White Theology and White Power Part III

When Christianity Became a European Civilizational Identity.

Jesus was a Jew from Roman Judea. The first disciples were Jews. Christianity spread through Jerusalem, Antioch, Syria, Asia Minor, Egypt, North Africa, Greece and Rome. Alexandria became one of Christianity’s great intellectual centers. Carthage gave Latin Christianity Tertullian and Cyprian. Augustine, one of the most consequential theologians in Western Christianity, was a North African bishop.

Christianity also continued to develop far beyond Western Europe. Christian kingdoms flourished in Nubia. Ethiopia maintained an ancient Christian civilization. Syriac Christianity extended from the eastern Mediterranean through Mesopotamia and eventually as far as India and China.[1]

Yet centuries later Europeans could travel into Africa, Asia and the Americas carrying a faith born outside Europe and present Christianity as an identifying feature of European civilization.

How did a Jewish and Mediterranean faith come to be understood so thoroughly as European?

The answer is more complicated than saying that Europeans converted to Christianity. Christianity became identified with Europe when Christian belonging increasingly became an organizing principle of European institutions, political authority and social membership.

That development came long before modern racial whiteness.

This distinction is essential. Charlemagne was not “white” in the modern racial meaning of that word, and the Carolingian world did not possess the racial classifications that developed centuries later. Europeanization and racialization were different historical processes.

The sequence examined in this series is therefore more precise: Christianity first developed a new relationship with imperial power. In Western Europe it later became deeply embedded in European civilization. Centuries afterward, European expansion and modern racial classification created the conditions under which Christianity could become entangled with white power.

Essay #2 examined the first transition. Essay #3 examines the second.

After Roman imperial authority weakened in Western Europe, Christian institutions endured. Bishops, monasteries and churches preserved texts, administered property, educated clergy, organized charity and sometimes performed civic functions in communities where Roman governmental structures had diminished.[2]

Christianity was becoming more than a religion practiced by Europeans. Christian institutions were helping organize European society.

The transformation is especially visible under Charlemagne and the Carolingians.

On Christmas Day in 800, Pope Leo III placed an imperial crown on Charlemagne in Rome. Historians continue to debate the political meaning of the event, particularly its relationship to papal authority, Frankish ambitions and the Byzantine Empire. Yet its symbolism was unmistakable: a Frankish king was acclaimed emperor within a Christian political order.[3]

The coronation makes a memorable picture, but the more important transformation occurred through institutions.

One of those institutions was baptism.

Owen Phelan’s study of the Carolingian world demonstrates that political and religious reformers around the beginning of the ninth century increasingly conceived of baptism as more than initiation into Christian faith. It became an organizing principle for what they envisioned as an imperium christianum, a Christian political and social order.[4]

This can be seen in the Admonitio generalis of 789 and other Carolingian reforms, which linked religious instruction, clerical discipline, education and public life. It becomes even more concrete in 811 or 812, when Charlemagne circulated questions to metropolitan bishops asking them to investigate how baptismal preparation was being conducted throughout their jurisdictions and report the results to his court. Responses survive from across the empire.[5]

An emperor was therefore concerning himself with how Christian subjects were being formed.

That is an institutional transformation of enormous significance.

The state did not simply protect Christianity. Political authority increasingly participated in creating a Christian society. Bishops helped govern. Clergy helped educate. Monasteries became centers of learning and landholding. Christian teaching influenced law and public morality. Rulers increasingly understood care for the religious formation of their subjects as part of government itself.

By the middle of the ninth century, Phelan argues, baptism had become so embedded in Carolingian thought that leaders increasingly assumed rather than argued for its place as a foundation of Christian society. Even after the Carolingian political project fragmented, the deeper assumption survived: medieval Europeans had increasingly learned to imagine their society as a community of the baptized.[6]

That formulation helps explain what “Christian Europe” actually meant.

It also reveals the problem created when religious belonging and political belonging move closer together.

The Saxon wars provide an important example, although they require careful treatment.

