In the first century, Christ cast the moneylenders out of the Temple, but they gradually arose again during the thirteenth century, which created economic panic among the peasants.

For example, the French town of Villefrance wrote to King Philip IV in the thirteenth century, saying that moneylenders “are absolutely and utterly destroying the town and district.”[1]

The moneylenders throughout the Middle Ages were involved in exploiting the peasants, and thus were hated. Even philo-Semitic historians such as James Parkes admitted that this was the case, where interest rates ranged between 22 and 173 percent.

Similar exorbitant interest rates were widespread throughout medieval England and France. The people behind all of this of course were Jewish moneylenders.[2] During that period, the word “Judaize” took a radical meaning.

Historian W. C. Jordan declared that it meant “to act like an outsider, to regard others not as brothers but under a different set of rules that permitted forms of exploitation that were forbidden to the circle of brothers and friends.”[3]

Jordan also observed that in the thirteenth century Jews in general “never successfully integrated themselves into the local society. They were always conceived as strangers involved in a business that was both extortionate and perverse.”[4]







This was part of the anti-Jewish reaction of that period, for Jewish authorities “suggested that charging interest to gentiles is a religious obligation for Jews.”[5] As a result of exorbitant interest rates,

“many ecclesiastical institutions went bankrupt and were closed down as a result of debts owed to Jews.”[6]

The moneylenders did not suddenly disappear in the early centuries. They evolved into usurious bankers and settled in private institutions which later controlled the ins and outs of nations.

Usurious contracts, which the Bank of England, the Bank of France, the Bank of Italy, the European Central Bank, the Bank of Canada, and the Federal Reserve have used since their inceptions, cannot be ruled out as a cause of the economic collapse.

This again is why serious Western thinkers through the ages saw usury as immoral. Usurious contracts certainly could not exist without “capitalism,” which makes greed, avarice, and many of the vices that early Church Fathers warn about legitimate.

As we have already seen in previous articles, in a usurious society, Mammon always comes first. From a Christian point of view, people have always come first, and using God’s gifts and talents for the benefit of all mankind should always be the ultimate goal.

It is for this purpose that in the seventeenth century many in the Catholic Church were motivated to help the Indians both spiritually and economically. As an alternative to the colonized thought of early Europeans which drove many of the Indians away from the Gospel, many took the path of self-denial and love that Christ had taught His followers.

As a result, a tremendous shift happened both in the economic and spiritual lives of the Indians. This was an alternative to the greed and avarice which capitalism made sophistically legitimate.[7]

The Christian principle of self-denial got its chance in the monasteries right after the fall of the Roman Empire. It was based on the principle Christ told a rich young ruler.

“If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell that thou hast, and give to the poor, and thou shalt have treasure in heaven: and come and follow me” (Matthew 19:21).

From this the Catholic Church deduced that priests or bishops ought to follow Christ rather than wealth, which can become a powerful stumbling block.

Hence, the monasteries were dedicated for people who would follow the principle of not only self-denial, celibacy, and obedience, but would also abstain from worldly attractions such as wealth.

Celibacy was important because “those who did not marry did not need money to support their families, nor did they need the autonomy necessary to use that money wisely as heads of households.” As E. Michael Jones points out,

“The monasteries became wealthy in the mundane sense by ignoring wealth. The individual monks renounced money, but their labors produced enormous wealth for the monasteries. The wealth grew over generations because the monks did not have children or the expenses they require. “More importantly, their lands were not constantly divided as children inherited the land from their father. The monks who had turned their backs on wealth ended up living lives of wealth, and wealth led to moral decay. The enemies of the Gospel used that moral decay to justify their attack on a supernatural way of life deeply repugnant to the carnal mind. “Christ told his followers that those who live according to the Gospel will elicit hatred from the carnal; the monasteries were no exception…Wealth can promote its own decline. Carnal clerics fuel resentment and oftentimes the very resentment their own immoral behavior has fostered in others.”[8]

Monasticism became the religious institution that sought to restore balance in pagan societies after the fall of the Roman Empire.[9] Monks were not only interested in prayer and fasting, but in saving a vast strata of life during the Middle Ages.

In fact, had it not been for their laborious work, Europe as we know it would have been a by-gone continent after the fall of the Roman Empire.[10] Cambridge Medieval historian Christopher N. L. Brooke acknowledges,

“The monastic library, along with the cathedral library, became the repository that ensured the survival of some part of the legacy of ancient literature.”[11]

Other leading scholars in this field, such as the late David Herlihy, have made similar remarks.[12] The academic and intellectual life, according to Brooke, began with Cassiodorus, who lived between 485-580 A.D. and who took a great effort to transmit Greek works into the West.

