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6 Modern Myths About Christianity & Western Civilization

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Social scientist Philip Sampson takes on six anti-Christian myths that are incessantly propagated through the news media, popular culture, the public schools, and academia. By "myth" Sampson means a story line in which a basic core of historical facts is altered - by addition, distortion, or subtraction - to create a picture in which Christianity is seen as a monolithic and destructive entity fundamentally hostile to humanistic values.

As timely as today's headlines, these modern "myths" include: (1) the story of Galileo versus the Catholic Church; (2) the ongoing Christian fight against Darwinism; (3) the pernicious influence of Christian missionaries on native societies; (4) Christian denigration of the body and sexuality; (5) Christian disregard for the environment; and (5) Christian persecution of witches. Sampson shows how in each case a generally accepted story has been created which seriously misrepresents the historical facts.

For example, in the chapter on Darwin, Sampson shows how the accepted story line of "Darwin and reason versus the church and superstition" overlooks the widespread scientific opposition to Darwin's ideas, both then and now, and the relative lack of empirical support for Darwinism. Moreover, Christians were not uniformly hostile to Darwin, nor were their objections necessarily based on Biblical fundamentalism.

Sampson also offers some interesting background on the famous Scopes "Monkey Trial," providing a much needed corrective for how that trial is often presented in the popular press. Even more to the point, Sampson shows how social policies derived from Darwinist assumptions - imperialism, eugenics, unfettered capitalism - were often OPPOSED by Christians.

And that is perhaps Sampson's major point: many of the attitudes for which Christianity is blamed are actually products of Enlightenment rationalism or Greek philosophy. Thus, the Indians were conquered not so much because Christianity demanded it but because modern, progressive, enlightened civilization demanded it; and if the environment is degraded, it is because since the Enlightenment we no longer see this as God's world, but man's, to do with as we please.

Sampson does not hide Christianity's historical sins. Rather, he puts them in perspective and shows how they often intertwined with other factors that are now overlooked. As a defense of a nuanced view of both actual history and intellectual history, Sampson provides an excellent antidote to the simplistic and bigoted myths which so often pass for fact.

Phillip J. Sampson, Phd. in social sciences, has written a very readable book on six anti-religious myths that permeate modern society about Galileo's condemnation by the Christian church, about Darwin's evolutionary theory, about Christian religion legitmating the ruination of the environment, about missionaries oppressing indigenous peoples, religious repression of the human body, and persecution of witches. For example, Sampson shows that 70 years prior to Galileo, Copernicus had the same idea that the earth revolved around the sun. Copernicus was supported by the church, as was Galileo, and both were honored by Catholic popes. Galileo suffered a short detention and mild, but honorable, reproof from Pope Urban VIII for calling the Pope a "simpleton." Likewise Darwinism is shown to reflect "survival of the fittest" capitalism more than science. And the notion that Judeo Christian religions legitmated the exploitation of the environment is shown to be a Greek, not a religious idea. Sampson convincingly shows that such stories do not fit the historical facts and are modernistic narratives meant to repress competing religious narratives and alternative worldviews. Unfortunately Sampson doesn't fully tell us why he believes such myths persist and how they are legitimated. This is a book for those who do not want to get their history or stories from movies or television.

No need to hesitate. Buy this beautifully researched, insightful book.

The author looks at 6 primary beliefs that define the modern world, tracing their development as fictions cultivated by 18-20th century Enlightenment humanists who distorted their opponents beliefs and history, even fabricating quote attributions in the process. The goal was to replace Christian understanding of God, reality and man with naturalist beliefs, derived from Greek paganism, thus move authority from God to man (specifically, them).

Because of the author's gentle style, some readers new to the debate over humanism vs. religion & science may find it valuable to first read "Atheism and the Erosion of Freedom" (Morey), to understand the underlying assumptions driving the Humanist project.

"Inventing the Flat Earth" (Russell) is another outstanding book that focuses on a single issue: the fabrication of the idea (in the 1820's) that medieval people thought the world flat, so as to discredit the church and construct a Dark Age to be be corrected by Enlightened moderns.

