Philip Jenkins
Christendom is in the literal sense a continent. We come to feel that it contains everything, even the things in revolt against itself.
G. K. Chesterton
Even using the word “Christendom” in contemporary discourse poses serious difficulties for many. Historians use the term uncontroversially to refer to the political/religious order that prevailed in western Europe from roughly the ninth century through the sixteenth. For modern Christian thinkers, however, Christendom represents a bygone nightmare that has left a heavy burden on the subsequent history of the faith. In this view, Christendom implies the intimate alliance between church and state, the use of secular mechanisms to implement church policies, and the institutionalization of religious intolerance (Iogna-Prat 2002; Chazan 2006; Burman 2007; Pegg 2008). To characterize part of the world as Christendom of necessity implies a stark contrast with some other regions or cultures that espouse different faiths. In the medieval context, Christendom stood in a tense relationship with dar al-Islam, an image that bears uncomfortable parallels to strictly contemporary circumstances. In a modern context, also, the term Christendom suggests a picture of Christianity as the religion of one part of the world – white, wealthy, and technologically advanced – spreading its faith as part of the package of imperial exploitation. Surely, Christendom must be a theocratic historical nightmare that no sensitive modern would care to see re-enacted?
Yet the concept of Christendom is both more complex and perhaps more relevant than these caveats might suggest. Above all, we have to define the term carefully, and to trace its changes of meaning over the centuries. This work allows us to see just how potent are the surviving legacies of the Christendom concept in the values and structures of many Western nations, even some of the avowedly most secular. And while some versions of Christendom are indeed linked with militarism and intolerance, others are more attractive in their universalism, their rejection of the nation-state as an absolute good. As nation-states lose their relevance in a globalized world order, it is natural for Christians to explore alternative approaches to political identity.
The English word Christendom is archaic, and of its nature refers to a bygone era in which the Christian religion represented the central justification and organizing force of society. (This distinction exists in some major languages, but not all: in French, christianisme indicates the faith, while chrétienté suggests the social order of Christendom; in German however, Christentum signifies just “Christianity”). Augustine’s City of God is the best-known source for the idea that the Christian world should also be a political order, which in the context of the early Middle Ages implied some version of the Christianized Roman Empire (a vastly over-simplified version of Augustine’s original thesis). In Eastern Christianity, the alliance between church and state was consecrated in what became known as the Byzantine Empire. In the West, Roman-based clerics developed theories of an imperial-papal alliance that influenced the empire formed by Charlemagne and his successors after 800. Though the notion of a new Western Empire enjoyed mixed fortunes, the idea of a Christian state permeated the new kingdoms that rose from the tenth century onwards. Successive popes fought to establish their overlordship over a unified Christendom, a Respublica Christiana, and from the 1070s they often succeeded in forcing secular rulers to establish their claims. After 1300, though, states like France and England had become strong enough to defeat and humiliate the popes, placing severe limits upon their ambitions (Herrin 1987; P. Brown 2003).
Despite the papal failure, we can legitimately use the term Christendom for the Latin European order, which sometimes found expression in common military effort, especially during the Crusades. About 1380, Chaucer’s knight had fought hard in “his Lord’s war,” riding far “as wel in cristendom as hethenesse.” Modern historians discuss these crusading efforts in terms of fighting for Christendom or extending the frontiers of Christendom, while the battle of Lepanto in 1571 still represented the confrontation of Christendom versus Islam. The Templars and other knightly societies were the military orders of Christendom (Walsh 2003; Tyerman 2004; Wheatcroft 2004; France 2005; Hopkins 2006; Phillips 2007). Consecrating this use of “Christendom” in English popular usage was Richard Johnson’s popular Famous Historie of the Seaven Champions of Christendom (1596), which recounted the legends of the patron saints of the leading nations of West Europeans, stressing throughout their struggles against pagan and Muslim enemies. Reading such uses, it is difficult to avoid thinking of the Muslim division of the world into the House of Islam and the House of War. Beyond Christendom lay borderlands that needed to be defended or, ideally, extended (Beckingham 1983; Johnson 2004).
