I think one of the greatest achievements of Christianity might have been to introduce to a broad audience, so to speak, the notion (apparently derived in whole or part from Judaism) that the elites are not, by virtue of their power, etc, subject to a different morality than the common people. A murder by the king is still a murder, just as if it were a murder by a common person. So far as I understand it, this was a notion largely absent from Greece and Roman cultures, which were more inclined towards the view that might makes right.
Related to that is the Christian notion that "all souls are equal before God". The notion appears to have played a role in the development of democracy in the West
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Those are two (absolutely) brilliant points.
In the ancient world of classical Greece and Rome, these civilisations had an underlying belief in "
natural inequality". Aristotle argued that the primal and legitimating factor for according citizenship was leisure and not "human dignity". The farmer therefore, while having a profession upon which the welfare of the
polis depended for survival, was excluded from citizenship on the basis that he lacked leisure-time in which to seek the ‘good life’ of virtue and reason in the
agora. Having both a job and citizenship rights were seen as two inimical things.
Likewise, throughout the imperial era the Roman emperor was 'above the law' and the law in point of fact “originated” from his authority. So he was not subject to the same moral duties or prohibitions as his 'subjects', even in theory.
The Athenian democracy, which the scholar Held characterizes as fundamentally dependant on “exclusivity”, had a slave population which in relation to the minute class of free citizens has been estimated at 3:2 meaning that the overwhelming majority of Athenian residents were not even citizens, as with women due to the patriarchal nature of society and alien migrants. Leisure for a minority enabled by the labour of others, whether slave or simply non-citizen, was a central dogma of classical citizenship.
Rights were not seen as universally applicable - different classes of people possessed lesser or superior rights and this was understood to be perfectly 'natural'. Aristotle even went so far as to argue that many people were "naturally" born to be enslaved - sub-human, essentially.
Harry Siedentop in the book "
Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism" explains the moral intuitions underpinning Christianity changed this:
https://newrepublic.com/article/119511/how-liberalism-lost-its-way-religious-roots-ideology
As Siedentop shows, the ancient world was not in the least like the Enlightenment’s understanding of it. Far from nurturing freedom, whether positive or negative, its cultures were shot through with hereditary inequalities of status, opportunity and expectation. Social roles were rigidly prescribed and, in effect, inescapable. Escape would be self-exclusion from the city and that was a kind of living death.
Patriarchy was fundamental to the social order. This was ordained by the household gods; it was the patriarch’s duty to serve them and he derived his authority from this role. The city was an association of families, each with its own cult, not of individuals. The family heads, who were by definition men, were priests as well as citizens. Women, slaves and the foreign-born, on the other hand, were not citizens and could not aspire to citizenship; the public realm of argument and debate that set the city’s course was not for them. In Athens, arguably the ancient world’s most famous city state, full citizens comprised only about a tenth of the population.
The next stage in Siedentop’s argument is the most explosive. He shows that the gravedigger of antiquity’s implacable nexus of practices and beliefs was precisely the Christian revelation...What the historical Jesus believed and taught is uncertain, though he patently thought that the world was about to end and that the marginalized poor had at least as good a chance of entering the Kingdom of Heaven as the rich and powerful. The real significance of his life lay in his death and its aftermath. For his followers, as Siedentop puts it, Christ’s crucifixion and the Resurrection that they believed had followed it were “a moral earthquake,” a “dramatic intervention in history.” For St. Paul, the true architect of the Christian religion, that intervention was inherently egalitarian and individualistic. The fatherhood of God implied the brotherhood of man and (an even more revolutionary implication) the sisterhood of woman.
Irrespective of their social roles, all individuals—slaves as well as the free, women as well as men—were equal in the sight of God. The inegalitarian integument of ritual, heredity and prescription that had held the ancient city together was replaced by an egalitarian union of all in the “body of Christ.” God’s grace was available to everyone, sinners included: souls were equal.
In a striking passage, Siedentop suggests that the scenes of Christ’s Passion and Resurrection painted on the walls of medieval churches “testified that the immortal soul, rather than the immortal family, was the primary constituent of reality.” The doctrine of the incarnation lay at the heart of Christian egalitarianism. The deity was no longer remote and awe-inspiring, like the Jewish Yahweh was. God was within us and “us” meant all of us.
To followers of this world-view, the elaborate, God-given taboos that governed daily life among the Jewish people were not just pointless; they were also offensive. God was no longer tribal. He was universal. The multiple, local gods of pagan Greece and Rome—and, for that matter, the similarly multiple gods of the barbarian invaders who overwhelmed the increasingly decrepit western Roman empire in the 5th century—were swallowed up in that universality...
Siedentop writes in the book:
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=f_6EBAAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=liberalism+origins&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjY2cyip47NAhXBBcAKHdkHCzcQ6AEIHDAA#v=onepage&q=liberalism origins&f=true
"...In its basic assumptions, liberal thought is the offspring of Christianity. [Modern] liberalism emerged as the moral intuitions generated by Christianity were turned against an authoritarian model of the church.
The roots of liberalism were firmly established in the arguments of philosophers and canon lawyers by the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries: belief in a fundamental equality of status as the proper basis for a legal system; belief that enforcing moral conduct is a contradiction in terms; a defence of individual liberty, through the assertion of fundamental or 'natural' rights; and, finally, the conclusion that only a representative form of government is appropriate for a society resting on the assumption of moral equality..."