“His library was the last really massive collection of books that the ancient world produced….

“In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, when learning revived for good and all, his scheme provided one of the chief foundations for the reintegration of learning, sacred and profane, of Roman literary science and Christian theological science based on the study of the Bible.

“Cassiodorus was one of the most distinguished of a group of men who tried to gather in encyclopedic form the best of ancient learning before the failure of education and the barbarian onslaught destroyed it.”[13]

In addition, throughout the ninth, tenth, and eleventh centuries, monks were highly trained in the scholarly world.[14] Monks also participated in saving what knowledge was left about almost every aspect of life, including agricultural life.[15]

Those monks knew that they were working primarily for the glory of God, and as such they took some of the most “difficult and unattractive” jobs, such as working in swamps, which used to be considered not only a low occupation but “sources of pestilence.”

One of the primary reasons again was that civilization must reflect God’s creation and beauty.

The Benedictine Rule emphasized that monks were obligated to participate not only in worship and contemplation, but also had the responsibility of doing manual work.[16] Benedict declared,

“Idleness is the soul’s enemy, and so at certain times the brothers ought to be engaged in manual work, and again at certain times in spiritual reading.”[17]

The work hours were varied, but on several occasions they would consist of more than twelve hours—from 2 am until 6:30.[18] In general, a typical day for monks “was given to labor, reading, teaching, hospital work, charity, and rest.”[19]

In 1197, when a famine hit a particular place in Europe, 1,500 people were taken care of; one monk remembered that they helped “all the poor who came to us.”[20] During the same crisis,

“A Cistercian abbey in Westphalia slaughtered all its flocks and herds, and pawned its books and sacred vessels, to feed the poor.

“Through their own labor and that of their serfs, the monks built abbeys, churches, and cathedrals, farmed great manors, subdued marshes and jungles to tillage, practiced a hundred handicrafts, and brewed excellent wines and ales.”[21]

In the process of time, “they managed to dike and drain the swamp and turn what had once been a source of disease and filth into fertile agricultural land.”[22]

This was so impressive that nineteenth-century historian Comte de Montalembert admitted,

“It is impossible to forget the use they made of so many vast districts, uncultivated and uninhabited, covered with forests or surrounded by marshes.”[23]

In a nutshell, the monks “taught metallurgy, introduced new crops, copied ancient texts, preserved literacy, pioneered in technology, invented champagne, improved the European landscape, provided for wanderers of every stripe, and looked after the lost and shipwrecked.”[24]

From villages to villages, cities to cities, and countries to countries, monks followed the same method of industry,[25] and thanks to them, Western civilization was restored during the Middle Ages; by that time, the works of art, biography, and history had began to shape Western culture[26] and later set the backdrop for the scientific revolution and the progress in abolishing slavery.[27]

The monks’ contributions to Western civilization were not limited to agricultural life and farming; they also restored the education that was largely destroyed by the barbarians after the fall of the Roman Empire.[28]

Universities, within a few centuries, got built. That monks constituted a central part in preserving a large section of Western civilization has been acknowledged even by some historians who were not sympathetic to monastic life. And all of this was done for the glory of God and for the benefit of His creatures and creation.[29] By the Middle Ages, as philosopher of science David C. Lindberg puts it,

“the church was one of the major patrons—perhaps the major patron—of scientific learning.”[30]

A proper survey of monks’ contributions to Western civilization has been lacking in works written by a number of writers and historians of some repute.[31] Maurice Keen in The Penguin History of Medieval Europe tells us that logic in particular “was uncongenial to the religious, reflective cast of monastic thought. It was not a subject to which the fathers or Holy Writ devoted much attention.”[32]

Within two sentences and with no historical depth and balance, the works of Aquinas, Athanasius, Tertullian, Ambrose, Jerome, Augustine, St. Anselm, among others who laid the intellectual foundations of Christendom, were dismissed! However, historian David Herlihy, who was one of the leading scholars in this field, tells us quite the opposite. He writes,

“Christian writers, and the tradition of Christian theology they developed, were instrumental in preserving at least in part classical rhetoric and logic—the fruits of the ordered intellect of antiquity.”[33]

Had it not been for the Church, according to Herlihy, the art of rhetoric, philosophy, and “orderly thought” would not have been preserved into the Middle Ages.[34]

Jewish historian Norman F. Cantor agrees that the Benedictines “were the pioneers in whatever rudiments of agrarian science the early Middle Ages possessed,” yet he goes on to indicate that they got their power from monopolizing others.