Included in "6 Myths":

#1) Remember plucky Galileo, who stood against the might of the church armed only with the flame of reason and a telescope? Tortured by the Inquisition and condemned as a heretic for showing humans lived on an insignificant speck orbiting a common star nowhere special in the Universe, a realization that devastated a now-undermined church? Well, nothing in the above humanist story is true.

Copernicus proposed the Earth revolved around the Sun decades before Galileo. It was widely discusssed, but evidence was lacking. The Roman Catholic Church provisionally accepted the view of Aristotle, that everything revolved around the Earth, pending other information. Geocentrism was a Greek idea, not a Biblical one.

While people debated heliocentrism, a matter of no significance in the Bible, (the main opponents of heliocentrism were other astronomers with pride vested in understanding of concentric spheres, NOT clergy), Galileo got in trouble for implying the Pope, who had gone out of his way to befriend Galileo, (even penning an ode to him in 1620), was a simpleton. Further, Galileo asserted that the Bible was written for the common man and did not need a church to interpret. This was strikingly similar to arguments of the earlier John Calvin and the Protestant Reformation, to which the Roman Catholic Church WAS acutely sensitive, contributing to Galileo's arrest.

The choicest morsel here is one that always baffled me: the notion that heliocentrism somehow devastated the church by removing Man from the center of creation. This shows total ignorance of Biblical Christianity which ACTUALLY says all things were made NOT for humans, but for the Son of God. Their value arises from God's delight in them.

When the Enlightenment lapsed back into Greek idiom, it confused mankind being given "dominion" (leadership responsibility) with the Greek understanding: "domination". The idea that nature's reason for existence is its usefulness to mankind is a Greek one, coming from Aristotle, not the Bible. It was extended by the Romans, who treated the natural environment as a conquered province. At times the confusion did seep into the church, via writings influenced by Hellenism, such as Aquinas, but was expelled during the Reformation.

At the time of Galileo, the Earth being at the center of the universe was NOT AN HONOR. It was the outer celestial spheres that were pure and divine. The Universe became more corrupt as you moved to the center, which is why Dante put Hell in the center of the Earth. The Earth was held to be corrupt due to mankind's Fall and sinful nature.

When Galileo asserted the Earth was ACTUALLY a heavenly body, far from demoting it, he elevated it (and mankind) in importance. And he wrote so. Which is what endeared him to the humanistic (ego/pride-centered) "Enlightenment" intellects.

Chapter #2) Darwin: completed the Copernican revolution for humanists, by seeming to remove God and Original Sin. Materialistic, undirected evolution meant human thought, ego/pride and power were the actual pivots around which the universe revolved, not God. The book documents an array of historical fabrications used to caricature the church's position on evolution. Humanists need to reinforce their view of themselves as rational and tolerant (because they are not), needing an enemy to attack so as to avoid self-examination (see my review of "Why People Believe Weird Things"(Shermer)). This is one reason there seem to be countless books railing against the danger of believing in pseudo-science like dowsing, but one is hard pressed to find anything pro-dowsing. Shadow-boxing?).

#3) The Environment. Shows how, contrary to the humanist myth that Bible-based human "dominion" caused environmental degradation, it is actually Greek and Roman thought, revived by the Enlightenment project (while suppressing Christianity through caricature and demonization), that gives the go ahead. To a Christian, a tree is part of Creation, designed by God. The Puritans were strong, original environmentalists, opposing animal cruelty even as their detractors lied to cartoon their motives as the opposite. It is in Christian societies where modern environmental awareness was founded and developed.

#4) The Missionaries -- shows how terms like "savage" and "barbarian" and "civilization" are foreign to Biblical understanding, but are prominent in "Enlightened" thought. Actual Christianity sees all humans as being made in the image of God thus having intrinsic worth. Accordingly, it is in Christian societies where slavery was legally banned and the idea of "human rights" has root.

#5) Human body -- punctures the idea the Christianity means sexual repression, and shows why humanists needed to invent the caricature.

#6) Witchcraft -- documents the real history, grossly exagerrated by humanists. 20 people died in Salem. But hundreds of millions have been killed and enslaved this century trying to create secular Utopias, be they communist, socialist, or fascist.

This skeletal summary doesn't do the book justice. Get the book. Read carefully.

