Rumours of Christianity's demise greatly exaggerated

The faith multiplied in its early years because it helped the sick, poor and the dying, when others were not interested.

When the unthinkable happened and Rome imploded, Christianity hunkered down for the long-haul with a new civilisation called Christendom emerging in Europe.

Rather than being anti-intellectual, Christianity uniquely fostered higher learning in the so called Dark Ages with the creation of the university.

With an historian's eye for irony, Blainey wryly notes that no other institution in the past century has done more to foster an alternative secular worldview.

The foundations of the modern west owe a huge debt to Christianity. The rise of democracy would not have happened without the Reformation challenging the authority of the Roman Catholic Church and the counter-reformation that followed.

As Blainey notes, this new freedom to challenge authority has also allowed atheism its place.

Re-invention, whether through Jesuit intellectualism and evangelism, or revivals to moribund Protestantism, has meant that Christianity has been massively influential globally.

Nonconformist Christians and their democratic ideals were seminal in the founding of America and gave rise to modern notions of tolerance and religious freedom which are now under question by aggressive secularists.

Australia's founding was also touched. John Newton, the former slave ship captain who upon his conversion to Christ wrote the hymn Amazing Grace, teamed up with the great Christian anti-slavery campaigner William Wilberforce to ensure that our first chaplain, Richard Johnson, was someone with a vibrant living faith, not just a cultural Christian.

Whether it was making slavery in the west and widow burning in India unthinkable, Christians were at the forefront of challenging accepted practices which were an affront to the idea that all human life had value and should be protected.

In recent centuries as enlightened secularism has tried to create a world where man, as Blainey puts it, "can live by bread alone", the utopian hopes of man's technological and material achievement have been dashed.

Two bloody world wars and the unprecedented systematic genocide of atheistic fascism and communism have seen to this.