How are History and religion related?

Question

Note, I don't want the history of religion.

This is for my social studies class...

Answer 1

Since the first primitive man/woman looked all around and questioned how all they saw actually got there...religion was born.

Answer 2

Most concisely, for a very long time what happened was determined by religious leaders. That is, a religious leader was also the political leader. As such, laws were designed around religious precepts.

A few examples:

The Romans were pagan, and they really didn't follow religion to its extremes. But after Constantine in 325AD or so, the state ("Roman Empire") followed the Christian faith. By the Middle Ages religious leaders were the only truly powerful figures.

So why was this important?

Religion in Europe united many different ethnicities and languages. Just as Latin united many people through a common language, Christianity united various tribes through one code of conduct. Think of religion as a moral and political code. Even after the disappearance of Rome in the 400s (it didn't actually disappear, just became politically powerless), it was the church that dominated politics.

Today things ar evastly different, but in many cultures religion continues to dominate politics. Muslim countries are much closer to what teh West was in the Middle Ages (not attacking Muslims, but it is a simple fact). For example, in Saudi Arabia the "official" religion is Islam and the Islamic laws are molded on the Koran and teachings of Mohammed. It would be like making the US Constitution on the basis of the Bible.

In simple terms, religion-->(determines) Politics. And politics is nothing if not history. As a famous person once said, we ARE history. Everything we do now is tomorrow's history. And religion has determined a lot of what happened in the past.

It is unfortunate many today deny the impact of Christianity on history, especially Western history. But they misunderstand that this does not have necessarily positive implications: Christianity was good and bad. It was good as it was a source of intellectual study (until the Renaissance, practically all educated people were clerics, and were it not for Christian scribes ALL the great works of ancient Greece and Rome might have been forever lost). It also helped shape the modern ethics that is part of our legal system. But it was bad because it imposed certain rules that were oppressive, especially against nonreligious people or people of a non-Christian faith. But it had an impact on history, and so it cannot be ignored. We would not be here today were it not for the influence of Christianity (and I don't mean this in a moral sense, but in a historical sense).