Christianity.

OpeningWhat it is.

Christianity is the faith that the Galilean Jew Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Romans around 30 CE, was raised from the dead and is the Messiah promised in the Hebrew scriptures — the Son of God through whom the world is reconciled to its maker.

Almost everything else in the tradition is commentary on that claim: how to read it, what it implies about God, what the church is, how to live, what happens at the end. The disagreements are old and deep; the family resemblance is unmistakable.

This deck takes the long view — the founding documents, the councils that fixed the creeds, the long medieval consolidation, the schisms East and West, the Reformation, the global expansion, and the religion's twentieth-century transformations.

Chapter IJesus of Nazareth.

Born in Roman Palestine, probably 4 BCE; crucified in Jerusalem under the prefect Pontius Pilate, c. 30–33 CE. The historical Jesus is best attested by Paul's letters (50s CE) and the four canonical gospels (Mark c. 70, Matthew and Luke c. 80–90, John c. 90–110), each reflecting a particular community's memory.

The agreed core: he taught in Galilee and Judea, gathered disciples, proclaimed the kingdom of God, performed acts read as miracles, ran afoul of Temple authorities, was executed by Rome on a charge that mocked him as "King of the Jews." His followers reported him alive after his death — the resurrection — and that experience set the new movement in motion.

The "quest for the historical Jesus" is two centuries old and unfinished. Albert Schweitzer's Quest of the Historical Jesus (1906), E. P. Sanders's Jesus and Judaism (1985), and the work of John P. Meier (A Marginal Jew, 5 vols., 1991–2016) frame the modern scholarly conversation.

Chapter IIPaul of Tarsus.

The Pharisee who persecuted the early movement and then, after a vision on the road to Damascus (c. 33–36 CE), became its most consequential missionary. Seven of the New Testament letters are now considered authentically Pauline by the consensus of scholars: Romans, 1–2 Corinthians, Galatians, Philippians, 1 Thessalonians, Philemon. The disputed letters (Ephesians, Colossians, 2 Thessalonians, the Pastorals) come from his school.

Paul's accomplishment was double: he carried the message into the Greek-speaking Mediterranean cities and he argued, against the Jerusalem leadership, that gentiles need not become Jews to follow Jesus. The Council of Jerusalem (c. 49 CE, Acts 15) ratified this. Without that ruling, Christianity remains a Jewish sect.

For there is no distinction: since all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, they are now justified by his grace as a gift, through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus.Romans 3:22–24

Chapter IIIHow the New Testament was made.

The 27-book New Testament canon emerged slowly over the second through fourth centuries. The four gospels, Acts, and the Pauline letters were widely read by 150 CE. Athanasius's Easter letter of 367 CE lists exactly the books we now have; the councils of Hippo (393) and Carthage (397) confirmed it.

The contest was real. Marcion (c. 144 CE) wanted to drop the Hebrew scriptures and most of the gospels, keeping only an edited Luke and ten Pauline letters. The mainstream rejected him — and partly in reaction, fixed the broader canon. The Nag Hammadi discoveries (1945) revealed the suppressed alternatives: the Gospel of Thomas, the Gospel of Philip, gnostic texts the orthodox bishops worked hard to exclude.

The Hebrew Bible, as the Christian Old Testament, was inherited via the Greek Septuagint. Jerome's Latin Vulgate (c. 405) became the West's standard text for a millennium.

Chapter IVThe empire turns.

For three centuries Christians were a small, sometimes persecuted minority. The Diocletianic Persecution (303–311 CE) was the worst — and the last. With the Edict of Milan (313 CE) Constantine ended the persecutions; by the end of the fourth century, under Theodosius's edicts (380, 391–392), Christianity was the empire's official religion and pagan sacrifice was outlawed.

The shift transformed everything. Bishops became civic figures. Martyrdom gave way to monasticism as the heroic ideal. Imperial money built the first great basilicas. The capital moved to Constantinople (330 CE) and the Eastern church developed its own character, deeply tied to the imperial throne.

