The End of Christianity (5 page)

Within fifteen years of 380, imperial edicts deprived all heretics and pagans of the right to worship, banned them from civil offices, and exposed them to heavy fines, confiscation of property, banishment, and, in certain cases, death. By 435, there were sixty-six laws against Christian heretics plus many others against pagans. The purpose of persecution was to convert the heretics and heathen, thus establishing uniformity.
²¹

But even the execution of Bishop Priscillian of Spain and six others in 385 could not prevent the continuing evolution of Christianity.

When the empire ended, the imperial church did not; rather, in a way it was set free, but it was also mutated by the influx of “barbarians” and its ascension to real political power. Many non-Roman tribes (Goths, Vandals, etc.) were Christianized, but Christianity was also barbarized: shock doctrines like hell were emphasized to appeal to less urbane minds. The Catholic Church also considered itself a king-maker, empowering itself to crown heads of state like Charlemagne. And the “papacy,” from some perspectives nothing more than the bishopric of Rome, came to see itself as
the
embodiment of Jesus on earth, the “vicar of Christ,” the seat of global Christian authority.

However, other bishops did not necessarily see things that way. For some, each bishop was equal, and the assertions of preeminence only added to the divisions between the Catholic or “Western” or “Latin” church and other “Eastern” churches. The Egyptian and Ethiopian churches had long maintained a distinct local identity, and the church in Constantine's old capital (Constantinople or Byzantium) found itself at growing odds with Rome over various issues, from papal authority to the use of icons in worship to priestly celibacy. The Byzantine (or Eastern or Orthodox) church also conducted its own missionary activities, including to the realm of Russia and eastern Europe. In 1054 the Roman church excommunicated the Byzantine church, creating the first enduring schism or speciation in European Christianity. Of course, then and today the “Orthodox” church is in reality a family of “national” churches (Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Latvian Orthodox, etc.), a permanent set of subspecies of Christianity.

As the imperial church gave way to the medieval church, there was no church but only
churches
. The situation would never revert but only extend, as additional sects, schisms, movements, and heresies ebbed and flowed. Among the challengers to Western-Christian unity were

• Peter Waldo and the Waldensians (1100s–1340s)

• The Cathars or Albigensians (1000s–1300s), against whom the Holy Inquisition was largely directed

• John Wycliffe and the Lollards (1300s)

• The Brethren of the Free Spirit (1300s)

• Jan Huss and the Hussites (1400s), who fought a long and costly war with the Catholic church

• The Huguenots (1500s)

• The Protestants, especially the Lutherans who followed Martin Luther (1518) and then the Calvinists of John Calvin, soon followed by George Fox and the Quakers or Society of Friends, King Henry VIII and the Anglicans or Church of England, and many, many other colorful groups like the Ranters, the Levellers, the Anabaptists,
ad infinitum
—these groups often splitting into subgroups and sub-subgroups.

CHRISTIAN DIVERSITY COMES TO AMERICA

Here and there throughout American society you meet men filled with an enthusiastic, almost fierce spirituality such as cannot be found in Europe. From time to time strange sects arise which strive to open extraordinary roads to eternal happiness. Forms of religious madness are very common there.
²²

It has often been repeated that the United States is a Christian country. It would be more accurate to say that the United States is a remarkably, even dazzlingly, diverse country and a creative country when it comes to religion. While the United States undeniably has a deep streak of Christian influence in its culture, that streak has taken many forms, included many sects and denominations, and has spawned many new local Christianities, quasi-Christianities, and pseudo-Christianities.

From the first European footstep on American soil, there were multiple and often mutually hostile Christianities jostling for space. Puritans (seventeenth-century Protestant “fundamentalists”) settled Massachusetts and turned into Congregationalists; Maryland was settled by Catholics, Virginia by Anglicans, and Pennsylvania by Quakers. Once Christianity was let loose upon the new land, like any newly introduced species, it adapted to local conditions and radiated out into a plethora of novel species and sometimes whole new genera, mixing with each other and the native flora and fauna in the most unprecedented hybrids.