The overall theme of the book is fighting myths of Christianity with sober historical facts. He does not ignore the not-so-friendly aspects of those doing bad things in the name of Christianity. For instance he mentions the people killed in witch burnings is appalling and admits there were some missionaries that did more harm than good. But he does let readers know legitimate and relevant information of history that paint a rather different overall picture than what many popular myths have insinuated. Some of the historical information he presents might raise an eyebrow or two. Below are a couple of examples.

Some myths of Galileo made it appear that this scientist had the scientific facts on his side and that the Church was against heliocentric theory, ignoring the scientific evidence, for religious reasons, thereby making this a simple "science vs. religion" dispute. To give a taste of what he says, what the author puts into light is that the secular scientists of that era were actually against heliocentric theory, the evidence supporting heliocentric theory had not yet arrived, and that the Church really didn't care much about defending geocentricism at all, pointing out that it had let Copernicus publish the idea before Galileo was born and that many of Galileo's supporters were in the Church rather than among secular scientists. The motives behind the Catholic Church forcing Galileo to renounce heliocentricism and the lenient punishment are also explained, though the explanation of motives could have been done more thoroughly. While the Catholic Church is not portrayed as perfectly saintly, the notion of the whole conflict centering on "science vs. religion" is refuted fairly well.

The witch craze is put into perspective with some surprising facts. The number of witch trials was lowest precisely where the Church and the Inquisition were involved. The Church was also more skeptical of witch accusations than one might expect (the more radical ones anyway, such as claiming to have slept with Satan), and the author provided examples to illustrate that point. In the so-called burning times, the substantial majority of towns and villages never experienced a single witch trial. While he acknowledges that the number of people died in Europe, North America etc. (most recent estimates total to about 150 to 300 people per year, a total of 40,000 to 100,000 overall; he mentions that some exaggerations of the numbers have been falsely stretched into the millions) is a terrible enough catalog of human suffering, he puts it into perspective with the far greater amounts of bloodshed in recent history. For instance, the Battle of Somme in 1916 killed a million people in five months, twenty five thousand the first day. The point is reinforced with several more notable historical facts of the twentieth century.

What is somewhat disappointing is that he goes into a little, but only a very little, into how these myths emerged. I would like to have learned more about that in a book such as this. Another possible flaw is that on the section of Darwin, he mentions that the acceptance of Darwin's theory was patchy at best (which is in fact true), but what he leaves out is that most (though certainly not all) still nonetheless accepted some form of biological evolution; many scientists accepted evolution because of the book yet rejected Darwin's theory of it. This may have inadvertently left a false impression in the mind of the reader. All things considered though, the benefits and enlightening historical data still outweigh its possible flaws and I highly recommend this book to those who have a historical interest in Christianity, as well as those people who have been suspicious of such anti-religious claims of Christian history.

We tend to believe that mythology is only for the ancients. What this author demonstrates is that our society now has our own mythology surrounding certain influential historical events. If nothing else, the true Galileo story makes this book worth a read. The fact is that Galileo was going against the scientific consensus of his day. The church merely was supporting the scientific consensus of the day. And we all know what "scientific consensus" means....

What most people don't realize is that history is being re-written to make Christians (or "xtians" as hate mongers spell it) into the bad guys of history. Apologetics is the new frontier of Christian ministry, and this book should be on every Christian's reading list. I think you should buy two copies and give one to your local library. I'll stop short of saying if every Wiccan were made to read this book, it would probably be the end of their religion!

Sampson has provided a valuable historical treatise for defending the historic integrity of the Christian faith from modern myths. He points out how key issues regarding Christian history have been distorted by non-believing scholars. Their efforts have been so successful, they have become modern myths accepted without thinking.

Get it. Read it. You'll love it.

Philip Sampson describes six myths that "everybody knows" are true but upon closer examination turn out to be fiction. Myths "present values and beliefs to us a though they were facts or history, and they use stories to do so" (p.13). One myth that appears in many guises in the modern world is that of the warfare between science and religion. The stories that are shaped by this myth invariably have as their villain the Church, as an institution immersed in superstition and ignorance, a bigoted opponent of reason and scientific progress.