Yet this aggressive usage was by no means the only sense of “Christendom,” as the term also implied a common cultural and spiritual heritage that was far above anything that could be offered by transient nations and states. Latin Christian lands shared so much in terms of religious and cultural values, and Catholic clergy represented the primary scholars and transmitters of culture. In addition, canon law represented a unifying force, over and above the variegated legal systems of individual societies. In this sense, Christendom reflected a critically important theological notion, that of the membership of the church as the Corpus Christianum, the Christian body, the consensus of the faithful. To draw another close Muslim analogy, the Christian community closely resembled the Muslim Ummah. This body was united under one (Catholic) church and sharing a common baptism and eucharist. In this sense, Christendom need not have a geographical limit at all, nor need it coincide with any political entity. After all, before the tenth century, probably as many Christians lived outside the control of Christian states, under Muslim rule in Asia or the Middle East, as lived within Christian nations like Bavaria or England. In later centuries, this distinction became moot, as the populations of Latin European swelled, and it became ever harder to sustain Christian identity within Muslim-dominated regions. By the thirteenth century, Christendom largely coincided with those areas of direct Christian political rule. After the fall of Constantinople, neither Western Catholics nor Protestants showed much awareness of the sizable Christian populations living within the Ottoman Empire (Berend 2001).
Yet loyalty to political entities – still less to military causes – remained only a part of the ideology of Christendom. All rational people knew that states and kingdoms might rise and fall, and thus deserved no more than passing homage – who in the high Middle Ages remembered the bygone kingdoms of the Lombards, Ostrogoths, or West Saxons? Yet the church survived. While the laws of individual nations lasted only as long as the nations themselves, Christendom offered a higher set of standards and mores, which alone could claim to be universal. Though it rarely possessed any potential for any common political action that might be truly effective, Christendom was a primary form of cultural reference (Bainton 1969). The church endured, and so did the Christian lands, as the term Christendom became synonymous with those portions of Europe that remained beyond Muslim control. Early seventeenth-century sovereigns dreamed of healing the Protestant–Catholic split that so desperately weakened that Christendom in the face of its Ottoman Turkish enemies. At least into the mid-seventeenth century, long after the end of the crusading era, this vision of Christendom as an overarching culture and political order retained its power (Reynolds and Witte 2007).
By the end of that century, however, appeals to “Christendom” sounded increasingly dated and irrelevant, partly because European military victories largely removed the Muslim threat that had so long permeated political consciousness. Christendom had far less need to define itself against an outside foe. Within Europe itself, the end of the Thirty Years War created a new state system, and religious ideologies were progressively excluded from political debate. By 1700, ideologies of Enlightenment and science were gaining influence, undermining so many of the principles of an older Christendom. Progressive and modernizing thinkers challenged assumptions about the influence of religious codes and beliefs over what they felt should be secular systems of law and government. Some modern writers trace this spread of secularization in terms of a “decline of Christendom” (McLeod 2000; McLeod and Ustorf 2003).
Rationalist thinkers now succeeded in making the term “Christendom” synonymous with obscurantism and intolerance, part of the lexicon of ignorance that also included “Gothic” and “the Dark Ages.” Gibbon in 1776 was already using the term “Christendom” as a historical concept, describing the Latin Christian world of the Middle Ages, something that obviously could have no relevance to his own enlightened day. Nineteenth-century approaches developed this critique still further, using Christendom to describe the stage in which science bravely challenged the ignorance of theology and superstition (e.g., Andrew Dixon White’s A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom [1896]). Atheist Robert Ingersoll described “the inspired Bible” as “the greatest curse of Christendom.” Christendom, it seems, had to disappear in order for the modern world to be born (White 1978).
From a very different approach, some Christian thinkers have used the term Christendom to describe a tragic stage in the history of the faith, a curse marked particularly by the church–state alliance, with all the compromises that demanded. In the 1840s and 1850s, Søren Kierkegaard targeted “Christendom” as one of the greatest problems and contradictions challenging authentic faith. “Christendom,” he declared, “has done away with Christianity without being quite aware of it” (Kierkegaard 2004: 31; Elrod 1981; Conway 2002). Kierkegaard’s ideas powerfully influenced twentieth-century believers, as they struggled to understand the moral and political calamities of their time, the wars and massacres so often undertaken in the name of Christian states or societies. However attractive in other ways, had the idea of a harmonious Christian society contributed to xenophobia and racism against outsiders, above all to Europe’s Jews? Henceforward, it was morally suspect to speak of interfaith relations or Christian missions except in the context of a post-Christendom. The image of Christendom, and the word’s connotations, deteriorated sharply (Bader-Saye 1999; Maier; 2002; Smith 2003).
