Christianity

[annwfyn]

This is a ramble, brought to you by an assortment of random communities which sparked my overtired brain and left me feeling the need to try and say something profound at 1 am.

I think I'm growing tired of Christianity being described as 'oppressive', 'patriarchal', 'the white man's religion', 'a male dominated religion', and a dozen other hackneyed phrases which all try and convey this impression of Christianity as the US Republican Party with added alters and crucifixes.

Christianity, as I understand it, was originally one of a number of mystery religions which became popular in the late Roman Empire, especially amongst the poor and vulnerable. Most religions at the time essentially offered one deal - you worship [insert name of deity here], and in return you'd get good stuff. If you didn't get the good stuff, your chosen deity probably didn't like, and it would mostly suck to be you. Christianity (amongst some others) offered a more intangible reward, that of life/reward after death. It offered the poor, the desperate and the weak something that they could continue to hope for, and a belief that something cared, even if the physical world which they lived in seemed to demonstrate that there was no divine presence watching out for them.

Christianity wasn't a 'religion of oppression'. It was a religion of the oppressed, of the poor, of the downtrodden.

Has that changed? Insomuch as it was adopted by the elite and has therefore become entwined with that elite, it has. Yet the entire bible, with its endless harping on about the need to protect the weak and the vulnerable, about how the poor shall be rewarded - that's not changed.

Is it a religion which oppresses women? Well, if you believe that everyone prior to Christ was worshipping a loving and naked Earth Mother, then maybe. If, on the other hand, you believe that many women were living in a classical society in which one's husband or father had the power of life and death over the women in their family, had no political rights, no right to wealth or control of their own life, and were sold into marriage at relatively young ages, then maybe you'll see Christianity as no better and no worse than many of the moral codes of its day. It did, at least, emphasise that women too have a soul which is of equal significance to men, and that they too were entitled to certain things in the eyes of G-d.

Admittedly, it's track record on feminism since hasn't been too great.

Is Christianity intrinsically a 'white man's religion'? For chrissakes! The goddamn faith came into being in the middle east. It is still worshipped in Egypt, and in the middle east by people who can trace the lineage of their faith back to the first Christians. In terms of numbers today, there are more Christians in Africa, and in South America than there are in Europe or America. It has never been a 'white man's religion'. It is a religion which was adopted with a great deal of enthusiasm by the European elites of the last 1000 years, but to call it a 'white man's religious' is to entirely disregard its history, where it comes from, where it originated from, and what it is now.

Bah. And humbug.

This incoherant rant is brought to you by an assortment of pagan, anti-racist, and assorted identity politics websites, and Sally's ongoing fondness for any faith that invested so heavily in illuminated manuscripts and stained glass windows.

Comments

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

I think it's like most religions. You can take good things from it, or you can behave like an idiot. I have no truck with the idiot variety of Christians. But then I have no truck with fundamentapagans either.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

In general I've got no issue with people criticising the church, or specific actions which have been taken in the name of religion etc. I think what occasionally vexes me is a habit (particularly common among various groups of people) to make broad generalisations criticising christianity in general which are based on assumptions and just aren't true.

Christianity as 'a religion of the oppressor' particularly bothers me for some reason, mostly because on a historical level it just isn't true.

[satyrica.livejournal.com]

I'd say there's also a big difference in talking about the church as an institution (in historical and present incarnations) and Christianity as a religion

[castorlion.livejournal.com]

Altar, not alter. One is a place of sacrifice, the other is to cause a change in state.

[castorlion.livejournal.com]

Ooh, yes, very good point. The two can be horribly separate sometimes/all the time.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

*nods* Tho I guess the two do get very heavily intertwined. I mean, for many many people in the 12th c., Christianity WAS the Catholic Church. For many people today there's still a very close correlation between one's own chosen branch of the faith, and the faith itself.

And it all gets complicated and tangled, coz the Church is really just made up of people, and real life decisions, and cannot really act on What The Faith Wants all the time.

[housemonkeytm.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

I can offer no guarantee that I will ever be able to type coherantly at 2 am.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

I'm going to call you on the "religion which oppresses women" thing.

Go read St Paul. Or Leviticus. Or Exodus. Paul didn't like women much at the best of times, and his statements as to how women should be treated were, I understand, backward even for the times in Jewish society.