In Cantor’s view, their powers increased “as a result of the monastic monopoly of learning.”[35] Congruent with this view is the popular idea that the Church got rich in the Middle Ages because it plundered the wealth of others for its own gain. Moreover, the Church allied with the state primarily for political and lucrative reasons.

There are other historians, however, who try to be fair and honest about the Middle Ages. George Homes in his quite balanced work The Oxford History of Medieval Europe tells us that there were many who converted “for political and financial backing,” but he also acknowledges that

“the Church had scored notable successes in establishing a Christian view of kingship, in setting up enduring centres of education and learning, in moving toward standardization of usages and, most important of all, promoting itself as a distinct elite corporation whose institutional and sacramental structure was intended to lead man to salvation.”[36]

Judith Bennett of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, in her widely read college textbook Medieval Europe: A Short History, tells us that Benedictine monks and nuns

“controlled the main repositories of learning, producing most of the scholars of the age and preserving many texts that would otherwise have been forever lost. They were eager vessels of missionary activity, spearheading the penetration of Christianity into the forests of modern-day Germany and later into Scandinavia, Poland, and Hungary.

“They produced scribes to record the business of lay courts, advisers to princes, and candidates for high ecclesiastical offices.

And as recipients of numerous gifts of land from pious donors, they held and managed large estates, some of which were models of intelligent agricultural organization and technological innovation.”[37]

Bennett does not raise the theological plausibility that monks and nuns acquired that much power because they sought first the kingdom of God and His righteousness (and this is perfectly understandable), and as such they were trusted with worldly goods which could not affect their souls and which they largely used for the glory of God.

In a message to me, Bennett conceded the point that she focuses on “the worldly intrusions that disrupted and guided monastic life that I underplay its spiritual motivations and benefits—both for monastics and for the laypeople for whom they prayed.”[38]

Previously, Bennett likened some of the activities in the monasteries to universities, and stated that there was a “need in secular society for the skills that could be acquired only in monastic schools.”

Bennett continues to declare that as a result of their dedication, hard work, and the wealth they accumulated through that, Benedictine monks and nuns “had an enormous impact on the world they renounced.”[39]

This of course is consistent with the teaching that Jesus told His disciples in Matthew 6:33, and which monks and nuns in general tried to apply. The only historian who was unashamedly fair on this particular issue was Will Durant.

After the monasteries trained monks and nuns to seek first the kingdom of God, “In the course of time the growing wealth of the communities overflowed into the monasteries, and the generosity of the people financed the occasional luxury of the monks.”[40]

Yet monks, like all other humans, were not immune to worldly temptations.

“Morals fall as riches rise, and nature will out according to men’s means. In any large group certain individuals will be found whose instincts are stronger than their vows. While the majority of monks remained reasonably loyal to their rule, a minority took an easier view toward the world and the flesh.”[41]

What we have been told for more than fifty years by a number of writers is that monks not only drew Europe to backwardness but stopped Western civilization from progressing. In addition, science reputedly moved backward during the Middle Ages and beyond because Christianity was out of touch with scientific enterprise.

This widely held view was popularized by John William Draper in his 1874 book History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science.[42] Draper’s thesis got refined a little by Andrew Dickson White in his 1896 book A History of Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom.[43]

Yet those ideas were shown to be demonstrably and hopelessly false.[44] By the end of the twentieth century, the White thesis was completely abandoned by a vast majority of historians of science and intellectuals precisely because it was inadequate and unnecessary.[45]

Historian of science Ronald L. Numbers calls it “the greatest myth in the history of science,”[46] a myth that people like Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins still hold.[47]

As celebrated historian of science Edward Grant argues in his magnum opus Science and Religion, 400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus, the Middle Ages in particular were not “a time of ignorance” but “a period of striking innovation.”[48]

Yet the idea that science is in conflict with Christianity has survived in popular books by the “New Atheists.”[49] And, like Charles Darwin before him, White did not write his book on the basis of the sciences.