Chapter VNicaea, 325.

Constantine convened around 300 bishops at Nicaea (modern İznik, Turkey) in 325 to settle the Arian controversy — the question whether the Son was of the same substance as the Father (the Athanasian position) or a created being subordinate to him (Arius's). The council ruled with Athanasius. The Nicene Creed (in its expanded 381 Constantinopolitan form) is still recited every Sunday in most of world Christendom.

We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, begotten from the Father before all ages, light from light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of the same essence as the Father.Nicene Creed, 325/381

The technical Greek word at the center was homoousios — "of the same substance." Whole imperial careers rose and fell on it. Athanasius was exiled five times by emperors who later sided with the Arians; he died, finally orthodox-restored, in 373.

Chapter VIChalcedon, 451.

The Christological controversies of the fifth century concerned not whether Christ was God but how the divine and human were united in him. Nestorius (Constantinople, d. 451) was charged with separating the natures too sharply; Eutyches with collapsing them. The Council of Chalcedon (451) issued the definition that has shaped subsequent Christology:

One and the same Christ, Son, Lord, Only-begotten, in two natures, without confusion, without change, without division, without separation.Chalcedonian Definition, 451

The price of clarity was schism. The Oriental Orthodox churches (Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriac, Eritrean, Indian) rejected Chalcedon's "in two natures" language as Nestorianising and have remained separate ever since — a fifth-century split older than any other in Christianity. Recent ecumenical dialogue has clarified that the disagreement was substantially terminological.

Chapter VIIAugustine of Hippo.

354–430. North African rhetorician, restless youth, Manichaean, Neoplatonist; converted under Ambrose's preaching in Milan in 386; baptised 387; bishop of Hippo Regius from 396 until his death as the Vandals besieged the city. The most influential Latin theologian in history.

The Confessions (c. 400) is the first great Western autobiography — a prayer-narrative of his early life addressed to God. City of God (413–426), written after Alaric's sack of Rome (410), reframes history as the contest between two cities, the earthly and the heavenly. On the Trinity (c. 400–420) shaped Western trinitarian thought; the late anti-Pelagian tracts shaped its doctrine of grace and original sin.

You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it rests in you.Confessions I.1

Chapter VIIIThe desert and the cloister.

Anthony of Egypt (c. 251–356) is the prototypical Christian monk — sold his property, withdrew to the Egyptian desert, and pioneered eremitic life. Pachomius (c. 292–348) organised the cenobitic alternative, monks living in community under a rule. Athanasius's Life of Anthony (c. 360) made the model famous.

In the West, Benedict of Nursia (c. 480–547) wrote the Rule that organised most subsequent Western monasticism: stability, obedience, conversion of life, the daily office, manual labour, hospitality. Ora et labora — pray and work. Benedictine houses preserved literacy through the post-Roman centuries; Cluny (founded 910) and Citeaux (1098) drove subsequent reforms.

In the East, Mount Athos (founded c. 963 in northern Greece) remains the heart of Orthodox monasticism. Its twenty ruling monasteries continue the hesychast tradition associated with Gregory Palamas (1296–1359) and the Jesus Prayer.

Chapter IX1054 — East and West.

The Great Schism of 1054 was the formal rupture, but the divergence had been building for centuries. The points of friction:

1. The filioque — the Western addition to the Nicene Creed that the Spirit proceeds "from the Father and the Son." Greeks rejected the unilateral change.
2. The papal claim — the Bishop of Rome's increasing assertion of universal jurisdiction. The four other ancient patriarchates (Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem) accepted Rome's primacy of honour but not of jurisdiction.
3. The azymes — whether the eucharistic bread should be leavened (East) or unleavened (West).
4. Different liturgical languages and styles: Greek and Old Slavonic in the East, Latin in the West.

