The following post has not been well written, it probably contains incomplete ideas and there are no proper references. I simply started writing and then stopped. Here is what came out.
I've read a number of books, articles, and blogs in the last two years that point me in an uneasy direction. From thesis research to casual reading, from Thomas Watson to G.K. Chesterton, to a myriad of contemporary scholars; all of them speak in unison about what can only be described as an ongoing conspiracy, namely the engineering of the popular understanding of history by historians with strong anti-Christian sentiments.
What is Christianity known for in popular culture? Crusades, Inquisitions, resisting science, Flat Earth wackos, Creationist wackos, slavery, White Supremacy, residential schools, Aboriginal Abuse, wars, weird beliefs, anti-intellectualism, homophobic, antiquated, ritualistic, barbaric, on and on the list goes; essentially boiling down to the stupidest, most hypocritical, and most violent people on Earth. From public education to popular media the uncountable acts of heroism, charity, peace, civil advancement, and intellectual rigor of Christian Civilization are being forgotten and replaced with a disparaging narrative about illiterate masses torturing and killing each other in the name of Christ at the behest of power hungry Popes and Christian Kings. This is the narrative taught in public school, proudly proclaimed by atheist authors, and published by news journalists.
The first experience with this manipulation of history that really stood out to was in public school history class. We covered the middle ages in a month. My dear grade 10 history teacher, Mr. Staples, took great delight in boiling things down to how Christianity used the fear of Hell to force everyone to go to war against such and such a group and it was about 1000 years of that between 500 AD to 1500 AD at which point humanity got past religion and started thinking for the first time since the Fall of Rome and we had The Enlightenment which worked to put all that nasty Dark Ages stuff behind us. This wasn't what he taught but this is what everyone in the class got from him as I witnessed art projects for next two and half years regarding the affects of religion that were extremely simplistic and negative (a poster with a grade 11 attempt at Gothic text reading "Tithe all your money to the Church and join the Crusades OR BURN IN HELL!!!!!"). What we learned in school about the middle ages and Christianity was wrong, but more on that later.
My reasoning at the time was that the teacher must not be a Christian and has never really studied Christianity and so he doesn't understand that the wars were justified and that sometimes there are some things not only worth dying for but also worth killing for, the eternal destiny of mankind and the glory of God being two such things (this opinion would change later) but it would take too long to explain how this all fit together and nobody would listen anyway. Then I went to Briercrest and learned real history and real theology. Society, intellectual and academic development, philosophy, literacy, all of it continued after the fall of Rome and Christianity was the driving force to preserve and promote its growth. Dear old Mr. Staples was grossly (criminally?) oversimplifying things for the sake of getting through a grade 10 history class, and everyone in that class has had a low view of Christianity and the Middle Ages ever since.
My second experience was in Dr. Jamie Muir's Philosophy course. He explained the method societies use to enforce specific narratives through the analogy of Plato's Cave. The Politia, or the unquestioned (and unquestionable) assumptions of a society act as the fire by which everyone in the cave uses for light and this will affect how they see things. The fire is a manufactured light, it is not the sun. He extended the analogy to Canada to help us understand. In Canada we all believe in human rights. This is an unquestioned assumption. If you question the idea of human rights in Canada you will get a backlash because the assumption is not only unquestioned it is unquestionable. "Of course we have Human Rights!" anyone will tell you. "You must be an idiot or a fascist to question basic Human Rights." If you press them to give an explanation for why they have human rights though, they will not be able to give you an answer. The assumption is not only unquestioned and unquestionable it is also not understood. There is a philosophical argument for human rights but nobody learns about John Locke anymore except for maybe a brief aside in a grade 10 history class. Even if we did 'learn about' him we have not read him or his argument for why we have human rights, we instead just assume that we have them and that we know what they are. There are a few more unquestioned assumptions that make up the Canadian Politia; Multiculturalism and Tolerance being two of the big ones. Nobody understands how they work or where they came from but everyone talks about them and uses them to persuade support for this or that cause. Never-mind the fact that they are incompatible with each other. Professor Muir posed the following question. What do you think about the forced circumcision of African girls? "It's a horrible breach of basic human rights!" we responded. But its their cultural heritage, he argued back, it's a practice to promote sexual purity, why are you imposing your intolerant beliefs about sexuality and culture onto this family? After a long pause one brave soul responded that, "well, I guess there could be an argument made-" WHAT!? NO! This is a blatant violation of basic human rights! This poor girl! What sort of monster are you to advocate for her forced circumcision?! The point was clear. Our unquestioned assumptions were self contradictory and nobody could explain how they worked or where they came from.
