In this blog, I have been sympathetic to but also critical of conservative as well as liberal Christian belief. Lately, however, I have become attuned to the possibility that conservative Christianity, especially, may have played an important role in freeing us from religious control.
I am concerned, in particular, that today’s younger generations may not understand what evil is, precisely because they are no longer raised with a personal understanding of the potential harms of religious or other anti-rational belief. Maybe they’ve had it too easy, intellectually speaking; maybe they are taking too much for granted.
This concern arises in, for example, this quote from New Discourses (Jones, 2020):
The woke have a messianic complex, a … goal to remake society, and view anyone who is opposed to their project not as simply having a different worldview, but as evil.
“Woke” refers, of course, to a belief that one has become truly aware of social injustice, and is now entitled to preach to others who lack such awareness (see Wikipedia). Preaching seems to lead naturally to accusations of “evil”: that is a word from religion. As the quote says, this quasi-religious belief isn’t focused on what makes sense; it only cares about enforcing its own orthodoxy.
We in older generations had the benefit of knowing something about the history of Christianity. We knew that the Middle Ages consisted of seemingly endless centuries of horrors, committed by the supposedly righteous Christians against the supposedly evil nonbelievers.
Here’s a quote from my blog post, reviewing a bit of that history:
It was heretical to eat meat on Friday, to read the bible, to know Greek, to criticise a cleric, to refuse to pay Church taxes, or to deny that money lending was sinful. … Franciscan spirituals were burned at the stake for such behaviour as claiming that Christ and the apostles had not owned property, preaching absolute poverty, wearing traditional hoods and habits and refusing to lay up stores of food. The Apostolicals, a sect founded in 1300, tried to live like the apostles. The luckier ones were burned at the stake like the sect’s founder, but others suffered worse fates. Dulcino of Novara, the successor to the founder, was publicly torn to pieces with hooks, as was his wife. … Cecco d’Ascoli, an Italian scientist, was burned at the stake in 1327 for having calculated the date of Jesus’ birth using the stars. . . . Heresy still covered everything from refusing to take oaths to refusal to pay church tithes. Any deviation from Church norms was enough to merit death: vegetarianism, the rejection of infant baptism, even holding the (previously orthodox) view that people should be given both bread and wine at Mass.
You can read that post in full if you want more. The history was unbelievable. And it just went on. Take the age of the United States and multiply it by five: that’s how long it continued. Once people latched onto the idea that they could be good just by believing something, they couldn’t let it go.
Somehow, the word “evil” has come back into fashion. And it occurs to me that possibly this is because young people are so much less likely, now, to have any deep personal familiarity with organized religion. Maybe we have had these last several centuries of increasing freedom from the insanity of religion precisely because we still had some cultural memory of what religion was.
You’d think people would be able to look at, say, violent Islamism, and grasp the importance of using science and reason to keep oneself safe from mindlessly destructive religious tendencies. But maybe that, too, is the thinking of my generation. Maybe that’s how you’d react if you were raised with some firsthand exposure to religious craziness. Maybe, when the destructive religion belongs to a culture that you have no personal investment in, it’s easier to downplay or disregard.
In 1971, we could listen to Jethro Tull, with lyrics like these:
If Jesus saves, well he better save himself
From the gory glory seekers who use his name in death
Oh Jesus save me
and we could feel that this was radical, outspoken, standing for something, against the hypocrisy of the older generations. But for young people who don’t have much personal exposure to what Christianity has made of Jesus, this could be like the Islamism thing. Saying stuff about Jesus nowadays may seem rather faraway and unimportant.
In 1971, only 4% of the U.S. population considered itself to have no religious preference. In 2019, that figure was 21% (Gallup). The percentages are similar on up the line, at all levels of religiosity. You’re much less likely to find intensely religious people now than you were then. Back then, Jesus freaks were controversial; now they would be more like a joke.
My question is whether maybe it has now become self-destructive to criticize good old-fashioned Christianity for its dishonesty. Maybe, if we don’t want quasi-religious people preaching a woke gospel and considering us evil for not sharing their delusion, we should consider preserving old-fashioned Christianity as an established part of legitimate American culture, so that we will always have that reminder of what can happen when you allow people to think in terms of religion rather than science or common sense.
It seems, on this day after Christmas, that maybe we should make sure our kids are always able to find value in the Charlie Brown Christmas story. When it ceases to play on a shared TV network on Christmas Eve, we may really be in trouble.
God, Spirituality, the Supernatural, and All That 