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Scholars have frequently debated the motivations behind Constantine's bold actions, including his decision to call the landmark Council of Nicea in 325. Yet whether his motivations were political or spiritual, Constantine set a precedent of political influence over church issues that has been abused by numerous European leaders over the centuries. His successor, Constantius, understood the political expediency of religious power when he petitioned church officials to equate his decisions with God's commands.

Of course, we would be foolish not to acknowledge how God utilized the Roman Empire's remarkable territorial reach—and thus the spread of its sponsor faith. Establishment proved fruitful for the church's evangelistic efforts as the Romans carried Christianity's banner to the farthest and most barbaric reaches of their vast empire, establishing the foundations of what would later develop into Christendom.

Yet from its inception, Christendom suffered the ill effects of the church's intimate relationship with the state. While in an environment of open religious competition American Protestant denominations have thrived both in numbers and—often—in spiritual health, European Christianity's disputes have historically proven bloody and spiritually costly.

Take for example the Great Schism of 1054, when Eastern and Western Christianity became formally divided. The estrangement between the two had been deepening for centuries—and it was as cultural and political in nature as it was theological. Then, to add military insult to ecclesiastical insult, an army of Western Christian Crusaders led by money-hungry Venetian merchants pillaged Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade in 1254, critically weakening that city's defenses. In the end, the division from the West so weakened the East that they were unable to resist the Muslim invaders who captured Constantinople in 1453. Soon, having breached Christendom's eastern flank, Muslim armies threatened Christian Europe itself, even to the gates of Vienna.

Rome's fall, Constantinople's forsaking, and Christendom's eventual collapse during the Reformation era's wars of religion reveal the perils of uniting the church so closely with temporal earthly regimes. Bluntly put, the church that lives by state power, dies by state power—its fortunes are too closely tied to political vicissitudes.

Roots of Europe's twentieth-century religious discontent
The French Revolution exemplifies the dangers faced by a church tied to an unpopular government, but France also birthed the Enlightenment criticism that eroded church support from Europe's educated elites. When Frenchmen renamed the Cathedral of Notre Dame the Temple of Reason in 1793, they expressed distaste for their nation's Catholic heritage and unswerving faith in the supremacy of human thought. Though Catholicism in France did not die with the Revolution, and the cathedral's name was later restored, French academics like Voltaire and Rousseau drew upon the scientific discoveries of Isaac Newton and others to build a rationalistic worldview, elaborated by later scientists such as Charles Darwin.

As the attack on faith by the intellectual elite continued, Christianity began losing Europe's working classes en masse during a series of secular crises, beginning with the urban squalor created by the rapid industrialization of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Shocked by the tremendous human toll of World War I, Europe's masses began turning toward other ideologies, especially socialism, which they perceived could speak more directly to their everyday circumstances than a seemingly irrelevant state-church.

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July (Web-only) 2003, Vol. 47