I was recently asked why I often write within or at least
around a particularly Christian mythos. It’s a legitimate question. It also has
three distinct answers. I’m going to give the most important one, a qualified
defense of Christianity, and leave the other two shrouded in mystery. Perhaps
I’ll get to them another time.
Christianity is a highly literalized religion. Something in
the majority Christian psyche from as early as we have records has been unable
to hear phrases like the Son of God without having to imagine a male God
literally impregnating a woman. I find that ridiculous. Similarly there are
stories of Jesus calming storms, walking on water and even raising the dead
with the strong suggestion this could be done by his followers. Given that Christianity
did not usher in an era of miracles in which the boat and medicine became redundant
I likewise consider these stories symbolic.
There are many ways in which my attitude to the miraculous
events of the Christian bible put me outside of normal Christianity. I don’t
consider Jesus especially and uniquely the Son of God. I don’t think I can talk
to him today in any normal sense of talking. I don’t think Jesus’ triumph over
death means they are alive now. That also means that I don’t believe that you
and I will be able to chat in a billion years in heaven (or in the other
place). You and I will be as dead in a billion years as Jesus. Meanwhile Jesus’
biological father, possibly Joseph or possibly some random raping roman soldier
will be even deader.
Given the literalism of Christianity and my statements of
belief in the above paragraph it’s pretty simple to say I am not a Christian.
The cracks in that certainty appear when we start to ask “what is God?” If God
is some very special personage akin to Zeus then a literal Christianity with a
literal impregnation of Mary makes sense and can be easily disagreed with. But
if God is in fact a symbol (Paul Tillich calls God “the symbol of God”) or, as
I have referred to God, a “moral field” then Jesus being the Son of them means
something much more interesting quite frankly. It means that Jesus is the image
of that morality. His life supposedly points towards it most accurately. Jesus
is the human incarnation of the mindset of God.
In a literal Christianity an understanding of how Jesus is
the son of God is supposed to inspire worship of Jesus. Jesus is set apart from
us by his divine and strangely both supernatural yet biological parentage. He is
not to be treated as just some teacher like the Buddha for example. He is above our humanity rather than beside us. In a non-literal christianity however
the emphasis is on how we are supposed to share in what Jesus claimed as his
authority. We are also supposed to be children of the “moral field”; children
of love, righteousness, justice and mercy. That’s the place in which I am in
conversation with Christianity.
What that conversation reveals is the stand-out quality of
Christianity amongst comparable philosophies. Christians reject the neutrality of
god in matters of justice. There can be no doubt that this is a continuation of
a jewish heritage but it is also further reinforced in Christianity. In
Liberation theology this bias of God is named as God holding a “preferential
option for the poor”.
I consider this “preferential option for the poor” to be a
very important quality to attribute to our “moral field”. I don’t think the moral field is so much of a
“thing” as it is a conceptualization of the assumptions that give positive
meaning or sense to life. For example, the moral field in which science makes
sense is one which values honesty. I’m saying that all life, including science,
makes sense when we adopt the moral assumption to stand with “the poor” or more
generally the oppressed and view the situation from that direction. Without
that stance bullying (on any scale) for example would simply look like a
“personality clash”.
Taking this stance of applying a pro-poor filter to our
moral view is not something that is arguable. It is essentially a radical
“free” choice. By free I mean we are not obliged to adopt it by any logical
necessity. The historical word for an assumption that is radically chosen and
invested in as a starting point for any moral questioning is God. Therefore I
find myself saying, using historical language, what I believe about morality is
that I believe God stands with the poor and oppressed. Of all religions, in my
study, Christianity is the best expression of this view.
This idea of God’s bias in favour of the oppressed is pretty
mainstream Christianity. Any enquiry of popular depictions of Christianity
would acknowledge that, as in the third Indiana Jones movie, the Holy Grail is
actually a pauper’s cup. And of course there is the classic “It’s a Wonderful
Life”. This is why I frequently praise the sort of unpolished Christianity that
forms popular fiction. It preaches a sympathy with the underdog and a criticism
of inequality as the definition of Christianity. While the idea of Christian humanist
values can be overstated, here is the connection between our rejection of
might-equals-right and a Christian cultural background. When Christian
apologists argue that women’s rights, opposition to slavery, hospitals and public
education have come out of a particularly Christian sense of universal dignity
they really aren’t wrong.