The mutual excommunications of 1054 (between Cardinal Humbert and Patriarch Michael Cerularius) were lifted in 1965 by Paul VI and Athenagoras. The churches remain divided.

Chapter XThe medieval synthesis.

Thomas Aquinas (1225–1274), Dominican, Italian, taught at Paris. The Summa Theologiae (c. 1265–1274, unfinished) is the most ambitious systematisation of Christian doctrine in the Latin tradition — God, creation, ethics, Christ, sacraments, the last things, structured by the rediscovered Aristotle and answered question by question.

Aquinas's "five ways" (ST I.2.3) are the canonical philosophical arguments for God's existence in the Christian tradition. His ethics built virtue theory onto Aristotle. His doctrine of analogy reframed how human language can speak of God at all.

The High Scholastic moment also produced Bonaventure, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, the great medieval mystics — Bernard of Clairvaux, Hildegard of Bingen, Meister Eckhart — and the founding of the universities. By 1300 Latin Christendom had become a vast intellectual project, woven into every European institution.

Chapter XIWittenberg, 1517.

Martin Luther (1483–1546), Augustinian friar and professor of biblical theology at Wittenberg, posted ninety-five theses on indulgences in October 1517. The dispute concerned, narrowly, the sale of "indulgences" used to fund the rebuilding of St. Peter's. It widened into a critique of papal authority, the sacramental system, and the medieval doctrine of merit.

Luther's three great solas: sola scriptura (scripture alone), sola fide (faith alone), sola gratia (grace alone). His German Bible (NT 1522, OT 1534) shaped the modern German language. He married Katharina von Bora in 1525 — a former nun — and produced the Small Catechism (1529) that has formed Lutheran piety since.

Hier stehe ich, ich kann nicht anders. Here I stand, I can do no other.attributed to Luther at Worms, 1521

Chapter XIIThe Reformed branch.

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) led an independent reform in Zürich; John Calvin (1509–1564), French exile in Geneva, produced the most systematic Reformation theology. His Institutes of the Christian Religion (Latin 1536, expanded through 1559; French 1541) shaped Protestantism wherever it took root: Geneva, Scotland, the Netherlands, the Puritan English-speaking world.

Reformed distinctives: the sovereignty of God, double predestination, a strict view of the Lord's Supper as spiritual presence (against both Catholic transubstantiation and Lutheran consubstantiation), and an insistence on regulated worship from scripture. The Reformed were also the most thoroughly civic of the Reformations — Geneva under Calvin became a model of disciplined city-republic.

The English Reformation (Henry VIII's break with Rome, 1534) took its own path, under Cranmer's Book of Common Prayer (1549, 1552, 1662) and the Thirty-Nine Articles (1571).

Chapter XIIIThe Catholic answer.

The Council of Trent met in twenty-five sessions over eighteen years (1545–1563), in three phases. Against the Reformation it reaffirmed: scripture and tradition as joint sources of revelation; the seven sacraments; transubstantiation; purgatory; indulgences (purified of abuses); the Vulgate as the church's authoritative biblical text; the necessity of priestly ordination through episcopal succession.

Trent also reformed in earnest: it required bishops to reside in their dioceses, ordered the founding of seminaries to train priests, regulated marriage (the Tametsi decree of 1563), produced the Roman Catechism (1566), and laid groundwork for the Tridentine liturgy that lasted until Vatican II.

The Society of Jesus — the Jesuits — founded by Ignatius Loyola in 1540, became the engine of the Catholic Reformation: educators, missionaries, theologians. Francis Xavier reached Goa, Japan, and the China coast before dying in 1552.

Chapter XIVThe wars of religion.

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries saw Europe torn apart by religious war. The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598), the Dutch Revolt (1568–1648), the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648) — perhaps eight million dead in central Europe alone — the English Civil War (1642–1651). The Peace of Westphalia (1648) ended the worst of it with the principle cuius regio, eius religio (whose realm, his religion).

