The Maturity Lie: Why Today’s Christians Are Not “Smarter” Than Today’s Muslims

The Math Nobody Does

Christianity began in the early 1st century — around the year 30 CE. Islam began in the early 7th century — the traditional starting point is the Hijra in 622 CE.

The gap between them is approximately 590 years.

And whenever someone compares “Christians today” with “Muslims today,” they are comparing a faith nearly 2,000 years old with a faith roughly 1,400 years old — while pretending the comparison is fair.

So let us ask the honest question: what were Christians doing 580 years ago, when their religion was Islam’s current age?

What Christians Looked Like 580 Years Ago

Five hundred and eighty years ago, Christian Europe was:

• Burning heretics alive. Jan Hus was burned at the stake in 1415 for questioning Church authority; Savonarola would follow in 1498.
• Fighting religious wars between Christian sects. The Hussite Wars (1419–1434) — crusades launched by the Catholic Church against fellow Christians — had just ended.
• Beginning the witch hunts. The European witch trials ran from roughly 1450 to 1750, with between 40,000 and 60,000 people executed — the overwhelming majority women .
• Selling forgiveness for money. Indulgence-selling was standard practice — the very corruption that would soon trigger the Protestant Reformation.
• Expelling and forcibly converting Jews and Muslims. Spain completed this in 1492 under a proudly Christian monarchy.

And It Got Worse Before It Got Better — Even After 580 Years Had Passed

Here is the fact that destroys the lazy version of this argument: the 580 years since that point were not a peaceful Christian golden age. Christianity’s deadliest religious violence came after it was older than Islam is today:

• The French Wars of Religion (1562–1598) — Catholic against Protestant, crowned by the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, in which thousands of Protestants were slaughtered in days.
• The Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648) — Christianity’s war against itself, consuming an estimated 4.5 to 8 million lives . Around 20% of Europe’s population perished, with parts of Germany losing up to half their people .
• The conquest of the Americas — subjugation and forced conversion of entire continents, justified in the name of the Gospel.
• The witch-hunt peak (1560–1630) — which came after the Reformation, fueled by Protestant and Catholic zeal alike. The Reformation did not calm Christianity; for a century, it escalated it.
• Northern Ireland’s Troubles (1968–1998) — Catholic against Protestant in the heart of modern Europe, over 3,500 dead, ending within living memory.

And if anyone claims that violence in God’s name is simply something the modern Christian world has outgrown, remind them of three more facts:

• The Rwandan genocide (1994): up to 800,000 people killed in one of the world’s most Christian countries — with churches complicit and massacres carried out inside them.
• The Central African Republic (2013–2014): explicitly Christian militias slaughtered Muslim civilians and destroyed hundreds of mosques.
• The Congo Free State: while “mature” Christian Europe lived in peace at home, it presided over a colonial regime under a Christian king that killed on a scale comparable to the Holocaust.

A 1,900-year-old religion, in the modern era, produced all of this. Time alone changed nothing.

So What Actually Matured Christianity?

The honest answer is uncomfortable for both sides of this debate: Christianity did not mature because its followers became wiser or kinder. It matured because of three forces — and notice that the calendar is not one of them:

1. Exhaustion. After the Thirty Years’ War killed a fifth of Europe, Christians on both sides concluded that religious war was unwinnable. Maturity was not chosen — it was bled into them. The Peace of Westphalia (1648) effectively took doctrine off Europe’s battlefield.
2. Secular correction. The tolerant Christianity we see today was not produced by the Church alone. It was dragged there by the Enlightenment and by the separation of Church and state — often against the Church’s own historical preferences.
3. Historical conditions. Europe had the luxury of fighting its religious wars on its own terms, in its own time, and then rebuilding. It is also worth remembering what secular Europe did next: the deadliest century in its history — the twentieth — was fought not over religion but over nationalism. The killing did not stop. It changed its banner.

And here is the mirror that completes the picture: at the very moment Christian Europe was in its darkest age, the Islamic world was in its golden age — the libraries of Baghdad, the scholarship of Córdoba, a pluralism under the Ottoman millet system that arguably exceeded Christian Europe’s treatment of minorities at the same time. Islam did not fail to mature because of its scripture, and Christianity did not mature because of its scripture. Different conditions, different centuries, different outcomes.

The Fair Comparison

So where does that leave us? Not with “Islam is 580 years behind” — that framing was always too simple, because religions are not organisms on a biological clock, and because Islam’s own timeline does not match Christianity’s: Islam built an empire within a decade of its founding, while Christianity spent its first three centuries as a persecuted minority without a single soldier. Two different histories cannot be reduced to one number.

The fair comparison is this:

• The Muslim world today is not a civilization in “adolescence” — it is 1.4 billion people, the overwhelming majority of whom live in peace, in places like Indonesia, Senegal, Malaysia, and Kazakhstan.
• The violence that dominates the headlines is concentrated in specific conflict zones — and it is entangled with colonial borders, oil politics, Cold War proxy wars, and dictatorships, pressures that Christian Europe did not face at the equivalent moment in its timeline.
• Islam’s sectarian wars are not waiting to happen — they have happened, from the Ottoman–Safavid wars of the 1500s and 1600s to Iraq and Syria today. What the Muslim world has not yet had is its Westphalian moment — the event that takes doctrine off the table. Europe only got that moment after paying for it with a fifth of its population.
• And history shows no guarantee such a moment comes with age. Christianity at 1,900 years produced Rwanda and the Troubles. Maturity is not something time grants. It is something conditions force.

The Conclusion

The maturity of the Christians we see today is not evidence of a superior religion, superior scripture, or superior people. It is evidence that Europe fought its religious wars to exhaustion, was disciplined by secularism, and rebuilt under favorable conditions — and even then, it still produced witch hunts, colonial massacres, and genocide in the modern era.

So the next time someone points at the Muslim world and praises Christian civility, remind them of the full ledger:

At Islam’s current age, Christians were burning heretics and starting the witch hunts. Centuries after passing Islam’s current age, Christians were slaughtering each other by the millions in the Thirty Years’ War. And nearly two millennia in, Christians still produced Rwanda.

The difference between the Christian world and the Muslim world was never the faith.

It was the conditions — and conditions can change.

Maturity is not a reward for the old. It is the scar tissue of the wounded — and some wounds have not been allowed to heal yet.