Even though Islam is arguably now a much more dangerous religion, the favourite target of Anglo-American so-called New Atheists, inspired by writers like Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, Dennett, P.Z. Myers and Jerry Coyne, is Christianity. One obvious reason for this is that Christianity is the predominant western religion, especially in the US which is the most religious western nation. Many Christian commentators complain on places like Fox News, Christian Broadcasting Network, talk radio programs, and (in Canada) on Michael Coren’s shows, that Christians are thus persecuted, that secularists have a double standard, professing to be tolerant and respectful of personal liberties, but waging a bitter campaign against Christianity, a religion that’s conspicuously the greatest force for good in the world. The implication, of course, for the Christians who keep one eye on such media and the other on the Bible, is that New Atheists are literally in league with the devil and therefore beneath contempt.
The typical New Atheist response is to produce a hackneyed list of grievances with Christianity, including crass statistics on the numbers of people historically killed in the religion’s name; the religion’s failure to measure up to scientistic standards of evidence; and the religion’s opposition to politically correct liberal views on social issues like abortion, gay rights, and science education. Regardless of the status of those issues, Christianity is indeed supremely worthy of criticism--but for another reason entirely, and so I’ll lay aside the standard New Atheistic arguments. (For a summary of general arguments against theism, see Theism.) A sufficient reason why Christianity is the worst religion is aesthetic in flavour, picking up on Nietzsche’s psychological critique of Christian resentment. Nietzsche wasn’t interested in whether Christian beliefs are true, since for him all truth is subjective, reflecting the will to power. So instead of tediously pointing out biblical contradictions, the absurdity of miracle claims, or the fallacies in arguments for God’s existence, he focused on tracing the character of Christian theology back to its psychological origins in the experience of the earliest Christians. Somewhat in that spirit, I want to highlight an aesthetic reason why nontheists ought to be critical especially of Christianity.
The most unforgivable fault of mainstream and elite Christians--and it’s unforgivable because the fault offends good taste, and the taste of something is visceral and thus highly memorable--is their chutzpah, their sheer audacity, their shameless participation in historical reversals that pile irony on top of irony until today the whole grotesque Christian edifice--what Kierkegaard called Christendom--is a glaring sign of the universe’s absurdity and perhaps the clearest proof of God’s nonexistence. Tertullian is infamous for saying that he believes the Christian message because of the message’s shamefulness, silliness, and impossibility, but Christianity’s absurdity is much deeper than the content of its creeds. Again, I’m not interested here in the epistemic status of Christian theology. I stress instead that when you compare the content of early Christian documents, including the New Testament and extracanonical, Gnostic scriptures, with the thrust of the Church’s historical development, you’re bound to be repulsed by the gall of so-called Christians simply for their association with the oldest, most hypocritical institution which is the Christian Church.
Jesus’ Repudiation of the World
In short, Jesus was a radical socialist and ascetic who condemned all expressions of human pride, from power imbalances, to war, to the narrowly-defined human family, to hypocritical shows of piety. All such natural excesses are preposterous given the nearness of God’s kingdom, whether this nearness is understood in temporal or in metaphysical terms. That is, regardless of whether Jesus assumed that God would soon terminate the natural course of things for everyone at once and personally reign after an imminent Judgment Day or that God’s reign is near for each individual who, after all, lives for only several decades before dying and waking to God’s judgment, Jesus’ main point was surely that we’d agree that radical changes are needed in all of our lives if only we could appreciate the spiritual context. Like horses with blinders on their eyes, we see only the present world, with all of its temptations and injustices, but Jesus claimed to be intimate with a spiritual source of nature, with divine creativity that renders the whole of creation comparatively insignificant.
All of this can be gleaned from the apparent influence of Essenian Judaism on Jesus, perhaps through John the Baptist. According to Josephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, who lived from the second century BCE to the first century CE and, as Josephus says, were present in large numbers in every town, were also dedicated to voluntary poverty, baptism, and the ascetic renunciation of worldly pleasures. Moreover, as I said, the radical nature of Jesus’ ethics is evident even in the New Testament which--aside from Paul’s portion--contains the mere exoteric Christian documents from the Church’s earliest period (although forgeries and obfuscating English translations render Paul’s letters orthodox).