The carriers of this new virus of religion, resulting in what is called the First Great Awakening (around 1720–1750), were men of passion, if not learning, like Jonathan Edwards, George Whitefield, James Davenport, Charles Woodmason, Devereux Jarratt, and Samuel Morris. They were the first “circuit-riders” of Christianity, itinerant preachers who traveled from village to farm to hamlet, spreading the Gospel in open-air or tent “revivals” wherever they could find an audience. Not only did they circulate among the masses, but they delivered the message in a style and language that the masses could digest, with all the excitement and crudity that frontier settlers wanted: “Trance states, ecstatic whirling, automatic utterances, falling down in the spirit, joyful exuberance, and spiritual happiness were all common occurrences.”
²³

After the relative calm of almost a century, the Second Great Awakening broke out in the mid-1800s. By this time some of the formerly innovative churches had institutionalized: Methodism had grown from fewer than five thousand members to more than two hundred thousand. The decades from about 1840 to about 1870 then saw another explosion of enthusiasm and inventiveness, producing some uniquely American Christianities.

One of the first signs was the emergence of a “primitive Christianity” movement. In the early 1800s, Elias Smith had called for a simpler, more egalitarian kind of Christianity, one in which the masses could interpret the Bible for themselves; his camp rejected any name and merely called themselves “Christians” or “Disciples of Christ.” Barton Stone and Alexander Campbell led other segments of the primitivist movement, and their members combined in 1830 to form the fifth-largest Protestant denomination by the end of the era.

A distinct element of the first half of the 1800s was a sort of reverence of nature known as transcendentalism. The latter was characterized by the recurrent American attitude, as expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson, that “religion must have feeling, must
be
feeling.”
²⁴
Transcendentalists like Emerson not only demoted but actually rejected old, literalist “religion” in favor of spiritual intuition flowing from contact with nature; religion as usually performed was little more than “the dead forms of our forefathers.”
²⁵
They literally asked Americans to “forget historical Christianity.” Another important influence on nineteenth-century thought was the “spiritualism” of figures like Emanuel Swedenborg, who took Christianity in new directions in writings such as
The Worship and the Love of God
and his eight-volume
Arcana Coelestia
. His main claim was that the Christian Bible was not to be taken as a literal, historical document but as a spiritual code or allegory.

That Americans were capable of and committed to inventing new forms of Christianity was imminently clear in the proliferation of new Christianities in the mid-nineteenth century. The most successful of these, claiming over twelve million members by the early twenty-first century, was Mormonism or the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints; it perhaps deserves the title of the first truly American Christianity since its dogmas assert that Jesus made an appearance and conducted a mission on American soil long before the Europeans set foot on the continent. The New World was the site of an ancient flourishing Judeo-Christian civilization, according to the Book of Mormon, the unique Mormon scripture Joseph Smith discovered transcribed on golden plates revealed by the angel Moroni at Hill Cumorah in upstate New York in the 1820s.

Out of the apocalyptic fervor of that era (and many Christian eras before and since), an end-of-the-world movement gathered around William Miller in the 1830s, also from upstate New York (a region so rife with Christian enthusiasm that it has been called “the burned-over district”). Several dates in the 1830s and 1840s were announced as the apocalypse, but none materialized, which is remembered as the Great Disappointment. Some Millerites drifted away from the movement, but others hung on, pushing the expected date into the future or developing a clever “shut-door theology” in which the world as we know it really
had
ended: while the earth still existed, heaven had closed its gates and only those who were already saved would be saved (i.e., the door to heaven was shut). Adherents of this position were called Shut-door Adventists. Another more enduring sprout from the Millerite branch was the Seventh-Day Adventists, largely based on the post-Millerite revelations of Ellen White.

Two final trends in the 1800s were the utopian (communitarian or “dropout”) style and the “mentalist” or mind-over-matter style. The first is part of a larger tradition in American culture, including non-Christian efforts like the Oneida Community, often with generally socialist aspirations; a Christian example is the United Society of Believers, better known as the “Shakers,” founded as early as the end of the 1700s by “Mother Ann” Lee. It became a separatist colony demanding common property, strict discipline, unitarianism, material simplicity, spiritual perfection, and absolute celibacy. Mentalism is also a strong American current, seen even today in think-yourself-healthy/rich/popular programs as disparate as Norman Vincent Peale, Deepak Chopra, and
The Secret
. The best illustration from nineteenth-century Christianity is the Church of Christ, Scientist (aka Christian Science) formally inaugurated in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy as a “health conscious” movement syncretizing religion and science around the notion of “mind cure” and “spiritual medicine.” Henry Wood's 1893
Ideal Suggestion through Mental Photography
argued that neither illness nor healing is a purely physical process but a psychological/spiritual one, too: recovery occurs when the patient opens his or her heart and mind to the “great light” of God, achieved through specific “meditations” and ideal thoughts, such as “God is here,” “I am not this body,” and “I will be healed.”

