Challenging and insightful

Great to hear an Asian perspective on many cultural events and issues, bound together with the lived experience of poverty in India and challenges of Christian life.

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Reads history like like the devil reads the Bible.

There is a classic Swedish proverb that reads something akin to "like the devil reads the bible", and after forcing me through this long series of pure lies, half-truths and facts completely taken out of context, I can do nothing but state that Vishal Mangalwadi reads history, and most other things for that matter, like the devil reads the Bible.

But let me start with what the book sets out to do. Mangalwadi's stated goal is to prove that the Bible is the book that shaped the world we live in today. And that this influence is nothing but good. The first thesis is not very difficult to defend, even if such a project requires a knowledge of both religious history, economic history and culture and the history of ides, something the author obviously lacks, but even with that knowledge and even if one wants to give the author his point the title is somewhat hyperbolic "the book that made your world". The second thesis can also be defended, but then requires that one takes into account that Christianity is accused of a lot of crimes throughout history, crimes that many attribute to the Bible.

To make either of these two theses credible, it is necessary for the author to make an honest effort to respond to just such criticism, and not just straw men from fox news' apocalyptic fantasies. What a serious writer would have done was to take the best arguments against his position, and then take the best versions of those arguments to counter them. But no. I guess that would require some actual work, and we can't have any of that can we?

Through extremely selective reading of history, the author "argues" that the reason why Western values have been more successful than other countries is that they have taken the Bible seriously. An argument many serious historians make, and which is defensible. What is not defensible is to dismiss colonialism as a possible explanatory model, or just take the good from tradition and claim that the bad, such as genocide, crusades, inquisitions, etc. are not the part of that story but only regrettable mistakes that you do not include. You can not eat the cake and still have it!

Furthermore, in a book that will explain how the Bible changed values, might there have been a point in discussing the origin of the Bible? Its history? No… this is where Mangalwadi's extremely shallow form of Protestantism emerges. The Bible is revealed from God, it´s earthly history is insignificant, we do not need any context to explain or understand it.

All of this is laughable enough, but when he tries to explain religious freedom and women's equal rights with the influence of the Bible, it just becomes embarrassing and historyless again, there is a case for this arguments. For example, it can be argued that the Christian view of the individual and person's inherent holiness and dignity naturally led to these successes,, but then one must also explain why an almost united Christianity fought against these advances to the last drop of blood.. And to take a few Bible quotes out of context and show that there are a few Christians who were on the "right side" does not count.

Overall, the only arguments found in the book are deliberate misreadings, lies, and obfuscations; you can not take the fact that Paul used the word individual and load it with our contemporary definition of the word. It just does not work that way. That this book is under all criticism is sad, because the subject deserves so much better. For those who want to understand how the Bible as text shaped us, I can instead recommend "the lost art of scripture" by Karen Armstrong. And for those who want an intelligent defense of the Christian tradition's influence on values, there is "how the catholic church built western civilization" by Thomas Woods, none of them are unproblematic, but they make honest and well-read attempts to do the same thing as this obvious charlatan.

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