The End of Christianity (3 page)

My hope is that this series of books helps honest Christians know the truth about their faith. Christian, is your faith true? Only if it passes the OTF will you ever know. If, however, you're reading this book with no other purpose than to find fault with it, then shame on you. Let this indicator serve as a forewarning that you are probably not being honest with your faith. What other indicator will do if that one doesn't?

Finally, if Christians can end their books with a call for a commitment, I can too. If after reading and thinking through this book you no longer believe, don't forget the last page, the commitment page. After filling that page out, you might find yourself experiencing what psychologist Marlene Winell calls “shattered faith syndrome.” If so, I highly recommend reading her book,
Leaving the Fold
.
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As with our last book, there is a companion website for this one. It can be found at
https://sites.google.com/site/theendofchristianity
. We will respond to important criticisms there when they appear.

—John W. Loftus

Dr. David Eller

[T]he paramount, vital doctrine[s] of Western Christianity such as the trinity, the Incarnation, and the Redemption and other details of dogma connected with them are all cultural creations.…At the beginning even the name “Christian” was not known to it, and it developed itself historically until its particular traits and characteristics and attributes took form and became fixed and clarified and refined and recognizable as the religion of a culture and civilization known to the world as Christianity.…Hence Christianity, by the virtue of its being created by man, gradually developed its system of rituals by assimilation from other cultures and traditions as well as originating its own fabrications; and through successive stages clarified its creeds such as those at Nicaea, Constantinople, and Chalcedon. Since it had no revealed law it had to assimilate Roman laws; and since it had no coherent world view projected by revelation, it had to borrow from Greco-Roman thought and later to construct out of it an elaborate theology and metaphysics. Gradually it created its own specifically Christian cosmology, and its arts and sciences developed.…
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T
he end of Christianity is not some far-off dream, nor is it on the verge of occurring. Instead, it happened two thousand years ago—in fact, Christianity never even began; it was stillborn. According to the words above, there is no such thing as the religion of Christianity; at best it is a multitude of related but distinct and often-enough opposed traditions, shifting and swaying with the winds of local culture and passing history. And who is the author of these words? Some angry atheist out to destroy religion? No, it is Muhammad al Naquib al-Attas, a devout Muslim and staunch enemy of secularization, who firmly attests that Christianity is and always has been secular, worldly, changing, and evolving to adapt to its social circumstances. And al-Attas is correct: Christianity
has
always been secular, worldly, changing, and evolving to adapt to its social circumstances—but so has Islam and every other human-made religion (why else would there be Sunni and Shi'ite Islam, as well as numerous Muslim schools of interpretation and jurisprudence?).

Many contemporary Christians see “evolution” as the antithesis and nemesis they must oppose and refute. Yet, as al-Attas and even the merest acquaintance with Christian history or modern global Christianity clearly prove, Christianity not only fails to refute evolution but actually
illustrates
evolution. Evolution is the process by which some entity changes and adjusts and develops in response to its environment. There is no disputing that life-forms and social-forms evolve over time: humans are not what we were millions of years ago, nor is an institution like government or language or marriage what it was “in the beginning” (in fact, none of these existed “in the beginning” at all). Likewise, there is no disputing that Christianity has evolved over time: Christianity today is not what it was 500 or 1,000 or certainly not 2,000 years ago (and there was no such thing as Christianity more than 2,000 years ago), nor will it be the same thing 100 or 200 years in the future. To be honest, it is not even the same thing in every country and congregation in the world right now.

Like every other product of evolution, Christianity is a bushy tree of sundry and squabbling species—or in the case of religions, “sects” and “denominations.” One very reputable count estimated there are over 33,000 of these Christian species in the world, and that was a decade ago; doubtless there are many more today, with more appearing every day.
²
There are some fifty sects of Methodism alone, which the Association of Religion Data Archives arranges into a literal Methodist “family tree” as scientists would organize any set of related species.
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What this means is that every Christian denomination hangs on one branch of a rambling bush of Christian churches, the commonalities and differences between which belie their evolutionary origin and history just as surely as any biological species. Even more, the evolution of Christianity follows exactly the same processes as biological evolution such as speciation, radiation, competition, extinction, and so on.