And the first five books of the Old Testament's treatment of women is barely better (and sometimes worse) than Afghanistan pre-9/11. It's exactly as good or as bad as other societies of the time.

But that's not the problem. The problem is Christianity right now. And as applied in the modern day, the Bible's recommendations for women are barbaric.

Religion of oppression? Well, a good chunk of the Old Testament is devoted to the Chosen People slaughtering, enslaving and oppressing anyone who opposed them. The New Testament contains some fairly graphic descriptions of what will happen to anyone who opposes the faith, too. The religion's track record in the last 10 centuries contains a litany of holy wars, heretic purges, slavery, forced conversion, and general unpleasantness. And right now Christianity's most vocal segments speak out firmly in favour of oppressing homosexuals, divorced women, and anyone of another religion.

Certainly there are Christians who oppose some of those. There are even a few who oppose all of them, although they're in the vast minority. But it's rather hard to claim, based on track record or teaching, that it's not a religion with an interest in oppressing others.

White man's religion? Agreed, certainly not. Indeed, most of the scariest, anti-women, anti-gay, fundementalist Christian lunatics are in Africa. Africa, indeed, is held up by most fundementalist organisations in the West as an example of a continent where things, for the Church, are going right.

[astro-dust.livejournal.com]

It's very refreshing to hear a reminder of the virtues of the Christian faith. When i was working at the summer camp in the states, there was a 16yo kid talking about how he despised religion in it's entirety because of the persecution he felt as a gay teen growing up in the heart of the Bible belt. I sat him down and tried to explain that it wasn't religion, but people using religion as a soap box for their own prejudice and yadda yadda yadda, i was quite pleased to see the look on his face as he actually took some time to think about his own blanket statements and the blanket statements of others, planting the seeds of acceptance, so to speak.
But i think personally it's the Christian Church's expansionist ideology that grates me the most. With so many African nations being converted to Christianity, a little piece of me mourns for the loss of their cultural spiritual beliefs, and therefore cultural identity. It's the same reason why i thumb my nose at Roman mythology, cut and pasting another culture's spirituality seems downright soulless to me.
And soulless is the last thing religion should aspire towards.

[lilitufire.livejournal.com]

Doesn't it depend on which bit of history you're talking about, though?

The Crusades were pretty unfluffy, from what I can remember. IIRC many of the "knightly orders" were pretty much hired mercenaries and lots of unpleasant things went on.

There's been some pretty.. um... interesting interpretations of the Christian message over the years. One of the most rampant fundamentapagans I knew grew up in a Catholic orphanage of a not fun type. I can see why his view of Christianity wasn't happy and fluffy - it simply hadn't been his experience of it.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

That's the church tho, and specifically the Catholic Church, which was as much of a temporal power base/state/insitution as it was the religion, and that in itself caused the Reformation.

Obviously, some people have had very bad experiences with people within assorted churches, with specific incidents within history. I think what I wanted to argue (probably quite incoherantly) is that it isn't fair to then view such things as being an intrinsic part of the basic religious message, or as being the sum total of Christianity's goals/objectives, which is what I've seen being argued quite seriously elsewhere.

Saying 'christianity has done crappy things' is fair enough. Saying 'I dislike Christianity because it is a religion which is designed to oppress and conquer' is the bit I found not-fair.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Religion of oppression? Well, a good chunk of the Old Testament is devoted to the Chosen People slaughtering, enslaving and oppressing anyone who opposed them.

The Old Testament is an interesting document in that essentially what it is documenting is the survival of a small desert tribe, which gets massacred/enslaved/attacked as often as it's doing the attacking and it's more interesting in that it documents a shift in the religion from being a traditional faith which views its pact with G-d as being 'we worship you. You give us stuff' to the focus on the afterlife. To be honest, I'd also argue that the jews weren't really oppressors - they were a small and marginal power in a world which was happy to attack them, and were fighting for survival, which is rather different than 'slaughtering those who oppose them'.

And whatever the Old Testament meant to the Jewish people of the day it is quite different to the original message preached in the 1st c. - 5th c. when Christianity, along with the worship of Isis, Mithras, and Orpheus, was one of the four main mystery religions, which all differed from other religions in tending away from offering temporal rewards/power.

