The End of Christianity (7 page)

Of all the Christian, pseudo-Christian, and crypto-Christian movements in Asia and Oceania, none is more colorful than the so-called cargo cults throughout New Guinea and the Pacific islands. Many of these regions were spared much foreign contact until the twentieth century, when war brought huge numbers of outsiders and their vast hauls of materiel to the islands. The problem for the natives was to determine where all this “cargo” came from and how they themselves might get some. There were actually many diverse local cargo cults, but the Vailala “madness” is typical. Sometime after 1910, a native man named Evara began to have visions and physical symptoms, including dizziness, upset stomach, trance, and dissociation. In his revelations, he saw a steamship coming, bearing the dead ancestors as well as stashes of cargo; when the ships arrived, the invading white people would be driven away and the indigenous people restored to independence. Over time, Evara's movement developed a more elaborate doctrine with a visibly Christian aspect. Many members referred to themselves as “Jesus Christ men,” and garbled notions of heaven and God emerged. God was called
Ihova
, and heaven was named
Ihova kekere
, or Jehovah's land. Other beings sharing heaven with
Ihova
included
Noa
(Noah),
Atamu
(Adam),
Eva
, and
Mari
(
Atamus
daughter). An old picture of King George V was offered as the likeness of
Ihova Yesu-nu-ovaki;
that is, Jehovah, the younger brother of Jesus.

For some final examples, we can turn to Africa, which was the last continent to be integrated into the European-Christian colonial project. Christianity was a crucial part of the colonial enterprise in Africa; among the Tshidi of South Africa, for instance, “evangelical Methodism was to prove an efficient teacher of the values and predispositions of the industrial workplace.”
³²
The goal was to substitute one way of life (Christian) for another way of life (traditional/animistic). However, the reality was more complex and more hybrid: Christian teachings necessarily “became embroiled in local histories, in local appropriations and transpositions, and were deflected in the process—often in surprising, sometimes in subversive, always in culturally meaningful, ways.”
³³

The Catholic missions to the Pogoro of Tanzania got involved in many aspects of tribal life, from employment and transportation to radio access and food distribution; they even became intermediaries in the traditional marriage system, secluding the young marriageable girls and intervening in marriage choices and the transfer of wealth between families. In fact, so interested in material/financial matters were the Catholics that the local people referred to Christianity “as ‘
diniya biashara
,’ ‘the religion of business.’”
³⁴
Meanwhile, the natives filtered Catholicism through their own cultural notions: they called church offerings
sadaka
, the same term they used for traditional offerings to the dead ancestors (which was how they understood the Catholic mass), and they viewed the priests like traditional ritual specialists who could fight evil spirits and witches with their words of power and their potions like holy water and anointing oils (
dawaya kikristo
, or “Christian medicines”).

In Budjga country (Zimbabwe/Mozambique), multiple Christianities competed for the souls of the natives, including Catholicism, Methodism, Seventh-Day Adventism, and Canadian Pentecostalism. Each accommodated native religion in various ways while challenging it in others: Methodism, for instance, adopted a local term for God (
mwari
) and perpetuated certain customs like ecstatic experiences but denounced others like the cult of the ancestor-spirits; Catholicism was more tolerant of the ancestor cult and included more ritual as in keeping with pre-Christian belief.
³⁵
The diversity of Christianity was not limited to introduced species; local African Christianities also evolved and spread, including Vapostori, a sect based on the revelations of Muchabaya Ngamerume in the 1930s. This movement featured a structure with offices including baptizer, evangelist, prophet, and healer, and its doctrines and practices mixed Christian (a Sabbath day on Friday, moral instruction, Bible reading, and Methodist hymns) with traditional or novel (witchcraft trials, polygamy, white robes for all members) elements.

