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I notice that whenever people rush to declare what Christianity has done for us and to proclaim the West's historical debt to it, they tend to don rather rosy glasses.

R. Iestyn Daniel (Letters, 15 December) wishes to credit Christianity with the country's schools, hospitals and universities, but forgets how many of those institutions excluded non-Conformists, non-Christians, women and the poor. Until relatively recently, if you belonged to any of those groups, Christianity - and state Christianity in particular - was usually deployed to exclude.

Farah Mendlesohn, Middlesex University