St Paul wasn't a modern, open minded feminist kind of guy. But he was writing in an age when a wife was the purchased property of her husband, and, like a slave, acquired only for his benefit. A woman could not exercise any civil or public office. A woman could not be a witness, surety, tutor, or curator; she could not adopt or be adopted, or make a will or contract. St Paul described women as subservient to men, but in the context of the time he'd have been absolutely revolutionary if he'd done anything else, and the rest of the bible is quite impressive in terms of the religious signficance it does give to its female characters - Mary Magdalene, the Virgin Mary et al.

I'm not saying Christianity is perfect. What I am saying is that to try and describe it as intrinsically evil, which you seem to be doing, strikes me as unnecessarily blinkered, and furthermore that most people who do so are confusing the idea of 'Christianity' with the socio-political track record of the Catholic Church, which is something entirely different.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

to try and describe it as intrinsically evil, which you seem to be doing, strikes me as unnecessarily blinkered

I find it interesting that you say this, when we were talking about specific issues rather than a value judgement on the religion as a whole - and specific issues that the church and the religion *does* have problems with. I don't think anywhere within my comment I made an overall value judgement on Christianity.

Anyway...

he was writing in an age when a wife was the purchased property of her husband, and, like a slave, acquired only for his benefit

One of the problems here is that when you say "I'm growing tired of Christianity being described as ...", you didn't say that you were referring to people discussing Christianity within the social and political context of the 1st Century AD. The logical assumption from what you say is that you're discussing people's attitudes to Christianity and the church(es) today.

And no matter what the context of Paul's writing was in his time (and, as I say, I understand he was quite restrictive for his time even then), one reason that Christianity as a religion is seen as both oppressive and anti-women is that it still argues that its religious text is relevant - indeed, infallible - today, and judged against the modern day, its writings and proscriptions are guilty as charged.

(You can argue that Christianity today doesn't claim that its writings are infallible. Sadly, that's only true for a tiny minority of the world's Christians.)

By the by, how are you defining "Christianity"? I kinda get the impression that how you're defining it is "what Christianity means to me" or "a historical context on 1st-5th century Christianity", whilst I'm defining it in my reply as "Christianity as it has represented itself both in its holy book and throughout history including the modern day."

I'm not really sure that you can separate your definition of Christianity from how it is represented through the world both in history and now, certainly not if you're talking about how people as a whole percieve it rather than your own individual experience. And, well, on that basis its track record, again, gives reason to describe it as both anti-women and oppressive.

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Basically, this entire ramble stemmed from someone on an LJ community describing Christianity as 'the religion of the white man' and 'essentially an entirely oppressive religion'. This came up shortly after I'd been reading about the 1st-5th c. mystery cults, and thus annoyed me.

I think what I've been trying to say is that while various Christian churches, including the Catholic, the Orthodox, and the Church of England have done some bad stuff, and while there are many obnoxious Christians, it bugs me when Christianity - in terms of the very basic ideas behind it (which I try and go back to the very beginning to get, and try and place in the context of its time) - is described as such when my reading of the basics of it just don't say that.

Basically, I think, I don't like people continually painting Christianity as if it were a religion designed to be The Man, when it wasn't meant that way at first at all.

I don't think I'd normally have written this, if it weren't for 'symbolism of the mystery cults' sitting beside me while some random American ranted online about how the basic message of Christianity inevitably lead to colonialism. Which I think it shite.

Sadly, I was half asleep when I rambled and was probably quite unclear. And have kinda been debating and tossing thoughts around in between other thoughts ever since. I totally accept I'm not at my debating best here, and my use of teminology is probably very muddled.

[cairmen.livejournal.com]

OK, I understand, yeah.

I guess one issue is that there's really not one single "Christianity" to talk about. Do you mean modern Christianity, and if so what flavour? Do you mean ancient Christianity, and if so do you mean AD50 messianic Christianity which was basically Judaism with added Messiah, Pauline Christianity, the Christianity of Constantine, Gnosticism, Christianity post-the codification of the Bible?

Some of them I'd agree with some of what you say, some of them I wouldn't, and so on and so on...

(Also - "basic message of Christianity"? That's a dumb thing for your random American to say right there. If you got fifty of the top academics on comparative religion together today, they'd be hard-pressed to say what the hell that message actually was.)