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White guilt is a Christian affliction. Not for nothing did Edward Gibbon saddle Christianity with the downfall of the Roman Empire.
Gibbon is the genius who wrote the 12 volumes that make up “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” [1776]. ( I read the 1943 version, which was “condensed for modern reading.”)
Gibbon brought upon himself the wrath of “bishops, deans and dons”—not to mention that of Dr. Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell. Boswell called Gibbon an “infidel wasp” for “the chapter in which he showed that the fall of Rome was hastened by the rise of Christianity.”
And indeed, Gibbon seems to point toward Christianity’s self-immolating, progressive nature, remarking on the courting by early Christians of criminals and women.
Willson Whitman—he wrote the 1943 Foreword to the abridged version—remarks on how “Gibbon outraged the Christians of his era by suggesting the ‘human’ reasons for the success of Christianity … Among these reason [Gibbon] noted that Christianity … attracted to its ‘common tables’ slaves, women, reformed criminals, and other persons of small importance [his words]—in short that Christianity was a ‘people’s movement of low social origin, rising as the people rose.”
I wonder: If to go by Gibbon, can Christianity be called the Social Justice movement of its day? Gibbon seemed to suggest so.