Charlemagne’s lengthy campaigns against the Saxons mixed political conquest, rebellion, religious conflict and Christianization. Baptisms sometimes followed military defeat, and harsh legislation connected Christian observance with political obedience. Earlier histories frequently described the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae as straightforward evidence of forced conversion.

Recent scholarship complicates that interpretation. Robert Flierman has argued that the capitulary was concerned significantly with preventing people already considered Christian from abandoning both Christian and royal allegiance, rather than functioning simply as a program for baptizing pagans at swordpoint.[7]

The broader history still demonstrates how difficult it had become to separate conquest from Christianization.

More importantly, Christians themselves recognized the danger.

Alcuin of York, Charlemagne’s adviser and one of the leading intellectual figures of the Carolingian renewal, became deeply concerned with the quality of conversion. Reflecting on missionary problems among the Saxons and later the Avars, he emphasized instruction before baptism and resisted the assumption that political submission could produce Christian faith. Phelan shows that Alcuin’s developing theology of baptism required genuine formation because sacramental membership carried moral, social and theological obligations.[8]

Alcuin therefore provides an important counterexample within the very system this essay examines.

The existence of Christian empire did not require every Christian thinker to reach the same conclusions about power. Political structures created possibilities, pressures and assumptions; they did not eliminate theological agency.

That distinction will remain important throughout this series.

Another group reveals the boundaries of Christian Europe even more clearly: Jews.

Jews lived within Carolingian political society but remained outside the sacramental community created through baptism. Phelan specifically uses disputes concerning Jews to demonstrate both the reach and the limits of the Carolingian imperium christianum.[9]

Their position exposes a fundamental question.

What happens when a society increasingly defines itself through a religious identity that some of its inhabitants do not share?

Jews were not foreigners simply because they were Jews. They could live, trade and participate within Christian-ruled societies. Yet they remained outside the “community of the baptized.” Religious difference could therefore acquire political, legal and social significance in ways that would develop considerably during subsequent centuries.

This should not be confused with modern racial antisemitism. Medieval Christian anti-Judaism and modern racial antisemitism have connected but distinct histories. The distinction matters precisely because this series is tracing how different forms of hierarchy developed rather than projecting modern racial categories backward.

Nor was the Christian world equivalent to Europe.

While Carolingian rulers were constructing a Latin Christian order, Christianity continued across Africa and Asia. Christian Nubian kingdoms endured for centuries. Ethiopia maintained its own Christian political and theological tradition. Syriac-speaking Christian communities developed distinctive churches and expanded eastward across Asia.[10]

Christianity itself had not become European.

Western Christianity had increasingly become centered within a European political and institutional world.

That difference helps us understand what happened to Christian memory.

Consider Augustine.

Augustine spent his life in Roman North Africa. He was born in Thagaste, studied in Carthage and became bishop of Hippo Regius in what is now Algeria. Yet subsequent Western Christianity inherited him so completely that Augustine could become one of the foundational “Western” theologians while the African Christian world that formed him became far less prominent in popular accounts of Christian history.

Augustine did not move after his death.

The intellectual map around him changed.

A North African theologian became a Father of the Western Church. A Jewish apostle named Paul became foundational to European theology. Scriptures originating in the ancient Near East became the sacred texts through which European kingdoms interpreted themselves.

Dominant traditions have the ability to absorb what they inherit until the inheritance begins to appear native.

Christianity eventually became so thoroughly associated with Europe that Europeans could forget how much of Christianity Europe had received from somewhere else.

The Carolingians did not create a finished institution called Christendom that remained unchanged for a thousand years. Their empire fractured. Popes and kings fought. Eastern and Western Christian traditions diverged. European kingdoms developed differently. The boundaries between ecclesiastical and political authority remained contested.

What endured was more basic: the increasingly powerful assumption that European society could properly be imagined as Christian society.

That assumption would later encounter entirely new historical conditions.

European maritime expansion would bring Christians into sustained relationships with African, Asian and Indigenous American peoples. Medieval categories such as Christian, Jew, Muslim, pagan and heretic would encounter emerging categories of civilization, ancestry and eventually race. Older theological distinctions would be retained in some places, discarded in others and transformed for purposes their medieval architects could not have anticipated.

