"...nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change..." - Douglas Adams
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this is a fashionable sentiment, but as Nietzsche (a man who cannot be accused of having much sympathy for Christianity) pointed out: The notion that a slave, humiliated and crucified, was as worthy of mercy and equal was nothing short of a complete overturning of the moral order of the world. Far from obvious it was radical and subversive. The kind of modern atheist who doesn't see this does so because he has Christian values so deeply in his bones he doesn't even realize it.
Given the prevalence of slavery within the first 1800 years of Christianity's existence, I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved. More credit goes to the Enlightenment.
> I don't think we can credit it with a value system that has sympathy for the fundamental humanity of the enslaved.
We can because there is a difference between introducing a new moral grammar into the world and what people do with it. The claim is not that Christians as people were any more moral or less power hungry than people tend to be, it's that from that point on in world history, they had to be hypocrites, precisely because something had metaphysically changed.
The Enlightenment doesn't stand in contradiction to this, it's the culmination of it, which was most visible in particular among the American abolitionists. Who more than anyone else staked their claims on Christian (and Enlightenment) grounds.
And as a practical point when it comes to today's issues. Pay attention to what the post-Christian secular America looks like. Because unlike the British humanists who thought equality was just common sense, you're going to be in for a wild ride, which Nietzsche did tell us.
But the slaves were told that there was an afterlife, and that they had a better chance of going there than rich people. That must have been nice to hear for them.
Yup. Which was why some (probably Nietzsche, but AFAICR several people before him too) called Christianity "a religion for slaves": It's very very useful for elites throughout the ages, from Roman patricians to current techbroligarks, to fob the plebs off with "Your reward will come in the afterlife!"... So they don't make a ruckus about getting any reward for their toil in the present. Or, as Marx (no, not Groucho) put it: "Religion is an opium for the masses"; means the same thing.