It’s Thursday, and that means it’s time for a life insurance post!  Here’s hoping I get around to that, but first, it’s education time.  This is an age of popular iconoclasm; and if you’re like me, a few words in defense of Christianity (and religion in general) are refreshing, so let’s get to it.  Here’s a popular sentiment of the sort which I would see discredity:

One has only to point to the early dark ages for evidence that Christianity was a decaying influence.  The Western Roman Empire descended into an intellectual, cultural, and ethical morass, whereas the Byzantines were better off and the Muslims downright upright.

I do not challenge recorded history but rather the assertion that today’s college-graduated iconoclasts are even passably familiar with recorded history.

The decline of American higher education

Yes, they have certificates from top universities, but in spite of the advancing leaps of the information age, the rigors required to obtain such certificates have declined sharply.  Although one of the U.S.’s top exports is higher education, we had better not pride ourselves too highly on it; predating the information age by a couple of decades came a social push for the majority of Americans to seek higher education.  College loans became more accessible—so accessible, in fact, that the number of graduates coming out of colleges overwhelmed the market of education-requiring jobs, leaving many with loans that they couldn’t pay off.

In response to the increased demand for college education, we got a lot of new colleges and universities.  It’s no surprise that we’d see an increase in educational institutions as our nation’s wealth increased, but the numbers are a little steep between 1970 and 1990.  We went from 2,558 institutions of higher learning to 3,559.[1] That’s an increase of 40% in 20 years!  That rate equates roughly to an increase of 50% in one generation (25 yrs).

Has the quality of our educational experience likewise improved 50%?  I didn’t go to school before the 70’s, but I have researched American pedagogy and classroom culture, and my conclusion is: no.

So, formally educated Americans can tell you who Richard Dawkins is.  They can tell you that the Crusades were something violent that somehow involved Christians a long time ago.  But they can’t tell you who Alexius Comnenus or Pope Urban II was, and that should be a red flag.

Spain wasn’t the only place of peaceful coexistence

For those of you interested in the foregoing names, here are the details off the top of my head (not having re-researched): The Greek empire had had a lousy turnover of emperors in recent decades.  (The last handful had had reigns averaging less than ten years, if memory serves.)  The Greek military forces were depleted due to recent conflicts with the Seljuks.  Alexius Comnenus (Alexios Komnenos), the latest Greek emperor, appealed to the Western powers to help solidify his authority in the East.

Theretofore, the papacy had enjoyed only a minimal degree of political power, and Pope Urban II saw an opportunity to assert the Latin church as a universal authority over all of the kingdoms of the West.  No, he didn’t immediately appeal to all of the kingdoms of the west but rather only to the Franks (being a Frenchman, himself).  This was the start of the First Crusade.  The Crusaders took the Holy Land and established what is known as the Kingdom of Jerusalem (whose first or second king was Fulk V of the Plantagenet line, the great-great-great grandfather of Richard the Lionheart and his brother Prince John of Anjou, prominent characters in the legends of Robin Hood).

Modern politics has opened the minds of some to the fact that Spain provided a place of peaceful religious coexistence whilst under Moorish rule during the dark ages.  However, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, though vied over on-and-off by foreign armies for the next… well, even until present day, being the coveted land it is—anyway, when held by the Christians and not at war, it was a place of peaceful coexistence for the three religions “of the book” (as our Moslem brethren might say).

Christianity vs. Christendom

Defining Christianity by the bloody events of the Crusades and the sometimes concomitant persecution of the Jews is similar to defining Islam by the acts of the Muslim terrorists.  When the formally-educated are compelled to distinguish between Christianity and Christendom, the case for maligning the former is diaphanous at best.  …Yeah, I guess I didn’t really address that point, but now that your interest is piqued, go out and do some research.  I have to get working on the ISU site.

---

[1] http://www2.census.gov/prod2/statcomp/documents/1994-03.pdf page 32/144