On the inversion of values - Part 2

Objection! The defendant is claiming the ‘Individual’ was born at the Cross. But what about the Stoics? Two centuries before Paul, Cicero and Seneca were already writing about Humanity and Cosmopolitanism. The Christians didn’t invent these values; they just burnt the libraries of the people who actually did and put their own label on the ruins.

Let’s pause the proceedings right there.

Before I let the opposing counsel tear my entire argument apart, I need to step out of the courtroom for a second, because there is a glaring question I should have answered from the very beginning. I told you in Part 1 how I came to this confession - by reading Tom Holland - but I haven’t told you why now.

Why does this matter? If you, the reader, are engaging in this transaction of time and attention, you have every right to ask what you will get in return. Is this just me showing you I can put words on paper?

It isn’t. I am writing because I changed fishbowls, and I suddenly saw the water.

For a great deal of my life, I lived in Òṣogbo. The cultural and moral landscape there operates on its own complex frequencies of power, faith, and community. The immediate concerns back home rarely revolved around policing the moral absolutes of a war a continent away. You are navigating tangible, local realities.

Moving to London immersed me in the modern West and introduced a completely different cultural pressure. Look at the world right now. Russia invades Ukraine. Israel invades Gaza. Immediately, society places an unspoken demand on you to take a side. If you claim to have a progressive mind, you must instantly label the victim and the victimiser, and you must declare your allegiance loudly. I watched the culture around me passionately rally for these causes with an absolute, uncompromising zeal.

My culture shock stemmed entirely from observing this psychological reflex. Here in the West, people fiercely argue about human rights and protecting the oppressed, judging impossibly complex global conflicts with zero hesitation.

But where do these moral reflexes come from? It is tempting to assume that siding with the oppressed over the powerful is just the default setting of humanity, that it is simply rational or obvious.

So what if it isn’t? Why should it matter to you where these values came from, as long as we still do the right thing?

It matters because if we don’t know why we instinctively side with the victim, our morality becomes blind. When “the victim” becomes our only standard for who is in the right, the quickest way to gain power is to claim you are the most oppressed. It matters because we are trusting the walls of our society - human rights, equality, compassion - to hold us up, without knowing if the foundation beneath them is cracking.

I have an ambitious goal: I want to see if I can influence you to step out of the present for even a second. Your quest, should you choose to accept it, is to take off the Western lens through which you currently see the world, to see just how blurry the landscape actually is without it.

So, let’s go back into court. Let’s hear the Prosecution out. Because if they are right, the foundation isn’t what we think it is.

In this part, I will yield the floor to the Prosecution to cross-examine my Wrecking Ball. We will weigh the Trinity of Rejections:

First, we will hear the rejection of the Jews, to whom this Wrecking Ball was not a liberation of the masses, but a horrifying blasphemy and a theological betrayal.

Second, we will face the Skeptics - represented by secular humanists like A.C. Grayling¹ - who charge the Church with both intellectual theft and historical catastrophe. They will argue that Stoics like Seneca had already birthed these values through reason, and that Christianity was merely a destructive middleman that burned the ancient libraries, plunged Europe into the Dark Ages, and endorsed centuries of slavery and crusades.

Finally, we will face the most devastating witness of all: Friedrich Nietzsche, who argues that this inversion of values wasn’t a triumph of love, but a psychological rot - a deliberate poisoning of human greatness by the weak and the envious.

The court is back in session

2.1 The First Rejection: The Stumbling Block

The Prosecution calls its first witness to the stand: a 1st-century Jew.

If I am claiming this Wrecking Ball liberated the masses, the Jewish establishment of antiquity would like a word. To the people who forged the very iron this Wrecking Ball was made of, the people who first articulated the Imago Dei, this new movement was a humiliating joke.

I must be painfully honest: If I had been a first-century Jew living under the crushing boot of Rome, I would have rejected the carpenter’s son too. When your nation is occupied and your people are being crucified for minor rebellions, you don’t want a philosopher telling you to turn the other cheek and love your enemies. You want a general. The Jews were holding out for the Lion of Judah to snap the Roman spear in half, not a peasant who let himself be nailed to a piece of wood without a fight.

Beyond the political letdown, the Cross was a theological impossibility. The Torah they had bled to protect was explicit: “Cursed is anyone who hangs on a tree”². To look at the battered corpse of a state criminal and call him the Creator of the Universe was the ultimate blasphemy. Yet Paul took this cursed figure, stripped away the protective boundaries of the Law, and handed their exclusive God over to the polytheistic, pork-eating Romans.

The Jewish establishment rejected the Wrecking Ball because they were reading their Bibles, looking at reality, and concluding that God does not lose. I would have made the exact same call. This naturally begs a massive historical question: how did Paul, a Pharisee of Pharisees who built his early career violently crushing this exact heresy, suddenly get it? What made him flip and hurl this cursed idea at the Roman social order?

It is a fascinating mystery, but an exploration for another day. Right now, the Jewish establishment has made its point, and they are stepping down.

2.2 The Second Rejection: The Theft and The Bad Fruit

The Pharisee steps down and the Prosecution calls its star witness for the modern age: the Skeptic. Represented by secular humanists like A.C. Grayling, the Skeptic looks at my Wrecking Ball and sees a massive historical fraud.

The Skeptic’s charge is twofold: intellectual theft and historical catastrophe.

First, the theft. The Prosecution points directly to the Stoics. Centuries before a crucified carpenter became the centrepiece of Western religion, Greek and Roman philosophers were already writing about Cosmopolis - the universal brotherhood of man. Seneca wrote letters urging masters to dine with their slaves because they “breathe the same air”³. Epictetus, one of the greatest Stoic minds, was himself a slave.

