THE FAITH

An overlong, underinterpreted chronicle of Christianity by a veteran British journalist.

There is no dearth of one-volume histories of the faith on bookstore and library shelves, and this latest survey by Moynahan (Rasputin: The Saint Who Sinned, 1997, etc.) is not likely to rattle the competition. Beginning with the gospel accounts of the ministry of Jesus and ending in a 21st-century world of troubled ecumenism among the churches and intense religious conflicts without, Moynahan tells a familiar story of martyrs and emperors, conquerors and crusaders, inquisitors and witchfinders, popes and mendicants, monks and missionaries, slavers and colonizers, reformers and counter-reformers. He flings his net as wide as possible, and although his own writing is undistinguished, he has a fine ear for the apt quotation and an eye for the odd and eccentric. But he lacks a coherent view of his subject or a mastery of its primary sources, and he is sometimes unreliable in detail. Moynahan has a tabloid journalist’s preference for the sensational, indeed the quasi-pornographic; he never averts his gaze from the tortures, burnings, and massacres that disfigure Christian history. Sex, politics, and greed also draw a great deal of his attention; other aspects of his subject are less fervently treated. He has little to say of theology—which, judging by his summaries of Paul, Augustine, the doctrine of transubstantiation, Luther, and Calvin, is probably a good thing. He has little empathy with religious thinking or spiritual practice. But most frustratingly, for someone offering a history of Christianity, he has no sense of the network of relationships that constitute a meaningful history. Instead, he simply presents one blessed thing after another.

Moynahan hopes “to have caught something of the essence of the faith” on his vast canvas. But it is never clear exactly what that essence might be. Readers in search of a historical understanding of the faith have many better places to look.