The Modern Departure From (Towards?) Christianity
In the 4th century after Christ, sometime between the emperors Constantine and Theodosius, the Church became mixed up between the Hebrew idea of God and the temporarily powerful Roman Empire.
Christianity was a revolutionary Hebrew prophetic movement in the first century saying, like generations of Hebrew prophets before them, that the outcasts had a point–the Roman Empire and it’s Pharisaical justifiers may be following their interpretation of the law, but they were being unjust: they did not listen to the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger or prisoner. The founder of this movement was killed and possibly even rose from the dead (maybe it was symbolism for how he/the Hebrew God couldn’t be stopped), and the chief evangelist, a former Pharisee/religious member, Paul, took it even further, to say that it goes beyond Jewish people and their customs: there was no race, class or gender (Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, male nor female) hierarchies in this movement (Galatians 3).
Anyway, this new movement got big enough (or perhaps, the Roman Empire got weak enough) that the ways of this growing group of outcasts were adopted by the Romans as a new justification for their power in the 4th century. In a massive concession to those they had previously cast out, they legalized their practices, decided upon and promoted texts and sponsored church construction for those who would work with them. The Romans blended their previous Greek based theology with this Jewish-based monotheism, and a powerful, imperial form of Christianity was built, officially in 381 AD.
Through all kinds of circumstances these two held together in the European tradition until the Renaissance, or, Martin Luther and the Protestants or Descartes or Spinoza, reaching a new level of rupture in the Enlightenment. The explanation of the Enlightenment comes from Immanuel Kant who wrote in 1784:
“Enlightenment is man’s emergence from his self-imposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use one’s own understanding without another’s guidance. This nonage is self-imposed if its cause lies not in lack of understanding but in indecision and lack of courage to use one’s own mind without another’s guidance. Dare to know! (Sapere aude.) ‘Have the courage to use your own understanding,’ is therefore the motto of the enlightenment.”
In 1798 he described the way this was working out in another piece called The Conflict of the Faculties. The faculties he refers to are the four academic departments, first the most powerful of theology, then law, then medicine and finally, this newer lowly discipline of philosophy. These thinkers of the European enlightenment had begun realizing that previous thinkers though suppressed by the state and the church had a point. The church and state did not like people questioning their power, but from these moments on, the message of those outside the state and the church, though not always aligned with power, gained more adherents through their alliance with open inquiry and justice.
The 1800s were turbulent, shortly after Kant, Friedrich Schleiermacher would begin charting a course for a Christianity that was not exclusively for the powerful, now termed “liberal Christianity” but still there was enough suppression of justice by churches that whole movements were started, completely absent of reference to the language which had described justice in centuries prior, the language of Christianity.
The powerful in the US took advantage of liberal Christianity’s tolerance and consolidated the Christianity that was most favorable to them into first a movement of “Christian Workers” (Moody Bible Institute in 1886) and then into “Fundamentalism” (Bible Institute of Los Angeles 1910–1915). They used aspects of the enlightenment’s empiricism without sustained historical and social awareness to show that if you followed their prescriptions, things would go well for you. And if one follows powerful people, it does work, for a season. This movement spawned all kinds of ways to suppress the spirit of outcasts described in the Biblical library but both movements lost people constantly.
In different ways, it was probably Immanuel Kant who was the breaking point in Europe, and not long after it was Ralph Waldo Emerson in the US. By their time, the form of Christianity adhered to by the powerful could no longer handle sustained inquiry, even with the advent of fundamentalist universities in the US it could not stop the Hebrew conception of God which ties itself to the side of outcasts.
There were many who tried to return to a Christianity that didn’t reject the world’s “coming of age” (as Bonhoeffer would describe it), a return to a historically and socially aware understanding of the Hebrew Prophets. People like Friedrich Schleiermacher and Hegel, Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Walter Rauschenbusch, Charles Sheldon, Simone Weil, Martin Luther King, James Cone, Dorothy Day and Cornel West, but this version of Christianity was persecuted by the more conservative Christians for being disruptive to the powerful. It was also persecuted by those who had distanced themselves from Christianity who thought using the Christian language and customs was a way for powerful people to get their fingers into radical movements.
Since at least Kant, the Christianity of the powerful has had constant problems. In the US first losing adherents like Ralph Emerson and the Transcendentalists, then losing the institution of slavery and Frederick Douglass, then losing their dominance during the gilded age and Jane Addams, again losing their foothold of racial segregation and James Baldwin, and today losing their battles against other minorities and many young people. As Jesus would say their house was “built on the sand.” They had confused power with the Hebrew God.
The only way these imperial forms of Christianity can stand is by eliminating the voices of minorities, which they do by claiming they are sinful. To their conception of a God closely aligned with the powerful of their day these minorities are sinful. Claiming a God closely aligned with the powerful honors the powerful and will get you somewhere until it is revealed that it was not justice which endorsed these powerful people, but exploitation.
The Biblical library claimed by Christianity is always ready to be that living and active sword, when read in social and historical context. In St. Paul’s longest letter he says that according to the rules of the powerful whether of the religious variety or the non-religious, everyone is a sinner, even the religious and/or powerful themselves (Romans 1–3). Therefore those outside of the protection of the empire have no condemnation directed towards them (Romans 8:1). Jesus said that his kingdom belongs to these (Matthew 5).
Each of these forms of imperial Christianity has claimed people leaving it were apostates, misinformed, deceived, sinful. Like Jesus said of his first century defection from the state and religion of that day, “John came neither eating nor drinking, and they say, ‘He has a demon’; the Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’ Yet wisdom is vindicated by her deeds.” (Matt 11:18–19), and each generation of apostates from imperial Christianity has been vindicated by their deeds: less power for the powerful, and more good news for the poor. Emerson echoes: “Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.” And his friend Thoreau asks “Why does [society] always crucify Christ and excommunicate Copernicus and Luther, and pronounce Washington and Franklin rebels?”
Another student of Christianity and rebellious Catholic Priest Philip Berrigan said “The poor tell us who we are and the prophets tell us who we can be, so we hide the poor and kill the prophets.”
The current form of powerful Christianity, US Evangelicalism is losing adherents left and right because it continues the sin of previous generations: it equates the Roman justification of God (power), with the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. This Hebrew version of God is the mystery that history does not allow unjust empires to stand. The prophets said always pay attention to the hungry, thirsty, naked, stranger and prisoner, because if they are there due to lack of power, their blood will cry out from the ground, and this God of the weak will hear it and will not be mocked.
Conservative Christianity’s young adherents were trained to care about listening to others, and like generations before them, upon reading the Bible and listening to others they are, like Jesus, leaving churches for more historically and socially aware expressions. The blood of the hungry, thirsty naked, strangers and prisoners is crying out from the ground. Like Sodom, whose sin was that she had wealth and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy, America too will go to hell if she does not use her vast wealth to alleviate the pain of her own citizens and the world, which she has been so dominant over for at least the last 70 years.
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Taylor Storey splits time between California’s Central Coast and Berlin, Germany where he is pursuing an MA in Cultural Studies.
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