There is therefore no straight line from Charlemagne to white supremacy.

There is, however, an institutional inheritance.

Before Europeans developed modern racial systems, Christian societies had already acquired extensive experience using religious identity to organize belonging, law, authority and the boundaries between communities. Christianity had also become deeply associated with European civilization itself.

That is the bridge between imperial Christianity and the later story of white Christian power.

Before Christian supremacy could become entangled with racial supremacy, Christians first had to confront an older question:

What happens when belonging to the dominant religion also becomes part of belonging to the dominant civilization?

That is where Essay #4 begins.

Notes

[1] Françoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debié, The Syriac World: In Search of a Forgotten Christianity, trans. Jeffrey Haines (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2023); Alexandros Tsakos, “Medieval/Christian Nubia,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History (2021). Syriac Christianity expanded eastward while Christian Nubian kingdoms remained major African Christian societies for centuries.

[2] Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom: Triumph and Diversity, A.D. 200–1000, 3rd ed. (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013); Robert A. Markus, The End of Ancient Christianity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

[3] Janet L. Nelson, King and Emperor: A New Life of Charlemagne (Oakland: University of California Press, 2019). Contemporary sources record Pope Leo III crowning Charlemagne emperor in Rome on Christmas Day 800; historians continue to debate the ceremony’s precise political meaning. See also Carl I. Hammer, “Christmas Day 800: Charles the Younger, Alcuin and the Frankish Royal Succession,” English Historical Review 127, no. 524 (2012): 1–23.

[4] Owen M. Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe: The Carolingians, Baptism, and the Imperium Christianum (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), especially introduction and chap. 2. Phelan argues that Carolingian reformers increasingly used baptism as a theological, social and political organizing principle for an imperium christianum.

[5] Phelan, Formation of Christian Europe, chap. 4. Charlemagne’s circular letter of 811/812 instructed metropolitan bishops to investigate baptismal formation within their jurisdictions and report their findings; surviving responses demonstrate broad implementation of the inquiry.

[6] Phelan, Formation of Christian Europe, chap. 5 and conclusion. Phelan concludes that even though Carolingian political aspirations for an imperium christianum ultimately failed, their sacramental assumptions endured; medieval Europeans increasingly conceived of society as a “community of the baptized.”

[7] Robert Flierman, “Religious Saxons: Paganism, Infidelity and Biblical Punishment in the Capitulatio de partibus Saxoniae,” in Religious Franks: Religion and Power in the Frankish Kingdoms, ed. Rob Meens et al. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2016), 181–201. Flierman challenges the conventional reading of the capitulary as simply a blueprint for forced conversion, emphasizing its concern with apostasy, fidelity and political rebellion.

[8] Phelan, Formation of Christian Europe, chap. 3. Phelan traces Alcuin’s insistence on instruction and formation surrounding baptism and the development of his thinking through missionary problems in Saxony and Bavaria. Contemporary scholarship also emphasizes Alcuin’s objections to rapid or coercive conversion and his insistence that teaching precede baptism.

[9] Phelan, Formation of Christian Europe, chap. 2. Phelan specifically uses controversies concerning Jews to illuminate both the significance of baptism for Carolingian political thought and the boundaries of the imperium christianum.

[10] Tsakos, “Medieval/Christian Nubia”; Briquel Chatonnet and Debié, The Syriac World. Christian Nubia persisted from roughly the fifth through fifteenth centuries, while Syriac Christian traditions developed distinct hierarchies and expanded eastward during the same centuries in which Latin Christian Europe was taking shape.

Principal Sources

Peter Brown, The Rise of Western Christendom; Owen M. Phelan, The Formation of Christian Europe; Janet L. Nelson, King and Emperor; Françoise Briquel Chatonnet and Muriel Debié, The Syriac World; Alexandros Tsakos, “Medieval/Christian Nubia”; Robert Flierman, “Religious Saxons.”