A few classes later Dr. Muir explained that the media always lies. News agencies never tell a whole story and the stories they do tell are spun in light of the Politia. That 5 - 15 minute blurb or page of text is created to serve the Politia and it could never be any other way. The 'get information out to the masses' initiative always needs to dumb things down and shorten things up for the masses to understand, the must play to the Politia if they want to be heard. This often leads to favoring one side of a story more than the others or just ignoring them altogether. Even a casual observer can see this happening all the time. News journalists, comedians, entertainers, these are the puppeteers who make shadows in Plato's Cave by the light of the Politia for the masses to see.
This is a passive conspiracy, there is nobody or no group of persons at the head trying to cover things up, although there are lobbyists who attempt to influence the Politia hoping to make it reflect their agenda. Alternative opinions and the knowledge to understand the world are freely available (literally free in libraries and online) but nobody bothers to read them. The few that do know better become the target of comedians and sitcoms, the nerdy geeky bookish high IQ with no social skills stereotype. The passive control of the Politia exerted over society through the puppeteers teaches everyone to not take these people seriously by painting them in funny colors and laughing.
Later Dr. Muir asked us if we had ever read Plotinus, we responded that we had not. He asked if we had ever heard of such a man. We responded again that we had not. He seemed troubled and then exclaimed that surely we should have at least heard of Plotinus and that his soul grieved for us for having been so destitute in our education, not just for not having heard of Plotinus but for not having heard of so many incredible and influential people throughout history whose ideas and writings are at the foundation of our society and our beliefs as westerners. I was shocked. Dr. Muir wasn't one for theatrics and he didn't show much emotion in front of the class. He grieved for us. I am still shocked and honestly wonder how little I actually know about anything for having not at least heard of the people at the foundation of western thought let alone read anything them.
He went still further and told us to never go to any university in Canada to learn philosophy as every university has become enslaved to the Politia. They do not actually teach philosophy but rather teach about philosophers in light of current Canadian beliefs. You will not learn Plato in Canada, only a Canadian view of Plato, one that is tolerable and censored by Canadian sensibilities and only seen through the light of other philosophers that Canadian scholarship finds ideal. I asked him privately after class if he was serious and he was. The state of philosophical education in Canada was a disaster, he said. If you want to learn Philosophy then you must pick a philosopher and read him. Read everything he wrote. Then re-read him and re-read him again. Then you will understand him and not just what other people have said about him. You will be prepared to dialogue about him and his ideas. If he was influenced by another philosopher then read that philosopher, don't ever settle for a textbook that tells you what to think about a philosopher, read the philosopher. There are only a handful of universities that actually do this in the United States and none of them do this in Canada. He proceeded to explain his own experience with attempting to teach this way at a university in Manitoba and how the feminists had aggressively lobbied the school to fire him and ban the books required for the class for teaching feminist philosophies that they disagreed with.
I was stunned. How much of my knowledge of people and events was from what others have said or written and not from the direct source? Pretty much all of it. What did I really know? Not much at all. How much of what I had been told was accurate or true and did they ever check to be sure? Why on earth should a lobbyist group have sway concerning what a university teaches? Shouldn't universities be the realm of free thought and unlimited academic inquiry?
How does this long seemingly unrelated story have to do with my conspiracy theory regarding the popular view of Christianity in history? This is the framework for how the conspiracy works. The Politia of North America has made it so that nobody actually reads first source or accurate second source material regarding history or Christianity which means that all of us just don't know what happened or why because the sources we absorbed are inaccurate and oftentimes just plain false. The Politia has also become anti-Christian; not in the sense of specific hatred for Christianity but more in the sense of painting Christians in funny colors and alternatively laughing and mocking them. This has given people that do hate Christianity an opening to present and publish disparaging material which, instead of being checked for accuracy, is adopted by the puppeteers of society to create shadows to entertain the masses. The false ideas published and perpetuated become fact in the eyes of the public. This is the template for what happened in Socrates' time, Dr. Muir argued that this was a universal problem, not restricted to any time or culture, and I have never heard any argument to say otherwise. But this is only the template, keep it in mind as we continue.
The third encounter I had with the manipulation of history to disparage Christianity was while I was writing my thesis on Thomas Watson, a Puritan preacher from Seventeenth Century England. As any thesis writer knows you have to do heavy research into first and second source material. What I found regarding the Puritans in general astonished me.
