Great comment here by Francis Miville. I’ll let you read it and do whatever you want with it.
Unfortunately, I think you are very mistaken. First piece of bad news: Christianity did NOT start as a religion more compassionate than the Judaism it stemmed from. Turning the other cheek clearly applied only within the fold considered, so as loving one’s enemies.
In Latin (and also in Greek and Aramaic) there are two words to mean an enemy: inimicus which means the guy you really don’t like from within your group or circle of direct acquaintances and who doesn’t like you, and hostes which means those from the hostile world outside your fold, no matter they are actually unfriendly or seem friendly.
Right from the very beginning of the Christian phenomenon to a very recent historical era, you were NOT supposed to befriend the presumed enemies from without, which formed the greater mankind you were not even supposed to pray for by command from Jesus himself: humanity at large is a hostile and damned entity and the community of the truly saved are numerically negligible. Right from the very beginning of Christianity you had far more actual friendships to cancel than new ones to enter so as to become a good Christian.
Early Christianity took wholesale the rightmost Jewish doctrine of then very few Jews actually applied or believed in to that point, and gave an even more restrictive definition of the in-group which namely asked the elect not only to combat actual sins of the kind the pagans committed but thoughts: free thought was the original sin you had to renounce first to.
The thinking was now onwards the church authority’s job and no longer yours. Jesus himself referred to the Jewish fold as his only reference, and he admitted converts from outside Judaism more reluctantly than most Jews then did.
Later on, it appeared that the boundaries of the Christian fold were becoming less and less ethnic in nature and more and more ideological, but that movement was not at all one of greater opening of heart to the outside world Vatican II style.
Quite the contrary, it was made up of more intolerance and exclusivism: the Replacement Theology that prevailed just stipulated that since so many Jews had fallen, the empty places would be taken by the required number of individuals from without but that the overall structure of the chosen people would not change from what it was when the OT was written and that the proportion of that chosen people relatively to humanity would not change neither, that is to say about one to a thousand or even less.
But even then, inter-ethnic and interracial opening were not valued at all, just tolerated at a minimum rate for the new fold to grow when the ethnic community of departure proved too hard to convert: you had to remain in the ethnic group you were born in according to the flesh, as well as in the social class you were born it.
Early Christianity very stringently prohibited all upward social mobility in the fashion of rightmost Judaism and Hinduism with a supplementary touch of intolerance. Racial prejudices were never to be combated: you had to believe in the inequalities generally admitted by all and consider them as divinely-willed. You could not as a born-again Christian go yourself towards other cultures and ethnic groups, even already Christianized ones unless you were mandated to do so as a missionary by the whole church organization.
The Law was not abolished (only Saint Paul held a discourse that seemed very liberating in this regard in the wording’s appearance only, because he was a disciplinarian of the strictest kind in practice; the other apostles and early Church fathers just called for the same law plus far more stringent restrictions): you had to renounce to know about the Jewish law and leave the knowledge of its application and implementation to the authority above you and it was nearly always in the direction of more, not less restriction.
The main fear was that by interpreting the Mosaic Law by yourself you would grant yourself too many indulgences.
For instance separating meat and dairy in the kitchen was not of your concern because meat along all luxury food items would be prohibited to you except for two or three days a year maybe where you would be given some cooked by others. What was feared if you knew too much about the law was your feeling of personal sovereignty over your life.
It must be noted that up to the times of the American and French Revolutions, conversion to Christianity was even more difficult and less easily accorded to neophytes and necessitated more time of preparation than entering most Jewish folds. Only the Jesuits had become to make the process somewhat shorter and more amicable and even then they ended up being outlawed for that very reason.
In sociobiological terms the turn the other cheek attitude was not one of humanism at all but of group solidarity against the outer world : you had to sacrifice yourself and all your whims and preferences for the survival of the community (both the religious one and the ethnic one) not by compassion for the human kind: that was considered perverted in the near-sexual sense.