In both North America and western Europe, suspicion about the claims of Christendom grew as intellectual confidence in the claims of “the West” fell. The second half of the twentieth century was marked by an outpouring of books by authors often basing themselves in an Anabaptist tradition, exploring what it meant to live in a post-Christendom culture, or even a post-Christian society, in the sense of a nation in which one could no longer assume even minimal adherence to Christian norms or values. Often, these authors posited a radical conflict between the noble rhetoric of Western societies and the observed behavior, which conflicted so sharply with Christian values of justice and self-sacrifice. In After Christendom? Stanley Hauerwas asked “how the church is to behave if freedom, justice, and a Christian nation are bad ideas” (Hauerwas 1991; Curry 2001; Murray 2004).
In modern American political parlance, the notion of Christendom seemed to have become radioactive, untouchable by any responsible thinkers. Yet since the nineteenth century, critics of the dominant Western order have often turned to the idea of Christendom in search of a higher ideal, untainted by the horrors of industrialism and mass society. As early as 1802, Chateaubriand made a powerful contribution to rehabilitating the bygone centuries of the Christian faith in La Génie du Christianisme (“The Genius of Christianity”). Like sympathies and interests motivated the scholars and antiquaries who excavated the records of a lost medieval civilization to recapture what had been worthwhile and valid in the former Christendom, and as far as possible to revive those practices in the modern churches (Schaff 1993).
The rhetoric of Christendom has also exercised a political appeal. Right up to the present day, visions of a lost organic Christian community have surfaced repeatedly in the form of medieval and Gothic romanticism, which often appealed to radical social critics of modernity. If Christendom justified religious warfare, then it was also – according to this vision – the ideology of a community in which the wealthy and powerful acknowledged their social obligations, in which the poor could always turn for succor to the abundant social provision of the monasteries, and in which all acknowledged the supreme and pervasive law of God. Church and state acted together inextricably. In terms of learning and scholarship, also, moderns who struggled with the seemingly irreconcilable claims of religion and science looked back nostalgically to a time when faith was the essential underpinning to intellectual endeavor.
As industrialization and modernization progressed, this idealized picture exercised a potent appeal, as an image that could be not just venerated, but actually implemented once more. In the English-speaking world, such radical revivalism characterized the work of Catholic authors like G. K. Chesterton and Christopher Dawson, but also that of Anglican and evangelical writers in the circle of C. S. Lewis and Charles Williams. In many cases, the idealistic vision of a bygone Christendom served to draw modern Protestants to the Roman Catholic Church (Belloc 1973; Alexander 2007).
It is especially in the international realm that Christendom has exercised a lasting and powerful influence, which has been analyzed at length in the splendidly wide-ranging study of Mary Anne Perkins, Christendom And European Identity: The Legacy Of A Grand Narrative Since 1789 (Perkins 2004). Christendom appealed by its supranational vision. The post-Enlightenment state had offered no focus of loyalty higher than the nation, and consequently no form of restraint on the actions of that state. What, then, were the political implications for Christians? Should they strive only to ensure that individual states acted in accordance with Christian principles or morality, or could they invoke wider standards and allegiances? From the end of the eighteenth century, activists of many ideological shades thought in terms of a Europe mobilized around common principles derived from religious faith, which some explicitly discussed in terms of a new or revived Christendom. This idea naturally excited Catholic thinkers, who appealed to universal and transnational values in their struggles against the policies of individual secular states. In 1920, for instance, Anglo-French author Hilaire Belloc not only proclaimed that “Europe is the Faith,” but made his boast specifically Catholic: “The Church is Europe; and Europe is The Church.”
