How does Manchester present Christianity?

A striking feature of A World Lit Only By Fire is its hostility to traditional Christianity. The author explicitly ties devout Christian belief to savagery, violence, superstition, oppression, inequality, impoverishment, anti-intellectualism and hostility to science. While the author does not attack Christianity directly, it is as close to direct as possible. Towards the end of Chapter III, the author actively celebrates Magellan's expedition for providing empirical proof that the world was round, which he takes to directly contradict the Bible (a position supported by no orthodox Christian church body today). As a result, Magellan put the final stake in the medieval world's coffin by making it impossible to read the Bible literally.

The oddity of attributing to Magellan, a devout Roman Catholic and later religious zealot (a fact not lost on Manchester), the destruction of medieval Christian Europe should strike any fair-minded reader. For Manchester however, to leave the Dark Ages the foundations of rational Christian belief had to be subjected to challenge. This meant challenging the Papacy via reform and Protestantism. It meant reviving antiquity, which showed that a non-Christian civilization could be culturally superior to Christendom. It also meant exploring the world to demonstrate that there were peoples who flourished without Christian belief. All of these factors, according to Manchester, led to what he regards as a glorious destruction of a united Christendom. Thereafter, secularism would sweep Europe even if in private religious belief persisted.