Religious tolerance and violence change within a tradition across centuries

Evidence

Today, many people, with more seriousness than Franken, think that radical Islam is the “problem religion” of the twenty-first century, but ten centuries earlier, it was Christianity (mainly Catholicism), and Islamic Spain was a cosmopolitan center of many faiths, a far more tolerant society than medieval Christendom. If some religions are inherently more violent than others, how do we explain these changes within a religious tradition? — Norenzayan, Ara, Big gods - how religion transformed…, 515

Categorization

• CANDY: The irony that Islamic Spain was more tolerant than medieval Christendom is a punchy dinner-party fact that flips modern assumptions.
• XREF: Connects to the reader’s parsing of religious-tradition variation across time, relevant to comparing fumi-e-era Japan Christianity with its earlier missionary phase.