Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #111973 in Books
• Published on: 1995-07
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 221 pages

From the Publisher
Back Cover Text:

"This is simply a book that everyone must sit down and read. At a time when the so called 'religious right' asserts that Christian values will save society from its rampant sins, the ordinary citizen should know exactly how the Christian Church has attempted to 'save' societies in the past. It is a grim lesson, but one that it is imperative to absorb. Doing so could save lives." -- Alice Walker

"In a lucid, objective, and accessible style, Helen Ellerbe presents some of the long-hidden shameful secrets of organized patriarchal religion. Her book is a fascinating read, essential for a complete picture of the cultural evolution of Western civilization." -- Barbara G. Walker

"If embracing the shadow is essential to healing the spirit, confronting The Dark Side of Christian History may help us to purge Christianity of its demonic elements and allow us to hear the good news once again." -- Sam Keen

By denying evil we do harm. By denying darkness we obscure the light. Over a period of almost two millennia, the Christian Church has oppressed and brutalized millions of individuals in an attempt to control and contain spirituality. The Dark Side of Christian History reveals in painstaking detail the tragedies, sorrows and injustices inflicted upon humanity by the Church. This expose is a compelling and passionate cry for human dignity and spiritual freedom.

Customer Reviews

Not unbiased, not pretty, worth reading
Though the author of The Dark Side of Christian History makes some efforts towards being unbiased, she does not fully achieve this goal. However, as she does her research and is dealing with terribly unpleasant subjects, I think it can be understood.

This is not a pretty book, but it is a coherent one. Each chapter is an essay on a different time in Christianity, how it evolved, and its affects on Western (and other) civilizations. A consistent history is shown from the early days of Roman Christiandom to current attitudes that is informative and unsettling. Quite simply, current problems and attitudes today can be traced back hundreds, or even thousands of years, and the history of the Church is not as simple as some make it sound.

Quotes from various sources paint the picture reasonably well, though this book could have easily been twice its size. If read with an open, critical mind, you'll find flaws, but you WON'T be the same. It's an excellent jumping-off point to study the parts of Church history people don't want to talk about.

Western culture has inherited an enduring legacy of pain.
Occasionally, a book comes along which belongs in every Pagan's personal library, but if it were up to me "The Dark Side of Christian History" would be required reading for the general population as well. Author, Helen Ellerbe, has written precisely the book I've been waiting for, and in fact would like to have written myself. While others before her have covered one or two of Christianity's more shameful exploits in a given volume, she has gathered together in one work, a definitive chronicle of events from each period from 100ce to the present day. She explains the evolution of the Christian world view and how this doctrine manifested itself in church policy, driving every aspect of its behavior. By viewing each step of this process in sequence, we see that the episodes of tyranny and oppression were not mere isolated incidents in an otherwise distinguished career of benevolence, but rather they were part of an ongoing process whereby each and every obstacle to hegemony was systematically subjugated, subdued, subverted and destroyed. In the chapter concerning modern times, entitled "A World Without God", Ellerbe demonstrates that while the power of the church is mostly gone, the effects of its doctrine in the form of a persistent world view are with us still. Western attitudes toward gender, race, sexuality and the environment have all been shaped by that doctrine created by the evolving church in its effort to impose rigid hierarchy on the entire world and everything in it. She goes on to show that while the rise of modern science has done much to strip the church of its power, most of the science of the last 500 years is in certain ways an extension of the Christian world view, rather than an affront to it, and we are only now just beginning to break free of this limitation. "The Dark Side of Christian History" though thoroughly researched and documented, is not difficult to read but it IS painful to read. I found myself hurting for all of humanity - past, present and future and asking myself the question "What if none of it ever happened?".

Brilliantly informative--to a point
I really wish I could give this book the five stars that the first nine chapters deserve. Unfortunately, after an excellent review of the multitude of atrocities, both physical and intellectual, committed by the various facets of the Christian religion through the ages, the author went astray in Chapter Ten. Ms. Ellerbe is apparently an excellent historian, but her grasp of science is unfortunately not as strong. She makes the common (and naive) assumption that a mechanistic view of the universe must necessarily be a deterministic view. In fact, the opposite is true. It is the very uncertainty and randomness of the modern scientific (mechanistic) view of the universe that frightens those who take refuge in the superstitious comfort of Christianity, where subservience to the authorities of the church provides certainty and excuses one from the responsibility to think and make decisions. She also errs when she somehow interprets the advent of the "wierdness" of quantum physics and relativity theory as heralding a movement away from a mechanistic, reality based interpretation of the universe. The fact that the tenets of these concepts are counterintuitive speaks only to the inadequacies of our intuition, not to some overlying mystical nature to the universe.

Chapter Ten also contains a rather odd logical fault. Ms. Ellerbe blames the hierarchical structure of the Christian church for the hierarchical nature of modern government and business. This is the same logical fallacy in which Pat Robertson so often indulges when he blames all of the ills of mankind on a theory that didn't see the light of day until the middle of the 19th century. Hierarchy in government significantly predates any advent of the Christian religion. As an example, just take a glance at the culture that Christians so like to hate--the Romans. Roman government might have gone through phases involving multiple rulers, etc., but it was well established as a hierarchy long before exposed to the taint of Christianity. Then there are the Asian cultures, generally built around an emporer.

The first nine chapters of this book are stellar; I'm just really sorry that Ms. Ellerbe chose to over-interpret her data when she decided to get metaphysical in Chapter 10.