Obviously, then, orthodox Christianity has never had a monopoly on the American mind; rather, it has shared the religious field with many other forces (religious and otherwise) and affected and been affected by those forces. In addition to the spiritualism and transcendentalism and mentalism of the age—all of which continue to exert their pull on society and Christianity today—the late 1800s added influences from Eastern religions and the occult, producing what could rightly be called the first “New Age.” Uriah Clark, for instance, published a guide for seance procedures in 1863 called
Plain Guide to Spiritualism
. Equally if not more significantly, Americans were discovering Asian scriptures, and archaeological discoveries in Egypt and Mesopotamia, India, and Central and South America also provided fodder for religious creativity. One example was Theosophy (from the Greek for “god-wisdom”). The Theosophical Society was founded in 1875–1876 by “Madame” Helena Blavatsky and Henry Olcott. Blavatsky's 1877
Isis Unveiled
elaborated her occult system received from “ascended masters” who revealed the knowledge to her. In 1879 she and Olcott moved the Theosophical Society to India, where it absorbed more Hindu content and practice (and where Hinduism absorbed it). Yoga and meditation were discovered and transmitted to the American public; Hindu terms and concepts like
samadhi
and
guru
were popularized. In 1888 she compiled her teachings into the “Bible” of Theosophy,
The Secret Doctrine
.

The “esoteric boom” of the early 1900s had many forms and faces. Some of its leading figures were Aleister Crowley, Edgar Cayce, and H. P. Lovecraft, and its accomplishments included Levi H. Dowling's 1907
The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
, Baird T. Spalding's 1924–1925 five-volume
Life and Teachings of the Masters of the Far East
, Ian Ferguson's 1924
The Philosophy of Witchcraft
, and Manly Hall's 1928
Encyclopedic Outline of Masonic, Hermetic, Qabalistic, and Rosicrucian Symbolical Philosophy
. Institutionally, in 1915 H. Spencer Lewis founded the Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis; in 1920 Paul Foster Case introduced a mystical order called Builders of the Adytum; and in 1924 Alice Bailey opened the Arcane School in New York. There was also a revival of mystical/gnostic/witchcraft interest in the form of the Ku Klux Klan's use of titles like Hydra and Giant and Great Titan and Exalted Cyclops, not to mention the invention of the “Wiccan” religion, which purports to be a continuation of pagan pre-Christian beliefs and practices but which is largely the creation of Gerald Gardner in such writings as
A Goddess Arrives
(1948),
Witchcraft Today
(1954), and
The Meaning of Witchcraft
(1959).

In reaction to these heresies and other threats like evolutionary theory and modernism, as well as more mainstream movements within Christianity (such as the “social gospel,” which sought to apply Christian thought and energy to social problems like poverty, racism, alcoholism, child labor, and war; or the “prosperity gospel,” which combines Christianity with New Age mentalism of the think-yourself-healthy/rich/popular variety), there emerged a movement that explicitly called itself “fundamentalism.” Fundamentalism is neither a uniquely Christian nor uniquely modern phenomenon, but wherever and whenever it is seen, it is relatively self-conscious and militant about “tradition,” even if it partly
invents
its tradition. At any rate, American fundamentalism arose from a series of documents published in 1910 and 1915 titled
The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth
. These writings led to an organization, the World's Christian Fundamentals Association, founded by William B. Riley in 1919. While the specifics of these and other similar efforts differed, on some general points they were in substantial agreement. All invoked the purity and perfection of scripture, whether old or new. Each looked upon not just a physical world but a spiritual world that had “gone wrong” somehow (which is a very old tradition in American Christianity: a century earlier Alexander Campbell wrote, “The stream of Christianity has become polluted”).
²⁶
And each saw itself as representing authentic Christianity; each imagined itself—and
only
itself—as the
restoration
of religion.