Darwin rejected Christianity primarily on the issue of suffering,[50] and White was reportedly motivated by his antipathy toward his sister for embracing Catholicism.[51]

Harvard scholar Julie A. Reuben made the point that White “cloaked his book in anti-Catholic rhetoric,”[52] an argument that later proved to be attractive in secularized Protestant culture which inevitably and indirectly produced racialist groups.[53]

White, who obviously had little knowledge of the history of science and religion, framed the conflict in non-negotiable terms: It is either science, which to White produced truths the Church had suppressed for centuries, or Christianity. In that sense, White also took issues with his fellow Protestants. He wrote,

“The two rival divisions of the Christian church—Protestant and Catholic—were thus in accord on one point: to tolerate no science except such as they considered agreeable to the Scriptures.”[54]

It is no accident that White was confused about the history of science and religion, and that thesis became so embarrassing that no serious scholar in the history of the sciences would advance it today, though it has been repeated ad infinitum in so-called atheist books.

The Protestant Reformation changed a significant number of views. What was considered sinful became normal and what was normal became sinful. We saw in a previous article that the Church universally condemned usury as sinful, but Luther and Calvin superficially said otherwise.

And with the emergence of capitalism, virtually everything turned upside down. It used to be that England was a safe haven for the poor and needy, and one historian noted that a person would only walk a few yards in England without finding a place to stay the night.[55]

As Benedict’s Rule put it, “All guests who come shall be received as though they were Christ.” Thus, “monasteries served as gratuitous inns, providing a safe and peaceful resting place for foreign travelers, pilgrims, and the poor.”[56]

Motalembert cited another historian saying,

“Let them ask Spaniards or Burgundians, or any foreigners whatever, how they have been received at Bec. They will answer that the door of the monastery is always open to all, and that its bread is free to the whole world.”[57]

In several cases it was the job of monks

“to track down poor souls who, lost or alone after dark, found themselves in need of emergency, where a monastic hospital had been established amid the mountains of the Rouergue in the late sixteenth century, a special bell rang every night to call to any wandering traveler or to anyone overtaken by the intimidating forest darkness.”[58] It is the same thing with monks living near the sea, setting up what we would consider in our modern time “stop signs” warning sailors of dangers ahead. In the case of shipwrecks, monasteries were already mobilized in places like Copenhagen to help.[59]

The monastic life, from its very inception with people like St. Anthony (251-356) in the third and fourth centuries, emphasized a humble spirit with respect to the poor and needy. When a merchant by the name of Apollonius became a monk, he immediately bought medicines and store houses in Alexandria, Egypt, to care

“for all the brotherhood in their sickness, for twenty years going the round of the cells from daybreak till three in the afternoon, knocking at the doors to see if anyone was sick.”[60]

Late Cambridge historian J. B. Bury acknowledges that there were some who wanted to abuse the system, where “impostors and charlatans under the guise of pretended austerities deceived the simple and lived upon alms received on false pretenses,”[61] and that many of those impostors got involved in “ecclesiastical politics and the theological controversies of the time” and spread those politics in places like Syria by the middle of the fifth century where again they immersed themselves in “violent and fanatical” episodes.[62]

But in its ascetic conformity monasticism was generally based on self-denial and was conceived of as a haven for those who wanted to abstain from this world’s pleasure and seek first the kingdom of God.

In the process, work as well as prayer was of primary concern.[63] St. Basil (329-379) followed the same method of charity and taking care of the poor and other fellow men. St. Basil made it clear that

“work is of greater value than austerities, and drew the conclusion that fasting should not be practiced to such an extent as to be detrimental to work. All this represents a new range of ideas.”[64]

In the process, “orphanages were established, separate from the monasteries but close at hand and under the care of the monks, in which apparently children of both sexes were received. Boys also were taken into the monasteries to be educated, and not with the view of their becoming monks.”[65]

Yet monastic life, despite its widespread influence, did not come into full bloom until St. Benedict came along and made it “admirably suited to Western” conditions.[66]

This had tremendous and powerful results, and preserved much of Europe during the chaos after the fall of the Roman Empire.

By the time Charlemagne was crowned in 800, usury was already forbidden in the monasteries and Charlemagne reinforced that teaching. Charlemagne was a powerful force for spreading literacy and he even instructed those in the monasteries:

“Take care to make no difference between the sons of serfs and of freemen, so that they might come and sit on the same benches to study grammar, music, and arithmetic.”[67]

Yet greed later took over many of the monasteries, which indulged in gathering wealth and brought depravity and reproach upon themselves.[68] Sometimes it was negligence and carelessness on the part of the church. Durant writes,

“The papacy for a time entrusted financial affairs in England to the Cahorsian bankers; but their ruthlessness so offended the English that one of their number was murdered at Oxford. Bishop Roger of London pronounced an anathema upon them, and Henry III banished them from England.

