to do with that, and how to grapple with both the most depressing and the most awe-inspiring behaviour displayed by people who have laid claim to the name Christian across the last 2,000 years.

1 Nicolas Boyon and Julia Clark, American and Global Views on Religion, 12 October 2017, https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-polls/global-advisor-views-on-religion-2017.

2 See Natasha Moore and John Dickson, The Church Must Confront Domestic Abuse, ABC The Drum, 12 March 2015, http://www.abc.net.au/news/2015-03-12/moore-dickson-the-church-must-confront-domestic-abuse/6300342.

3 Christopher Hitchens, God Is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything, Warner Books, New York, 2008, pp. 7, 15.

4 Michael Gove, In Defence of Christianity, The Spectator, 4 April 2015, https://www.spectator.co.uk/2015/04/in-defence-of-christianity/.

5 Greg Sheridan, God is Good for You: A Defence of Christianity in Troubled Times, Allen & Unwin, Sydney, 2018, p. 13.

6 See Chapter 17, Social Capital.

7 Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God, and Modernity, Polity Press, Cambridge, 2002, p. 149.

PART I

Worst of the Worst

It is the early spring of 1210, and a line of mutilated men – eyes gouged out, noses cropped, lips cut off – snakes its way across the French countryside. The pope’s army has sacked their hometown of Bram, and dispatched this gruesome procession to a neighbouring town as a warning of what is to come.

It is 1300, and the church has declared a Jubilee. Pilgrims, many of them poor but devout, flock to Rome. They show their piety by surrendering their gold: at one basilica, priests have to use rakes to collect the mountain of coins heaped around the shrine each day.

It is 1495, and the Spanish Inquisition is in full swing. In cities like Seville and Toledo, many live in continual fear of being hauled before the tribunal. Torture is routine. Neither age nor sex gives the zealous inquisitor pause; both children and women in their nineties are subject to the rack, the pulley, or water torture – though it is reported that pregnant women are sometimes allowed to sit while being tortured.

It is 1850, and millions of Africans and their descendants have been enslaved in the land of the free over the last 230 years. Slave-owners deploy the Bible to shore up their position; as one preacher declares in disgust, There is no power out of the church that could sustain slavery an hour, if it were not sustained in it.

It is 1982, and in Boston Margaret Gallant is writing to her cardinal, in anger and sorrow. A priest who has molested a total of seven boys in her extended family has been returned to his parish and continues to have access to children, whose parents know nothing of his crimes.

How can this be?

How can people call themselves followers of a man who came in poverty and humility, proclaiming peace and justice, offering compassion and forgiveness, urging self-denial and love of neighbour and enemy alike, who gave up his life for others, and then commit acts like these?

What is Christian faith worth, if it doesn’t restrain such behaviour, and in some cases even seems to furnish justifications for it – not to mention a warm glow of self-righteousness?

Would we be better off, after all, without religion?

CHAPTER 1

CRUSADES

NOW THAT OUR MEN HAD POSSESSION of the walls and towers, we saw some wonderful sights … Piles of heads, hands, and feet were to be seen in the streets of the city. One had to pick one’s way over the bodies of men and horses. But these were small matters compared to what happened at the Temple of Solomon. You would not believe it if I told you. Suffice to say that in the Temple and porch of Solomon men rode in blood up to their knees and bridle reins. Indeed, it was a just and splendid judgment of God that this place should be filled with the blood of the unbelievers …

Now that the city was taken, it was well worth all our labours and hardships to see the devotion of the pilgrims at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. How they rejoiced and sang a new song to the Lord! Their hearts offered such prayers of praise to God, victorious and triumphant, as cannot be told in words … This day, I say, will be famous in all future ages, for it turned our labours and sorrows into joy and exultation. This day, I say, marks the justification of all Christianity, the humiliation of paganism, and the renewal of our faith. This is the day which the Lord hath made, let us rejoice and be glad in it, for on this day the Lord revealed Himself to His people and blessed them.

Raymond of Aguilers, c. 1101

When around 10,000 European Crusaders broke through the walls of Jerusalem in July 1099, they proceeded to carry out a massacre of biblical proportions. The Muslim inhabitants of the city sought refuge in the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam’s third-holiest site, barricading themselves in. But the soldiers broke through and slaughtered thousands of men, women, and children, throwing some off the high walls, putting the rest to the sword.

As recounted by the Provençale chronicler Raymond of Aguilers, when the slaughter was over, the Crusaders marched to the nearby Church of the Holy Sepulchre – traditionally revered as the site of Calvary, where Jesus had submitted to a shameful and unjust death a millennium earlier – and held a thanksgiving service.¹

These supposed knights of Christ believed they were not only doing the will of God, but earning his forgiveness for their (many!) sins. This was something new and surprising: salvation for taking up the sword. Religious wars have been common across human history, but the idea that fighting might be spiritually meritorious – like giving to the poor, or going on a pilgrimage – was something of an innovation of this, the First Crusade.

It all began with a church council held in Clermont, France, in the middle of 1095. On the final day of the council, Pope Urban II preached a sermon that was to change the course of history. He had received a plea for help from the Christian emperor of Byzantium (modern-day Istanbul), who was facing attacks from Turkish forces. Urban urged the crowds to head East to rescue their fellow Christians; to channel their violence for good rather than fighting each other at home. He issued a decree: Whoever for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money, goes to Jerusalem to liberate the church of God can substitute this journey for all penance.

The appeal struck a chord across Europe; tens of thousands signed on for the arduous journey East, heeding the call of fiery preachers like Peter the Hermit, who travelled around whipping up support for the campaign. Everywhere he went, enormous crowds gathered; prostitutes came forward and vowed to become nuns; he brought props with him, actual crosses that he laid on those who committed to the Crusade in response to his preaching. This was a strange inversion of Jesus’ command to take up your cross. In place of a call to self-denial – to willingly embrace suffering, rejection, and weakness for his sake – it was a call to arms and to glory.

How did these followers of a crucified leader, who eschewed violence and forbade his disciples from taking up the sword to defend him or his cause, end up here,