The cumulative trauma reshaped Christian self-understanding. The Enlightenment's case for religious toleration — Locke's Letter Concerning Toleration (1689), the Edict of Nantes (1598, revoked 1685, partially restored 1787) — arose substantially as a response. So did the eighteenth-century strain of Christianity that emphasised reason and ethics over dogma, from the latitudinarians to the Deists to Kant.

Chapter XVThe Great Awakenings.

Eighteenth-century Anglo-American Protestantism produced a series of revivals that reshaped its character. The First Great Awakening (1730s–1740s) — Jonathan Edwards's "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God" (1741), George Whitefield's open-air preaching, John Wesley's Methodist movement (organising societies from 1739) — emphasised conversion, personal experience, and the new birth.

The Second Great Awakening (c. 1790–1840) was more populist still: camp meetings on the American frontier, the rise of the Baptists and Methodists, Charles Finney's New Measures (1820s–1830s), the founding of new denominations and sects, the abolitionist surge that connected revival with anti-slavery.

The deeper effect was a reframing of authority: from inherited church to personal experience, from creed to conversion, from parish to gathered congregation. The American religious landscape — voluntarist, denominationally fissile, revivalist — took its lasting shape.

Chapter XVIThe missionary century.

The nineteenth century was Christianity's largest expansion since the Roman conversion. Catholic and Protestant missions, often riding the rails of European empire, planted churches across sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, the Pacific. William Carey to India (1793), Robert Morrison to China (1807), David Livingstone to southern Africa (1841), Hudson Taylor and the China Inland Mission (1865).

The cost was complicated. Mission Christianity was sometimes complicit with colonial violence, sometimes a genuine vector of literacy, medicine, abolition, and self-determination. The historian Lamin Sanneh argued that translation of the gospel into local languages always produced unforeseeable indigenous traditions. Andrew Walls described the "non-Western turn" of Christianity that became visible in the late twentieth century.

By 1900 perhaps 80% of Christians lived in Europe and North America. By 2025 perhaps two-thirds live in the Global South.

Chapter XVIIThe nineteenth-century crisis.

Three intellectual shocks transformed Christianity in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries:

Biblical criticism. D. F. Strauss's Life of Jesus, Critically Examined (1835) read the gospels as myth. Julius Wellhausen (1844–1918) developed the documentary hypothesis of the Pentateuch's composite authorship. The questions of historicity that scholars take for granted today were profoundly destabilising in their generation.

Darwin. On the Origin of Species (1859) made the literal Genesis chronology untenable for educated readers. The settlements were various: Catholic and mainline Protestant accommodations (Newman, John Henry Strong, the Catholic Modernists); fundamentalist resistance (the 1910 Fundamentals tracts; the Scopes Trial, 1925).

Marx, Freud, Nietzsche. Religion as ideology, neurosis, slave morality. Christianity in the twentieth century would have to answer these critiques, partially absorb them, or ignore them.

Chapter XVIIIVatican II.

The Second Vatican Council (1962–1965), called by Pope John XXIII, produced four constitutions and twelve other documents that reshaped Catholicism. Mass in the vernacular. The laity reframed as the "people of God." Religious liberty affirmed (Dignitatis Humanae). Ecumenical openness to other Christians (Unitatis Redintegratio) and to non-Christian religions (Nostra Aetate — including a decisive repudiation of the deicide charge against Jews).

The cost has been disputed for sixty years. The traditionalist case: a rupture with the pre-conciliar church, vocations collapsed, mass attendance fell. The reformist case: a recovery of the patristic and biblical sources, an honest engagement with modernity. Most historians now see Vatican II as a significant but partial reform — one whose interpretation is itself a key axis of contemporary Catholic disagreement.

Joseph Ratzinger (Benedict XVI, pope 2005–2013) was a council theologian; Karol Wojtyla (John Paul II, 1978–2005) a council bishop. Francis (2013–2025) was its first pope formed entirely after.

