Christian Faith and Progress

There is a common caricature of Christian faith that sees it as inherently opposed to the idea of progress and that anything worthwhile and good in the world has been achieved in the teeth of opposition from the church. A good example of this is latest musing of British skeptic and philosopher A.C. Grayling. Grayling is mortally offended at the suggestion (being made by some German evangelicals) that the constitution of the EU should have any reference to Europe’s Christian heritage and proceeds to interpret the history of Europe as a valiant struggle to escape the superstitious clutches of the church.

“By the accident of its being the myth chosen by Constantine for his purposes, [Christianity] plunged Europe into the dark ages for the next thousand years – scarcely any literature or philosophy, and the forgetting of the arts and crafts of classical civilisation… before a struggle to escape the church’s narrow ignorance and oppression saw the rebirth of classical learning, and its ethos of inquiry and autonomy, in the Renaissance.”

For Grayling, the time between the deminse of classical Greece and the Enlightenment was essentially a 1600 year hiatus into ignorance and superstition so any reference to the formative role of the Christian religion in European history would be a mistake (I’ll add at this point that I have no particular concern about what does or does not make its way into the EU constitution).

Grayling goes on to make the following radical claim: “From that point to this day every millimetre of progress in liberty and learning has been bitterly opposed by the organised institutions of Christianity”

Predicatable references to the Spanish Inquisition and other gross injustices perpetrated by the church follow (although I was shocked that he didn’t express the usual lament over the persecution of Galileo). While no thoughtful Christian would argue that the church is not guilty of these and other injustices (both past and present), Grayling’s views represent an extremely selective reading of history. Is his statement actually true? Has every millimetre of progress in liberty and learning really been opposed by the Christian church ?

Is he not familiar with the preservation of classical Greek learning by medieval Irish monks? Was the Reformation not a genuine step forward in its emphasis on the responsibility of the individual before God and its opening up of not only the Bible but other literary sources to a far wider audience? Was not scientific exploration based (at least initially) on a profound belief in the ordered rationality of the universe as an expression of the mind of God? Was the abolition of slavery (or for that matter the civil rights movement) completely devoid of Christian motivation? Was the outrage over and opposition to apartheid the exclusive domain of those outside the Christian church?

For all of these examples of progress there are sad examples of Christian opposition as well but to pretend, as Grayling does, that in order to become a Christian you must also be committed to opposing progress in all its forms is laughable. There are always elements within society that are afraid of and resistant to change but to pretend that this resistance is somehow part of the DNA of the Christian faith is, in my opinion, irresponsible and misleading. It is an important exercise to talk about what we actually mean by the term ‘progress’ and this caricaturization of the role of Christianity within the debate is not helping.

For an interesting look at the Christian contribution to some of the dominant features of the modern world see Jonathan Hill’s What Has Christianity Ever Done For Us?