Well, as to where I heard about it, it just came up in my daily digest feed. (Didn’t even notice that it was kind of an old article until I’d made my admittedly-rather-stream-of-consciousness response and started looking through other folk’s comments afterwards….)

But anyway, it was an interesting-enough article that I really felt inspired to respond. And definitely happy to keep the dialogue going. I’d gotten so tired of (and was beginning to grow increasingly angry with) the media and mainstream academy’s demonization and marginalization of traditional Christians that I decided to start writing and see if I could help put another perspective out there. So… thanks for responding. Here are some additional counter-thoughts based on what you said:

1. Islam’s militarizing effect on Christianity. You said:

There was indeed a “jihadist” quality to the zealousness with which Pizarro, Cortes, Balboa, and others sought to evangelize with the sword, but as far as I know nobody has made this argument.

It very much needs to be made! This is an under-researched topic, probably almost entirely because it isn’t considered “politically correct” to the Academy’s current apparatchik ruling class. Just taking the traditional narrative at face value, we have the very strange situation that…

A. …Islam gobbles up half of Christendom by Jihad (again, this is from Islam’s own most trusted sources)…

B. …is stopped only when they hit the stone wall of Constantinople and the hammer of Charles (puns/ metaphors intended)…

C. …yet it takes 350 years for it to develop a reciprocal “Crusading” movement…?!?

D. …then (even stranger) it is this crusading movement that seems to take 100% of the modern criticism for its religious violence and as a foreshadowing of the looming evil of modern “colonialism.”

E. And this despite the fact that, outside of Spain, the crusades were actually a pathetic little rear-guard action in what looks more like a tidal wave of Islamic conquest. (See Dr. Bill Warner’s Dynamic Battle Map of the Crusades vs. Jihad to get a better visual perspective on this…)

The whole mainstream narrative has always been so upside-down and backwards to me! And yes, Spain’s militancy does owe its origin to the 7-century-long struggle to reclaim their country from the Moors and Islam. Not that such militancy was a good thing, per se, but it does need to be put in context. (When you study what things were actually like in Medieval Spain, you realize that the picture we’re often given of a tolerant Muslim semi-utopia is complete nonsense.) …but that’s not the main thing I’d want to emphasize… After all, my heritage is Reformed and Protestant, so we were victims of the Inquisition, too… If I were transported back to those times, I’d probably join the Dutch Revolt…

2. Unintended Consequences. I do think it’s a little unfair to blame the Spanish for the epidemic of diseases that was the main killer of the indigenous people. I mean, people didn’t even understand the first thing about germ theory, much less have any tools for combating epidemics. Remember also that these same sorts of diseases had absolutely devastated the Byzantine Empire in the generation before Islam’s rise (probably setting the one of the key conditions, if not the sine qua non, for Islam’s success) and had wiped out a third to half of the population of Europe 2 centuries before the European expansion to the Americas’s. When it comes to pandemics, it seems silly to blame the victims (which was basically anyone who had contact with these diseases.)

3. Other Broad traditions: You say:

“As for other faiths, I in no way sought to downplay the dark sides of the “Dharmic” faiths, which are numerous.”

Well, that’s certainly good to hear. I find it distressing how modern Westerners only ever seem to want to find fault and negativity in their own heritage and traditions, and yet look at other cultures with such rose-colored glasses. I don’t think you can ever even really understand other traditions without first gaining some understanding and appreciation for where you come from, and while, yes, that includes some bad things, it includes some good as well. I don’t think it’s healthy for a culture to be as self-hating as western culture is becoming, any more that it would be healthy for an individual person to be so mired in self-hatred.

On this note, I find the broad categorization of Abrahamic vs. Dharmic and interesting one, but I think that there is a third broad stream which you are overlooking. I’m not sure what the right word for it is, but it is the tradition that owes its origins to Confucius, along with Taoism and the other Chinese thinkers of the “100 Schools” Era. While yes, Buddhism has also had a tremendous influence on the same regions, this “Sinic” {?} (for lack of a better name) tradition is an independent stream that has significantly altered the course of the nations it has dominated, and as such has radically changed the ways in which they have responded to the twin challenges of globalization and modernization. You speak of how these specific societies’ success seems to result from their resistance to Christianity:

Meanwhile, the “pagan” countries of the east that took great pains to keep Christianity and other western imports at bay for many centuries (specifically China, Japan, and Korea) are thriving in the modern world in a way that most of the formerly colonized world is not. Clearly, more Christianity (or more Islam, for that matter) does not yield better societies.

I would submit that you are missing a key factor, here: the Sinic cultural/ religious tradition itself. Rather than attribute such success to a negative (absence of Christianity, which isn’t even really true of South Korea anymore anyway), you should be attributing the success to a positive (the beneficial effects of the Confucian tradition on society.) Much like Christianity (and, for that matter any idea-system I can think of or even imagine), Confucianism can be both a dead weight holding society back when it is interpreted with too much rigidity and a highly beneficial thing when it is interpreted and applied a bit more flexibly. Well, now that I think about it, there are some idea-systems that are so pernicious that they don’t have any positive effects on society. Fascism/ Nazism, for one. And Marxism… I honestly can’t find a single thing about the Marxist tradition that doesn’t lead to death, destruction, and the closing up of, rather than the opening up of, human minds…But now that I’ve started to ponder open-endedly, I think that to be a clear sign that I’ve said my piece for now…