Recollections of a bygone Europe united and constrained by a common faith had a special appeal for the generation that suffered the horrors that afflicted that continent during the 1930s and 1940s. European Christian thinkers like Jacques Maritain recoiled from the evils wrought by societies that rejected God, or that exalted the race or nation-state to the level of the divine. In place of totalitarian doctrines, Maritain advocated an “Integral Humanism” that was fully aware of both secular and spiritual dimensions, and which naturally had political implications: Maritain himself contemplated a New Christendom in Europe. His ideas profoundly influenced political leaders such as Konrad Adenauer and Alcide de Gasperi, who sought to create a new Europe that rejected statist excesses, and that sought instead to implement fundamental Christian social values. In national politics, this impulse resulted in the Christian Democratic parties that would play so central a role in the politics of Germany and Italy (Burleigh 2006).
At a transnational level, these Catholic thinkers were at the heart of the movement towards European unification during the 1950s, one of the most important global events of the post-1945 era. Curiously, this religious dimension is often neglected by historians of the unification process, which makes little sense except in terms of the Catholic revival of that era. During the papacy of Pius XII (1939–1958), the Catholic Church enjoyed immense prestige and popularity as the vital force opposing Communist expansion, a position that reached its apogee in 1950 with the celebration of Holy Year in Rome, and the proclamation of the dogma of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary. As the struggle with Communism intensified, Catholic politics intimately linked Marian and apocalyptic doctrines, and such themes underlay the early stages towards European union. Not coincidentally, the European flag, with its twelve yellow stars on a blue background, strongly recalls the traditional images of the Virgin Mary, although omitting the central figure so as not to offend Protestant sensibilities. The flag was commissioned in 1950, that year of high Marian enthusiasm, and its designer Arsène Heitz freely acknowledged borrowing the passage in the book of Revelation that is commonly taken as referring to Mary, “a woman clothed with the sun, and the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.” Europe would be a new Christendom, defining itself not against Islam, as in the Middle Ages, but rather against Godless Communism, and in the new era as the old, its patron would be the Virgin (Coupland 2006).
Obviously, that is not how matters turned out, and united Europe has very often come into conflict with religious authorities, particularly the Catholic Church. There are many reasons for this, including the powerful French tradition of laicité, the absolute separation of religion from politics, but also the swift secularization that most West European nations have experienced since the 1970s. The most acute tensions between the churches and the secular order arose from the radical transformation of values in matters of gender and sexuality, and the dominance of individualism, libertarianism and personal autonomy. On matters such as abortion and contraception, gay rights and same-sex marriage, genetic engineering and stem-cell research, the Catholic Church repeatedly found itself fighting a rearguard battle against the advance of what were increasingly portrayed as core European values (C. Brown 2001; McLeod 2006).
By the end of the twentieth century, the European political entity that still flew a disguised Marian flag became ever further removed from any open – or even residual – display of Christian values, at least among political elites. During the debates over a proposed European constitution at the start of the 2010s, framers sought an exalted protocol that would describe the roots of European values and civilization. Though many wished to include at least a passing nod to the Christian heritage, others strenuously resisted even such an acknowledgment, strenuously rejecting any connection to Christendom. Instead, its preamble declared,
Drawing inspiration from the cultural, religious and humanist inheritance of Europe, which, nourished first by the civilizations of Greece and Rome, characterized by spiritual impulse [sic] always present in its heritage and later by the philosophical currents of the Enlightenment, has embedded within the life of society its perception of the central role of the human person and his inviolable and inalienable rights, and of respect for law. (Zenit 2003)
The 70,000 words of this prolix document thus fail to include a single specific reference to Christianity. This omission pleased those who believed, in the words of former French president Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, that “Europeans live in a purely secular political system, where religion does not play an important role” (Episcopal News Service 2003). In the same years, a number of conflicts at both national and European level suggest the extreme difficulty faced by office holders who adhere to traditional or orthodox Christian views on matters of gender and sexuality.
In such matters, European political realities appear to define themselves against those of Christendom, and arguably against Christianity as such. Recognizing the power of European secularism, important voices in the Vatican have spoken less of a revived Christendom than of a new evangelization, in which Christians see their role as that of a “creative minority,” the small body of leaven in a larger lump that is presumed to have little knowledge of the faith (Ratzinger and Pera 2006).