Chapter XIXAzusa and after.

The fastest-growing form of Christianity in the twentieth century. The conventional point of origin is the Azusa Street Revival in Los Angeles (1906–1915), led by William J. Seymour, the son of formerly enslaved parents. Speaking in tongues, faith healing, racially mixed congregations, the conviction that the gifts of the Spirit recorded in Acts 2 were available now.

From Azusa it spread fast: the Assemblies of God (founded 1914) and other classical Pentecostal denominations; the Charismatic Movement that brought Pentecostal experience into Catholic, Anglican, and mainline Protestant churches from the 1960s; the global wave of independent Pentecostal-Charismatic churches that now includes perhaps 600–700 million adherents worldwide.

Brazil, Nigeria, South Korea, the Philippines, Guatemala, Chile, Kenya, China — the centres of twenty-first-century Christian growth are mostly Pentecostal or Pentecostal-flavoured. The shift from the older mainline to charismatic forms is one of the largest religious facts of our lifetime.

Chapter XXEastern Orthodoxy.

The world's third-largest Christian communion, around 220–260 million faithful, organised in fifteen autocephalous (self-headed) churches: Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, Russia, Serbia, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Cyprus, Greece, Poland, Albania, Czech-Slovak, plus the disputed Orthodox Church of Ukraine.

The theological emphasis is distinctive: theosis (deification, becoming "by grace what God is by nature"); the apophatic tradition (Pseudo-Dionysius, Maximus the Confessor, Gregory Palamas); the centrality of the Divine Liturgy; the veneration of icons defended at Nicaea II (787) after the iconoclast crisis. The seven ecumenical councils (325–787) end the Orthodox dogmatic canon; the West kept adding councils, the East did not.

The twentieth century pressed the Orthodox churches hard — the Bolshevik destruction of Russian Orthodoxy after 1917, the Greek-Turkish exchanges of 1922–1923, the post-1989 revival, the 2018–2022 Ukraine ruptures. The diaspora, especially in North America, has produced a creative theological renaissance.

Chapter XXILiberation theology.

Latin American Catholic theology of the late 1960s and 1970s, formed by Vatican II and the CELAM bishops' meetings at Medellín (1968) and Puebla (1979). Gustavo Gutiérrez's A Theology of Liberation (1971) was foundational. Leonardo Boff in Brazil, Jon Sobrino in El Salvador, Juan Luis Segundo in Uruguay developed the school.

Theology is critical reflection on praxis in light of the Word.Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation (1971)

The "preferential option for the poor" became the school's slogan. The 1984 and 1986 Vatican instructions, drafted under Cardinal Ratzinger, criticised liberation theology's borrowings from Marxist analysis. The movement was disciplined but not destroyed; its concerns reappeared, recast, in Pope Francis's pontificate (2013–2025).

Black liberation theology in the United States (James Cone, A Black Theology of Liberation, 1970), feminist theology (Rosemary Radford Ruether, Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza), and womanist theology (Delores Williams, Katie Cannon) developed in parallel.

Chapter XXIIThe shape of the doctrine.

The doctrinal core most Christian traditions share, despite their many disagreements:

1. Trinity. One God in three persons — Father, Son, Holy Spirit — "of one substance," not three gods and not three modes. Defined at Nicaea (325) and Constantinople (381).
2. Incarnation. The eternal Son became fully human in Jesus of Nazareth — "true God and true human," united in one person, defined at Chalcedon (451).
3. Atonement. Christ's death deals with sin and reconciles the world to God. Multiple theories — ransom, satisfaction (Anselm), penal substitution (Reformed), Christus Victor, moral influence — have coexisted.
4. Resurrection. Christ rose bodily from the dead. The pivot of all Christian claim.
5. Church. The community of those who follow Christ, marked by baptism and the eucharist. Disagreements concern its order, ministry, sacraments, and visibility.
6. Eschatology. Christ will return; the dead will be raised; God will judge; a new creation will come.

