When did Christianity become generally pacifistic?

Question

Afterall.... some folks here love to go on about the crusades and witchhunting (as though they seriously consider population-control to be a bad thing)... but when precisely did christianity's fierce war-making totally come to an end? When did people stop getting executed for heresy in primarily christian countries?

Answer 1

The last person killed [burned] by the Spanish Inquisition was in 1825.

The rape, beating, robbing and murdering of Mormons in the mid-west lasted until they moved to Utah, 1850ish.

Holocaust in a Lutheran country mid-1940s

Jim Jones happened in the 1980s, as I recall, though that might be fudging to include him, since it wasn't for heresy all those people died.

Answer 2

Luke Skywalker has it almost right. Along side changing with the times, true Christians had to undergo a change of the heart. God's way is through love and so all of them who claim Christ must operate that way in order for them to be fully seen and known as a true Christian. The horrible things of the past changed when the prideful evil men of that time who claimed Christianity, yet had not discernible actions to prove it, either died off or were overcome by a greater number of Christians who finally realized that God doesn't want Himself or His word forced upon people. God would rather that none should perish (spend eternity in torment) and that all would come to repentance.

Answer 3

Hmmmm.....

as i recall, the Founder of Christianity, this Guy called Jesus, went to His death willingly and without fighting 2,000 years ago. Then, after Him, all of His disciples except one met an excrutiating death, also without fighting. Then there was a good hundred years or so where Rome went around catching Christians and killing them in all sorts of gruesome ways; again, without them fighting.

Only after Christianity became the official religion of the Empire and suddenly found itself confronted with questions of law and order (they were the ones in power, not out of it) did questions over violence and nonviolence arise. After Rome's fall Christianity became the cement holding the western world together. If you were heretic, therefore, you were just as much traitor to your country as to God.

Executions over heresy began to stop thousands of years later with the advent of "freedom of religion." Basically put, the theory goes like this: God gave man free will. That is, man has the right to choose. As this is a God-given right, nobody has the right to take it away.

Some people will charge that the Enlightenment produced this. They are wrong. The concept of "God-given rights" came onto the scene earlier than the Enlightenment, though the Enlightenment picked up on it and spread it about Europe, in a twisted form. Please look up the trial of King Charles I of England, where it was basically a trial over "God-given rights." From England this concept leaped over to America, skipping, in large part, the Enlightenment twisting of it. This is why, in part, the American Revolution produced freedom and success on a massive scale never before seen, while the Enlightenment-inspired French Revolution turned into a bloodbath and ended up under Napoleon.

Because this concept in now in play, and because it is America, not Enlightenment-inspired Europe, which is now the world leader, execution for heresy is generally regarded as primitive because it denies the "God-given rights."

Answer 4

for my section, that's, and that's between the numerous motives that i'm a Christian pacifist. besides the incontrovertible fact that, i do no longer decide directly to signify that in simple terms because of the fact i'm a pacifist, everybody else must be one, besides. transforming into a pacifist is a controversy of guy or woman ethical sense. i could believe in advertising peace regardless of if the thought weren't tied in with my faith (yet i in my view sense that that's).

Answer 5

Around the time of the Rennaisance, things started to change. Reason started to rear it's ugly head. Science was starting to form, as was logic, after a long rest.

Not to say that people weren't still occaionally tortured/hanged, etc. But that was the time when religion started to loose it's stranglehold on the European world.

As for the repealing of heresy statutes, which countries do you want to know about?

Answer 6

Christianity was always supposed to be pacifistic, what with all the teachings to "turn the other cheek" and "blessed are the peacemakers", etc. Unfortunately, people have tried to use it, as all religions have been used, as a mandate to slaughter each other or people of other faiths.

Answer 7

While they haven't stoned anyone in a good long time, there are still fierce war mongers in Christianity. Only now days their favored weapons are the media and politics instead of the sword and fire.

BB

Answer 8

GW is born-again and his track record for death is very high. I'd say Christianity stopped being pacifistic when Christ died. It's always like that with enlightened beings, they try to impart their truth, their enlightenment, but it's so hard that all that remains are ideas which are always misunderstood because they lack the force of the enlightened consciousness that originated them.

Answer 9

They realized that they needed to change with the times, unlike a certain other Middle Eastern religion in today's world.

Answer 10

It hasn't, of course. Bush claims God told him to invade Iraq, and religious minorities are still the targets of vicious hate crimes in countries with Christian majorities.