Yet for all the pessimism, the ideology and experience of Christendom have left a powerful inheritance for the modern world. Even in apparently secular Europe, memories of an older Christendom remain much in evidence, and conceivably such residual traces might provide the foundation for a contemporary revival. Sociologist Grace Davie argues that, despite the public coolness to Christianity, the Christian presence still remains potent through social memory. This is all the more potent in cities and small towns that still retain the Christian imprint on every street, every Heiligegeiststrasse (Holy Spirit Street) and Paternoster Row, and in which the whole urban plan is still shaped by parish boundaries. Neither God nor the church is easy to miss. Europe’s cultural Christians are “content to let both churches and church-goers enact a memory on their behalf,” secure in the knowledge that Christianity is there if and when they need it (Davie 2002: 19). The churches represent accumulated capital that can be drawn on as needed. In this comfortable and non-demanding sense, most do still define themselves, however vestigially, as Christians. Even in the most apparently secular countries of Northern Europe and Scandinavia, Christian customs are surprisingly evident through the popularity of Christian rites of passage. In most of Europe too, Christianity also still dominates the round of the year. Catholic countries are famous for their proliferation of saints’ days and religious-based public holidays, when work shuts down entirely. Many European countries still retain quite stringent laws prohibiting blasphemy, phrased explicitly to protect Christian sensibilities. Surprisingly perhaps, the practice of Christian pilgrimage is currently enjoying a new golden age in Europe, particularly to Marian shrines both old and new.
While it would be easy to dismiss these habits as hollow survivals or vestiges, a remarkable concern about Europe’s religious identity has resurfaced in recent years with the emergence of strong and visible non-Christian communities, particularly Muslim immigrants, whose leaders demand respect for their beliefs and values. Since 2001, for instance, Europe has experienced repeated controversies over fictional and artistic works deemed insulting or disrespectful to Islam, provoking a Muslim response that has been passionate, and sometimes violent. At its most acute, Muslim insurgency has resulted in mass terrorist attacks in Britain, France, Spain, and elsewhere. Observing such actions, some commentators have raised the question of the place of Christianity within Europe, and whether the radical secularism that prevails among political elites accurately reflects popular sentiment. As in earlier centuries, it is especially the presence of a hostile and threatening rival faith that urgently drives rethinking of Europe’s religious roots, and of the theme of Christendom.
The consequences have been varied and striking, as religious conflict has raised harsh questions about the state’s obligation to treat all cultures and faiths as equally valid and legitimate, and worthy of protection, granting no special privilege to Christianity. Yet the ideology of multi-culturalism has faced severe strains when facing extremist forms of faith with values that at so many points violate common European assumptions about free speech and equality before the law. In response, many commentators both Christian and otherwise have re-explored the contribution of Christendom in shaping modern Europe. In the words of Anglican Bishop Michael Nazir-Ali, “Almost everything you touch in British culture, whether it’s art, literature or the language itself has been shaped by the Judaeo-Christian tradition, by the Bible, by the churches’ worship and belief.” Even some writers who would once have been unabashedly secular or leftist have reasserted the Christian roots of Europe’s fundamental values of individualism and legality. In many West European countries, Christians have reasserted the need for the symbols of the traditional church–state alliance, for example the crucifixes that commonly hang in schools and hospitals in Catholic nations (Jenkins 2007).
This renewed concern over Christian identity has had a significant political impact in mobilizing opposition to Turkish membership of the European Union. Turkey, of course, is overwhelmingly Muslim, and supporters of its membership condemn any suggestion that Europe should be a “Christian club.” Yet in popular politics, there remains a potent sense that Europe should retain a predominantly Christian character, acknowledging the lively inheritance of Christendom in shaping the continent’s beliefs and values.
Debates about “Christendom” have also emerged powerfully in the global South, those regions of the world in which Christianity has spread rapidly in recent decades, especially in Africa and Asia. In Latin America, meanwhile, an old-established Catholic culture has increasingly been challenged by new charismatic and Protestant forms of faith. The beliefs of many rising churches give theme a strong predisposition to favoring close ties between church and state. Most Protestant and charismatic churches have a potent respect for the Old Testament, and for the political values described in those texts. From such a biblical perspective, Christians have an obligation to infuse their values into politics, to create godly states, and evil consequences might well befall those nations that violate divine law. Reinforcing such political/religious ideas is the inheritance of several colonial nations, especially Britain, in which a particular church enjoyed a privileged legal status. In most Latin American nations, only in recent times have most nations challenged the special legal role accorded to the Roman Catholic Church, a status that dates back to the era of Spanish and Portuguese imperial rule (Jenkins 2006a).
