Sometimes - and quite often - the comments are more edifying than the article itself......
our ideas of democracy (Greek demokratia) and republic (Latin res publica) are part of our Greco-Roman heritage rather than originating in Christianity.
You bet they’re not Christian.
Democracy is a divisive tool, whereas Christianity is a unifying force.
Democracy is a divisive tool, whereas Christianity is a unifying force.
Say, are there not 25,000+ splinter-cells of Christianity in the West, alone? And do not Christian groups split all the time over this or that policy difference, multiplying like mushrooms after a warm Spring rain?
And sadly, without the unifying force of Catholicism to genocide entire peoples, butcher entire cities, and Crusade there’s no way to keep the Believers on the same reservation now, is there? Every time you hear some churchie complain, in their vast ignorance about their own history and faith, always recall the Massacre at Béziers, where the Pope’s forces murdered every living thing, every child even and called themselves Holy.
And that wily Pope figured out an easy way to separate the True Believers from those naughty Cathars – kill everyone. There’s even a quote used to this day: “Kill them all! God will know his own.” When you don’t have time to torture, you gotta just murder everyone.
Another excellent black pill is learning why the greatest Christian city ever built, that shining stalwart buttress against Muslim power projection into Christian Europe, Constantinople, was sacked and irretrievably weakened by the Fourth Crusade. It wasn’t an accident nor an issue of pay; it was intentional and planned by someone whose title begins with a “P” and rhymes with “cope” although it’s claimed he’s innocent. Heard some claim him innocent as many as three times.
You’ve made my point for me, and then tripped over it.
Yes — Christianity splinters. Constantly. That’s what happens when a faith is built on a text every believer is free to read and argue with, and when its founder explicitly told his followers to render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to put away the sword. A religion that can’t split is one that has a single throat to choke — and you’ve just spent three paragraphs describing what happened when yours had one.
https://biblicisminstitute.wordpress.com/2016/01/14/jesus-and-the-sword/
Now, about your examples. You cite Béziers and the Fourth Crusade as though they’re the skeleton in Christianity’s closet. They’re the skeleton in Rome’s closet — and the Eastern Orthodox, who watched Constantinople burn, have been pointing that out for eight centuries. The crusaders who sacked the greatest Christian city in the world did so against the explicit command of a pope who excommunicated them for it. Innocent III, by the way — the same pope whose legate reportedly gave the “kill them all” order at Béziers. You’ve managed to cite the same man as both the architect of Catholic unity and the man whose subordinates disobeyed him into catastrophe. That’s not an argument against Protestant fragmentation; that’s an argument against centralized authority, which is the Protestant position.
As for “kill them all, God will know his own” — the phrase is reported by a Cistercian chronicler decades after the fact, attributed to a legate, and contested by historians to this day. But grant it entirely. What does it prove? That a medieval army conducting a siege committed a massacre in an age when every army conducting a siege committed massacres — including the Cathars’ own allies, including the Ottomans, including everyone. You’re not describing Christianity. You’re describing the 13th century and pinning it on the one institution you dislike.
And here’s the part you skipped: the Cathars were exterminated by the centralized authority. The Waldensians were persecuted by it. The Protestants were massacred by it. The people who broke from Rome did so in large part because of exactly the butchery you’re describing. So when you sneer that Protestantism lacks “the unifying force of Catholicism to genocide entire peoples” — congratulations, you’ve identified the feature, not the bug. The “splintering” you mock is what happens when people decide the alternative is being on the receiving end of the next Béziers.
You wanted a black pill. Here’s one: every institution that ever held a monopoly on salvation — Catholic, Orthodox, Calvinist, or secular — has eventually used it to justify a sword. The reason the West has 25,000 denominations is that we kept deciding that was better than the alternative. You call it mushrooms after a warm rain. I call it a firewall.
And besides — all of this assumes the men doing the deciding were deciding what Christianity is. A pope can excommunicate a crusade, a legate can order a city put to the sword, a council can anathematize a rival, and none of it settles the question. What man decides Christianity should be has never been the same thing as what it is. That’s precisely why the splintering is tolerable: the men who claim the authority to define it keep being wrong, and the thing itself keeps outliving them.
