they often spout the view that every advancement of human rights and every progression of human endeavour derives from intellectual seeds sown by the French Revolution and from the freethinkers of the Enlightenment. Sceptics even have the gall to claim that the rise of modern science and the abolition of slavery all happened in spite of Christianity, not because of it.4 Yet that old chestnut, well-worn as it is, has one fatal flaw: it is not true.
