Does democracy need Christianity?

Apr 16, 2021 by

by Michael Kirke, MercatorNet:

The world before Christ was a savage place. Ancient civilisations were cruel and unforgiving. In this world, despite the benign and wise voices of people like Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Socrates, Cicero and others, Egypt, Persia, Greece and Rome placed very little value on human life.

Tom Holland’s Dominion and Professor Mary Beard’s S.P.Q.R. – to name but two relatively recent depictions of that world – illustrate the great divide between the values of BC and AD.

But if Rome was not built in a day, neither was Christendom. Peter Heather’s Fall of the Roman Empire, or the story of St. Columbanus and his missionaries in the turbulent Europe of the 6th and 7th centuries, show us how long it took for authentically Christian values to take root in a pagan world.

Even into the 12th and 13th centuries, the flowering which we see in the lives of St Francis, King Louis IX, and St Thomas Aquinas, personal brutality accompanied a confused and confusing political morality, exemplified by blundering Crusaders, the unedifying struggles between the Empire and the Papacy, and the Hundred Years War.

The path to the modern world, was long and arduous. In the 20th century, it faltered at least twice and was threatened with extinction.

What was the common denominator of the regressions experienced by Christendom – which we now coyly call Western civilisation? It was the abandonment of the principles of life and living which Christians derived from the teaching of a Man who claimed to be the Son of God.

A new book, Escaping the Bunker: Democracy Needs Christianity, by the Irish writer Mark Hamilton, looks at today’s society and politics. He finds it in grave danger of catastrophic collapse. Of his book he writes:

Read here

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