"Good" & "Bad" Christians?

[Belacqua]

A mild-mannered Christian 500 years ago would make a modern fundamentalist fanatic look like a fence-sitting agnostic.

500 years ago, in 1519, in Florence and educated parts of the Vatican, an intellectual Christianity influenced by Ficino and Pico was strongly influential. Though controversial, with opponents, it was nonetheless important in making Christianity even less literalist and more open to non-Christian ideas. Many high-level Christians from this school supported Galileo and other researchers, were open to advanced science, and lobbied within the Vatican to have up-to-date research considered and even funded. 

Those Christians would make a modern fundamentalist look like a sub-literate cretin.

You could look up, for instance, Thomasso Inghirami, who died in 1516. At the age of 16 he was in a performance of Seneca's Phaedra, reciting his lines in classical Latin. When the curtain behind him failed to go up on time, Thomasso kept the play going by improvising, in perfect classical Latin, lines that were in character. After that he was known in the Vatican as Phaedra for the rest of his life. He was a fantastically well-educated man, liberal by the standards of the time. Raphael did a charming portrait. Again, modern fundamentalists, next to him, look like garden slugs.