Some Christians have, however, also opposed all these ideas.
When they do so they usually occupy a stream of Christianity which claims that
nature is morally teleological – that is to say that what is natural also
describes what should be. This stream entrenches inequality through “natural”
hierarchies; white above coloured, and men above women. It then denies the
inequality even exists by claiming nature as its defense.
My view is that this kind of nature based moral teleology
doesn’t properly belong to Christianity. It is not historically Jewish and it contradicts
other aspects of Judeo-Christian thought. I think it belongs to Greco-Roman
paganism far more naturally.
To be perfectly clear on this: The idea that men and women
have different morally obliged functional roles based on their created natures
(which evangelical Christians call complementarianism) makes sense as Greco-Roman
philosophy but is contrary to the direction of Christian philosophy. The
similar idea that natural law codifies our biological instructions for
sexuality (ie. that the penis and the vagina are “meant for each other”) is
also Greco-Roman. By this I don’t mean that heterosexism in Christianity comes
from Greco-Roman roots, just that this particular process of grounding right
and wrong in nature and creation does. These ideas are as Platonic in style as
looking for moral meaning in the shape of our skulls. However these are the
ideas that still justify inequality today.
By contrast the Mosaic era condemnation of homosexuality was
about its social implications for patriarchy, not its biological unnaturalness.
The created order in Judaism is much more ambivalently able to serve as a
template for how we should act. Even in
Christianity may have made a big mistake getting into bed
with Greco-Roman thought. It’s a naïve project however to separate the two. Jerusalem was heavily Hellenised
before Jesus even entered the theological arena. Paul, the apostle, whose
writings compose much of the New Testament is a Romanised Jew. The notion of an
original Christianity prior to the “infection” of Greco-Roman thought can never
be uncovered. Instead if we want to imagine Christianity completely free of a
natural moral teleology that justifies inequality then we have to go beyond it
to something new.
That is exactly what is underway and has been for some time,
in feminism and queer theory. It may seem strange but I see these movements as
offshoots of Christianity. In fact I see them as taking the direction of
Christianity, with its bias towards the oppressed, further than Christianity
itself. In this way feminism and queer theory are at least potentially more
Christian than Christianity.
I think it’s regrettable (and understandable) that many
feminists and queer activist have jettisoned the language of God; definitely
the Judeo-Christian god. In doing so, they concede their own social history. If
anyone can claim rightfully to be standing in God’s current place, the claim made
by Jesus, it is not church oppressors of women and queers (and queer women) but
people working on behalf of those oppressed. When Christianity is viewed in its
context, as a movement away from its surrounds, its progressions and arguments
are continued by feminists far, far more than they are continued by Christian
complementarians.
To express this on a more personal level, when I left the
Catholic Church as a young man and became involved in queer politics I was only
superficially rebelling against my parent’s beliefs. On a more fundamental
level I was living out my parent’s beliefs in a good God who loved everybody
and cared especially for the oppressed. Nowadays I think we all see that more
clearly. There is something deeply healing about acknowledging my parent’s
values in my life even in the places we disagree.
I also believe that myth can only be defeated by myth. Myth
is ultimate reality, the realest of the stories we tell, in the sense that
Micheal Polyani or Paul Tillich would use the term. (For what I mean here see
the end of this post, No-one believes in Reality).
We can’t defeat the myths that support women’s divine
inequality to men or the spiritual inferiority of gay love, or the holy purpose of violence with appeals to pragmatics. That kind of a counter
can only distract momentarily, like offering candy to a
potential suicide. Ultimately when oppression is heaven sent, the
oppressed need to locate God on their side. That’s something that Christianity provides.
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