Preaching was a vital component, but beyond the spiritual authority which abolitionists conveyed, there needed to be political authority to enforce abolition. It certainly helped that Britain “ruled the waves”. As the world’s greatest naval power it could police the Atlantic, and as the world’s greatest empire it had the clout to negotiate the

However, sober-minded historical research (and there are very careful records to consult) puts the death toll at about 2,000 executions for the notorious 50 years under Tomas de Torquemada and his protégés (1480–1530). In the following 300 years there were a further 3,000 executions. Compare even the worst of Torquemada’s time with the last 45

Or, to say the same thing in a slightly different way, Christianity is the air we breathe. It is our atmosphere. It’s our environment, both unseen and all-pervasive. And in the tradition of a spiritual teacher (truth be told, I’m an Anglican clergyman, so the shoe fits), I’m going to ask you to focus on your breathing. This is a technique common to

The Inquisition became infamous for its brutality—with Protestants historically having led the way in the myth-making: reporting or intimating greatly inflated numbers of deaths.

The extraordinary impact of Christianity is seen in the fact that you don’t notice it. You already hold particularly “Christian-ish” views, and the fact that you think of these values as natural, obvious or universal shows how profoundly the Christian revolution has shaped you.

“Christian?” you say. “I’m not sure my world is particularly Christian”. This book is, in large part, about making that case. You can be the judge of how successful it is, but here’s my contention: we depend on values and goals—and ways of thinking about values and goals—that have been deeply and distinctively shaped by the Jesus-revolution

If we are outraged by the Crusades—and we should be—that is Christian outrage we’re experiencing.

Even when Athens experimented with what it called “democracy”, it was a thoroughly religious enterprise. Instead of a mon-archy (rule by one), or olig-archy (rule by a few), demo-cracy was the “power of the people”. The crucial question is, of course, whom did the Greeks consider to be “the people”? When we consider “the people”, we might think of

To claim—as Christians do—that the man on the cross was God is the most revolutionary notion the world has ever entertained.