Chapter XXIIIWorship.

Christian worship is built around two sacraments shared by virtually all traditions: baptism (with water, in the name of the Trinity, marking entrance into the church) and the eucharist (also called the Lord's Supper, the Mass, the Divine Liturgy — the meal of bread and wine commanded at Christ's last supper). Catholic and Orthodox traditions count five additional sacraments — confirmation, reconciliation, anointing of the sick, holy orders, marriage.

The shape of the eucharistic liturgy is remarkably consistent across the major traditions: gathering, scripture reading, sermon, prayers, the eucharistic prayer recalling Christ's Last Supper and the Spirit's invocation, the breaking and sharing of bread and cup. The Apostolic Tradition (c. 215, attributed to Hippolytus) gives an early picture; modern eucharistic prayers in many traditions return to its forms.

The liturgical year — Advent, Christmas, Lent, Easter, Pentecost, ordinary time — structures Christian worship time as a yearly rehearsal of the gospel narrative.

Chapter XXIVThe world Christian map.

Roughly 2.4 billion Christians in 2025, by Pew Research and the World Christian Database estimates. The major communions:

• 1.4 BRoman Catholic — in communion with Romesince c. 30 CE
• ~700 MPentecostal/Charismatic — classical, charismatic, neo-charismaticsince 1906
• ~600 MProtestant (non-Pentecostal) — Lutheran, Reformed, Anglican, Baptist, Methodistsince 1517
• ~260 MEastern Orthodox — Constantinople, Russia, Greece, Romaniasince 1054
• ~85 MOriental Orthodox — Coptic, Ethiopian, Armenian, Syriacsince 451
• ~28 MAnglican Communion (overlapping Protestant)since 1534
• ~6 MAssyrian Church of the Eastsince 5th c.

Categories overlap; numbers depend on whom you count. The growth poles in 2025 are sub-Saharan Africa (especially Nigeria, DRC, Ethiopia, Kenya), East Asia (especially China and South Korea), and Latin America (Pentecostal expansion within historically Catholic countries).

Chapter XXVTwenty Christians worth knowing.

• 1st c.Mary of Nazareth — mother of Jesus, central in Catholic and Orthodox pietyJewish woman
• 1st c.Mary Magdalene — first witness of the resurrectiondisciple
• d. c. 64Peter — chief apostle, traditional first bishop of Romeapostle
• d. c. 165Justin Martyr — first major philosophical apologistapologist
• 347–407John Chrysostom — "golden-mouthed" preacher, archbishop of ConstantinopleGreek Father
• 347–420Jerome — Vulgate translator, biblical scholarLatin Father
• 480–547Benedict of Nursia — the Western monastic Rulemonastic
• 1098–1179Hildegard of Bingen — abbess, visionary, polymathmystic
• 1182–1226Francis of Assisi — founder of the Franciscansfriar
• 1225–1274Thomas Aquinas — the Summa Theologiaescholastic
• 1342–c.1416Julian of Norwich — Revelations of Divine Loveanchoress
• 1483–1546Martin Luther — the German Reformationreformer
• 1515–1582Teresa of Ávila — Carmelite reformer, mysticmystic
• 1703–1791John Wesley — the Methodist movementrevivalist
• 1813–1855Søren Kierkegaard — Christian existentialismphilosopher
• 1906–1945Dietrich Bonhoeffer — Discipleship, Nazi resistance, executed 1945Lutheran
• 1910–1997Mother Teresa — Missionaries of Charity, CalcuttaCatholic
• 1929–1968Martin Luther King Jr. — Black Baptist preacher, civil rightsBaptist
• 1917–1980Óscar Romero — archbishop of San Salvador, martyrCatholic
• 1936–2025Pope Francis — first Latin American pope, first Jesuit popeCatholic

Chapter XXVITwenty-five essentials.

