Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Death of Christianity

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 27; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/08879982-1729845

2164-0041

Lawrence Swaim,

Violence, Religion, and Philosophy

There is at the heart of Christianity a disturbing doctrine that has the uncanny ability to overwhelm cognition, and — when internalized by the believer — the ability to traumatize. I refer to the belief, held by most Christians, that Jesus Christ, the prophetic figure of Christianity, was crucified to redeem the world, and that this plan originated with God.This belief, central to most forms of Christianity, both Protestant and Catholic, maintains that God allowed Jesus to be tortured to death in public in order to redeem human beings, so that God might reconcile himself to his own creation.This patriarchal doctrine makes God out to be a vengeful, homicidal deity who can be satisfied only with the death of his son, and portrays the state terrorism of the Roman Empire (the crucifixion) as redemptive. This vision of God is so reprehensible, and sufficiently different from the God of love as taught by Jesus, that it poses an unsolvable and irreducible moral problem.The extreme sense of paradox created by this doctrine can and does traumatize the believer, especially when disturbing images, narratives, and beliefs concerning the crucifixion are constantly reiterated over a lifetime. This reiteration unconsciously bonds the believer to his Christian faith community, but it does so by causing him to internalize as redemptive the aggression implicit in the crucifixion. Because of this, a profound identification with aggression tends to be the fundamental emotional orientation of institutional Christianity.This key belief of Christianity — that God caused Jesus to die on the cross for the sins of the world — is most commonly called substitutionary atonement by Christian theologians. It could be more accurately referred to as blood redemption or blood atonement — by dying on the cross, Jesus atones for the sins of humankind and redeems sinners in the process. Some Christians will object at the outset by saying that it was humanity, and not God, that crucified Jesus Christ. Indeed it was, but every Christian theology of which I am aware maintains that it was God that infused the crucifixion with its power to redeem. Human beings may have crucified Jesus, but it was God who gave that crucifixion its redemptive power, thus ensuring eternal life for the believer.In other words, God colluded with the procurator of the Roman Empire, a specialist in imperial cruelty, to arrive at redemption for you and me. God, in this scenario, is little more than a cosmic thug whose specialty is ritualized human sacrifice and whose preferred method of redemption is public torture of dissenters. If you do not “accept” this distasteful belief (that is, if you refuse to internalize it as part of a conversion experience) because you do not accept that torture can be redemptive, you yourself will go to hell and be tortured for all eternity. (Interestingly, this was also the implied social contract involved in the use of the Inquisition as an instrument of social repression.)Whatever else it may do, the doctrine of blood atonement does send a message that violence can be redemptive. This message came to be, over a period of time, the very heart and soul of Christianity. I am not talking about Jesus’s life, the Beatitudes, the Sermon on the Mount, or the parables. I am talking about the idea that God made a human sacrifice out of Jesus as a scapegoat for the sins of humanity. This belief in blood redemption is, I submit, perhaps the most violent idea ever devised by the human mind, with the single exception of eternal torment for temporal sins. And this belief in Jesus’s blood atonement, far from being some unexamined bit of theology in the dank margins of religious exotica, is the foundational theological concept of almost all institutional Protestant and Catholic Christianity. Jesus’s violent death on the cross (the central dynamic of salvation) is constantly referred to by Christians as being of supreme importance, from the primitive church through the Middle Ages right up to, and very much including, today’s conservative Catholics and Protestant evangelicals — in other words, the majority of American Christians.Please note, also, that this belief in substitutionary atonement is also a central belief in the liberal mainstream Protestant denominations (Presbyterians, Methodists, Episcopalians, and Lutherans). Liberal Christians see the Garden of Eden story as an allegory for the growth of evil in human consciousness. They tend also to see Judgment Day — correctly, I think — as a remnant of the apocalyptical thinking of Jesus’s time. But even the most liberal Christians, usually so adept at discerning the metaphorical nature of religious language, generally do not denounce the idea that the execution of Jesus by the Roman