When you think of the Puritans what do you think of? Moralistic prudes in drab pilgrim clothes being overly serious about everything and spending lots of time on hard wooden pews in old wooden churches. M.L. Mencken once quipped that "Puritanism is the haunting fear that someone somewhere may be happy." What I discovered through my research was a very different narrative though. The Puritans were not drab but colorful, not conservative but cutting edge reformers, and their morals were loose and sometimes scandalous compared to their Anglican and Catholic contemporaries. They were not stuffy, they were radically fresh, they were not against science or learning, they founded schools and academies and fought and died for freedom of the press and triggered an explosion of literature and discussion on everything ranging from politics to economics and public education to religion. Far from being deranged preachers full of condemnation they preached incredible grace and were teachers, politicians, poets, businessmen, the educated radical edge of English society at the time. Why then are they remembered for tortuously strict censorious moralizing? Because their opponents seized power and wrote the history books and did a very good job of disparaging the Puritans' legacy. All that remains in the public consciousness regarding the Puritans is a narrative about sexually repressed pilgrims with sour faces and funny hats. It seems like everyone knows the portrayal from The Scarlet Letter but nobody remembers how they were criticized for their loose religion, partying too much, and their scandalous sexual freedom. They were politically diverse, some siding with the Revolutionaries, others with the Royalists and came from all walks of life inhabiting every sphere of society but we have decided to paint them all with a very large dark brush.
The very things the Puritans labored and strived for to the point of persecution and death are the very things they are remembered for trying to stop and destroy! It was crazy. History as I knew it had been remembered upside down. The more I read the Puritans the more I became convinced of it, what we know about Puritanism is wrong. All we know is the caricature left behind by those who hated the Puritans. This is a true shame as they had such an influential role in establishing the foundations of both Canada and the United States. More than that, they were incredibly deep thinkers with penetrating vision and one of the highest points of political, theological, and academic development available for Protestant Christianity (Evangelicalism specifically) to draw upon!
How did this happen? How do we remember them for the opposite of what they were? The consensus I came across throughout Puritan studies is that those who hated the Puritans left disparaging histories which have since been picked up by other historians who hated religion in general and what was fabricated became fact in the minds of the masses. They labored powerfully and passionately to the point of death for so many of the rights and benefits we enjoy today, setting the foundation for the society we live in, and we have not only forgotten them but then rejected them and named them enemies.
I wondered then, while I wrote my thesis, if I or any of my friends and family would suffer a similar fate or how many of my Christian brothers and sisters who struggled mightily for God's Kingdom and the benefit of others only to have been forgotten and then rejected; remembered only through a caricature created by those who hated them. It is a good thing that God remembers them and that He will have the final say.
My fourth encounter with the manipulation of history to disparage Christianity was when I read through G.K. Chesterton's Orthodoxy. In this book he talks about his own journey as a non-Christian looking into Christianity. He noted how those who hated Christianity didn't make a whole lot of sense. One hated Christianity because it was the cause of all wars in Europe, another hated Christianity because they were too peaceful and refused to fight. One hated Christianity for its political power another for its political weakness. One hated Christianity for its overly high view of humanity, another for its extremely low view of humanity. One hated Christianity for its ruthlessness, another for its compassion. How could Christianity be the cause of all wars but too peaceful, too powerful and too weak, loving humanity too much and hating humanity too much, too ruthless and too compassionate all at the same time? His conclusion was that either Christianity was a truly impressive evil or the problem wasn't with Christianity at all but rather with the people who hated it as they compared it to some sort of ideal that Christianity would not conform to. Then he took the time to research what Christianity actually was and became a Christian himself.
Chesterton marveled at the complex asymmetrical balance of Christian doctrine and explained that it is very easy for nonbelievers looking in to be confused or disappointed; expecting symmetry seeing asymmetry, and assuming that it was therefore unbalanced. But just as everything in the world isn't quite symmetrical (moles on a face, one heart in the left of your chest and not one on the right, etc) so too is the religion of the living God who created the asymmetry not quite symmetrical, which is really the only thing that could make sense. The unyielding 'fight' within Christian doctrine is counter balanced by its unwavering grace and mercy, but not symmetrically. Like a wobbling top there are some points where Christian doctrine brings more fight to bear and at other points more grace which may appear to be unstable but in reality it is not.
This asymmetrical balance is complex and not easy to understand. It is not what we expect to find and it appears at first to be about to fall over. It is very easy to dismiss Christian doctrine as a lost cause or just plain foolishness or contradictory and that is what society does. Everyone can find something to hate about Christianity. Even in 1900 the real picture of Christianity had been buried by so many people painting their own pictures and Chesterton had to actively dig through the mess to find what Christianity actually was. Just one more example before moving on, he had been lead to believe, like many in that time period, that Christianity was very much like and completely compatible with Buddhism. After actually reading both Buddhist and Christian texts Chesterton announced that this was absolutely false, that the two were absolutely nothing alike. Another point at which unscrupulous or uninformed historical authorities had painted an inaccurate portrayal of Christianity which became fact to the masses.