To date, only one African nation has explicitly proclaimed itself a “Christian nation.” Zambia took this course in 1991, when that nation’s vice president urged citizens to “have a Christian orientation in all fields, at all levels.” Although that experiment has had little practical impact, calls for a similar self-definition have been heard in other black African countries. However, as in earlier periods of European history, Christian policies are often shaped by the experience of neighboring or competing non-Christian societies, especially among Muslims. Many African Christians live in nations with substantial Muslim populations, or live adjacent to Muslim-dominated societies, and they observe the growing Muslim tendency to enforce religious standards through law, and to proclaim Islamic Sharia as the law of the land. As Muslim–Christian tensions and conflicts grow, sometimes to the point of armed struggle, Christians feel heavy pressure not to show themselves any less dedicated to the public implementation of their faith than Muslims, and are thus encourage to seek the establishment of their religious principles. For Christians too, as for Muslims, religious law is all the more attractive when it holds out an absolute standard by which to judge the pretensions of dictators who seem to know no other constraints.
In other ways too, present-day conditions in some emerging Christian churches echo those of older Europe. The growth of Christianity has occurred against a background of economic globalization and political weakness, which challenges the very idea of the nation-state. To use Benedict Anderson’s famous phrase, nation-states are imagined communities of relatively recent date, rather than eternal or inevitable realities, and many of these communities have begun to reimagine themselves substantially, even to unimagine themselves out of existence. Even in Europe, loyalties to the nation as such are being replaced by newer forms of adherence, whether to larger entities (Europe itself) or to smaller (regions or ethnic groups). If even such once-unquestioned constructs as Great Britain are under threat, it is not surprising that people are questioning the existence of newer and still more artificial entities in Africa or Asia, with their flimsy national frontiers dreamed up so recently by imperial bureaucrats. As Paul Gifford notes, many Africans live in mere quasi-states: “Though they are recognized legal entities, they are not, in a functional sense, states” (Gifford 1998: 9). Partly, the changes reflected new technologies. According to a report by the US intelligence community, in the coming decades “governments will have less and less control over flows of information, technology, diseases, migrants, arms, and financial transactions, whether legal or illegal, across their borders . . . The very concept of ‘belonging’ to a particular state will probably erode.” As in the Middle Ages, the transience of national identity encourages people to seek for more permanent kinds of loyalty, while the presence of rival faiths leads some to frame that loyalty in religious terms.
Since the 1970s, social scientists have noted parallels between the fragmented political realities of the global South and the cosmopolitan world of the Middle Ages. Some have even postulated the future emergence of some movement or ideology that could in a sense create something like a new Christendom. This would be what political scientist Hedley Bull called “a modern and secular equivalent of the kind of universal political organization that existed in Western Christendom in the Middle Ages.” If we speculate on what such ideologies might look like, then they are likely to be religious, in that while universal and supra-national ideas are flourishing, they are not usually secular. The centers of gravest state weakness are often the regions in which political loyalties are secondary to religious beliefs, either Muslim or Christian, and these are the terms in which people define their identities. As the present author has suggested in a book entitled The Next Christendom, the new Christian worlds of the global South could find unity in common religious beliefs (Bull 1977: 254; Jenkins 2006b).
As global religious conflicts have expanded since 2001, the concept of Christendom has acquired even more alarming connotations, with its implications of a new cold war between militant and conceivably well-armed global blocs, adhering to irreconcilable ideologies of jihad and crusade. When we add the apocalyptic themes that extremists on both sides cultivate, we appear to have a recipe for potential global destruction. Yet of course, the language of Christendom or Christian politics might have vastly different connotations, and usually does so. Most attractive, perhaps, in the contemporary world are the supranational and even anti-national implications of “Christendom,” and the sense that even national governments must always be subject to higher law. The states of Europe’s Old Christendom have had to relearn that lesson, painfully, on more than one occasion, and the message is all the more powerful for newer nations where Christianity is a more recent and still vibrant growth. But whatever its actual experience, whatever the ideological shades, long experience now makes it clear that the urge to create a distinctive political order is deeply engrained into Christian thinking, and that the idea of Christendom will never be wholly absent.