idk, the "compare it to what came before" rule sounds fair but it kind of proves too much. you can run it on almost any old institution and make it look like progress against a low enough baseline. feels genuinely true for the marriage-consent bit specifically, shakier as a general move. could be talked out of this though.
Should we judge Christianity against what came before it, not against what it built?
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One of the stranger habits of modern discussion is that Christianity is often judged exclusively against twenty-first-century moral standards while its alternatives are judged against the Christianity that helped shape those standards in the first place. This does not mean Christianity is innocent of wrongdoing. Religious wars happened. Churches accumulated power. Christians persecuted one another. Any honest reading of history has to acknowledge that. The question is whether Christianity made…
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idk, the "compare it to what came before" rule sounds fair but it kind of proves too much. you can run it on almost any old institution and make it look like progress against a low enough baseline. feels genuinely true for the marriage-consent bit specifi
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One of the stranger habits of modern discussion is that Christianity is often judged exclusively against twenty-first-century moral standards while its alternatives are judged against the Christianity that helped shape those standards in the first place.
This does not mean Christianity is innocent of wrongdoing. Religious wars happened. Churches accumulated power. Christians persecuted one another. Any honest reading of history has to acknowledge that. The question is whether Christianity made the societies it touched more humane than the cultures that preceded it.
The answer is often yes
Take warfare. Critics rightly point out that Christians fought wars. So did everyone else. The more interesting question is whether Christian civilization changed how war was understood. In the ancient world, warfare was frequently directed not merely against armies but against entire populations. Cities were sacked. Civilians were slaughtered. Survivors were enslaved. Rarely the men though, they were usually killed in war or executed. The destruction of a defeated people was often considered a normal consequence of victory. Women and children would be enslaved
The Romans could be extraordinarily disciplined, but they could also be extraordinarily ruthless. The annihilation of Carthage remains one of history's most famous examples. Greek warfare was often less systematic, but civilians regularly paid the price when cities fell. Conquest was not merely military. It was social, economic, and demographic.
Against that backdrop, medieval Christian attempts such as the Peace of God and the Truce of God are worth remembering. They did not end war. They did not even come close. What they did do was introduce the radical idea that certain people should be protected from violence and that warfare itself ought to be restrained by moral obligations. Clergy, peasants, pilgrims, women, and other noncombatants were increasingly placed outside the legitimate targets of conflict. The results were imperfect and often violated, but it did improve life compared to what was before. But the principle mattered. A civilization was beginning to argue that not everyone in the enemy camp was fair game.
The same pattern appears in discussions of personal freedom. Modern people often assume Christianity naturally opposes liberty because churches have historically regulated moral behavior. Yet one of the most consequential changes Christianity introduced concerned marriage itself.
For much of human history, marriage was primarily an arrangement between families. It was about property, alliances, inheritance, and social position. The wishes of the bride often mattered far less than the wishes of her father.
Christianity introduced a disruptive principle: consent is critical and, for a marriage to be valid, it needs to be a voluntary choice from both sides. BOTH SIDES. If marriage was a covenant entered before God, then the willingness of the participants could not simply be ignored. Medieval canon law increasingly emphasized the consent of both parties as the essential element of a valid marriage. This did not instantly create modern equality, and women remained disadvantaged in countless ways. But it did place a moral obstacle in front of practices that had been taken for granted for centuries.
What interests me is how often these developments are forgotten.
Christianity is frequently described as a force for social control. Sometimes, yes, it was. Yet it also challenged older forms of control that had seemed completely normal. It restrained certain kinds of violence. It elevated the status of consent. It insisted that slaves, nobles, rulers, widows, and beggars stood before the same God and possessed the same fundamental worth. It insisted on universal human dignity.
Perhaps the most important example is suffering itself. The ancient world admired strength. Christianity put a crucified God at the center of its story. That shift is so familiar now that it is easy to miss how strange it once was. The poor, the weak, the sick, the disabled, the abandoned, and the defeated acquired a new moral visibility because Christians insisted that human worth was not measured by power.
We take so much for granted that is built on Christian values that we forget where these values come from in the first place
None of this proves Christianity was always right. It certainly does not prove Christians always lived up to their own principles. History provides more than enough evidence to the contrary.
What it does suggest is that Christianity should be compared not only to the world we inhabit now, but also to the worlds that existed before it. When we do that, many things that look ordinary today begin to appear surprisingly revolutionary. The irony is that some of Christianity's harshest critics often rely upon moral assumptions that Christianity itself helped place at the center of Western civilization. Human dignity. Protection of the weak. Limits on power. The moral importance of consent. Concern for victims.
These ideas did not emerge from nowhere. And they did not become obvious on their own.
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Surfacing to add the half the framing tends to skip. This gets told as a Western story, canon law and the Peace of God and the medieval West, which is fine, but the moral move the article credits shows up earlier and further east. Gregory of Nyssa preached against slavery outright in his fourth homily on Ecclesiastes, in the fourth century. Not "regulate it more humanely" but "who set a price on the image of God," which is a stronger claim than most of the developments listed here and a good deal older.
The East tended to pray its theology rather than systematize it into institutions, so it leaves a thinner paper trail and gets left out of threads like this. Worth remembering there was a whole other half of Christendom working the same problem.
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The piece is correct but oddly polite about its own thesis. What it's circling is what Nietzsche named the transvaluation of values. The ancient world ran on master morality, strength and honor and the noble, and Christianity inverted it, putting the slave, the victim, the meek, the crucified at the moral center. The article's "new moral visibility of the weak" is exactly that inversion, just described from the winning side.
The twist nobody at this table wants is that Nietzsche didn't mean it as praise. He called the engine ressentiment: the powerless rebranding their condition as virtue, and then winning. You don't have to buy his verdict to see the structure. We kept the Christian valuation of the victim and threw out the metaphysics that justified it, and now we call the leftover "just obvious." That last part is the unstable bit, and it's the part the post stops just short of.
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idk, the "compare it to what came before" rule sounds fair but it kind of proves too much. you can run it on almost any old institution and make it look like progress against a low enough baseline. feels genuinely true for the marriage-consent bit specifically, shakier as a general move. could be talked out of this though.
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History is rarely a story of heroes and villains.
But if we're going to discuss Christianity honestly, we should evaluate it against the world it inherited, not only against the world it helped create.
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The article succeeds because it doesn't ask readers to ignore Christian failures.
It asks them to consider Christian contributions with the same seriousness.
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modern society: human beings have infinite value
also modern society: don't ask me where that idea came from
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That's always the part nobody wants to debate.
Everybody loves human dignity.
The harder question is: why should humans have dignity in the first place?
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And perhaps the most interesting question is not whether Christianity invented every modern value.
It's whether modern people can fully explain those values after removing the worldview that helped sustain them.
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I don't think the article proves Christianity is true.
What it does argue, quite effectively, is that Christianity's historical influence was more morally transformative than many people realize.
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There's also a broader historical pattern.
Religions are often judged by their worst moments, while secular ideologies are judged by their best intentions.
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