Across the continent many other Christian species developed, sometimes referred to as African Initiated Churches or African Independent Churches or African Indigenous Churches. A famous example is Aladura, a Nigerian sect whose name means “owners of prayer.” Many Aladura members practice faith healing and disparage all medicine (both modern and traditional), and they believe that God speaks to them through dreams and visions. In 1920 Joseph Sadare founded the Precious Stone Society, also in Nigeria; an offshoot of this movement became the Christ Apostolic Church in 1941, stressing Bible study and education and even leading to the opening of a teacher-training school. Moses Orimolade started the Cherubim and Seraphim Society in 1925 as a branch of the Anglican Church, and this new group eventually split into over fifty different sects. Other examples from a long list of new African Christianities are the Kimbanguist Church, or the Church of Jesus Christ on Earth, Jamaa (a Catholic-Franciscan-inspired church with a sort of Pentecostal feel); and Kitawala (a more socially radical sect originating from Jehovah's Witness activity in central Africa). Speaking of radicalism, some Christian groups have taken a decidedly nasty turn in Africa (as elsewhere), like the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda, led by Joseph Kony, a self-proclaimed spirit medium and prophet who seeks to form a religious state by kidnapping children to fight in his holy army. An apocalyptic Ugandan church called the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a splinter group originated by excommunicated Catholic priests, apparently committed either mass suicide or mass murder of approximately one thousand members.

THE FUTURES OF CHRISTIANITIES

Some have said that the ultimate test of Christianity will come if and when we discover intelligent life on another planet: supposedly Christianity will then be debunked once and for all, since humans will no longer be a unique species in the universe, their God's special creation. However, the religion has proven highly resilient in the past and will continue to be resilient in the future. When Christians first encountered Native Americans, they were compelled to do some heavy thinking and interpreting in order to integrate those societies into the Christian worldview (Were they human at all? Were they descendants of Adam and Eve? Did they have souls? Were they capable of religion?), but Christians managed to adjust. Whenever we finally meet the extraterrestrials, Christians will be equally resourceful. Some will conclude that only humans are godly and qualified to be Christians, while the ETs are godless, even dumb animals. Others will entertain the notion that their God created the extraterrestrials, too; some will go so far as to suggest that Jesus died for the outerspace beings, too, or even that their God may have had a son with some space woman and arranged their species-specific salvation. And at least a few ambitious congregations will send missionaries to the distant planet, as in the novel
The Sparrow
by Mary Doria Russell (probably with the same tragic results). You can be sure that if the space natives have their own culture and religion, Christianity will crossbreed with it and yield some interplanetary Christian cults.

For the moment, we must leave our speculations on Planet Earth, where there is more than enough opportunity for—and evidence for—Christian evolution. Christianity first appeared in the world as a small religious movement in the Middle East, quickly jumped the fence to become a Hellenistic mystery religion, then got swept up in the Roman Empire and transformed into an imperial religion, diffused into Europe and morphed into a European religion, and subsequently was carried to North America and every other part of the world, where it assimilated local features while it accommodated itself to those local features. Now Christianity is truly a world religion-or a loose association of religious species with only a passing family resemblance between them. There is truly no such thing as Christianity but only
Christianities
, and more and more of them-more and more different from each other and from the ancestral species, the Jesus Movement—every day.

Worst of all for contemporary Western Christians, the globalization of Christianity not only promises to change the world but to change Christianity, too. Already, the familiar old Western/Caucasian Christianities are giving way to non-Western and non-Caucasian Christianities, which are feeding back onto the parental species and sects that sired them: as Philip Jenkins has put it, “Christianity as a whole is growing and mutating in ways that observers in the West tend not to see.”
³⁶
In 2002, Jenkins estimated that almost half of the population of Africa was Christian, and by 2025 more than half of all Christians in the world will live in Africa or Latin America, with another 17 percent in Asia; that would mean that Western or European Christians, formerly the dominant group and the ones who have given the religion its recent complexion (in both senses of the term), will be a distinct minority. Indeed, there may already be more Anglicans in Nigeria than in England.

The effects of this change will be, and to an extent already are, a profound modification of Christianity, something like the end of the era of the dinosaurs and the beginning of the era of mammals. Catholic writer Walbert Buhlmann has gone so far as to envision a new Reformation, a “Third Church” different from all previous Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christianities (which would actually make it a fourth church, but who's counting?). Not only will the center of gravity of global Christianities shift (there might someday be a Latin or Asian or African pope!), but the contents of local non-Western Christianities are and will continue to be different from the comfortable Western styles and will impact back on those comfortable Western styles. Predicts Jenkins:

The revolution taking place in Africa, Asia, and Latin America is far more sweeping in its implications than any current shifts in North American religion, whether Catholic or Protestant. There is increasing tension between what one might call a liberal Northern Reformation and the surging Southern religious revolution, which one might equate with the Counter-Reformation, the internal Catholic reforms that took place at the same time as the Reformation.…No matter what the terminology, however, an enormous rift seems inevitable.
³⁷