Empire two thousand years ago was God’s way of redeeming humankind. They, too, have generally internalized this central idea to such an extent that they can no longer see it for what it is: an attempt to redeem the psychic effects of aggression by accommodating, idealizing, and internalizing it — standard mechanisms of trauma bonding.This particular form of trauma bonding has resulted in a generalized Christian obsession with crucifixion and the cross. Generally blood redemption is associated with the worst and most obscurantist aspects of Christianity, at least partly because the emphasis on Jesus’s death can be used to downplay and repress the importance of Jesus’s life and teachings. But the primitive nature of the doctrine of blood redemption is especially conducive to — and tends to encourage — social practices of extreme brutality. It shouldn’t surprise anyone that a religion that embraces the doctrine of blood atonement should once have believed that Jews killed Christians in order to put their blood in matzah. In fact Christianity’s most violent and pathological obsessions (loathing of women, war in the name of Jesus, and flagrant anti-Semitism, to name just three) waxed and waned in roughly the same proportion as the Christian obsession with Jesus’s death on the cross and the accompanying belief in blood redemption.This obsession continues today in the recurring emphasis on Jesus’s blood in evangelical sermons, hymns, and literature. And it continues in the liturgical churches’ Eucharist, which culminates in the symbolic drinking of Jesus’s blood and eating of his flesh. The anti-Semitism is still often there, too, although in a disguised form. The current Pope has again made possible the reading of prayers for the conversion of Jews during Easter Week, a clear reference to the idea of inherited Jewish guilt for Jesus’s death. In many conservative evangelical churches, people long for the End Time (or End of Days), which means the end of the world. Many of them believe the End Time will result in the forced conversion of the Jews. For those Jews who don’t convert to Christianity at the End Time — well, the final solution for them will be genocide. God, the same psychopathic God who needed a human sacrifice to be reconciled to the world that he created, will murder all the Jews who refuse to convert to Christianity, thereby finishing the job that Hitler started at Auschwitz.Blood redemption, the central doctrine of Christianity, is the train wreck of Western civilization. You want to stop looking at Jesus up there on the cross, but you can’t, because images and reminders of Jesus’s death are everywhere. And even when there are no images, there is every imaginable kind of music about it, from Bach to bluegrass. It is the pain and horror and blood of the crucifixion that evangelicals, in particular, are obsessed with — that is their preoccupation, and that is what they think about and preach about. Nothing, you see, is quite as dramatic as murder — which is why cop shows on TV are so popular; and there is no murder with as much over-the-top, pulse-pounding excitement as the murder of God, especially when the listener can be denounced as an accomplice.If you drive through huge sections of the Midwest and the South, you’ll often find that there is nothing on the radio but right-wing Christian radio stations. Even the am stations that aren’t technically evangelical carry evangelical preaching, full of constant references to the blood and gore of the crucifixion. These fundamentalist sermons, declarations of faith, and gospel-quoting sessions all come to the same conclusion: Jesus suffered on the cross for you, for your sins, because you are a sinner for whom Jesus had to suffer interminably and shed his blood.This evangelical preaching overlaps naturally with am hate radio, in which talk show “hosts” imitate Rush Limbaugh and rant against any trace of liberalism or critical thought. The underlying emotional dynamic of am hate radio is pure aggression. Hate radio is redolent with resentment toward people who are perceived as having more education, more money, more cultural literacy, more intelligence, or more pleasure than oneself. It is also shot through with hostility against people who belong to different races and religions. Many listeners to am hate radio feel offended by the Civil Rights Movement and emasculated by the women’s movement. These are overwhelmingly, in other words, angry white men whose skin color and gender no longer guarantee them a modicum of deference. Hate Radio is aimed at angry white guys who are sinking every day into deeper economic, emotional, and spiritual blight — men who are desperate to find scapegoats who can’t retaliate.Christian evangelicalism and am hate radio go together very well; they represent two connected phenomena that have been interacting for well over sixteen hundred years. The first is the belief in the crucifixion of Jesus as the basis for human redemption, an idea central to most Christian teachings. The