All of this can be gleaned from the apparent influence of Essenian Judaism on Jesus, perhaps through John the Baptist. According to Josephus, Philo, and the Dead Sea Scrolls, the Essenes, who lived from the second century BCE to the first century CE and, as Josephus says, were present in large numbers in every town, were also dedicated to voluntary poverty, baptism, and the ascetic renunciation of worldly pleasures. Moreover, as I said, the radical nature of Jesus’ ethics is evident even in the New Testament which--aside from Paul’s portion--contains the mere exoteric Christian documents from the Church’s earliest period (although forgeries and obfuscating English translations render Paul’s letters orthodox).
But by a wild improbability, an esoteric Christian library survived over the centuries and was discovered in Egypt in 1945. The Gnostic Christians were persecuted as heretics by the orthodox, literalistic Christians, but some of the Gnostic texts, such as the Gospel of Thomas, are as early as the canonical ones, especially since they effectively include Paul’s authentic letters which are the earliest Christian texts. Moreover, the Gnostic texts make sense of clues in the canonical gospels regarding the basis of Jesus’ radicalism. When we put together the cosmologies implicit in the Gnostic gospels with Jesus’ ethical teachings in the canonical gospels, we’re forced to regard early Christianity as a God-intoxicated, and thus anarchical, antisocial, ascetic, utterly unworkable rebellion against the natural world. As Nietzsche put it, Christianity was otherworldly to the point of being antinatural and nihilistic in the sense that the earliest Christians valued only a ghostly world beyond the present one.
The fact that many of the earliest Christians were Gnostics means that Christianity was continuous with the perennial wisdom traditions that gave rise to eastern religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. Indeed, as the mystic Manly Hall says in Lectures on Ancient Philosophy, the entirety of the Christian good news is easily interpreted as an allegory of the spiritual enlightenment that each individual ought to experience, of the need to renounce the standards fit for our natural bodies and to identify instead with the divinity within, which is our own conscious self. The good news, for those with esoteric insight, wouldn’t be that one particular man named Jesus rescued us all from the cosmos in which we’re trapped by the evil lord of this world, by being crucified at the start of the first century CE. Instead, according to the insider’s version of Christianity, the mystical, psychological truth is that we each have our own “power of Christ” within us because, as Plato said, we can remember our higher, spiritual home; that is, we have an innate conscience, or sense of the good, which forces everyone eventually to condemn the physical cosmos in favour of our ideals. In Christian terms, we each already have the power of self-transformation, of sacrificing the life of our natural bodies, which are sources of sin and suffering, casting off those shells to free our true “spiritual” or conscious self. Again, according to this view, the crucifixion of Christ isn’t a unique historical event that happened only to one person, but an obligation for each suffering individual, who’s trapped in God’s spoiled creation and forced to sin just by being born into this world with a distracting animalistic body, to realize that this world is a sham compared to our true home with God.
The point is that many early Christians carried Jesus’ radical viewpoint from ethics to metaphysics and cosmology, condemning not just imperial Rome but the whole natural order as monstrously unjust, as a prison for spirit (consciousness). As the scholar of Gnosticism, Hans Jonas, points out in The Gnostic Religion, the Gnostic Christian shares the modern existentialist’s feelings of alienation, and I’d add that Lovecraft’s science-centered cosmicism is consistent with this antinatural viewpoint. Indeed, contrary to Nietzsche, Jesus’ hostility to nature is admirable as far as it goes, since it presupposes an appreciation of what I call our grim existential situation, or what Christians call our fallen state. (See Happiness.) Both Jesus and Nietzsche appreciate the horrors of nature, although they disagree on the virtues needed for the best response. But whether Jesus was himself a Gnostic or even whether he lived at all as an historical figure who preached and was crucified, as stated in the canonical gospels, is irrelevant for the purpose of my aesthetic case against Christianity. The unavoidable conclusion, though, is that earliest Christianity was astonishingly radical. We know this now not just from Jesus’ ethical teachings in the New Testament (NT), which for many centuries were available only to Christian elites who spoke Latin, but from the Gnostic gospels, which again were unavailable for many centuries, because most Gnostic texts were burned along with the Gnostics themselves by literalistic Christians.