This rift will not only be geographical but also deeply cultural: because of the religious traditions in those places as well as their often intense conservatism, “[w]orldwide, Christianity is actually moving toward supernaturalism and neoorthodoxy, and in many ways toward the ancient world view expressed in the New Testament.”
³⁸
Of course, some Western and American religious conservatives may endorse this trend, but even they will find that the new Christian traditionalism is not their grandfather's Christian traditionalism. For liberal and mainstream Christians (and of course for non-Christians), these developments are unwelcome and even menacing. For instance, the Anglican archbishop of Nigeria, Peter Jasper Akinola, has not only taken a strong stand in his country against homosexuality and the ordination of gay priests but has also pressured his British and American brethren to block such behavior, which he has called “an attack on the Church of God—a Satanic attack on God's Church.”
³⁹

Whether or not figures like Akinola represent the future of Christianity—or one local future of one local Christianity—the ultimate lesson is the same. Christianity is not and never has been one single unified religion with a monolithic dogma and morality. Christianity, like every other religion and every other culture, is an organism. Once its initial ancestor is loose on the world, it absorbs nutrients from its environments, adapts to local conditions, mutates, and interbreeds with other nearby species. The new species formed in these mattings multiply, migrating to new lands even as they feed back into the ancestral population. The final result is many locally unique species, with a few extinctions along the way, each related closely or remotely to its ancient ancestor, but none identical to it and none more or less “true” than any other. The “original” ancestor (the Jesus Movement) long since disappeared, never to be revived, and—as with every evolutionary tree—it was no more true or authentic or special than any of its descendants anyhow.

by Dr. Richard Carrier

I
t's often claimed that Christianity could never have begun or succeeded unless the people of its first three centuries had overwhelming evidence that it was true. Therefore we should conclude there was overwhelming evidence it was true, even if that evidence doesn't survive for us to see it now, and since we should believe anything for which there is overwhelming evidence, we should believe Christianity is true. But when we look at the actual facts of that time and place, we find Christianity's conception and growth were not remarkable at all. In fact, what happened is quite the contrary of what we should expect if it really did have the backing of a benevolent miracle-working God. This evidence thus actually
disconfirms
Christianity. Since I have already surveyed and analyzed all the evidence elsewhere, most extensively in my book
Not the Impossible Faith
, I will only summarize the facts and cite where each is established.
¹

A WHOLLY UNREMARKABLE GROWTH

It will often be claimed or assumed that Christianity, right out of the gate, was as successful as sex in the sixties, winning over millions of people in just two or three generations. But it was exactly the opposite.
²
All evidence and scholarship confirms Christianity was for a long time a tiny fringe cult that was so socially invisible that the most experienced Roman legal expert of his generation, Pliny the Younger, a Roman senator who had held the positions equivalent to chief of police in Rome, attorney general for the whole empire, copresident of all the provinces, and state governor (multiple times), had never in his life even seen any Christians. He had no idea what they believed, why it was illegal to be one, or even what the punishments were supposed to be until some troublemakers started in on them in his jurisdiction…in 110 CE.
³
That's eighty years after the movement is supposed to have begun, the equivalent then of nearly two entire lifetimes and more than four generations. The number of Christians must have been exceedingly small for a very long time, of no greater account than any lunatic fringe.

A full analysis of all the reliable evidence available indicates the rate of growth of Christianity as a whole, from its very beginning and throughout its entire history, was less than 4 percent a year, the same as that of any other aggressively evangelistic religion (such as the Mormon Church). It can therefore claim no supernatural success in winning converts. Its rate of development and success was entirely natural. Since that rate was natural, we should expect its cause was natural, which alone closes the book on Christianity having any supernatural evidence or guidance. Had it had such, its rate of success would reflect that. It does not.

