VOLUME CCXIV — What Christianity Enforced

A man in his 40s hasn't been to church in 20 years, he doesn't believe anymore. Not even a doctor and not in the institution, not in the God he was raised to fear. But something remains when he cheats on a diet, snaps at his children, watches pornography, tells a lie to avoid conflict, he feels it. The pull, not toward God exactly, but toward confession.

He wants to tell someone, needs to tell someone, he feels the pressure building until one day he confesses to his wife or to a friend or to a therapist, to anyone who might grant what he's seeking. Absolution, forgiveness. The words themselves have religious undertones. And so this is the architecture behind his need.

The confession booth is gone, he hasn't entered one in decades, but the mechanism remains. The installed requirement for external absolution, the incapacity to forgive himself without a witness. This is the enforcer that was placed within him, at seven years old, it still operates at 45. The institution didn't know how to follow him into adulthood, didn't know how to convince him to keep believing.

But it did install something that would follow him on its own. Faith was not spread through persuasion, it was spread through the sword. Maintained through fire, enforced through terror, the institution didn't ask for belief, in fact it demanded it. And those who refused paid with their lives.

This is not ancient history, this is the foundation. The church you see today with its cathedrals, its rituals, its claim to moral authority, stands on bones. The bones of heretics, the bones of Gnostics, the bones of pagans who wouldn't convert, the bones of women accused of witchcraft, the bones of anyone who threatened the construction of the institution. This is not metaphor, it's not allegory, it's not made up.

The violence was real, the terror was deliberate, and it worked. Christianity didn't spread through Rome because Romans found it convincing. In 313, Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan, which legalised Christianity and granted it imperial favour. Suddenly, being Christian meant access to power, and not being Christian meant exclusion.

But Constantine did not make Christianity the state religion, that came 67 years later. In 380, Emperor Theodecius issued the Edict of Thessalonica, which made Nicene Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire. All other forms of Christianity were declared heresy, paganism was still tolerated, but not for long. Between 389 and 391, Theodecius issued the Theodecian decrees, visits to pagan temples were forbidden, pagan holidays were abolished or absorbed.

The sacred fire in the Temple of Vesta which had burned for over a thousand years was extinguished. The Vestal virgins were disbanded, blood sacrifice was banned, looking upon statues of the gods became a punishable offence. In 391, Christian mobs destroyed the Serapeum of Alexandria, one of the ancient world's greatest temples. Busts of Serapus were torn from walls, doorways and windows across the city and replaced with crucifixes.

In 392, paganism was declared an illegal faith. In 393, the Olympic Games were cancelled, they had run for over a thousand years. Pagan temples were destroyed or converted into churches, pagan priests were killed or converted under duress. In generations, Europe was Christian, not because millions had a spiritual experience, but because the alternative was either social death or actual death.

This is conversion by structured violence, the faith spread not because it was true, but because it became mandatory. Then the Inquisition began in the 12th century, the church established formal tribunals to identify and eliminate heresy. Democracy meant wrong belief, and wrong belief meant anything that deviated from church doctrine. The punishment ranged from penance to imprisonment to burning alive.

Torture was formally authorised as a method of extracting confession. The accused were not told who had accused them, they couldn't face their accusers, the proceedings were secret, confess, and you might be shown mercy, maintain your belief and you are guaranteed to burn. At the massacre of biziz in 1209 when soldiers asked how to tell Catholics from the heretics, a church official allegedly replied, kill them all, God will know his own. 7000 was slaughtered in a single church, prisoners were blind or dragged behind horses used for target practice.

The scholar who coined the word genocide in the 20th century called this crusade against the cathars, one of the most conclusive cases of genocide in religious history. This was not an aberration, this was institutional maintenance. And then the witch trials between the 15th and the 18th centuries, an estimated 40 to 60,000 people were executed as witches in Europe and its colonies, the vast majority were women. They were accused of consorting with the devil, practicing evil, rejecting the Christian God.