second is the worship of aggression in the form of state power. The two validate and drive each other forward and have done so since the time of Constantine in the early fourth century; and for this reason they are intertwined in Western society. Blood atonement and the worship of state aggression don’t appeal to those who already have power, but to people who feel powerless, clueless, and without a coherent strategy for their lives.In the Christian evangelical and fundamentalist movements, it is blood atonement that redeems. In am hate radio, the redemption comes from hating — and fantasies about hurting — human beings who are different and who probably cannot retaliate. Either way, it is always about redemption through aggression, experienced through a constant stream of violent words and images. Politically, it always expresses itself as support for war, torture, and repression.I know there are progressive Christian evangelicals, and there are also a few progressive am talk shows. But in the majority of Christian radio programs, the unconscious message, on the level of the emotions, is identification with aggression, identification with the ecstasy of victimhood, and redemption through violence.This obsession that Jesus had to die on the cross for your sins and that only by accepting this can you avoid damnation, didn’t start yesterday. It didn’t start with Billy Sunday or with Billy Graham, or even with the great Puritan preachers like Jonathan Edwards. It started in 381 ce when the belief in blood redemption was institutionalized at the Council of Constantinople, and in the twelfth century, when that belief was extended to confer salvation on crusaders who killed Muslims or who were killed by them. All the violence — all the killing of Jews, Muslims, women, and heretics — can be traced back to the belief that Jesus suffered publicly on the cross for the sins of the world and, in so doing, redeemed the world. That established Christianity as an exclusive religion: only those who believe in blood atonement, who believe that Jesus died on the cross for their sins, can spend eternity in the New Earth. The rest of us must be punished — that is the basic message. But it did not start out that way.Nobody knows exactly why he did so, but at the age of thirty, a man named Jesus from the small, slightly disreputable town of Nazareth, in Galilee, began to roam across the country speaking to large crowds, talking to them about a new kind of relationship with God. In gospel accounts we discover that this prophet or teacher believed that the end of the world was near and sought to prepare his followers for it. The best preparation was to create a new relationship with God, Jesus believed, and he explained how that could be done, using the vernacular Aramaic language of his time and employing earthy, hard-hitting parables and metaphors that the people of his time understood.He encouraged his followers not just to follow the law, but also to internalize it, because only then could it change behavior. To accomplish that, Jesus taught them to pray to God for help, using a new prayer that Jesus taught as part of his spiritual discipline. If they prayed with all their heart, God would change their personalities in such a way that people would feel the same kind of love that people feel for their children, parents, siblings, and best friends. As their relationship to God changed, so would their relationships with one another. You had to ask for help from God, and your ability to receive God’s love would change how you see the world and bond you to other people who were going through the same process. Jesus believed in charity toward all people, a determination not to judge others, and an ever-present willingness to humbly ask God for guidance.Supposedly this would create a new “kingdom” of believers, psychologically bonded together by this new personal relationship with God and animated by God’s law embedded in their personalities. That was the process. But Jesus was also concerned about aggression and had some startlingly new ideas about how to deal with it. One idea was so counterintuitive and so radical that it probably struck some listeners as a form of insanity: Jesus said people should pray for their enemies and even love them. Not kill them, not retaliate against them, but pray for them and love them. Of course, you had to pray to God a great deal to get into that kind of mental and emotional state, but Jesus said it was possible. This was something people hadn’t heard before.Many of Jesus’s teachings were inspired adaptations of Pharisaical and other concepts current in Judaism, but Jesus was selective about the themes he pursued and he expressed them in charismatic and exciting ways. Although Jesus was close to the Pharisees in both theology and temperament, he was different in one important way: Jesus apparently believed that Jewish law couldn’t become a part of one’s personality until it was internalized and that the Pharisees wouldn’t, or