On Christian Tolerance

Marcus Vinicius was a Roman patrician who fell in love with a beautiful Christian maiden named Ligia. Their romance is prominently featured in Henryk Sienkiewicz' historical novel Quo Vadis, subsequently adapted by Hollywood in 1951 in an epic movie.

Vinicius was young, dashing, handsome, and fabulously wealthy. He was also a pagan who knew next to nothing about the then-new Christian faith prior to meeting the love of his life. Ligia returned his affection but had to restrain her feelings until their union could be sanctioned by the Holy Church. The young lovers lived during the reign of Nero, the infamous Roman Caesar whose assistance was initially sought by Vinicius to help win Ligia's hand, and eventually her heart.

Vinicius spared no effort to woo Ligia. When he found out that she was Christian, he proposed to add Jesus to the gods of his household in order to please her; after all, what harm could result from one extra deity when there already existed so many who had somehow been getting along from time immemorial? The devout lass was horrified by this proposal, as would be expected given her fiercely monotheistic faith. Luckily for them, the conclusion of their passionate attachment was a happy one, and Vinicius ended up adopting the faith of his beloved but not before witnessing the genocidal massacre of her coreligionists by the monstrous Nero.

History is unkind to losers, and Nero was no exception. The bulk of what is known about him was transmitted by his enemies, from murdering his mother Agrippina all the way to “fiddling while Rome burns” then blaming the catastrophe on the Christians and sending them to be devoured by wild beasts in his circuses. While Nero most certainly was no saint—saints seldom if ever make successful emperors—he was very unlikely the ogre his biographers would have you think. As for the butchery to which he subjected the Christians, it is virtually certain that it was wildly exaggerated, if not altogether made up.

For Rome of the 1st century CE was unlikely to host significant numbers of Christians. Arguably the entire Roman Empire at the time had very few Christians, way too few to provide for a gory spectacle in the spacious Roman circuses for Rome's heathen spectators. In a nutshell, if Nero had heard about the Christian faith at all, he in all probability hardly gave it a thought. He had too many powerful foes to waste his time oppressing a harmless and obscure minority.

This is not to say that the Christians endured no persecution under the Romans. They suffered under Decius and Diocletian, but that was 200 years after Nero, by which time the new faith was firmly established and patiently anticipating its triumph with the Edict of Milan under Constantine the Great. Paganism was to make a final desperate reaction under Julian the Apostate in the second half of the fourth century CE, but that was essentially it. The old gods had to yield to Christ as pagans joined the new faith en masse, preferably of their own free will or—if necessary—by brutal force. Jupiter's temples were transformed into churches and cathedrals or demolished wholesale; old gods morphed into Christian saints; and Vestal Virgins became nuns. It is well established that by the time of Theodosius the Great, it was the turn of Paganism to be persecuted by the turn-the-other-cheek Christians! So thoroughly did the Christians hound the adherents of the old faith that they'd soon run out of them and turn their weapons against each other in a long and forlorn struggle to define orthodoxy and identify what each sect considered to be the authentic form of Christianity.

Back to Ligia and Vinicius. The young man was more than willing to accommodate Jesus in his pantheon, but the lovely young woman was too pure and too jealous of her God to tolerate any other deity, however much she loved her suitor. It does not take too much imagination to extend the comparison to polytheism versus monotheism, the first by definition far more tolerant than the second no matter what the followers of the latter proclaim.

And yet it's all about the suffering of the monotheists. No one cares for or talks about martyrs for Paganism. It is taken for granted that polytheism is bad and monotheism is good; the latter is logical and the former is not; faith in the old gods equals superstition, whereas faith in one God is somehow scientific. To add insult to injury is the presumptuous claim of the victimizer that he was tormented and persecuted by none other than his victim.

If indeed the early Christian communities were oppressed by ruthless heathens from Nero to Julian (spanning 300 years), wouldn't one expect the Christians to be exterminated rather than the other way round? Did Christianity employ purely peaceful means in its relentless conquest of the world? How exactly did Charlemagne convert the Saxons? The Europeans preached Jesus to the Native Americans and Africans? And let's not go into the Crusades.

A victor needs not apologize for his triumph; legions of scholars would happily justify his most unjustifiable excesses. Volumes would be written to whitewash every crime, rationalize every absurdity, make sense out of utter nonsense, smear each and every opponent, and brainwash one generation after another into docile obedience.

Some may proudly point out how tolerant modern “Christian” Europe and America are, but this is false: the West is tolerant because it is secular, because of its separation of church and state. The Christian West was never tolerant, not only of Jews and Muslims but also of “different” Christians. In Spain it was the Inquisition, in France the massacre of the Huguenots, in Britain the persecution of the Catholics and the Puritans, etc....

The notion of a “tolerant monotheistic faith” is an oxymoron.