Although I'm really not what you could call a follower, I've always found church history to be pretty engaging. I first studied the history of the Church not out of intellectual curiosity, but out of non secular need. You see, I was having difficulty with the faith that I was brought up in. My oldsters were highly non secular folks, but I felt the faith was hypocritical. They preached the love of God, and yet they suspected that all sinners would go to hell. I had no desire to believe in a wicked God who would doom folks to eternal suffering. I have analyzed the history of Christianity to discover how this belief has come about. It seems that church history is more sophisticated than folks have a tendency to present it as. There are all sorts of history of the Catholic Church books out there, but many of them are written with a specific agenda.

Either they are written to bring folks back to the fold, or they are written to denounce the church.

I would have liked to read some church history that was written from a fair and balanced point of view that gave each side its equal chance. When you study early church history, you discover how political everything was. It seems that one of the most significant agendas for the early church was to consolidate belief. The Gnostics and other heretics were oppressed for their concepts. Church history is about early Christians coming up with one story to share with all of the followers. They stressed Heaven and Hell as it would cause bigger obedience. Had they been interested in variety of thought rather than in making a uniform code of belief, things could have been extremely different. In the final analysis, reading church history didn't return me to my religion, but it probably did give me spiritual benefits.

Due to my Christian history readings, I have made a decision to formulate my ideology independent of any non secular doctrine.