The medieval Western Church was conservative rather than progressive, since it tried to preserve what was left of the fading Roman Empire in that region. Thus, this Church was wary of freedom of thought. From the eighth to the thirteenth centuries, Islam had its golden age in math and science, thanks to its House of Wisdom which invited scholars from all over to translate classical knowledge into Arabic and Persian.

The Church then shifted to providing pretexts for the Crusades, necessitating all kinds of casuistry that would have appalled Jesus. Then came the inquisitions against heresy, and the notorious Albigensian Crusade. The medieval Church supported Machiavellian secular rulers rather like how the Russian Church now supports Putin’s war of aggression in Ukraine. Finally, the Catholic Church split, as the Protestants themselves opposed the corruption, so this is hardly just an atheistic canard.

More generally, Christendom was political in that only Orwellian degrees of deception could have applied Jesus’s countercultural ethos to a state religion for the remnants of the Roman Empire.

Yes, capitalism is a modernizing, progressive force, but it exacerbates our greed and re-establishes dehumanizing degrees of economic inequality.