Customer Reviews

The Dark Side of Christian History

5 star:		(51)
4 star:		(25)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(16)

 

 

This is a wonderful book. I'm glad it is finally out. All of the religious intolerance of the early church is brought to light. The facts should not be used as a reason to hate the church; but, they help us all understand that claims of a divine right to speak for God are all false. If you liked this book , I would also recommend the book An Encounter With A Prophet. The author of An Encounter With A Prophet would no doubt be burned at the stake if organized religion still had the power it had in the middle ages.

Though the author of The Dark Side of Christian History makes some efforts towards being unbiased, she does not fully achieve this goal. However, as she does her research and is dealing with terribly unpleasant subjects, I think it can be understood.

This is not a pretty book, but it is a coherent one. Each chapter is an essay on a different time in Christianity, how it evolved, and its affects on Western (and other) civilizations. A consistent history is shown from the early days of Roman Christiandom to current attitudes that is informative and unsettling. Quite simply, current problems and attitudes today can be traced back hundreds, or even thousands of years, and the history of the Church is not as simple as some make it sound.

Quotes from various sources paint the picture reasonably well, though this book could have easily been twice its size. If read with an open, critical mind, you'll find flaws, but you WON'T be the same. It's an excellent jumping-off point to study the parts of Church history people don't want to talk about.

The Dark Side of Christian History is one of those rare finds. This book was written in a concise fashion and details the horrors, both spiritually and physically, that the early Church visited upon members of society. I found Helen Ellerbe's research to be thorough, citing many historical documents and publications. Contrary to a statement made by another reader, this book is highly accurate and credible.

Many individuals have no knowledge of the atrocities committed by the church. Without understanding these events, we can never progress beyond them. The era of the Inquisition and the Witch Hunt is over, but religious intolerance is still with us, rearing its ugly head. With the help of provocative books such as this, I believe we can move past religious intolerance - once and for all.

On a final note, I am Wiccan, and although I believe that present-day Christians should not be held responsible for the Church's brutality of the past, I would like to see our Christian brothers, sisters and leaders acknowledge, accept and learn from these events.

I'm in favor of any book that debunks Christian Myths. This book was well written and informative. I particularly appreciated the author's take on the antiquated belief that we need to fear God. If you enjoyed this book you might also wish to read An Encounter with a Prophet by Clyde A. Lewis

Once again we shall read the comments based upon the "Kill the messenger" mentality. As a writer and "serious" researcher of Western Theology, I have read countless books on the history of the church (and written one or two as well), and this book is among the best. The ability to place before the reader a large number of ideas in a straightforward and easy to grasp manner while remaining objective is not always easy or even possible. Still the author has managed to do this rather well. No one could possibly mistake my stance on my own writing, but this book I find much more neutral. A must read for anyone in the church, or considering it. Not a judgement of religion, just a simple stating the historical reality. This in itself will be enough to offend many.

This is a very good (by not quite excellent) book which, in a concise 188 pages, takes you through the history of Christianity providing you with a handy reference for all of the murder, oppression, irrationality, suppression of science and progress, and opposition to freedom and pleasure which characterize this vile slave religion. Although written from an obivious wiccan perspective given to a bit too much environmental whining and a slightly overdone feminist tone, it is still an exceptional book. The scholarship is fairly solid, with ample references and footnotes even if a couple of the authors logical transitions and asertions of causality are a little innaccurate or incomplete at times. Still, it is probably better and more compact than most anything else you will find out there. It is certainly a worthwhile eye-opener for anyone out there still blinded by the lies of religious propaganda which continuously spew forth from Christian pulpits.

I was very impressed by Helen Ellerbe's "The Dark Side of Christian History." A critical overview of nearly 2000 years of Christian history, Ellerbe sheds light on the ugly skeletons that "feel good" Christendom would like the rest of us to ignore or downplay. Ellerbe opens by saying that the Christian legacy "fosters sexism, racism, the intolerance of difference, and the desecration of the natural environment" and goes on to intelligently justify her position.