Jesus versus the Imperial Church
However, not all Christians went along with Rome. The Gnostics didn’t attend the Rome-sponsored councils that hammered out Christian orthodoxy, remaining true to the otherworldly spirit of Jesus’ message. The Donatist Christians as well went as far as to reject the authority of priests who thrived under Constantine but who had betrayed fellow Christians to save themselves, during the earlier Roman persecution of Christians by the emperor Diocletian. At the Council of Arles in 314 CE, the Donatists were condemned as heretics, while for obvious Christian reasons the Donatists in turn condemned the Roman Empire as evil due, for example, to its wealth which went hand in hand with sin. In 317 Constantine sent troops to kill or banish the Donatists, withdrawing the troops in 321. Donatist opposition to Rome-backed Churches persisted until the seventh century when the Muslim conquests rendered the inter-Christian conflicts moot.
Why many Christians went along with pro-Christian emperors is easy to understand. Rome had destroyed Jerusalem in 70 CE; moreover, according to Christian beliefs, Rome had slain Jesus himself as well as other Christian martyrs. Although Rome was tolerant of and often indifferent to the religious practices of the cultures it ruled, the empire smashed anti-Roman uprisings with an iron fist, which indicates again how radical Jesus would had to have been to be executed. On top of that understandable fear, there’s the passage of centuries between Jesus and Rome’s conversion to Christianity, which means that the memory of Jesus’ intentions would have faded even for the Gnostics, Donatists, and others who best understood what Jesus was up to, let alone for the fair-weather followers who might have come and gone with not even an indirect connection to Jesus himself. Just as pedophiles presently exploit Catholic Church policies, many Jews and gentiles would have joined a movement that synthesized Judaism with Hellenism--but in pursuit of their own agenda, especially once Rome stopped persecuting Christians and favoured the religion.
Still, the effrontery of those later Christians is repellent. There was sufficient evidence of what the religion’s founder would have said and done, in those myriad gospel narratives and other Christian scriptures. Although those texts conflicted with each other, which is why the Ecumenical Councils were needed to unify the Christian Roman Empire, something like the summary I give above must nevertheless have shone through. Indeed, the audacity of those Christians who betrayed what they must have regarded as their founder’s clear message, by accepting state power to establish Christianity as an imperial religion, is matched only by the Romans’ cynicism. Granted, the gospel narratives that were selected for inclusion in the Christian canon whitewashed any Roman involvement in Jesus’ death and scapegoated the Jews. But Jesus’ radical message remains even in those sanitized texts, and that message is at least implicitly opposed to all grand secular endeavours, including political ones. (Presumably, the gospels couldn’t have been entirely rewritten for the purpose of Roman propaganda, because they’d already become popular, thanks to their mystical and thus implicitly anti-Roman message.) For example, Jesus was evidently opposed to war and family, which were bedrocks for Rome. Nevertheless, Constantine and later emperors chose to help unify their failing empire by converting to a religion founded by a Jewish radical anarchist, socialist and antinaturalist, which made Jesus at least implicitly an anti-imperialist.
Partly, the emperors must have grown comfortable with Christianity because Roman religion already had its own plethora of rising and dying demigods. Also, their familiarity with the Roman versions of the perennial wisdom traditions, such as in the mystery cults, would have made the emperors privy to the esoteric view, according to which the story of any dying and rising god-man is allegorical, and thus the emperors would have realized that Rome didn’t actually kill “the Son of God.” Yet another reason for Rome’s eventual use of Christianity, to which I’ll return in the next section, is that the subtext of the Christian message actually favours secularization, a point which opens the way for a second level of Christian chutzpah. If Rome could assimilate even Jesus’ radicalism, the Empire could stamp out any anti-Imperial sentiment.
As Elaine Pagels points out in The Gnostic Gospels, literalistic Christianity was embraced by Rome as orthodox because it empowered a hierarchy of Church officials (Jesus had to personally confer power to Peter, the first Pope), whereas the Gnostic Christian was more like the Protestant in his or her pursuit of individual salvation without the need of any connection to a religious institution. Gnostic Christianity was thus useless to the emperors in their attempt to revive their empire by unifying its culture. Rome needed a bureaucracy to exercise top-down control of mass religion. Ultimately, the reason for the split between the hierarchical, literalistic Church and the individualistic, Gnostic one is the exoteric-esoteric divide in any mass movement in which the masses have unequal cognitive capacities. Just as gifted children in private schools are given the freedom to pursue their own interests, whereas less intelligent children are forced to follow a technocratic curriculum, the more sophisticated Christians were attracted to the philosophical character of Gnosticism, to the idea that salvation requires secret knowledge of the grim reality of nature, whereas the poorer, illiterate, or less intellectually-curious Christians had to be led, and that demand for leadership was naturally met by a supply of Christian leaders, who became the Catholic priests, bishops and popes.
