The Christians: Their First Two Thousand Years: We the People A.D. 1600 to 1800 Democracy: Christendom's Unintended achievement [Vol. 10]

This volume, the tenth in our series of twelve, introduces in its last chapter the new challenge confronting Christians today, at the dawn of the third Christian millennium. For Christians of the twenty-first century, "the world" that Jesus Christ enjoined us to convert no longer consists of strange people living in strange lands beyond the seas. Today the nonbeliever also lives in the house next door, or sits at the next desk in the office, or is the earnest young public school teacher in charge of our children's education. We live in the so-called "post-Christian era." But its origins are not recent-the descent into post-Christianity dates from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. We therefore begin the description of this descent, showing how and why it occurred, in the final chapter of the present volume and will continue its story in volumes 11 and 12. For this reason also, we have begun this tenth book with the account of the Thirty Years' War, surely one of the most deplorable and tragic events in the entire history of Christianity and a major contributing factor in the wide intellectual rejection of the faith that led to post-Christianity. Could that war have been avoided? Were the Protestants to blame? Were the Catholics to blame? Were both to blame? How can we ensure that such a catastrophe never recurs? It is the function of history to seek answers to such questions. After that war, however, much becomes warmly positive in this volume's two centuries. Out of the conflicts born in the Protestant and Catholic Reformations, described in the previous volume, there emerged first in Britain and then in Britain's American colonies the phenomenon of representative government. In the years that followed, this would lead to the establishment of what Sir Winston Churchill called the "Great Democracies." Ironically, few if any of the founders of this movement on either continent embraced democracy as a desirable goal.