Ellerbe covers the suppression of theological diversity in early Christianity (including the suppression of alternative gospel texts), the Crusades, the Inquisition, genocide against Native Americans, the witch hunts of the 1400s-1700s, and other atrocities committed under the direction of Christian churches. The book is thoroughly annotated, and contains a substantial bibliography for further reading.

My only criticism of Ellerbee's book is that, if anything, she doesn't go far enough. This is especially true in her brief mention of Christian complicity in the slave trade. The intertwining of Christian churches and theologies with slavery is a truly vast phenomenon with a huge body of documentation (start with Frederick Douglass' "Narrative" and Harriet Jacobs' "Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl"). But I suppose there is only so much an author can accomplish in a book of about 220 pages.

I recommend "The Dark Side" both to intellectually honest Christians and to non-Christians who may be the targets of some of the types of bigotry that have historically been intertwined with Christianity. As a companion text, try "The Bible Tells Me So: Uses and Abuses of Holy Scripture," by Jim Hill and Rand Cheadle.

This is a great book to start with to learn more about the controversial aspects of Christian history. This history includes the questionable formation of the Church from after Jesus's death to modern times, as well as the worst atrocities inflicted in the name of the Church. If you are looking for a good introduction, buy this book.
My criticism would be that in certain areas the author treads too far, and in other areas not far enough. The author is a woman, who obviously appears to be a liberal feminist (although not an extreme feminist). Her interest thus leads her to cover Christianity's supression and Inquisition of witchcraft. She does not cover in depth slavery, or colonialism, two of the most damaging Church sponsored activities in our history. She also spends the last chapter discussing our modern situation, and trying (too hard) to relate the actions of the Church to our current views of science, politics, and society in general. I think the conclusions she makes in the section are stretching it a bit.
Overall, I would recommend this book as a great starting point on the issue. It is also important for anybody belonging to a religion that is currently under attack by Christian fundamentalists!!

I met Ms. Ellerbe shortly after the book's publication and was very impressed with her openess and her vast understanding and knowledge of the Orthodox Christian Church history. She states clearly from the start that the book is not designed as a slam on Christianity ~ nor that she favors any other religions over it. Helen Ellerbe spent 7 years researching and verifying the information contained within her book ~ and she used actual Church documents for it. We always hear about the 'good' work of the Christian Church ~~ Ms. Ellerbe, without rancor, and with a factual and unbiased point of view based on scholarly research, gives us the 'other side' of the Church's story ~ and corrects quite a bit of history at the same time.

I like this little book. As some have noted, it has its errors and its inadequacies, but it does a good job of presenting the fundamental problems with Christian history (and by extension with X-tian faith), so it gets four stars. If you want to know what the world would be like living under a theocracy without traveling to an Islamic country, this book will be more than you want to know. I found Ellerbe's use of illustrations from earlier centuries one of the more interesting aspects of the book. One 19th century illustration of churchmen torturing a suspected witch is something I shall never get out of my mind, and I do not think I would have found it in any other book. The illustrations alone make this book worth a close look. The discusion of missionaries in the New World is also unforgettable. And if anyone was ever in doubt about what real sin is by a Christian's reckoning, Ellerbe reveals it fully and clearly as sexual pleasure. There is no doubt that sex is the biggest sin because it is the biggest of pleasures, all of which are evil. In the words of William Blake, "as the caterpillar chooses the fairest leaves to lay her eggs on, so the priest lays his curse on the fairest joys." And yet the Christian witch hunt was itself a kind of sexual adventure, of course, in which sexually attractive people were zealously pursued and tortured because of the feelings they aroused in the faithful. Christian priestcraft has always involved this dynamic, and to some extent today the persecution of the sexually attractive has simply morphed into psychological abuses (if not child molestation); the psychology is the same. And as the author points out, in hunting witches it was always the keenest of sexual pleasures for witch hunters to subject their victims to the cruelest sexual humiliation and a painful death involving sexual torture, all in Jesus's name. Only in that way could guilt inevitably be revealed (as the torturers became sexually aroused the guilt of the witch was confirmed). Ellerbe renders that dynamic in an easily accessible way to a readership who would never have the inclination to approach Foucault's "Discipline and Punish" or his "History of Sexuality," as examples. That fact itself makes her book a highly worthy endeavor.