Christendom

• 1. Introduction

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  Christendom is a word coined in the 9th century by a single scribe, somewhere in southern England, possibly at the court of King Alfred the Great of Wessex. That scribe was translating a Roman historian's work from roughly the year 416 and needed a term for something that didn't yet have a name: the universal community of people whose lives centered on Jesus Christ. What began as a linguistic convenience became one of the most consequential ideas in human history. How did a word invented in a scriptorium grow to describe an empire of faith spanning half the globe? And what brought it down?

• 2. A Word Takes Shape

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  The Anglo-Saxon term crīstendōm carried a meaning close to what we now call Christianity itself. Its Dutch cousin, christendom, still works that way today, denoting the religion rather than the territory. The shift in English came gradually, so that by around 1400, in Late Middle English, the word had settled into the sense we still recognize: lands where Christianity is the dominant religion.

  Scholars have kept arguing about exactly what the word means ever since. In 1997, Canadian theology professor Douglas John Hall called it literally the dominion or sovereignty of the Christian religion. Thomas John Curry, a Roman Catholic auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, offered in 2001 a more institutional reading: the system, dating from the fourth century, by which governments upheld and promoted Christianity. British church historian Diarmaid MacCulloch put it plainly in 2010 as the union between Christianity and secular power.

  Those three definitions point to the same tension that would run through Christendom's entire history: the tension between faith as a spiritual practice and faith as a governing arrangement. That tension never fully resolved, and it is largely what ended Christendom in the end.

• 3. Constantine and the Church

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  Emperor Constantine issued the Edict of Milan in 313, proclaiming toleration for the Christian religion, and convoked the First Council of Nicaea in 325, whose Nicene Creed anchored belief in one holy catholic and apostolic Church. From that moment, Christianity and state power were bound together in a new way.

  Malcolm Muggeridge, writing in 1980, put the distinction sharply: Christ founded Christianity, but Constantine founded Christendom. Douglas John Hall places the inauguration of Christendom in the 4th century, with Constantine in the primary role, so central that Hall equates Christendom with what he calls Constantinianism. Emperor Theodosius I then pushed further with the Edict of Thessalonica in 380, making Nicene Christianity the official state religion of the Roman Empire.

  In the East, Constantinople became the leading city of the Christian world in size, wealth, and culture. Byzantine civilization was, by some accounts, the most brilliant culture during the whole of the Middle Ages. Its literature, art, and architecture left monuments that scholars have described as showing the whole lustre of Byzantine culture. That brilliance carried a political message: Christendom was not only a faith but a demonstration of what faith could build.

• 4. The Great Fracture

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  Christmas Day in the year 800 marks one of the clearest pivot points in the story. Pope Leo III crowned Charlemagne on that day, producing a second Christian king beside the Christian emperor in the Byzantine state. The consequences were structural. The Carolingian Empire defined itself against Byzantium as a distributed culture against a centralized one, and the two halves of Christendom began to develop distinct characters.

  Charlemagne also launched the Carolingian Renaissance, a period of intellectual and cultural revival that began in the 8th century and continued through his descendants into the 9th. The Great Schism of 1054 then severed the religious tie. Western Christianity organized itself around Rome; Eastern Christianity organized itself around Constantinople. After the Fourth Crusade, when Crusaders conquered Constantinople and accelerated the decline of the Byzantine Empire, hopes of religious reunification effectively ended.

  The pontificate of Innocent III, who held office from 1198 to 1216, is considered the height of the temporal power of the papacy. For nearly two centuries after his era, the Papacy stood as the highest authority in the West. But that peak was also the beginning of a long descent. Tensions between Innocent III and secular rulers were already running high. When the kings of France established a French national church in the 14th century and the papacy grew entangled with the Holy Roman Empire, three men simultaneously claimed to be the true pope in what became known as the Western Schism, driven by politics rather than theology. The Avignon schism was finally ended by the Council of Constance.

