The first 300 years of Christianity were troubled times. As Christians, inspired by their new faith, created churches all over the Roman Empire, they were persecuted and often cruelly executed because they refused to make sacrifices to the Roman gods. The persecutions were not continuous, and some Roman governors made a point of tolerating Christians, but the threat was always there.
One threat they did not face, however, was persecution by other Christians. Christianity was such a fledgling religion that it had no clear hierarchy or even ruling group immediately after the apostles died. It had no orthodoxy and no political power in those early years.
That would change. Heresies led to the terrors of the Spanish Inquisition; the deaths of so-called heretics like Jan Hus (burned at the stake in 1415), Sir Thomas More (beheaded in 1535), and Archbishop Thomas Cranmer (burned at the stake in 1556), to name a few. Those later internecine persecutions could be just as horrifying as Jesus’s crucifixion was.
My class on English history this fall touched on the witch craze that spread through Europe for about a century following 1570. Six hundred “witches” were executed in England, and 1500 in Scotland (a much smaller country).[1]
What caused this persecution, which occurred in the supposedly modern century after Protestantism appeared? Typical explanations, says Derek Hirst, are patriarchal misogyny (four-fifths of those executed for witchcraft were women), feuds and disputes among neighbors, even failure to help the poor, which led to imprecations and presumed maleficia. But to Hirst, ”the role of the elite was crucial.” Bishops, divines, and other luminaries became convinced that there was an active devil unleashed in the world. “The state put machinery in the hands of local persecutors, but the impetus came from the intellectuals,” says Hirst.[2]
Hirst does not elaborate on this power-elite theory, but R. I. Moore does, in his book The Formation of a Persecuting Society.[3] Moore didn’t write about seventeenth-century witches, but about the Church’s rooting out of heretics, Jews, and lepers in the Middle Ages in Europe. Those efforts, he believes, established a machinery of persecution that operated almost automatically.