couldn’t, internalize the emotional implications of their own law. To Jesus, this meant that the Pharisees weren’t practicing what they preached. The Pharisees were mainly interested in measuring social behavior against the law, whereas Jesus, although a shrewd observer of behavior, was concerned about the way people experienced God psychologically.Jesus was a powerful speaker, skilled at reducing profound ideas to jokes, stories, and parables, and was apparently one of those rare people for whom others feel an almost immediate attraction. He was, in other words, the consummate itinerant preacher, and one with a natural sense of comic timing. He was extremely quick on his feet, regularly turning the tables on those who tried to entrap him with trick questions. In the course of his ministry, Jesus challenged many prevailing cultural belief systems of his time, especially attitudes toward women — in fact he constantly deferred to women in ways his followers found sacrilegious. Jesus sought a spiritual revolution and made it clear that he wasn’t preaching violent revolution like the Zealots. (After all, Jesus believed that God was coming soon to set up a kingdom of the righteous, so a human rebellion wasn’t necessary.)Although Jesus judged religion by its effect on behavior, he was unique in his emphasis on the interior rather than the public dimension of religion. This fascination with a personal relationship with God, when combined with the insistence on praying for one’s enemies, was, in a sense, a way of pleading with God to change humanity from the inside out. It was certainly a new way of dealing with human evil. Of course, Hillel and other great rabbis of that time were working along similar lines. But in Jesus’s case, the moral precepts he taught were intended not just for achieving a good life or a just society, but also as preparation for the imminent end of the world. Perhaps partly because of this, his sermons had a searing psychological intensity that made Jesus special, especially to the poor, the rejected, and the socially marginalized.For most Jews of Jesus’s time, righteousness tended to come from the laws Yahweh had created, just as later in rabbinical Judaism it would come from debating the various interpretations of those laws. For Jesus, righteousness could paradoxically arise from forgiving the obnoxious or homicidal behavior of others. Much of the drama of the New Testament arises from the irony — and pathos — of the difference between what Jesus was saying and what his disciples wanted to hear. It was a time of religious enthusiasm, during which Jerusalem and its environs were thronged with would-be messiahs, secret Zealots, apocalyptic preachers, shamans, and itinerant wonder-working magi of every description.But for Jesus, righteousness was a state in which laws were followed out of love rather than duty, and arose from a person’s relationship to God. Jesus insisted that the right relationship with God came not from the endless parsing of law against public behavior, but from a private, inner attitude based on the willingness to humble oneself. When Jesus taught people to pray for a new kingdom (“thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven”), the words refer not to a worldly kingdom, but to a spiritual one, in which he and his followers would strive not for power, but to change the nature of power. They would accomplish this through radical love and forgiveness, which Jesus believed was God’s will, and which he thought God could, if asked, help people to achieve.Very early on, Jesus’s disciples formed an idea that Jesus was a Messiah, and quite naturally expected him to overthrow the Romans, because that’s what a Messiah was supposed to do — the Messiah was supposed to rescue the Hebrew-speaking people from their oppressors. They fully expected that Jesus would use his special powers to get rid of the cruel Roman procurator Pontius Pilate, along with his disrespectful and sadistic troops.But when Jesus was arrested and hauled in front of Pilate, he was scorned by the Pharisees, scourged by the Roman soldiers, and crucified by the imperial state. The messianic dreams of his disciples were smashed. Their teacher, their rabbi, their Messiah, their Jesus of Nazareth — the charismatic, tireless leader whom they had accompanied in their itinerant wanderings throughout the country — was tortured in public by crucifixion, which was the special punishment reserved for the worst enemies of the state and the most despicable criminals. Throughout this time Jesus lifted not a finger to save himself. There was nothing even remotely messianic about his last hours. Why didn’t Jesus use his spiritual powers to stop the Roman soldiers in their tracks? After all, he’d already used those powers to heal the sick, to raise the dead, and to turn water into wine. But when crunch time came, he did nothing, meekly allowing himself to be tortured to death before his followers’ eyes.For Jesus’s disciples, it was a devastating experience that overturned