A Strange Cause of Intolerance

Maybe it's part of my rebellious nature, but I like to read history from different and slightly radical points of view - you know, "the untold story," the parts you never heard in your Western Civ. class.

Just now I'm slowly making my way through Philip Jenkins' latest work, The Lost History of Christianity: The Thousand Year Golden Age of the Church in the Middle East, Africa, and Asia - and How It Died.

So many - in both the West and the East - think of Christianity as a Western religion, but in the big picture of things that's quite an aberration. For much more of its history - and likely, its future - Western Christians have been a minority (among Christians). That's a big part of what this book is about.

Here's something though that really raised my eyebrows. In many times and places, for centuries, Christians and Muslims lived in relative peace, but sometime around the end of the thirteenth century that changed. Why do you suppose that is?

"We can identify specific political reasons for the new harshness to Christians. A reaction against Western crusading zeal played some role, but that is not of itself an adequate explanation," says Jenkins.

Turns out intolerance was on the rise, globally, and Christians lands were treating their religious minorities just as badly as Muslim ones were. England expelled all its Jews in 1290 and France followed in 1306; in the next few decades pogroms reached "appalling heights." The papacy formally listed witchcraft as a heresy in 1320. The French trumped up charges to shut down the Knights Templar. Everyone seemed to be hysterical and paranoid. Why?

"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 into 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... States foundered, kings were murdered, and popular revolts and uprisings became commonplace.

"Whatever the religious coloring of particular societies, this was a world that directly attributed changes in weather or harvest to the divine will, and it seemed natural to blame catastrophes on the misdeeds of deviant minorities who angered God."

Philip Jenkins, The Lost History of Christianity, pp. 135-137

Also reading Jenkins these days, looks like, is a blogger I've been following named Steve Addison.