Christianity and the history of bathing

[fractaltime]

I was in a discussion about the virtues of religion when someone claimed that if there was one thing religion always had promoted, it was cleanliness. Cleanliness, right ... Since this particular person was a proponent of Christianity, I dug up some literal dirt on that religion's history of cleanliness:

• Widening Christian influence, first expressed by St. Benedict in 550, loathes nudity and sensuality and commands that bathing is sinful. Baths are banned in Europe in 1538.
• Bathing defined the difference between the Classical Age and the Dark Ages. The Greeks and Romans were very clean people and public baths were everywhere. Medieval Europeans, on the other hand, didn't bathe at all.
• public baths in Spain were closed after the muslims were driven out.
• "In response to the debauchery of Roman baths, the early Christian church frequently discouraged cleanliness. 'To those that are well, and especially to the young,'Saint Benedict in the sixth century commanded, 'bathing shall seldom be permitted.'" [...] "Colonial America's leaders deemed bathing impure, since it promoted nudity, which could only lead to promiscuity." [...] Laws in Pennsylvania and Virginia either banned or limited bathing. For a time in Philadelphia, anyone who bathed more than once a month faced jail." [...] "The father's of the early church equated bodily cleanliness with the luxuries, materialism, paganism and what's been called 'the monstrous sensualities' of Rome," explains Professor Greene (V. W. Greene, a professor of epidemiology at the Ben Gurion Medical School in Beersheva, Israel). Europe during the Middle Ages, it's often been said, went a thousand years without a bath."
• Saint Benedict: "bathing shall seldom be permitted."
• "St. Agnes, who was martyred in fourth century Rome, took the injunction to heart; she never bathed, even once"
• "In the early 1200s, St. Francis of Assisi declared personal uncleanliness a sign of piety. Europeans have an interesting history of bathing. Long before they turned Christian, Scandinavians and Germans bathed naked in lakes and rivers during the summer months, and in public baths during the winter. With the advent of Christianity nakedness came to be associated with vulgarity, lascivious thoughts and, therefore, sinful. St Agnes (d. 1077) never took a bath; St Margaret never washed herself; Pope Clement III issued an edict forbidding bathing or even wetting one's face on Sundays. Between the 16th and 18th centuries, the practice of bathing in rivers was frowned upon. In 1736 in Baden (Germany), the authorities issued a warning to students against "the vulgar, dangerous and shocking practice of bathing."
• "Cyril was beatified and made a saint for his instrumental role in cutting our ties with the great ancestral minds of the past and marks the beginning of a thousand year plague we now call the "dark ages." Where progress and ingenuity was condemned as evil, and history was lost. It was a crime to take a bath, under pain of death."
• "With the victory of Christ, cleanliness and hygiene were themselves suspect. The Church condemned public bathing (as immoral and sinful) as energetically as it did the theatre, and encouraged the closure of the baths which had done so much to preserve public health in the large metropolises of the Roman world."
• "July 5 [1881], the following ordinance was adopted: Be It Ordained by the City Association: That Sea or Bay bathing in the nude state is strictly prohibited between the hours of 5 a.m. and 11 p.m., and at no time shall it be allowed north of Tenth Street. Other ordinances adopted that day forbid bathing on Sunday, prohibited riding or driving on Sunday, regulated and prescribed assessments on businesses."
• "I just wanted to point out, the periods in western culture in which religious groups held significant political power, mainly the Middle Ages, but not restricted to the Victorian Era and Reformation period, were times of intellectual stagnation. Culture, music, art, and everything else were almost non-existant. Ever wonder why they were called the dark ages? Churches forbid bathing, critical thinking, and waged countless wars in the name of religion."

I think she'll think twice before repeating the assertion that cleanliness is a particularly religious virtue in public.