everything they knew about the messianic vocation. The synoptic gospels make it unmistakably clear that Jesus’s disciples had discerned an opportunity to improve themselves personally by getting in on the ground floor of the new kingdom they thought Jesus was about to build. Jesus’s disciples were psychologically crushed. They went from being confreres of a Messiah to being hunted criminals. Thus it should be no surprise that after his death his disciples began suddenly to see him in various places, under unusual and mysterious circumstances — after all, Jesus was a man with so much personal charisma that many of them had dropped everything (that is, they had actually walked off their jobs) to follow him. They loved him as they had loved no one else. So his frightened and dispersed disciples began to see him after he was dead.The hysterical character of these encounters is easily discerned from scriptural accounts. The disciples walk for many miles on a road with a stranger, and even eat supper with him, without realizing until later that he is Jesus. Of course, it makes no logical sense that the disciples could have walked or eaten with Jesus, a man with whom they’d spent so much time, without recognizing him immediately; but this should not be seen as literal truth but as a psychological phenomenon with great metaphoric value. Among other things, it meant that Jesus could be anybody, that kindness to strangers was actually kindness to Jesus, that feeding any hungry person was feeding Jesus. The disciples’ sightings of Jesus after his death amounted to a psychological defeat of death.As for the historical Jesus, the story of Jesus’s body being interred in a cemetery is surely an invention, because the Romans would never have allowed one of their condemned prisoners to be so honored. Most likely his remains were eaten by the packs of wild dogs that roamed Jerusalem, as New Testament scholar John Dominic Crossan has suggested. The real Jesus disappeared from history after his death, along with his earthly remains. But his disciples saw him, or apparitions they thought were him, repeatedly and, in so doing, were comforted in their loss. But in being so comforted, they turned the trauma on its head. Jesus hadn’t been killed by the Romans after all. Jesus had risen! The Romans had been defeated! If Jesus returned to life after being dead for three days, that would enable the early Jesus movement to erase the stigma of the crucifixion by representing Jesus as so powerful that he could outsmart the Romans at their own game. Even the Roman Empire, with all its might, could not kill Jesus, because he had risen victorious from the grave!It was a giddy, life-affirming victory, but the belief in Jesus’s resurrection already contained a negative tendency. It took people one small step away from Jesus’s message, putting the emphasis on Jesus’s supernatural powers rather than on the radical nature of his teachings. But it was not yet a big step, because the early church had no reason to suppress or dissimulate Jesus’s radical teachings. The revolutionary nature of Jesus’s ideas was not yet threatening, because the Jesus movement had no political clout. They were merely another group of semi-indigent religious fanatics in Jerusalem, one of many such messianic groups, and probably one of the least attractive. It was easy for them to talk about loving their enemies, because they did not yet have the power to retaliate against them.Another big paradigm shift in Christianity occurred in 312 ce, and it, too, was traumatic. An ambitious Roman general named Constantine gave nominal fealty to the traditional gods of the Romans; but he also wanted a more dynamic state religion that could operate as an adhesive to bind together his disintegrating empire, which had become spatially sprawling and ethnically diverse. Christianity as it stood couldn’t do that, because of the many variations of Christian belief — unless someone imposed a single brand of Christianity on the young church. For that to work, one brand of Christianity would have to become the state religion and the others would have to be banned. Christianity would not necessarily replace the older gods, but if it became a state religion, it would be given a state ascendancy over the older pagan beliefs that would increase with time.This revolution in the fortunes of humanity occurred — or was set in motion — by the events of a single day in 312 ce. Constantine, who had ruled the Roman Empire’s western dominions with a combination of brutality and strategic acuity, was preparing to go into battle against Maxentius, a rival Roman general. The evening before the battle, as he lingered at Milvian Bridge near the River Tiber outside Rome, Constantine saw a cross in the sky above the words In Hoc Signo Vinces (“In This Sign, Conquer”), which he decided was a sign from the Christian God. That night he had a similar dream. His interpretation, not surprisingly, was that the Christian God approved of him, personally, and