Catholics will respond that the state involvement in the Church benefited both sides, that the Christian Church obviously flourished thanks to its access to secular power. But this response misses the point: the Church’s flourishing in the evil, fallen world, governed by what Paul called powers and principalities, is a bad thing from Jesus’ radical, antinatural perspective. Authentic Christians want to escape the prison of nature, not build an empire within that prison. The audacity of early Catholics was their pretense to be followers of both Jesus and the Roman emperor. As Jesus said, you can’t serve two masters, God and money.
We authorize the followers of this law to assume the title of Catholic Christians; but as for the others, since in our judgment they are foolish madmen, we decree that they shall be branded with the ignominious name of heretics, and shall not presume to give to their conventicles the name of churches. They will suffer in the first place the chastisement of the divine condemnation and in the second the punishment of our authority which in accordance with the will of Heaven we shall decide to inflict.
We’re looking here at the difference between day and night. That the one should turn into the other requires a revolution, which is to say that the Church that was established in Jesus’ name betrayed the heart of his message, the spirit of his rebellion. The ironies are many and palpable. And so for centuries, Christians acquired secular power by persecuting other Christians and then non-Christians, leading to the destruction of pagan society; to the imprisonment, torture, or burning of heretics including Gnostics, Jews, pagans, witches, and scientists; to the pogroms and inquisitions against thought crimes; to the crusades against the Muslim Empire; to the European wars between Catholics and Protestants; and to the genocide against Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans. Again, my point isn’t to judge Church history from a modern, secular perspective, but to condemn the cognitive dissonance and audacity of at least the educated and non-monastic Christians, which enabled them to call themselves followers of Jesus even while their lifestyle seldom had anything to do with his otherworldly renunciation of natural life. Their chutzpah is appalling.
Sure, Jesus vehemently condemned people to hellfire, but the type that he condemned would have included the exclusivist and hypocritical friends of secular power who came to run the Church. And granted, the Catholic Church also fed and clothed the poor, through its monasteries and missions, and a minority of Christians lived ascetically as monks, nuns, and mystics. Catholic history is mixed from a Christian perspective. But in the first place, the standard of living might not have been so low that there arose such a demand for Church charity, had the Church not destroyed pagan society and stifled intellectual progress, holding medieval Europe in a dark age while the more rational Muslim society prospered. Secondly, the extent to which the Catholic Church cared for the poor and advocated asceticism, thus staying true to its founder, is outweighed by the magnitude of its betrayal of Jesus, especially since, as in today’s Christian charities, the assistance was rendered with secular as well as spiritual intentions: the poor were helped as long as they supported the Christian institution which empowered and enriched the elites in the Church hierarchy. Still, the charge of unbearable chutzpah doesn’t apply to those Christians who actually tried to live like Jesus.
Sure, Jesus vehemently condemned people to hellfire, but the type that he condemned would have included the exclusivist and hypocritical friends of secular power who came to run the Church. And granted, the Catholic Church also fed and clothed the poor, through its monasteries and missions, and a minority of Christians lived ascetically as monks, nuns, and mystics. Catholic history is mixed from a Christian perspective. But in the first place, the standard of living might not have been so low that there arose such a demand for Church charity, had the Church not destroyed pagan society and stifled intellectual progress, holding medieval Europe in a dark age while the more rational Muslim society prospered. Secondly, the extent to which the Catholic Church cared for the poor and advocated asceticism, thus staying true to its founder, is outweighed by the magnitude of its betrayal of Jesus, especially since, as in today’s Christian charities, the assistance was rendered with secular as well as spiritual intentions: the poor were helped as long as they supported the Christian institution which empowered and enriched the elites in the Church hierarchy. Still, the charge of unbearable chutzpah doesn’t apply to those Christians who actually tried to live like Jesus.