This chapter reveals three historical epochs of Christian speciation: (1) the early period, from the first centuries to the Reformation; (2) the American period, with many new, uniquely American adaptations; and (3) the twenty-first-century global period with new Christianities emerging in Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. Christianity will be exposed as a thicket of bickering religions, absorbing local influences and reinventing themselves over and over again—which does undermine any possible claim of uniqueness or truth in Christianity.

THE INVENTION OF TRADITIONS (LIKE RELIGION)

Every tradition, no matter how old, was once new. Worse still, when a new tradition first appears, it is obviously not yet “traditional”; it is novel, often even unconventional or heretical. Keen and honest observers have known this for a long time, but the historians Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger made it explicit in their book
The Invention of Tradition
, where they explain that traditions seek to inculcate certain values and norms of behavior by repetition, which automatically implies continuity with the past. In fact, where possible, new traditions normally attempt to establish continuity with a suitable historic past. However, insofar as there is such reference to a historic past, the peculiarity of “invented” traditions is that the continuity with it is largely factitious. In short, they are responses to novel situations that take the form of reference to old situations or that establish their own past by quasi-obligatory repetition.
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That is, traditions often claim a certain kind of antiquity, and often base their authenticity on that alleged antiquity, when they are not old at all; indeed, the newest (would-be) traditions have the biggest authenticity problems and therefore frequently go to the greatest extremes to disguise their novelty and to link themselves to some venerable history.

Humans invent traditions regularly, but two further facts are true. First, most traditions are not so much invented as
fabricated
or
compiled over time
; a tradition seldom pops up in the world out of nothing, nor does it arise fully formed. A new tradition cannot help but grow out of the preexisting social milieu of prior traditions, ideas, values, and vocabulary; that is why every new invented tradition, no matter how radical, always shows the signs of its pedigree. Like any new species, it is an incremental change from the species before. Also, the newly minted tradition is born incomplete, embryonic, and continues to develop and grow after its birth so that the tradition a century or a millennium later will hardly resemble its original form. In fact, it may have branched off several times over the ages, giving birth to additional new traditions.

Second, some social contexts tend to be more fertile for the production of new traditions than others. In particular, occasions of social crisis are breeding grounds for new traditions, which we should regard as social movements or as what anthropologist Anthony Wallace called “revitalization movements,” defined as “a deliberate, organized, conscious effort by members of a society to construct a more satisfying culture.”
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The preconditions for the movement typically involve some circumstances that upset the previous satisfactory culture, including natural disaster, contact with another society, war and conquest, and so on. At first only a few individuals, those closest to the problems, feel the effects, but over time the situation can lead to a “cultural distortion” in which people's understanding of their world and their existing traditions no longer function.

What can occur next is both very common and highly predictable. Out of the chaos of failing understandings and declining fortunes steps a man or woman with an idea; this person is the “prophet.” Usually this future leader has had a troubled life, involving personal and professional disappointments, ill health, and/or proclivities toward altered states of consciousness (dreams, visions, hallucinations, possessions, and the like). Indeed, the answer that the “prophet” brings is purportedly not his or her own but something received from a higher or prior power. The innovator now begins to communicate the message, professing it on every occasion as well as performing wonders and entering into trancelike states. Sometimes, he or she attracts an audience or a group of followers, and, if lucky, the movement starts to grow. As it grows, it must necessarily organize, the first and most primitive form of organization being a direct one-on-one relationship between master and disciple based on the master's charisma. However, even in the master's lifetime there may be adaptation—changes to the original message due to expansion of the membership, resistance from outsiders, altered circumstances, or differing interpretations. Here the movement adjusts to the needs and understandings of members and to the challenges and pressures of the wider society; one frequent adjustment is militarization and violence. And when the founder dies, the movement experiences the crisis of succession: Who will lead the followers now? This is often a moment for institutionalization, for establishing rules and structures for the group including qualifications for membership and a canon of acceptable beliefs and behaviors. If the movement is successful, its effect can be felt by the entire society and even beyond to other societies. Finally, a “cultural transformation” occurs, and the movement becomes part, maybe the defining part, of the culture; the innovation becomes a tradition. Having presumably solved the problem that spawned it in the first place, the movement settles into its role as the new norm and becomes “routine.”