They argued that every human being shares a spark of the divine Logos, or universal Reason. To the Skeptic, human rights are purely logical. They are the natural conclusion of a rational mind. We have zero need for a “Sky Father” to deduce that murder is wrong or that treating others with dignity creates a functioning society. The Church hijacked Greek philosophy, slapped a “Jesus” sticker on it, and claimed the copyright. Crediting Christianity for our modern moral reflexes is like crediting a set of training wheels for a cyclist winning the Tour de France. They were attached to the bike for a while, sure. Today, we have outgrown them.

Then comes the bad fruit. If the Church demands credit for the beauty of Western values, it must also own the horror.

I claimed this Wrecking Ball liberated the mind. The Skeptic asks why, in 391 AD, Christian mobs sanctioned by their bishops destroyed the Serapeum of Alexandria, burning one of the greatest repositories of ancient wisdom and science⁴. Christianity plunged Europe into the Dark Ages - a thousand years of dirt, superstition, and illiteracy, where the only allowed knowledge was whatever the priest could control.

And what of the body? I claimed the Imago Dei destroyed the Roman social pyramid. Yet the New Testament explicitly commands, “Slaves, obey your earthly masters with respect and fear”⁵. For eighteen hundred years, the Church baptised the institution of human bondage. We cannot brush this away as the sin of a few corrupt individuals; the absolute highest moral authority in Christendom provided the blueprint.

In 1452, Pope Nicholas V issued the decree Dum Diversas⁶, explicitly granting European kings the divine mandate to consign conquered peoples to perpetual servitude. This papal bull laid the formal theological and legal groundwork for the Transatlantic slave trade. If the Wrecking Ball was as groundbreaking as I claim it to be, how do you explain the most brutal slave trade in human history happening under the direct, official blessing of the Church?

To the Skeptic, the secular Enlightenment freed the slaves. Humanity only reclaimed its dignity when it finally stopped listening to the priests and went back to the logic of the Greeks.

2.3 The Third Rejection: The Rot

The Skeptic leaves the stand having painted Christianity as a hypocritical middleman. The final witness, however, thinks the Skeptic is being far too generous. He thinks Christianity is a psychological disease.

Enter Friedrich Nietzsche.

Nietzsche looks at the ruins of the Roman Empire and sees an absolute tragedy. In his devastating critique of Slave Morality⁷, he points out that the ancient world operated on a Master Morality. To the Romans, good meant strong, beautiful, noble, and excellent. Bad meant weak, timid, and pathetic. This was the natural, biological order of a vibrant, conquering species.

The Christians - the slaves, the outcasts, the losers of history - were consumed by envy. Unable to defeat the Romans on the battlefield of power, they pulled off the most successful psychological revenge in human history. They inverted the values.

They convinced the world that weakness was actually holy. They rebranded their cowardice as “turning the other cheek”. They weaponised pity. They took the soaring, majestic eagle of human potential and locked it in a cage of guilt.

Nietzsche charges my Wrecking Ball with the ultimate crime: it made us mediocre. It made us anxious, self-loathing, and terrified of our own greatness. As he wrote, “The Christian resolve to find the world ugly and bad has made the world ugly and bad”⁸. This was a revolution of resentment.

2.4 Are We The Baddies?

The Prosecution rests.

The courtroom is dead silent. I am sitting at the defence table, staring at the evidence they have piled before the jury. The smouldering ashes of the Alexandrian libraries. The blood-soaked crosses of the Crusades. The chains of enslaved men and women justified by scripture. The undeniable, haunting logic of Nietzsche’s claim that we have glorified victimhood at the expense of human excellence.

I brought this case to show how a Jewish carpenter and his followers saved the world from the cruelty of Rome. As I look at the history of my own faith - a history of inquisitions, forced conversions, and absolute moral superiority - a terrifying pop-culture reference echoes in the back of my mind.

It is that famous Mitchell and Webb sketch⁹ where two SS officers, sitting in the trenches, suddenly notice the skulls on their uniforms and ask each other the dreadful question: “Hans…are we the baddies?”

People in history always think they are the good guys. Rome was completely certain it was bringing order to the world. The inquisitors were completely certain they were saving souls. Today, when we cancel people online, when we wage wars in the name of human rights, we are completely certain we are on the right side of history.

Looking at the wreckage left by the Wrecking Ball, I have to ask a difficult question. Have we just changed who gets to be cruel in the name of “the good”?

Perhaps the real enemy of humanity is certainty itself.

The jury is staring at me. I have no rebuttal.

Court is adjourned.

Footnotes

1. A.C. Grayling, The God Argument: The Case Against Religion and for Humanism (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). ↩

2. Deuteronomy 21:23 (ESV). ↩

3. Seneca, Moral Letters to Lucilius, Letter 47. ↩

4. For a detailed account of the destruction of the Serapeum and broader Christian iconoclasm, see Catherine Nixey, The Darkening Age: The Christian Destruction of the Classical World (London: Macmillan, 2017). ↩

5. Ephesians 6:5 (NIV). ↩

6. Pope Nicholas V, Dum Diversas (18 June 1452). The bull authorised Alfonso V of Portugal to “invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue” non-Christians and consign them to “perpetual servitude”. ↩

7. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, First Essay: “Good and Evil, Good and Bad” (1887). ↩

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §130 (1882). ↩

9. David Mitchell and Robert Webb, That Mitchell and Webb Look, Series 1, Episode 1 (2006). BBC Two. ↩