Secular Christianity: a Second Level of Chutzpah
But the Catholic is a monist who shares the Jewish belief that Creation is good, that God isn’t alienated from nature but works within it in the form of the Holy Spirit which guides the Church, animating the “body of Christ.” So the Catholic can say that there was no Christian audacity, because Christians aren’t bound even by the New Testament, but must attend to the ever-developing Christian message as it’s revealed especially to the Catholic hierarchy which was empowered to be God’s chief instrument for our salvation, next to Jesus. Thus, in effect, the Catholic can move the goal posts to justify the secularization of Christianity. After all, the subtext of Jesus’ message, as it’s presented in the NT, is found in the prevailing interpretation of the Pauline gospel, according to which Jesus’ ethical standards are impossible for fallen humans to adopt and so all that should be expected of us is that we claim Jesus’ excellence as our own, by proclaiming him our lord and savior. That is, the orthodox view of Paul’s formulation of the gospel came to dominate Christian thought, but that view effectively undermines Jesus’ antinatural radicalism and excuses bad, secular behaviour on the part of Christians.
Note the order in which the NT texts are presented in the Bible: the gospels come first even though Paul’s letters, which barely mention the historical Jesus, are older. The resulting impression on the reader is that Paul implicitly criticizes Jesus for being unrealistic. The gospels tell of Jesus’ harangues against humanity for being so impure, and then of his being executed for his trouble. The subtext is one of realism: in the fallen world that’s distant from God and at best indirectly controlled by heavenly forces, humans will either fail miserably to live up to God’s standards and save ourselves from the hell which is our lot or else the forces of evil will avenge themselves on those saints who reveal an escape hatch in the form of an ascetic life. Then comes the real good news in spite of the apparent bad news of Jesus’ lofty standards and ignominious death: as Paul seems to say, there’s a short cut, an easy way out for even the greatest sinner, which is that we simply need to confess our sins and call upon Jesus to save us, in which case the credit Jesus earned for himself will be transferred to us without our having to personally live like Jesus and earn our own way. (As indicated in the previous section, that latter point is one where Gnostics and Catholics differ in their reading of Paul. Gnostics believed we each have our own power of Christ to overcome ignorance and liberate our state of mind, whereas Catholics contend that we acquire that power only from external sources of salvation, namely from the concrete event of Jesus’ sacrifice and from the Catholic institution.)
On this realistic, quasi-Pauline subtext of the NT, then, there are two Christian excuses for sin and thus for a rejection of Jesus’ ethics. First, contrary to Gnostic Christianity, God works throughout the imperfect natural universe and so God’s representatives in the Catholic and Protestant Churches need offer no apology for allying with such secular forces as the Roman, Russian, Spanish, French, British, and American Empires. But compromises are needed because we do live in a fallen world, just as God limits himself by achieving his goals for Creation by mysterious and convoluted means. Second and contrary to Judaism and Gnosticism, God expects very little from us in our fallen state (we’re fallen in that we’re spirits which have lost our unity with God and been imprisoned in matter); we can’t save ourselves and so we’re bound to sin even after we become Christian.
With these two assumptions in mind, the full meaning of Church history comes into view. On a naïve level, discussed in the last section, the Church repulses me with its wholesale treachery against its own scriptural ideals. But when we interpret those scriptures like a jesuitical Christian, we discover that most Christian leaders haven’t shared Jesus’ radical ideals since perhaps the second century. Instead, these leaders embrace the secular world and its natural ideals of wealth, power, and pleasure, viewing them as they think God views them, as instruments that ultimately serve God’s will even if only God knows how. By incarnating on Earth, God conquered and sanctified fallen nature, and so God blesses secular powers as long as we inevitable sinners follow God’s path through the wilderness. By severing the Church from Jesus’ otherworldly radicalism and worshipping God the Holy Spirit as it historically preserves the Church by adapting it to changing circumstances, Catholics effectively deify the natural forces of time and of social evolution, including all of the biological and psychological factors that determine how Christians respond to events and how Catholic officials make pivotal decisions for the Church. In this sense, Christianity brings God down to Earth just as Aristotle reduced Plato’s transcendent Forms to natural processes. The upshot is that Christianity reduces to a kind of pantheism. Far from undermining pagan secularism, the Church merely renames some gods and prunes the over-abundant mythical celebrations of mystical experience by focusing on a Jewish version of the pre-existing myth of the dying and rising god. From the elite Christian perspective, Christianity is just as this-worldly or practically secular as Judaism and Roman religion, which means that Christianity is ultimately just another ideology in the service of secular powers, similar even to the most primitive form of tribal idolatry.