Wallace goes on to describe the finite variety of revitalization movements. Any particular movement may emphasize old, new, or foreign elements. It may first attempt or profess to revive some or all of the precrisis culture on the premise that life was good then and what we need now is to be more traditional, to strengthen and recommit to our long-standing norms and values; Wallace calls these revivalistic or nativistic movements. Other efforts may import some or all parts of a foreign culture, typically because that culture is seen as superior; such movements Wallace dubs vitalistic, or we might call them “modernizing.” A third kind of movement introduces original content from the mind of the prophet. In reality, any actual movement combines aspects of any or all of these styles, including the millenarian style that anticipates (and generally welcomes) an immediate and apocalyptic end to this existence and the coming of a better existence in the future. Wallace also adds that movements vary in the extent to which they pursue secular versus religious means. Secular means refer to human relationships like politics, while religious means involve relationships between humans and supernatural beings. “No revitalization movement can, by definition, be truly nonsecular, but some can be relatively less religious than others.”
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In other words, if a social movement is to change the world in some way, it must include some worldly changes to the economy or family or political system; still, these transformations are often made at the suggestion of, with the assistance of, and on the authority of the spirits. Here as everywhere, secular and supernatural cannot be rigidly separated.

The result is the key process of
syncretism
, by which elements of culture can be added, subtracted, and reassembled in an infinite number of ways that, nonetheless, belie their historical descent. Just as one gene may mutate in a living species while other genes remain untouched, or a foreign gene may be introduced into the species, so the parts of a culture can and easily do fragment, fission, flow, and fuse in new yet not exceptional forms. The outcome is a kind of “speciation,” the process by which a new kind emerges from an old kind—not totally unlike the former species but not totally like it, either. Sometimes the product is two species where once there was one; they may go in different directions or coexist or compete. Eventually the first species may die out completely, or it may speciate again at a later time, just as the new species may further speciate. This gives living things and social ideas and institutions their “bushy” quality.

THE INVENTION(S) OF CHRISTIANITY

Christianity sprouted as a social/revitalization movement precisely like so many movements before and since, and it has followed an absolutely standard growth process. It was born in a moment of cultural crisis, a moment that bred many other, often quite similar responses—the conquest of Palestine by the Romans, and before that the introduction of Greek or Hellenistic culture. The experience was profoundly disorienting for the ancient Jews: foreign people, foreign power, foreign ideas, foreign gods abounded. As in any such situation, there were simultaneous and diverse reactions. Already in the century before Jesus, the political-military movement of the Maccabees organized an army to liberate the homeland in the 160s BCE and reconquered Jerusalem in 164 (this event, by the way, is the origin of the “tradition” of Hanukkah). But the Maccabees’ success was short-lived, and under Roman authority a number of Jewish adaptations appeared together. The so-called Sadducees were the religious “conservatives” or “elitists” who sought to maintain traditional priestly power, even if that meant collaborating with the Romans. The Pharisees were comparative innovators who aimed to protect the religion by changing it: their goal was “to make the faith of Israel relevant to everyday situations and to new circumstances under Roman rule and Hellenizing threats. Besides this, they held some doctrines, such as the final resurrection and the existence of angels, which the more conservative Jews declared to be mere innovations”
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(positions now “traditional” in Christianity). Outside of the “establishment,” other independent movements flared, spread, and faded. One was the Essenes, a sort of separatist group that withdrew into the wilderness to escape the hated alien influence. Another was the politically engaged Zealots who advocated armed rebellion; while the Sicarii carried out daring daytime assassinations of Roman officials and Jewish collaborators.