Recent books that are contemptuous of religion in general — Sam Harris’ "The End of Faith" and Daniel Dennett’s "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" — compare the worst of Christianity with the best of reason. In Harris’ book, we read about the medieval Catholic Church: the Inquisition, witch trials and burnings and, in our century, the "Christian theology responsible for the Holocaust." Dennett refers to people who share his antireligious views as "brights" who "have the lowest divorce rate in the United States," while "born-again Christians [have] the highest." Neither man mentions the way unfettered reason, in the form of science, presents us with conundrums like the atom bomb.
I call it secular fundamentalism — one more example of the strict maintenance of doctrine, without actual experience of "the other," a bubble that actively screens out different points of view. What secular fundamentalists ignore is that ad hominem attacks on Christianity make permissible ad hominem attacks on any religion or philosophy. Who’s next?
True, eh? Good so far.
The piece continues, however, to pick up the baton and run with it, rather than toss it aside and step out of the race. For Gallagher certainly doesn’t like this prejudice, but she understands, because the Christian Church, particularly in relationship to power, must plead guilty:
The connection between Christianity and political power is enough to make this believer hang her head. And yet to attack this Christianity as all of Christianity is, of course, an error. It ignores the fact that medieval Christianity was reformed — by Martin Luther and the Church of England, among others. But most of all, it neglects a history that includes someone such as the German pastor Dietrich Bonhoeffer, who organized the Confessing Church to resist Nazi exclusion laws, joined the plot to assassinate Adolf Hitler and paid for it with his life.
Bonhoeffer believed that the heart of what it meant to be a Christian was to act on behalf of the marginalized — the helpless, the sick, the poor, the friendless. He distinguished between what he called "cheap grace," that form of lip service I think we can all identify with, and "costly grace," meaning the kind that gets you into trouble.
If I think of costly grace, I remember the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks; the abolitionists; the Christians of Jubilee 2000 who successfully pressured Britain and the United States to forgive the developing world’s crippling debt; the Quakers who protect and advise pacifists; the women and men who work daily in soup kitchens, for living-wage ordinances, against torture at Guantanamo Bay. None of us have done enough, and that is partly why so many people only know about the Christianity that cozies up to power.
Well, the Catholics thank you for cutting us off the vine.
The whole Christianity – powers and principalities relationship is sticky and challenging, and a history full of unintended consequences and much-needed reform.
And I’ll say, before I go on, that to cite Luther and the Church of England as examples of reform of the relationship between Christianity and political power is exceedingly odd. I mean..you know..Church of England?
No need to rehash that here, endlessly. But what irritates me about this kind of discussion is the willful ignorance of history that runs rife through them. It is an idealist’s view of human activity, past and present. What studying history will help you do – if you study it honestly – is to learn to put things in context and to make a real effort to understand the past on its own terms. To look at people’s actions in the past without imposting our own expectations and values on them: well, the Christians should have known that to allow themselves to become the established religion of the Roman Empire would have been problematic, would have put them at risk of compromising their fidelity to the Gospel. Could they? Perhaps they should have known that. But could they?
It’s a question that fascinates me, and I go back and forth on it all the time. Because, you see, you get too much into the context meme, and you end up excusing all sorts of thing that really, some prophet should have called the powers-that-were on, and in fact, probably did. Such a thing happens when Catholic historical thinking gets into a triumphalist mode and all things are excused and justified because of context. "It was a violent time…" Well, yes, but couldn’t someone have noted the tension?
But then, if you go the other way, you end up faulting the past for not having a thousand years’ worth of hindsight. It is all very nice and comfortable to cluck about the Christian church and earthly powers, but honestly…what else were they supposed to do in the West? Read a bit about the history of Rome, for example, and how it was periodically and regularly left in shambles by invaders and marauders, and the only powers left with a roof over their heads were the popes and such. So of course, as was the case throughout the West, the Church naturally absorbed civic, social and economic roles because…it was all that was left. Certainly the medieval period gives us a surfeit of cautionary tales and hindsight and correctives, and the medieval period gives us plenty of evidence of careful discussion about these issues and (yes) reform efforts.
Even before, you know, Martin Luther and King Henry VIII wnet to bat to, er…reform the relationship between church and political power.
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