Australia’s Religious Right groups like to play up the significance of Christianity in Western history. This is rarely done with subtlety, but Richard J. Gibbs’ recent effort on the Australian Christian Lobby (ACL) website deserves special mention.

According to Gibbs:

Christianity has the world’s first and best psychologist, sociologist, anthropologist and scientist … [T]he Bible is a scientific study of social and political life using these scientific methods.

Christianity has the best leader, teacher, counsellor, helper, healer and judge the world has ever seen. Christianity has answers and solutions to all social, political, economic, scientific, cultural, legal and personal problems …

Clearly a man who likes his lists, Gibbs tries to give us some idea of the manifold benefits that Christianity has brought to the world:

…[T]he principles of social justice, equality, freedom and democracy, … such institutions as schools, hospitals, orphanages and the Red Cross, the world’s greatest charities, foreign aid missions, … [the] abolition of slavery, abolition of slums, reduction of poverty, prison reform, abolition of cruelty to animals and abolition of child labour, unsafe factories and long working hours …

Gibbs proceeds to credit Christianity with the concept of the ‘duty of care’, public liability, anti-discrimination, anti-racism and human rights laws, as well as a collection of great thinkers, scientists, artists, writers, musicians and explorers. He then identifies a few great Australian Christians, including early Prime Minister Alfred Deakin - described by another Religious Right author as a spiritualist and hence ‘anti-Christian’ (Peter Frogley [1999] Government in Australia, 20) - and the infamous ‘flogging parson’, Rev. Samuel Marsden.

I could take issue with most of Gibbs’ fanciful claims - for example, it is ludicrous to imply that schools and hospitals were Christian inventions - but I want to focus here on two very specific assertions, namely that Christianity is responsible for democratic political systems and for the abolition of slavery.

According to Gibbs, Christianity ‘is the cornerstone of Western liberal democracy’, while Christians ‘developed the idea of … government by the people, for the people’ and ‘abolished absolute monarchy’. Even a minute amount of historical research will convince you that these claims are without foundation. The democratic ideal is traced back to ancient Greece and largely disappeared during the Dark Ages and Middle Ages while Christianity was in the ascendant. While the rebirth of democracy can be linked to the Protestant Reformation (a minority Christian movement, let us not forget), it is essentially a product of the Enlightenment, which the modern Religious Right wishes to roll back as far and as fast as possible! As for Christians being responsible for the abolition of absolute monarchy, tell that to Louis XVI and Tsar Nicholas II.

My position is that while liberal forms of Christianity are not incompatible with democracy, the Religious Right-style Christianity espoused by most fundamentalists and conservative Pentecostals is ipso facto hostile to democracy. How in conscience can you extend equal political rights to people in thrall to the Devil?

The argument that Christianity was responsible for the abolition of slavery is simply a sick joke. Jesus never condemned slavery. Neither did Peter, Paul or anyone else in the Bible. Even evangelical authors like John Stott admit this - www.elroysemporium.com/news/slavery.html, 5. The Old Testament (Lev. 25:44-46) tells you whom you can buy and sell as slaves and provides that you can will them to your children as an inheritance. The New Testament asks you not to mistreat your slaves, but spends much more time telling slaves to obey their masters e.g. Eph 6:5:

Slaves, obey your human masters with fear and trembling; and do it with a sincere heart, as though you were serving Christ.

Just as an exercise, try asking some conservative evangelicals for their interpretation of that passage, emphasising the ‘fear and trembling’. I guarantee that not a single one of them will interpret it literally, despite the fact that they’re duty-bound to do so. Watch them shuffle.

18th and 19th century opponents of the slave-trade were often Christians (or deists or humanists), but they faced the most intense backlash from other Christians. (And if opponents quote the example of William Wilberforce at you, ask them to explain Wilberforce’s view of ‘justification by faith’ in terms of this quote:

He nowhere found in scripture that it would be asked at the last day ‘were you Churchman or dissenter?’, but ‘what were your works?’ (Robin Furneaux [1974] William Wilberforce, 47)

You could also ask them if, like Wilberforce, they disapprove of capital punishment - but this is beside the point.)

And it was the same in America as it was in England. For every Abraham Lincoln you had a Christian antagonist such as Confederate Vice-President Stephens:

[The foundations of our Southern government] are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the Negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery - subordination to the superior race - is his natural and normal condition …

The substratum of our society is made of the material fitted by nature for it, and by experience we know that it is best, not only for the superior, but for the inferior race, that it should be so. It is, indeed, in conformity with the ordinance of the Creator. It is not for us to inquire into the wisdom of his ordinances, or to question them. (As quoted in Bertrand Russell [1934] Freedom and Organization, 1814-1914, 322-3)

After the Civil War, the American Book and Bible House published Charles Carroll’s The Negro a Beast, informing its pious readers that ‘the Bible and Divine Revelation, as well as reason, all teach that the Negro is not human’. No wonder that escaped slave and famed black speaker Frederick Douglass had this to say:

I assert most unhesitatingly that the religion of the South is a mere covering for the most horrid crimes … I should regard being the slave of a religious master the greatest calamity that could befall me … [I] hate the corrupt, slaveholding, women-whipping, cradle-plundering, partial and hypocritical Christianity of this land. (As quoted in Carl Sagan [1996] The Demon-Haunted World, 343-4)

Democracy was not founded and slavery was not abolished by Christianity, Mr Gibbs, but by courageous and right-thinking people.

Filed in: Christian Right, People