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln, lamented on his deathbed the extortions of ‘the merchants and exchangers of our lord the Pope,’ who ‘are harder than the Jews.’”[69]

Durant however goes on to dismiss Jewish participation in money-lending,[70] but recent historical record tells us otherwise.[71]

By 1500, the church had already yielded to outside pressure from businessmen and lawyers that led to the reinforcement of usury. The church’s previous teaching with respect to economic life was strictly ignored. By this time, much of the earlier religious tradition had been secularized, and gradually the church lost its teachings, most particularly with respect to usury.[72]

In the process of time, kings and queens began to have power

“to nominate archbishops, bishops, abbots, and priors…Ferdinand and Isabella overrode the popes in filling many ecclesiastical vacancies in Spain. In the Holy Roman Empire, where Gregory VII had maintained against Henry IV the papal right of investiture, Sixtus IV conceded to the emperors the right of nomination to 300 benefices and seven bishoprics.

“The kings often misused these powers by giving church offices to political favorites, who took the revenues—but ignored the responsibilities—of their abbacies and sees. Many ecclesiastical abuses were traceable to such secular appointees.”[73]

In this respect, Durant is more honest than many modern historians who see no difference between those within the church who loved their Mammon and those who wanted to follow the teachings of Christ. Carter Lindberg complains,

“The church could not change its long history of condemning usury, but the church did learn how to profit from what it condemned.”[74]

Who were those who profited from usury? Lindberg never tells us. The law of the United States condemns stealing. Suppose thousands of police officers steal. Does that prove that the law or the police force is a fraud?

Some scholars declare that capitalism evolved during the ninth century among Catholic monks who “were seeking to ensure the economic security of their monastic estates.”[75]

But none of these scholars take into consideration the fact that kings and queens appointed their own “bishops” and “monks,” many of whom were sinful people that ended up following the course of this world, something that was radically different than the ways early monks saw the monasteries.

There is ample evidence which shows that lending money at interest was even practiced among some bishops in the eleventh, twelfth and thirteenth centuries,[76] but in every case these people were appointees who had been seeking an earthly kingdom.

Durant declared, “As wealth mounts, religion declines,”[77] a statement which seems to reflect what the early church stood for: that seeking wealth for the sake of wealth and building an earthly kingdom by oppressing the poor through usury is contrary to the teachings of Christ.

Businessmen of course were the first to shout for joy when the teachings of the church with respect to usury declined. By the sixteenth century, the selling of indulgences led to a violent reaction which fueled the Reformation.

Yet seldom are these practices placed in comparison to those monks who actually repudiated the practice of usury and even indulgences.

The only person able to do such differentiation (to my knowledge) is Edward Gibbon. Gibbon blamed the Church for the fall of the Roman Empire, calling those monks “unfaithful stewards” who were involved in “rapacious usury.”

But Gibbon also suggested that this was not a widespread phenomenon. Pagans were in awe of the Church’s charity in taking care of the poor and needy; this “materially conduced to the progress of Christianity.”[78]

A final point we should emphasize here is that during the Middle Ages and beyond, the Church established the most highly regarded institutions in the world.

Oxford and Cambridge, along with other universities in places such as Toulouse, Orleans, Naples, Salamanca, Seville, Lisbon, Grenoble, Padua, Rome, Perugia, Pisa, Modena, Florence, Prague, Cracow, Vienna, Heidelberg, Cologne, Ofen, Erfurt, Leipzig, and Rostock were founded solely for the glory of God and the benefit of His creatures.

[youtube Z8W6z6xDhMk]

[1] Ibid., 66; also E. Michael Jones, “John Law and Paper Money,” Culture Wars, April 2012.

[7] For a brief study, see E. Michael Jones, “Adam Smith, the Jacobite Rising, and the Catholic Alternative to Capitalism,” Culture Wars, June 2012.

[8] E. Michael Jones, The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History (South Bend: Fidelity Press, 2008), 156.

[9] See Christopher Brooke, The Age of the Cloister: Monastic Life in the Middle Ages (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2001); David Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1993).

[10] One historian who has gone to great lengths to document these historical accounts is Christopher Dawson, The Making of Europe.

[11] Christopher Brooke, The Age of the Cloister: The Story of Monastic Life in the Middle Ages (Mahwah, NJ: Paulist Press, 2003), 52.

[12] David V. Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, 1968), 13-17.

[13] Brooke, The Age of the Cloister, 53.

[15] Thomas E. Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization (Washington, DC: Regnery, 2005), 29-30.

[16] David C. Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 154.