• c. 400ConfessionsAugustine
• c. 426City of GodAugustine
• c. 547The Rule of St BenedictBenedict
• c. 1265Summa TheologiaeAquinas
• c. 1418The Imitation of ChristThomas à Kempis
• 1559Institutes of the Christian ReligionCalvin
• 1577The Interior CastleTeresa of Ávila
• 1678The Pilgrim's ProgressBunyan
• 1903The Varieties of Religious ExperienceWilliam James
• 1917The Idea of the HolyOtto
• 1937The Cost of DiscipleshipBonhoeffer
• 1952Mere ChristianityC. S. Lewis
• 1957The Mystical Theology of the Eastern ChurchLossky
• 1971A Theology of LiberationGutiérrez
• 1981The Nature of DoctrineLindbeck
• 1985Jesus and JudaismE. P. Sanders
• 1989Sources of the SelfCharles Taylor
• 1996The Body and SocietyPeter Brown
• 2003The New Testament and the People of GodN. T. Wright
• 2007A Secular AgeCharles Taylor
• 2009The Christian World: A Global HistoryMacCulloch
• 2010The Next ChristendomPhilip Jenkins
• 2017Strange RitesTara Isabella Burton
• 2019DominionTom Holland
• 2022Christianity: The First Three Thousand YearsMacCulloch (rev.)

Chapter XXVIIThe case against.

A serious treatment of Christianity has to register the major criticisms. They are not few, and most of them are old.

The historical record. Crusades, inquisitions, religious wars, anti-Jewish violence including European complicity in the Holocaust, slavery's defenders, the residential schools, decades of clerical abuse and institutional cover-up. The church has been, repeatedly, on the wrong side — sometimes inseparable from imperial and racial violence.

The intellectual case. Hume on miracles. Feuerbach on projection. Marx on ideology. Freud on illusion. Russell on why he was not a Christian. The New Atheists (Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett) of the 2000s rehearsed older arguments louder.

The internal case. Slow on slavery, slow on women, slow on LGBTQ inclusion, slow on the indigenous it converted at gunpoint. Many of the church's own moral developments came under external pressure.

A sober defender of the tradition has to take all this seriously. Tom Holland's Dominion (2019) makes the case that the moral framework used to indict Christianity itself derives, recursively, from Christianity's slow assimilation of its own scriptures. The argument is contested but not silly.

Chapter XXVIIIChristianity in 2025.

Three big trends shape contemporary Christianity:

The southward shift. The centre of gravity has moved from Europe-North America to sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and parts of East Asia. The typical Christian today is a young woman in Lagos, São Paulo, or Manila — not a European parishioner.

The Western retreat. Mass attendance and self-identification have collapsed across most of historic Christendom. Britain's "no religion" group reached 53% in 2021 census. American "nones" reached 28% in the 2024 Pew survey. France, the Netherlands, Sweden are post-Christian by most measures. The story in the United States is uneven — mainline Protestant collapse, Catholic stability via immigration, the rise of nondenominational evangelicalism, and the steady drift of young Americans away from organised religion.

The political polarisation. The American religious right and its global counterparts; the Latin American Pentecostal political turn; Russian Orthodox alignment with the state; integralist arguments on the Catholic right; progressive Christian alignment with social-justice causes on the left. The political identity of Christianity is more contested in 2025 than in any year since the religious wars.

Chapter XXIXWatch & read.

↑ PBS Frontline · From Jesus to Christ (Pt. 1)

More on YouTube

Watch · The Council of Nicaea in 5 Minutes
Watch · Crash Course World History · Luther & the Reformation

Where to begin reading

Start with the Gospels of Mark and John in any translation; then Luke. Read in parallel: Diarmaid MacCulloch's Christianity: The First Three Thousand Years (2009) for the historical sweep; Rowan Williams's Tokens of Trust (2007) for the doctrinal tour; Marilynne Robinson's Gilead (2004) for the religion as a way of seeing.