I’ve been following and occasionally commenting on a lot of recent diaries here about Christians, Christianity, and who or what or how much is to blame for the religious mess we’re in. I thought I’d chime in with a few thoughts of my own, based on research I’ve been doing for the past several years on the origins and application of Christianity.
All religions have good and bad points (even the Aztec religion). What happens with organized religion — a religion with a defined priesthood and prescribed rules, rewards, and punishments — is that they tend to magnify the good and bad extremes. And as organized religions gain access to secular power, they tend to be corrupted by that access and magnify their bad points even more.
But Christianity has some unique aspects, derived from its origins and its early history. Among these are:
1. Belief that the world was about to end any moment. This is what drove the early missionaries to such efforts in the Roman empire — Jesus was about to come back and judge the world, and it was vital to get people to believe that so that they would be saved from hell when he did so. This also affected their attitude toward sex, society, and governance: none of these were important any more, since the world would shortly no longer need any of that. For reasons far too complex to go into here, the Catholic church eventually came to terms with the idea that the world would continue for the foreseeable future. Protestants, especially the more fundamentalist ones, and many evangelicals as well, continue to insist that the end is near, and make plans and policies on that basis.
2. Focus on individual salvation. In basic Christian theology, nothing in life is as important as how we will spend eternity afterwards. And that decision will be based less on what each person does as on what each person believes — believes that Jesus died for our sins. This belief is an individual one, meaning that each person is being asked to focus on his or her own salvation, with the welfare of the community, the society, the planet, coming as an afterthought.
3. Uniformity of belief. It’s not enough to believe in Jesus; you have to believe in him the right way. This goes back to the New Testament; read the letters of Paul, or some of the later epistles, which denounces people who believe in Jesus, but not quite in the way the author of the letter wants them to. This was no trivial matter: getting the details of belief wrong could condemn one to hell for trillions and trillions of years. Catholics and Protestants fought devastating wars in Europe, and some would go to war even now if allowed, all because each believes the other got the details of salvation wrong.
4. Universality of belief. All the above leads to another aspect that is unique to Christianity: the insistence that all the world believe the same thing (according to whatever details). Other religions either ignore nonbelievers (Judaism) or tolerate them (Islam), but don’t see it as their vital duty to save them from going to hell for their nonbelief. (I can’t speak as clearly about eastern religions, but I’m not aware of a similar attitude there. Extremist Muslim groups such as ISIS are historically out of the Muslim mainstream, so far.)
5. Discomfort with secular power. This might seem strange, given how Christian nationalists are currently working hard to seize the levers of power in the United States, but historically Christianity has had a complex relationship with the state. Early Christians had nothing to do with the state — the Roman empire — though actual persecutions were rarer than you might think. But once Constantine and Theodosius established Christianity as the religion of the empire, Christian theologians had to work out just how much they would combine the church with the state. They never did manage to completely do so, as the history of the medieval church easily shows. There has never been, so far as can think of, a Christian equivalent to the Muslim caliph, a ruler who was both the highest secular and the highest religious authority in Islam.
In our modern pluralistic world, many Christians have figured out how to come to terms with the first four aspects I’ve listed (not an exhaustive list at all). These are the Christians who are defending their faith in these diaries. Those here who attack Christianity (wholly or in part) are focused on those four aspects and the damage they’ve done to the world over the last 2000 years. I suggest that each group needs to acknowledge where the other is coming from.
Last thought, regarding the fifth aspect: If we do end up with some kind of theocracy in the United States, it will tear itself apart very quickly, as Catholics (of several sorts) and Protestants (of many sorts) vie for control and the secular keys to heaven.