What it did

The order, and why it is this one

Join anywhere. Each stop carries the route with it, so the foot of every question here offers the next one and the way back to this page.

1. 01What did Christianity do about slavery?The New Testament regulates slavery and does not condemn it. What Christians then did with that, over nineteen centuries, runs in both directions, and the texts did not settle it.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
2. 02What did Christians think about war?Before Constantine, Tertullian and Origen both argue that Christians should not take up arms, though Tertullian shows that some did. A century after his conversion, Augustine is telling a Christian officer when and how he may. Both sides quote scripture, and both are on the record.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
3. 03What were the Crusades actually about?One of the most consequential speeches of the Middle Ages exists only in accounts composed years later by men who wanted different things from it. What the crusaders then did is far better attested, including what they did to people who were not Muslims, and including what the pope who called the fourth crusade said about it afterwards.Deepdepth, meaning: Major unanswered questions.Uncertain. Meaningful scientific, historical or philosophical disagreement remains.Read
4. 04What were the inquisitions?The inquisitions were courts, staffed by clergy, tasked with identifying and punishing heresy. They kept detailed records, which is why historians can say what they did rather than what people said they did. The revision that followed those records corrected the numbers and did not make the institution defensible.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
5. 05What did the missions do to the people they reached?Christian missions accompanied European colonisation for five centuries, sometimes as its instrument and sometimes as a witness against its cruelty. Both of those are in the record, in the same decades, occasionally in the same person.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
6. 06What did the church do about abuse?Between 1950 and 2002, four per cent of Catholic priests in the United States had allegations of child sexual abuse against them, from a study the bishops themselves commissioned. Inquiries in Ireland, Australia and France found comparable patterns. The institutional response, for decades, was transfer and silence. What follows is about the Catholic Church, because that is what the commissioned research and most of these inquiries examined.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read
7. 07Did Christianity invent charity?In a letter preserved under his name, a hostile emperor, trying to revive the old religion, ordered a high priest to set up hostels because the Christians were supporting the pagan poor as well as their own, and it was winning them converts. In the same sentence he says that no Jew ever has to beg, so the Christians were not the only ones looking after their poor.Shallowsdepth, meaning: Interesting questions with substantial evidence and real uncertainty remaining.Known. Strongly supported by evidence and broadly established.Read