What they actually were in most cases were healers and midwives, women who lived outside of male control, women who threatened local power structures, women whose property someone wanted, women someone held a grudge against, women who practiced herbal medicine quietly. And so the church provided the theological framework and the state provided the execution apparatus. Together they murdered tens of thousands and terrorized every woman who remained into understanding what happened to those who stepped outside sanctioned boundaries. This wasn't superstition run amok.

No one in power truly believed these women were witches. Because this was simple enforcement, the systematic elimination of alternative sources of spiritual authority, particularly feminine spiritual authority. And they did this through terror and murder. And then the Crusades, nine major military campaigns between the 11th and 13th centuries, hundreds of thousands killed entire cities massacred.

And the stated purpose was to reclaim the holy land for Christianity. And the function was to expand church power, redirect European military energy, acquire wealth, eliminate competing faiths. When the Crusades took Jerusalem in 1099, they massacred the Muslim and Jewish inhabitants. Contemporary accounts describe literal blood running through the streets.

Now remember this was done in the Christian God's name by men who believed or said they believed that they were serving God. The faith was spread through slaughter. And then the colonial missions continued the pattern when European powers colonized Africa Asia in the Americas missionaries followed. Indigenous spiritual practices were labeled demonic.

Indigenous peoples were saved or so they said, often at gunpoint. Some were taken from families and placed in mission schools where their language, culture and spirituality were systematically destroyed. Those who resisted were punished imprisoned, killed. Entire civilizations, traditions and spiritual practices were dismantled to make room for Christianity.

And this continued into the 20th century, the residential schools, the stolen generation. The cultural genocide carried out by missionaries who believed they were doing God's work. The faith was spread through the destruction of everything that could have stood in its way. Now you might ask, why name all this?

And the answer to that is I'm not naming it to attack Christians alive today who didn't commit these horrific acts. And it's not to suggest that every person of faith is complicit in historical violence. Of course, that's not true. I name this because it's important to make visible what this institution is built upon.

Because the church claims moral authority. But that authority was established through terror. The church claims to represent truth, but that truth was enforced through violence. The church claims to offer salvation, but that offer was delivered at sword point.

It cannot understand the institution without understanding its enforcement. And the enforcement was not occasional excess. It was systematic, sustained and theologically justified. The violence was not despite Christianity.

It was in the service of Christianity. The institution could not have achieved its scale, its wealth and its power without it. The violence is not passed, it echoes. And the fear that still surrounds questioning faith, in the shame that still attaches to doubt, in the reflexive defense of the institution by people who would be horrified by its methods.

The terror worked so well that it no longer requires burning people at the stake because it installed itself. The internal enforcer, the fear of questioning, the guilt of doubting, the sense that deviation is danger. This is why Christian apologetics exists. Entire courses designed to arm believers with prepackaged arguments against any question, any doubt, any perspective that might call the faith into question.

Think about what that reveals. If the truth was self-evident, it wouldn't need defending. The very existence of apologetics is an admission that this belief system cannot survive, open their inquiry without rehearsed counter-arguments, without walls built in advance. This is not the behavior of people who have found truth.

This is the behavior of people terrified of losing their illusion of what they call truth. Now seeing all this clearly doesn't destroy faith, it doesn't minimize God or the divine or the sacred. It clarifies the institution you're dealing with. An institution that achieved its dominance through violence, a construction maintained through terror until terror became unnecessary because belief became automatic.

If your faith survives this seeing, it's real faith. If your faith requires not looking at any of this, it's mindless compliance. Real faith can hold history. Compliance requires forgetting and ignoring.

Ask yourself. What do you have? Real faith or compliance? If this transmission shifted something in you, there's a short book that I wrote that shows you why.

It's called Before Approaching the Threshold. There's a link in the show notes to access it and it's free. Welcome to the Architect Speaks.