There is a popular theory among modern skeptics that we might call the "Theory of Historical Coincidence." It goes like this: The West developed freedom, science, and human rights not because of Christianity, but simply while Christianity happened to be there. The faith is viewed as the wallpaper of history -- omnipresent but irrelevant to the structure of the house.

The critic argues that Christians are intellectually dishonest. We claim credit for the abolition of slavery and the rise of the university, but we refuse to take the blame for the Inquisition or the Crusades. We are accused of cherry-picking history to suit our "cult."

But this accusation rests on a superficial reading of how ideas shape reality.

The Test of Dominance

The critic implies that "dominance" naturally leads to good things. But history is a slaughterbench of dominant powers that produced nothing resembling human rights.

Look at the pre-Christian world. Rome was the master of the Mediterranean. It possessed law, engineering, and philosophy. But it was a society built on the backbone of chattel slavery. The Roman father held the power of life and death over his children. The Emperor was a god. Dominance did not produce liberty there; it produced the Pax Romana -- peace through total subjugation.

Look at the materialist empires of the 20th century. Communism was dominant over half the globe. It explicitly rejected the Christian God. Did it produce liberty? No. It produced the most efficient machinery of oppression in human history.

So, if dominance alone is not the seed of liberty, what is?

The Specific Mechanism

We claim that liberty is a Christian fruit not because we are arrogant, but because we can trace the genealogy of the idea.

The concept of the Person -- an individual with infinite value, distinct from the tribe or the state -- creates a specific problem for tyranny. If the peasant bears the Image of God, the King cannot simply use him as a tool.

This idea is the sand in the gears of absolute power.

When the critic says we ignore the "bad parts," they miss the point. We acknowledge the bad parts. We acknowledge the burnings, the forced conversions, and the silence in the face of slavery. But we argue that these were betrayals of the Christian essence.

When a Christian inquisitor tortured a heretic, he was acting against the command of Christ to "love your enemy." The logic of the faith eventually rose up to condemn the action of the believer.

Contrast this with the "bad parts" of secular dominance. When the French Revolutionaries guillotined the nuns, or when the Soviets liquidated the Kulaks, they were not betraying their worldview. They were fulfilling it. They believed that the "ends justify the means" and that there is no God to judge the slaughter.

The Doctor and the Disease

Imagine a doctor who prescribes a regimen of diet and exercise. If the patient follows it and gets healthy, the doctor gets credit. If the patient ignores it, eats poison, and dies, the doctor is not blamed.

Christianity prescribed the Imago Dei and the law of charity. When the West took this medicine -- as in the abolitionist movement, the civil rights movement, and the development of the hospital -- the result was health. When the West ignored this medicine and followed the pagan lust for power -- as in the African slave trade or the wars of religion -- the result was death.

The critic wants to blame the doctor for the patient's refusal to take the pill.

The Necessity of the Transcendent

The deepest error in the critic's worldview is the belief that you can have the fruit without the root. They want a world of "good things" -- rights, dignity, compassion -- without the "transcendent."

But these things are not natural. In nature, the weak die. In nature, the tribe matters more than the individual.

To assert that a single human being has rights that the entire world cannot violate is a supernatural claim. It requires a belief in a Transcendent Justice that stands above the State. If you remove that Transcendent, you are left with the "dominance" the critic speaks of. And without God, dominance is just a boot stamping on a human face, forever.

We do not ask for "credit" to boost our ego. We ask for the recognition of the root so that the tree does not die. If you cut off the theology that birthed your freedom, do not be surprised when your freedom withers away.