[17] Brooke, The Age of the Cloister, 72.

[19] Durant, Age of Faith, 785.

[22] Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, 29.

[26] Brooke, The Age of the Cloister, 142.

[27] See Rodney Stark, For the Glory of God: How Monotheism Led to Reformations, Science, Witch-Hunts, and the End of Slavery (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[28] Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Western Civilization, 29, 44-45; Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society, 13-17.

[29] See Jean Leclercq, The Love for Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982).

[30] Lindberg, Beginnings of Western Science: The European Scientific Tradition in Philosophical, Religious, and Institutional Context, Prehistory to A.D. 1450 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 151.

[31] See Susan Wise Bauer, The History of the Medieval World: From the Conversion of Constantine to the First Crusade (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010); Morris Bishop, The Middle Ages (New York: Mariner Books, 2001); Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

[32] Maurice Keen, The Penguin History of Medieval Europe (New York: Penguin, 1991), 96.

[33] Herlihy, Medieval Culture and Society, 6.

[35] Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages (New York: HarperCollins, 1993), 154.

[36] George Holmes, The Oxford History of Medieval Europe (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 45.

[37] Judith Bennett, Medieval Europe: A Short History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2002), 77.

[38] Personal correspondence with Judith Bennett.

[39] Bennett, Medieval Europe: A Short History, 77.

[40] Durant, Age of Faith: A History of Medieval Civilization (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1050), 786.

[42] John William Draper, History of the Conflict Between Religion and Science (New York: D. Appleton, 1874).

[43] Andrew Dickson White, A History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom (New York: Prometheus , 1993).

[44] See for example Lindberg, The Beginnings of Western Science; Jean Leclercg, The Love for Learning and the Desire for God: A Study of Monastic Culture (New York: Fordham University Press, 1982); Edward Grant, Science and Religion,400 B.C. to A.D. 1550: From Aristotle to Copernicus (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); for similar studies, see Toby E. Huff, The Rise of Modern Science: Islam, China, and the West (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Peter J. Bowler and Iwan Rhys Morus, Making Modern Science: A Historical Survey (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); Peter J. Bowler, Monkey Trials & Gorilla Sermons (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007).

[45] See Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010); Gary Ferngren, ed., Science and Religion: A Historical Introduction (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); John Hedley Brooke, Science and Religion: Some Historical Perspective (Cambriege: Cambridge University Press, 1998); David C. Lindberg and Ronald L. Numbers, God and Nature: Historical Essays on the Encounters between Christianity and Science (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986); When Science and Christianity Meet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

[46] Numbers, Galileo Goes to Jail, 1.

[47] See Sam Harris, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values (New York: Free Press, 2010); Richard Dawkins, The Blind Watchmaker: Why the Evidence of Evolution Reveals a Universe Without a Design (New York: W. W. Norton, 1996).

[48] See Grant, Science and Religion, chapter 1.

[49] See Daniel C. Dennet & Alvin Plantinga, Science and Religion: Are They Compatible? (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010).

[50] See Adrian Desmond and James Moore, Darwin: The Life of a Tormented Evolutionist (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991).

[51] Ronald L. Numbers, ed., Galileo Goes to Jail and Other Myths about Science and Religion (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 3.

[52] Julie A. Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 34.

[53] For a historical survey on a similar topic, see for example Brad S. Gregory, The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[55] William Cobbett, A History of the Protestant Reformation in England and Ireland (London: Charles Clement, 1824).

[56] Woods, How the Catholic Church Built Civilization, 38.

[60] J. B. Bury, Cambridge Medieval History (New York: MacMillan, 1911), 1:523.

[67] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 155-156.

[69] Durant, Age of Faith, 628.

[71] See for example William C. Jordan, The French Monarchy and the Jews: From Philip Augustus to the Last Capetians (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1989).

[72] Jones, Jewish Revolutionary Spirit, 156.

[73] Durant, The Reformation, 14-15.

[75] Carter Lindberg, The European Reformations (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2010), 114.

[76] Stark, The Victory of Reason, 55.

[78] Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (New York: Penguin, 1994), 1:463.

Author Details Author Details Jonas E. Alexis Read Jonas Alexis’s latest posts here >>>



Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea. Jonas E. Alexis has degrees in mathematics and philosophy. He studied education at the graduate level. His main interests include U.S. foreign policy, history of Israel/Palestine conflict, and the history of ideas. He is the author of the new book Zionism vs. the West: How Talmudic Ideology is Undermining Western Culture. He teaches mathematics in South Korea.