Top ten religion stories of the millennium

Christian Century, Oct 20, 1999

Spurred by what it calls "millennial fever," a public television series has compiled a list of what it describes as the top ten religion stories of the past 1,000 years. The choices made by Religion and Ethics Newsweekly are in chronological order, with summaries of each development:

* The Great Schism. The split of Christianity in 1054 into Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic branches, with the former headed by the ecumenical patriarch in Constantinople (now Istanbul) and the latter headed by the pope in Rome.

* The Crusades, which began in 1095 when Eastern Orthodox leaders appealed to the pope for help in fighting the Muslim forces that had invaded the Holy Land. But the Crusaders turned against the Orthodox as well, looting Constantinople. The Muslims drove the Crusaders out by the end of the 13th century.

* The spread of Islam to most of India by the 13th century, and its consolidation in the Middle East and parts of Europe, culminating in the capture of Constantinople in 1453 by the Islamic Empire of the Ottomans.

* The Gutenberg Bible. Johannes Gutenberg's invention of the printing press and his publishing the Bible in 1455, which resulted in mass distribution of religious teachings and ideas.

* Church support of art, music and intellectual life. This included the Vatican's commissioning of Michelangelo to paint the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Religious patronage also supported the development of universities in cities such as Oxford and Cambridge.

* Martin Luther's 95 Theses. Luther's posting of the 95 Theses in 1517--in which he, then a young Catholic monk, accused Catholic leaders of corruption and false doctrine--led to the Protestant Reformation.

* Missionary movements. These began in the 16th century when early European explorers took predominantly Catholic missionaries around the word. By the 18th and 19th centuries, the second wave of missionary movements was being led by Protestants.

* Religious liberty. The journey by English puritans to seek religious freedom in the New World, which eventually led to one of the founding principles of the United States--that government should not prohibit the free exercise of religious belief.

* Challenges to religious ideas in the 19th century, including Charles Darwin's theory of the evolution of the species; psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud's suggestion that religion is an illusion; and Karl Marx's materialistic worldview which inspired communist revolutions around the world.

* The Holocaust. Centuries of anti-Semitic persecution in Europe culminated in the Holocaust, when an estimated 6 million Jews were killed by the Nazis.