Again, where Christians distinguish themselves is their monumental audacity, their delusion that their religion differs from a garden-variety rationalization of secular injustices and dominance hierarchies. The deeper level of Christian chutzpah, then, is that Christians typically assume a self-righteous posture, paying lip service to Jesus’ ascetic ravings but practicing a religion that effectively justifies any secular activity, no matter how counter-productive or even abominable from a spiritual, antinatural viewpoint. To be sure, this audacity would be impossible without their uniquely radical scripture that speaks of Jesus’ ethics, since that scripture serves as a fig leaf concealing the shame of Christians’ secular preoccupations. The most familiar case of Christianity as a handmaiden of secular powers is the American conservative’s brand of the religion, which very obviously bears not the slightest resemblance to anything that Jesus would have welcomed. From the warmongering to the fetishes for guns, violent sporting events, and Ken and Barbie doll-like nuclear families; and from the greed for money and material goods to the seamless union between religious and Machiavellian schemes in the Republican party, conservative “Christianity” in the US is a farcical charade, a preposterous amalgamation of opposites that brings shame to all its informed participants.
By contrast, Jewish and Islamic scriptures openly sanctify secular forces, including war, as long as the participants compensate by chanting some magic words, eating select foods, and performing other comparatively meaningless rituals. This is why whatever excesses the Israeli military or the mujahedin may be guilty of and however complicated their scriptures may be which allow for moderate and liberal interpretations, their killing for the secular purposes of protecting land, exacting vengeance and so forth are never obviously wrong from a Jewish or Islamic frame of reference, respectively. Sure, Jews have their Ten Commandments, but they also have volume upon volume of rabbinical commentaries on the Hebrew Scriptures, making every manner of legalistic distinction which effectively justifies any conceivable action a person might take. Thus are Jews secular survivors above all else, which is why they're not hypocritical when they reject mystical ideals.
The Worst Religion in the World
Christians ought to be the most confused members of a major religion, because their scripture is so utterly opposed to their religion’s history. That conflict isn’t accidental. Jesus’ radicalism was unworkable from the outset, because Jesus condemned all natural works, all natural forces, all our thoughts and inclinations that aren’t God-soaked. Jesus was opposed to this whole world, to this “kingdom” not yet ruled by God. The very notion that a religious institution, such as the Church, should be erected in his name is grotesque. Evidently, Jesus didn’t take matters into his own hands and write an account of what sort of institution he wanted to create. As the Gnostics understood, Jesus wanted to create no institution at all, since he didn’t want to add one more natural burden to distract us from what he regarded as the ultimate, harrowing truth, that we need to abandon this present world entirely by way of loving God alone with all our emotions, intellect, and consciousness.
Naturally, no sooner had the Church gained a sizeable following so that it became useful to the local secular power, than that leviathan, the Roman Empire, swallowed the Church whole. The fact that the Church promptly dropped all pretense of following Jesus’ contempt for natural life and united not with God but with one hotbed of natural vice after another, from one secular empire to the next, earns Christianity the title of Worst Religion in the World, aesthetically speaking. Moreover, the Christian religion is thus the most richly deserving of philosophical and scientific criticisms, if only because those intellectual criticisms prettify the more gut-level but nevertheless warranted response, which is just that of vomiting in the presence of any educated, non-ascetic Christian. For centuries, these lapsed Christians have had the habit of wearing precious metal crosses around their neck, ostensibly to remind themselves of Jesus’ crucifixion. What they should at least subconsciously appreciate, though, is that they themselves symbolically condemn Jesus just by owning those crosses instead of giving them to the poor, not to mention by betraying their so-called Lord in a thousand other ways. Their audacity knows no bounds when they feign to follow Jesus the ascetic, the socialist, the pacifist, and the anarchist, even as they belong to a treacherous Church and live as hedonists, war supporters, and eager members of secular institutions while wearing about their neck a perfect symbol of their own apparent contempt for Jesus.