Channel 4's history of Christianity is thankfully over, having given vent to every possible criticism of Christianity that the fashionable secularist could hope for. In week 1, we had Harold Jacobson discussing Christian anti-semitism; week 2, the lapsed (actually rather anti-) catholic conservative Michael Portillo on how Constantine spoiled Christianity by mixing politics and religion; week 3 was theologian Robert Beckford evangelising on how Christianity brought social cohesion to the diverse tribes of Anglo-saxon Europe: at least, he thought Christianity a good thing. We then moved to Rageh Omar and the religious fanaticism of the crusades and the West's failure to see this through Muslim eyes; week 5 - the best program - by Kwame Kwei-Armah (I can't remember his name), but this too associated Christianity with imperialism; week 6 Anne Widdecombe and the horrors of the Reformation; week 7 and Colin Blakemore to show why Darwin had disproved the claims of Christianity and why we should all be Jacobins, uh sorry, Humanists now; week 8 to finish it, why can't Catholicism and Christianity be more like modern liberalism? by Cherie Blair.
Did anything positive arise from Christianity over 2000 years? Well, the only sympathetic commentators were Beckford and Kwei-Armah, but even they saw it through a left-leaning perspective. I might say to Portillo that without Christianity, Europe would have probably been islamised; to Rageh Omar that the crusades were a defensive war against a relentless encroachment on Europe by Islamic armies and navies that lasted from the 7th to the 17th century. Anne Widdecombe could have spoken of some of the achievements of Anglicanism and English protestantism after the reformation instead of merely concentrating on the violence: I am a Catholic and it doesn't matter to me if the burghers of Lewes burn Pope Paul III in effigy; it bothers me much more that the Reformation gets used to paint Christians as intolerant bigots, Anne.
Beckford was sympathetic but Christianity has more to offer than an adjunct to Labour's social cohesion policies; Kwame is so preoccupied with post-colonial perspectives that he forgets how Christianity is seen by many Africans as the enlightenment. Christianity should modernise, says Cherie .. well, the idea that modern liberalism and Socialism are really "Christianity in practice" is the great heresy of the age.
As for anti-semitism, well Nazism had a neo-pagan ideology and had much more in common with progressive ideas than the left will admit; Blakemore underplayed the extent to which the Catholic Church and the monasteries sponsored science and technology - and overplayed the philosophical significance of the theory of Evolution.
The political slurs are part of the ongoing propaganda campaign of the cultural revolution; the irony was that there was very little about doctrine, very little spirituality; and of course very little about the civilising effect of Christianity. The series merely reflected the pre-occupation of Christianity's enemies and detractors.
