The Lost History of Christianity #3

As Philip Jenkins has pointed out in The Lost History of Christianity, Christianity survived much stronger and much longer in the Eastern world than we might have imagined. Vibrant, growing, expanding churches in Syria, Iraq, Iran, India, Egypt, Ethiopia, etc., were very much alive well into “the Dark Ages.”

So what happened?

“The deeply rooted Christianity of Africa and Asia did not simply fade away through lack of zeal, or theological confusion: it was crushed, in a welter of warfare and persecution.”

For many years, Christians and Muslims had managed to live together. In fact, many Christians moved to Arab nations, preferring the tolerance of Muslim rulers to the brutality of other leaders.

But something changed around 1300. And it changed all over the world. Jews suffered under Christian rule, and certainly Christians suffered under the law of Islam. Expulsion and massacre replaced tolerance. The persecution was so great that it was difficult for religious minorities to survive. They either moved to a place with the protections of a “Christian state,” or they were killed off.

Jenkins claims that while there were many factors that contributed to this change, the biggest factor was climate change (and the eroding economic condition that accompanied it). The world hit a long spell of cooling off.

“If we seek a common factor that might explain this simultaneous scapegoating of vulnerable minorities, by far the best candidate is climate change, which was responsible for many economic changes in these years, and which increased poverty and desperation across the globe. Populations had swelled during the warming period between the eleventh and thirteenth centuries. Europe’s population more than doubled during these prosperous times, forcing settlers to swarm onto marginal lands. In the late thirteenth century, however, Europe and the Middle East entered what has been described as the Little Ice Age, as pack ice grew in the oceans, and trade routes became more difficult both by land and by sea. Summers became cooler and wetter, and as harvests deteriorated, people starved. The world could no longer sustain the population it had gained during the boom years. Europe suffered its horrific Great Famine between 1315 and 1317, with reports of widespread cannibalism in 1318-20. Populations contracted sharply across Eurasia, and grossly weakened societies lingered on to face the horrors of the Black Death in the 1340s.”

The old Eastern Syriac churches, once the lively centers of scholarship and evangelism, perhaps suffered the worst carnage. They barely survived as “inward-looking quasi-tribal bodies within the Near East.” Christians — along with their art and architecture — were driven out or annihilated.

Here is a sad, chilling thought: “For practical purposes . . . Middle Eastern Christianity has, within living memory, all but disappeared as a living force.”

(One more post in series to follow.)