The Galileo story is presented as a clear example of this conflict. We are told that the Bible says that everything moves around the earth but Galileo's observations showed that the earth moves around the sun. Because he stood his ground, so the story goes, he was tortured by the Inquisition, condemned as a heretic, and wasted away in a prison cell.

Reality, however, is quite different. First of all, it was Aristotle, not the Bible, that taught the everything moves around the earth. The Roman Catholic Church was reading certain Biblical passages through Aristotelian lenses and has since admitted that mistake. When one allows the Bible to speak for itself and recognize when it uses phenomenological language, one finds no conflict with observational evidence.

Second, the idea that the earth revolves around the sun did not originate with Galileo, but with Copernicus, in 1543, 90 years before Galileo was condemned in 1633. In fact, during Galileo's lifetime there was still insufficient evidence to choose between Copernican and Ptolemaic (geocentric) theories. So while Galileo believed that the earth did in fact move around the sun, his observations could not prove it. And we don't see a climate of repression of new ideas by the Church. On the contrary, alternative hypotheses were freely discussed. In fact, according to Cardinal Bellarmine, who is sometimes portrayed as the villain in the story, Copernicus' model made "excellent good sense" (p. 38). Then why was he condemned?

In a 1632 book which contrasted the standard Aristotelian cosmology with heliocentrism, he in effect called Pope Urban VIII, the very pope who had befriended him, a simpleton for not agreeing with him. But was he then tortured by the Inquisition, imprisoned for months in a dank prison cell and left to die a broken, lonely man in exile? No. Although summoned to Rome in his old age, detained, and forced to renounce heliocentrism, he was given his own rooms and servants. And then he was allowed to return home with his pensions from the Church intact. "Galileo's condemnation was the result of the complex interplay of untoward political circumstances, political ambitions, and wounded prides" (p. 39).

A similar theme of bigotry and oppression on the part of Christianity is portrayed in the story of Christian missionary activity. A virtual identification is made between the activities of the missionaries and the evils of colonialism, implicating the former in all the atrocities and exploitation of the colonists. A third story, that of the persecution of witches in early modern times, is yet another where blame is directed towards a "cruel and intolerant" Christian church. Sampson separates fact from fiction in showing in both cases that reality was quite different. Like the story of Galileo, that of missionary oppression has its origins in eighteenth-century Enlightenment anticlericalism. By shifting the blame for colonial exploitation away from Enlightenment and evolutionary ideologies and to Christianity, "the modern mind gains an alibi for its part in the oppression of native people and covers up its complicity in wide-scale human misery" (p. 112). Regarding the witch-hunting story, between 90 and 99 percent of the deaths reported by the popular story are fictional, and it was lay authorities, not the Inquisition or Puritan ministers, who were behind most of the prosecutions. The death rate was actually lower in countries like Spain in Italy, where the Inquisition was strongest, because by demanding evidence and higher standards of proof, it actually acted as a brake on lay courts and popular zeal.

Sampson argues that contrary to the claims of popularizers of modernism, this worldview is sustained and held up as our hope for the future, not by reason and facts, but by stories. In order to deflect attention away from the failings of modernism, these stories have to create villains, usually played by representatives of Christianity, in order for the hero to shine by contrast. To do so, however, the stories have to play fast and loose with historical facts, sometimes by exaggerating them, sometimes by simply fabricating them.

He argues that postmodernism also utilizes stories to illustrate its worldview. However now the players are different. The story of witch-hunting no longer pits reason versus superstition as the modernist story has it. Instead we see issues of power struggle between competing social groups: mystical, independent, and free women on the one hand, and misogynist male rationalists on the other. Here religion, at least less rational forms of it such as mysticism and paganism, is on the side of the hero and science is moved to the role of villain. Nonetheless the selective use of facts and their embellishment is the same.

The modern and postmodern arguments both have aspects to commend them, but they are incomplete and fail as overarching explanatory worldviews, and that is why they inevitably distort history in order to appear more complete than they are. Sampson concludes by suggesting the Christian metanarrative, a story solidly rooted in history, one that engages us like no other story because we have the priviledge of knowing the Author, and being a part of His Story.

I loved this book. It challenged me and brought new evidence to my doorstep that I'd never heard before. Well documented and well written. Enjoyable and eye-opening - I highly recommend this book.