The Problem with Christendom

For centuries the various states of Europe were often collectively referred to as Christendom. Despite their many differences, the term Christendom was used to indicate that the Christian states of Europe together represented the extent of the Kingdom of Christ through their political institutions. The Reformation complicated this notion, yet the idea of Christendom continued for centuries despite the theological differences among the confessional states of Europe. When Christendom is invoked nowadays, it is done either as a model of something to reject, or with a nostalgic wistfulness for an era in which Christianity had a greater role in directing domestic and foreign policy.

For those who think back to it fondly, Christendom conjures up an image of a unified vision of a Christian society in which there is a consensus around what constitutes sin and a government committed to oppose it through the use of legal force. Some evangelicals, frustrated at the apparent relativism and immorality that they find in our pluralistic society, imagine some form of Christendom as the solution: a world in which school prayer is common place, public officials invoke God more frequently, and where bad language, abortion, and homosexuality are out of public sight. Such suggestions often are more closely tied to a mythic vision of the American past circa 1950, but the lack of precision in these descriptions neglects the institutional mechanisms necessary to create such a world. Considering the Christendom of early modern Europe can provide a helpful corrective by offering us the ability to see how states used their coercive power to create a more Christian society. Living in the United States today, it is challenging to wrap one's mind around how power was deployed to defend and support the Christian church within Christendom. To help bridge this gap, I would suggest that we consider the Spanish Inquisition as an archetypal institution of Christendom.

The Spanish Inquisition was an attempt to close the gap between the ideal Christian society and the real Christian society. In this regard it was quintessentially modern because it focused on the actual implementation of an abstract ideal in a way that the medieval world rarely attempted. Because it was also one of the earliest modern bureaucracies, it has left us excellent records that enable us to understand its purpose, operation, and achievements with considerable precision.

The story of the creation of the Inquisition begins with the forced conversion of the Jews of Castile to Christianity, which had taken place on a major scale in 1391 following the preaching of a charismatic Dominican friar. Afterward, there were some concerns throughout Spain that many of the new converts and their descendants, known as conversos, maintained Jewish practices and beliefs in secret. The label of converso stuck for those of Jewish ancestry and they were considered more suspicious by those of "old Christian blood." The tensions increased with the social and political prominence of many conversos in the mid and late fifteenth century. In 1477, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella were warned by the Dominican friar Alonso de Hojeda that conversos were "Judaizing" without interference by the ecclesiastical authorities, and they took it upon themselves to do something about the problem.

Pope Sixtus IV granted the Spanish monarchy the authority to create a special tribunal, known as the Spanish Inquisition, to investigate and prosecute the crime of Judaizing. It was an institution run by clergy, but the inquisitors were appointed by the King and reported to him rather than to the Archbishop of Toledo. Contrary to popular belief, they did not have the authority to execute anyone as an ecclesiastical tribunal, but they could convict people of capital offenses and then "relax them into the arm" of the secular authorities, who could then execute them for their sins.

Most modern commentators are appalled by, among other things, the use of torture on individuals tried by the Inquisition to force confessions. Torture for confession, however, was a direct result of the theological convictions of the inquisitors themselves. They were motivated not only to discover the crime of practicing the Jewish faith despite having been baptized into the Christian church, but also to effect the reconciliation of the convicted to the Christian church. Using torture, they pursued confession so that there could be absolution for the sins committed and the accused would, even if executed for the crime, go to Purgatory and later Heaven rather than suffer all of eternity for their sins. Hours of water torture or the rack was counted lightly against the eternal torment of hell.

Now, it is important to note that the Inquisition is generally portrayed as an inherently arbitrary institution, yet considerable historical research has demonstrated that it was comparatively lenient by early modern standards. The vast majority of cases tried did not lead to execution--in fact, execution was reserved for those who were convicted of heresy once and had subsequently relapsed, or for those who refused to confess despite considerable evidence. Also, the Inquisition was generally more lenient in its judgement that the secular Spanish judiciary and the vast majority of those tried by the Inquisition were reconciled to the church. There are cases, for example, of prisoners under civil jurisdiction who tried to have their cases transferred to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition, indicating that this comparative lenience was recognized at the time. That said, the social and economic consequences of having been tried and condemned, even with reconciliation, were significant.



It also changed its focus as time passed, from conversos, to the mystical sect of the alumbrados, to those of "old Christian blood" with moral offenses (such as blasphemy, fornication, bigamy, and sodomy), to Portuguese conversos, to moriscos (or Christian converts of Muslim ancestry) who might be secretly practicing Islam (until their expulsion from Spain in 1609), among others, as the decades and centuries passed. The Inquisition continued to serve the Spanish Crown from its inception in 1478 until its final abolition in 1834, making it a long-standing institution of early modern Christendom.

It is hard to think of this institution as good from the perspective of our own liberal democracy, and yet the logic of its use of power follows from the assumption that the Christian community is identical with the political community, and that the latter should use its power to improve the former. The unity of these two communities is what drives the use of power to strengthen the church. And it was not a distinctively Catholic feature Christendom, as the magisterial confessions of early modern Europe (i.e., those Christian traditions that had the magistrates' support as the official church of a state) each had their own institutions for enforcing the Christian community. The theological differences mattered, as historical sociologists such as Philip Gorski have shown, but the belief that power must be used to reinforce proper Christian belief (orthodoxy) and practice (orthopraxis) was common among them.

For those who wonder where ideas such as religious liberty came from, they must often look to the poor and marginalized. Arguments for it were made among peasants throughout the Atlantic world, as traced by Stuart Schwartz, and also by members of religious minorities such as Anabaptists (or re-baptizers, sometimes identified as the members of the "Radical Reformation"). For the Anabaptists, religious toleration made sense since they believed that the true Christian community would never be identical to the political community. Adult baptism required one to choose to become a member of the church in a way that left people free to choose otherwise. The practice of infant baptism in the magisterial traditions made the child simultaneously (and legally) a member of the church and of the political community. Church and state were identical in these traditions, but that could not be true for the Anabaptists. This split had profound consequences for the possibilities of Christendom, and the marginalized Anabaptists with their emphasis on the morally significant action of the individual soul became the source within Christianity for calls for the state to extend religious toleration to those souls. In doing so, they rejected the basic political and theological foundations of Christendom and opened the door in the modern world to a very different conception of the relationship between the Christian Church and political power.

Such views were articulated, for example, by Kaspar Schwenckfeld von Ossig (1489-1561), who argued that since all true religion occurred through Christ working directly on the soul of the individual, all coercion and state-sponsored churches were a betrayal of true Christianity. The theological descendants of Schwenckfeld were the Quakers, who created the first British colony in the United States without an established church in Pennsylvania in 1681.

While this summary is brief, I've tried to keep the texture of the events clear to help preserve the otherness of the past. It is this sense of distance that I fear is lost by those who champion and defend Christendom in some form, such as James K. A. Smith, Oliver O'Donovan, and Peter Leithart. With a greater sense of what that actually means, I urge caution among the Christians sympathetic to their claims, for I fear they would not like what that would entail.