also of his imperial ambitions. According to his own later accounts (and those of his hagiographer), he used this inspirational vision — and the cross as a lucky talisman — to rally his troops, who soundly defeated Maxentius. He probably would have won this battle anyway, but the wily Constantine had good reason for wanting the support of Christians: they had grown quite numerous in Rome.The words In Hoc Signo later became a popular motto of the church, the letters IHS even appearing on communion wafers in the liturgical churches. (They were said to represent the first three Greek letters of Jesus’s name, but the other connotation — of defeating an enemy in battle — was widely understood to be the real meaning.)From then on, Roman emperors would increasingly wage war or conduct affairs of state in the name of the Christian God because they saw themselves as acting out God’s will on earth. Christianity would no longer be led by idealistic, scruffy, schismatic types living on the fringes of society. It had become the official religion of the Roman Empire. Overnight, Christianity transformed from a movement of the lower classes into a defender of privilege and government repression. The bloodier the violence committed in the name of Christianity, the more violent its imperial theology would become. Author James Carroll explores this topic in Constantine’s Sword: The Church and the Jews, writing, “When the power of the empire became joined to the ideology of the Church, the empire was immediately recast and reenergized, and the Church became an entity so different from what had preceded it as to be almost unrecognizable.”Empire and church interacted upon each other, but clearly it was the church that changed most. Consider, for example, that up to this time Christians had often been pacifists. When Christians had been persecuted, they tended to accept it without complaining, since by suffering martyrdom they were able to die in the same manner as Jesus. And no single brand of Christianity had been suppressed by any other, because no single group had been powerful enough to do so. Now, however, ascendant members of the church hierarchy saw the opportunity to consolidate their theological power in the same way that Constantine sought to consolidate his temporal power.The church would use its new political clout to impose theological uniformity upon the loose amalgamation of hundreds of different sects, traditions, and beliefs that constituted Christianity. Soon the cross was to be found on the shields of the Roman legions, whose members considered it good luck. The belief in blood redemption, which had been steadily growing within the church hierarchy, fit well with the brutality of imperial rule.Carroll shows how anti-Semitism waxed and waned in general conformity with other excesses, almost invariably tending to be associated with Christians’ growing obsession with the crucifixion of Jesus. This anti-Semitism was also associated with the promotion by church hard-liners of the doctrine of blood redemption. The cross was becoming a central preoccupation of the church, and since “the Jews” were popularly thought to have been responsible for Jesus’s death, they began to be seen increasingly as embodying the evil that Jesus supposedly died to redeem. And the Jews’ evil was seen as particularly heinous, because they had rejected Jesus’s gift of redemption.The doctrine of blood redemption would also, in an indirect and unconscious way, predispose Christians to anti-Semitism. If violence could redeem, and one person could suffer for all humanity’s sins, why couldn’t a single group of people be made into a scapegoat for the sins of the world? The idea of the scapegoat, an animal that embodied the sins of the tribe, had of course preceded Christianity, but it now took on an unexpected and diabolical human dimension.The magical thinking involved in this aspect of emergent Christian theology would, on an unconscious level, prefigure the Augustinian idea that the Jews must suffer to demonstrate God’s disapproval of their unwillingness to become Christians. If Jesus could embody all the sins of the world when he was crucified and redeem the world through his suffering, why could not a single people — the Jews — similarly embody all the evil in the world and experience redemption through their suffering? In fact it was argued that suffering could redeem them, because it would motivate them to “accept” Jesus — and his crucifixion as redemptive — by converting to Christianity.Taking the cross out of Christianity might, after all these centuries of identification with the crucifixion, be giving up the glue that has held it together — a negative kind of glue, to be sure, but nonetheless an emotional orientation capable of creating a powerful bond for people who are habituated to it. Without the trauma bond of an inexplicable and brutal God who sacrifices his son, the church would almost surely lose its mass base. It would become a radically smaller and less moneyed religio