It was Darwinian minus the Theory of Evolution. Christianity is more strictly incompatible with Communism than any other religion, though it is also as strictly incompatible with economic liberalism of any kind.
Judaism is by its principle far less opposite, as it has actually shown to be with fits and starts at various times in history, until the advent of late established Zionism by which Jews have but very little to identify themselves as Jews with but the existence of Israel on the map, which happens to be a fascist state since about 1967-73. Jews however racist or snobbish towards their non-Jewish contemporaries were often encouraged otherwise to think that in the future it would be otherwise, as the whole human kind would be Jewish at last.
In traditional Christianity such a hope is to be forgone as a main heresy : humanity at large will always be wicked, and it has no future but to persecute the last saints at the end of the world before being itself destroyed by fire, and all humanistic doctrines challenging that Christian anti-humanistic pessimism were to be interpreted as Jewish booby traps set up in the intention of robbing money or achieving a future world dictatorship.
What must be noted is that Christianity is in principle a religion with Love as a fruit but NOT a religion of love: it is by its own NT definition a religion of the discourse (logos), of the preached word you have to submit to unconditionally by renouncing to all personal ideas with an intolerance towards whomever tempts you in contrary direction to be as directly as possible imitated from OT.
Love in the Christian sense is better thought of as care: though that care is for fellow Christians or potential Christians, and even more eternal truths approaching you from God, never humans as such and even less humanity or anything intended towards the good of the latter such as social or technical progress.
Though it is the main theological virtue, is only conditional and instrumental to the process of salvation brought about by submission to the divine Logos, which is NOT the Logos as defined by Athenian philosophy as accessible through reasoning, discussion, and exchange of ideas: for traditional Christianity as was crystallizing right after the first Resurrection news, Satan is free discussion in person, the element of air.
The fact that now Judaism has become more difficult, intolerant and anti-humanistic (even though it was always so to a certain good degree) than Christianity which seems now to be sentimentally humanistic (but that impression it gives is very recent: it started with Anglican Latitudinarianism in the 1680-1730’s, continued with Dickens’ and Victor Hugo’s literary approach and was finalized about 1960 with Vatican II), testifies to the exceptionally inverted times we are witnessing, which could be apocalyptic, though this is far, far from certain.
The only sign pointing towards that direction among many others that still lack is the Jews having gone back to Israel, but it may well be a misfire as many Jewish scriptures and admonition by sages clearly state that the Jews will have to make no specific effort and even less any move of conquest to get back to their point of departure as divinely intended: otherwise they are due for a splendid defeat and maybe a few other millennia of Diaspora or the realization that they have never been Jews at all actually.
Among the numerous other apocalyptic syndromes, clearly lacking are general abandonment of Christianity by humanity: this is true only for the Modern West which now comprises less than 10
But conversion of the Jewish fold to Jesus’ teaching as it is abandoned by all other peoples: we are further from that point than ever. The most probable immediate outcome, if we are to believe the best-established narrative, is as a kind of harsh retribution by the jilted Christian God, a military conquest of most of Europe by Islam as it happened earlier with the Christian nations of the former Middle East and Byzantine Empire, while other parts of the world become more Christian and also more prosperous while the West turns into a kind of Iraq-Syria.
A lesser but important syndrome to watch before any true apocalypse can happen is the Jews losing their whole financial fortune to return to the exact lifestyle they had in Antiquity as well as all former Christian countries losing all their political power and scientific knowledge once they have given up believing.
This will be probably true for the US quite soon (my opinion is that the US brand of “Christianity” is the religion most contrary to Christianity ever devised, rather a kind of Jewier than Jew Noachidism for Jesus that could jettison Jesus at once as soon as Israel stringently asks for all pilgrims to go to Jerusalem), but once it has happened, it will turn out to have been a numerically negligible part of the world, setting a very negative example not to imitate for millennia to come maybe.
