Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince serves as a critique of Jesus Christ and his teachings. In particular, The Prince instructs readers to abandon Christ as a model for human life and adumbrates a vision of political life that rejects Christian politics as hostile to progress and human flourishing. Crucial to this project is Machiavelli's exhortation to wage war against the Catholic Church: while he comments in the Discourses that “its ruin or its scourging is near,” he encourages its ruin in The Prince. His desire to hasten the ruin of the Church leads Machiavelli to endorse the conquest of Italy and its subjection to princely rule as the surest means to accomplish this goal. Machiavelli's judgment of what might become of Christianity itself, however, is more equivocal. He surely contemplates its ruin, but also imagines that it might be scourged successfully. The requirements of this scourged Christianity, however, appear paradoxical: so damaging are the consequences of Christ's teachings that any politically salutary version of Christianity must abandon the commandment to imitate the life of Christ. Machiavelli's anti-Christian understanding of politics, human nature, and morality inform this plan, but it is his call for an anti-Christian prince that reveals most clearly his revolutionary vision of the future of Italy, Europe, and the broader world. Hence, The Prince indicates that Machiavelli's plan entails a rejection—rather than a renewal or renovation—of Christ's teachings and example. Machiavelli is a radical critic of the Church, the teachings it propagates, and its founder.

Attention to Machiavelli's critique of Christ in The Prince clarifies his intention in writing the book, which I maintain is largely defined—and limited—by his goals regarding the Church and Christianity. Most of the existing scholarship concerning Machiavelli's view of Christianity limits its analysis to the Discourses on Livy, problematically focuses on Machiavelli's presumed private attitudes toward religion, attributes Machiavelli's most cynical statements about religion to the influence of his intellectual milieu, or excuses Machiavelli's troubling statements regarding Christianity with demonstrations of his ardent patriotism: this study will correct these defects. I, instead, seek to make explicit a minor theme of the current scholarship, which recognizes Machiavelli as a teacher of evil, and in opposition to Christ's teaching.