• 5. What the Church Built

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  Medieval Christianity created the first modern universities. Bologna, Oxford, and Paris were among the earliest, established around 1150, growing from cathedral and monastic schools into self-governing corporations chartered by popes and kings. Each divided itself into faculties specializing in law, medicine, theology, or liberal arts, and each held open theological debates among faculty and students.

  The Catholic Church also established a hospital system in medieval Europe that improved substantially on what the Romans had built. Historian of hospitals Guenter Risse describes these institutions as established to cater to particular social groups marginalized by poverty, sickness, and age. The Cistercian monasteries offer a striking example of what religious communities could accomplish in practical terms: of the 740 twelfth-century Cistercian monasteries, nearly all possessed a water wheel, and the movement was instrumental in promoting hydraulic engineering, water circulation systems for central heating, and advanced farming techniques such as crop rotation.

  Cluny Abbey, founded in 910, used Romanesque architecture to convey awe and inspire devotion and helped launch a wave of monastic reform known as the Cluniac Reforms. In the decades between the 11th and 13th centuries, the church built vast cathedrals of what sources describe as staggering beauty across Catholic Europe. Historian Paul Legutko of Stanford University described the Catholic Church as at the center of the development of the values, ideas, science, laws, and institutions which constitute what we call Western civilization. The printing press, which Gutenberg made possible during the Renaissance, would eventually spread knowledge beyond the church's direct control, but the infrastructure that made that spread meaningful had been built largely by the church itself.

• 6. Reformation and Fragmentation

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  The Peace of Augsburg in 1555 officially ended among secular leaders the idea that all Christians must be united under one church. Its principle, cuius regio, eius religio, meaning whose the region is, his religion, recognized that the political map and the religious map would now be the same map. The Treaty of Westphalia in 1648 confirmed this legally, ending the concept of a single Christian hegemony across the territories of the Holy Roman Empire.

  The Hundred Years' War had already been pulling at the fabric. It accelerated France's transition from feudal monarchy to centralized state and demonstrated that both France and England could raise independent standing armies through taxation, without reference to the church. In the Wars of the Roses, Henry Tudor took the crown of England. His heir, Henry VIII, established the English church as a separate institution.

  The European wars of religion are usually dated as ending with the Treaty of Westphalia, though some historians extend the period to include the Nine Years' War and the War of the Spanish Succession, which concluded with the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. By the 18th century, the focus of European history had shifted away from religious conflict entirely, toward nation-states, Enlightenment rationalism, and the developing colonial empires. Galileo Galilei's telescopic observations in the early 17th century had begun turning a technical revision of astronomy into what science historian Alexandre Koyré called the utter devalorization of being, the stripping of hierarchical order, purpose, and meaning from the universe. Blaise Pascal captured the mood in his Pensees, published in 1670: the eternal silence of these infinite spaces frightens me.

• 7. The End of Christendom

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  Writing in his 1964 encyclical Ecclesiam Suam, Pope Paul VI observed that one part of the world had in recent years detached itself and broken away from the Christian foundations of its culture, although formerly it had been so imbued with Christianity and had drawn from it such strength and vigor. He was describing a process that scholars trace back at least to the French Revolution, which Douglas John Hall calls the first attempt to topple the Christian establishment.

  Diarmaid MacCulloch, writing in 2010, argued that Christendom was killed by the First World War of 1914-18. The war brought down the three main Christian empires of Europe, the Russian, German, and Austrian, along with the Ottoman Empire, rupturing the Eastern Christian communities that had existed on their territory. The empires were replaced by secular and often anti-clerical republics. Britain, the only surviving monarchy with an established church, was severely damaged by the war and lost most of Ireland to Catholic-Protestant conflict.

  Thomas John Curry pointed in 2001 to two specific documents as markers of Christendom's end: the First Amendment to the United States Constitution, ratified in 1791, and the Second Vatican Council's Declaration on Religious Freedom, issued in 1965. By 2010, roughly 157 countries and territories had Christian majorities, but these were nations with governments that no longer upheld Christianity as a governing system. The faith had spread; the dominion had not followed.