There is so much good in reading Chesterton and I feel like I've maybe gone a bit off track. The point of bringing Orthodoxy into this is that he articulates how people get Christianity so very wrong and that so many people hate it because they don't understand it and don't want to. Both the educated and uneducated a hundred years ago, and these were the people who brought us to where we are today.
A fifth encounter with the manipulation of history to disparage Christianity has been recent experience with popular media. Last year at Christmas there was a smear article published about how Christianity was hopelessly stupid and historically false. This author, doubtlessly influenced by Hitchens and Dawkins, managed to paint Christianity as hopelessly violent, consistently opposed to science, the cause of the Fall of the Rome, a force of power hungry ignorance, and then also started tearing up the entirety of Biblical Studies by trying to show how original texts don't line up with each other and how there are so many translation problems. This was posted as an academic Christmas special on a prominent news website. This article and the author were immediately taken to task by Seminary professors and pastors throughout North America who condemned the information in his article as utterly false and disparaging to the point of hate speech and provided overwhelming evidence to counter every single one of his claims... but it was still chosen as the academic voice of the news.
There was another article about how Christianity was NOT the cause of the Fall of Rome and how the entirety of our knowledge of the 'Middle Ages' has been purposefully distorted and utterly unrecognizable from history by the anti-religious historians who coined 'The Enlightenment'. Far from being a dark age or even a 'Middle Age' (as though it were just time filler between Rome and The Enlightenment) the centuries after the dissipation of the Roman Empire was filled with life and learning. Instead of descending into chaos as we have been lead to believe the fractions of the empire coalesced into independent kingdoms who worked to preserve the peace and knowledge of the empire without the empire. New technologies were constantly developing as were political and social systems. The priorities of these new kingdoms was different than that of the Empire and they focused on food production and defense as the empire could not longer provide or protect them against Vandal raids from the north and Muslim armies from the east and south. The people did not become stupid or fall into a 'dark age' the new kingdoms built schools and it was Christianity that preserved the learning of Rome, taught people how to read, built universities, and continued the academic, philosophical, and theological endeavors. Christians were not the ones doing violence until late in the Middle Ages, it was the Christians who suffered violence from everyone. There was no division or jarring transition between then and the so called 'Enlightenment,' at least not until a false division was made by humanist scholars with the express purpose of disparaging Christianity by calling the time before 'dark' and their new endeavor to remove religion 'enlightened.'
Then another article published just recently by a seminary professor at Covenant, once again about how what we know about the Middle Ages is wrong. He explains that nobody who was educated believed the Earth was flat since 300 BC. The whole 'Flat Earth' criticism leveled against Christians was to show them to be ignorant and anti-science is a hoax perpetuated by the early Darwinists against Creationists. It worked. The Crusades were not about grabbing power and conquest as we have been lead to believe. They were primarily for the purpose of defending Christians from ever encroaching Muslim armies. The Inquisitions were not about torture or a crime against humanity as we have been lead to believe, they were for removing heresy from The Catholic Church via Excommunication. Torture was not a common or even uncommon as have been lead to believe but rare. According to this professor who has a PhD in Medieval history, the 'torture museums' wherein modern citizens can witness all manner of barbaric torture devices and techniques used in the Middle Ages are fabrications created to demonize Christian Civilization. It worked.
Then there was an Anti-Christian meme that popped up shortly after reading this, it was a picture of a man being drawn and quartered made to look like authentic Medieval artwork with the phrase "We already tried Christian society run by the rich, it was called THE DARK AGES for a reason!"
So here we have all manner of historical and academic weight and credibility but it consistently gets ignored in favor of the disparaging narratives. It's disheartening and frustrating. I don't have capability to read everything that has been written or understand all that has been said. Even if I did nobody would listen. Just look at all of the incredible and powerful communicators who labored throughout history for the Kingdom and how they have all been ignored, having their life's work summed up in a disparaging Facebook meme.
I think what I see playing out isn't a real conspiracy, just continued confirmation of what what the Bible teaches about humanity preferring darkness to light and exchanging the truth of God for a lie. It happens continually in every age; the world is continually forgetting what God has done and continually hates Christ and his followers and their work in the world. I don't think this hatred is necessarily intentional, although some of it certainly is, but rather passively inherited through the Politia and original sin. It is all so very big though, my mind can barely keep the few pieces it has encountered in place. Praise be to God that he knows what's going on and he is the one who directs us and vindicates us.
Thought Done.
Greg Out.
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