Even after nearly three centuries of that entirely ordinary growth, only when Christianity acquired absolute despotic power (first in the hands of Emperor Constantine, and then by all his subsequent family and imperial heirs thereafter) did its growth begin even to approach a majority—and even then, only after the collapse of many of the Roman Empire's social institutions following fifty years of constant civil war and a ghastly collapse of the economy were people thrown into the arms of escapist movements exactly like Christianity. That it would then come to dominate the Western world after such a sequence of perfectly natural events is likewise perfectly natural.
⁴

All of this does mean that the claim that the rise of Christianity caused the fall of the Roman Empire is a myth. It was the other way around: the fall of the Roman Empire caused the triumph of Christianity. Its success was a symptom of a decaying age of anxiety and despotism. The accompanying chart (see
fig. 1
) shows the maximum possible rate of growth conforming to known data. Notice how Christianity is practically insignificant (even at its very height, barely a few percent of the population were Christian) until a fifty-year civil war began destroying the social system (starting in the 230s CE), followed by a catastrophic economic depression (in the 270s CE). All of this came over a generation before Constantine, the first Christian emperor, seized power by force. Even after that, it took over a century for Christians to fully take over, just as it became increasingly difficult or even outright illegal to practice any other religion (paganism was outlawed in 395 CE along with Jewish evangelism).

Accordingly, scholars have only ever found natural causes for the growth and success of Christianity, its behavior conforming entirely to known sociological models.
⁵

AN INORDINATE FONDNESS FOR
HUMILIATED GODS AND HEROES

Nevertheless, you'll hear the befuddled question “But who on earth would believe a religion centered on a crucified man?”

Well, the Sumerians, perhaps. One of their top goddesses, Inanna (the Babylonian Ishtar, “Queen of Heaven”), was stripped naked and crucified, yet she rose from the dead and, triumphant, condemned to hell her lover, the shepherd-god Dumuzi (the Babylonian Tammuz).
⁶
This became the center of a major Sumerian sacred story, preserved in clay tablets that date back over a thousand years before Christ.

The Romans might have believed such a thing. One of their most revered gods, Romulus, suckled a wolf and murdered his own brother. Or the Greeks, whose most beloved hero, Hercules, was briefly condemned to be a stable boy shoveling cow-flop. Even full-blooded Greek gods were forced, on occasion, to endure menial lives: like Apollo, who was condemned to be enslaved as a shepherd; or Poseidon, a bricklayer. Or the Anatolians, whose most popular religion, with priests and followers all over the Roman Empire, centered on the worship of a lowly eunuch (the castrated Attis), and whose priests as a result castrated themselves in honor of their god. This despite the fact that the emasculating act of castration was among the worst of embarrassing disgraces to the snobbish elite of the time, worse even than crucifixion.

Seneca wrote of this practice of castration and comparable acts of mutilation promoted by other popular cults:

If anyone has leisure to view what they do and what they suffer, he will find practices so indecent for honorable men, so unworthy of free men, so unlike those of sane men, that if their number were fewer no one would have any doubt they were demented. As it is, the only support for a plea of sanity is found in the number of the mad throng.
⁷

Thus, even something so foul and repugnant to an educated man like Seneca nevertheless commanded a large following. There can be no ground for claiming Christianity was any different than the cult of Cybele and Attis in this regard. One man's disgrace was apparently another man's holy salvation. Clearly, the most repugnant beliefs could command large followings—all the more so among the powerless, oppressed, and disenfranchised, for whom humiliated heroes sometimes became a rallying point for opposition to an unjust imperial order. Hence, being unjustly crucified could even be a point in someone's favor.
⁸
Indeed, contrary to what's often claimed, many Jews
expected
a humiliated Messiah who would be unjustly executed shortly before the end of the world.
⁹
Among pagans, murdered gods who came back from the dead were wildly popular, not shockingly novel (more on that in a moment).

There is no evidence that a crucified god was an obstacle to converting—for anyone who actually converted. Especially considering hardly anyone converted until Christians had so magnified and exalted their God-man that he was exactly to everyone's liking. This change is evident even in the behavior and treatment of Jesus on the cross (and his march to it) from the earlier Gospel of Mark (15:15–37) to the later Gospel of John (19:16–30). Thus, the story could be changed to suit any audience, from the subversively humiliated hero to the triumphant divine dignitary who's always in charge and needs no one's help. There's certainly nothing supernatural about rewriting history to market your product.

HOW'D A STUPID, WORKING-CLASS HICK
FROM GALILEE GET SO POPULAR?

Well, OK, weirdly humiliated gods were popular. But surely no one would have flocked to a cult claiming an uneducated rural construction worker from some inglorious town in the middle of nowhere was now God of the Universe! Well, why not? Where demigods came from was rarely of much concern to anyone. They all had obscure origins in small rural towns. That didn't stop their popularity one bit, and if you're actually marketing your cult to working-class hicks, what better God to have than a working-class hick? Among the lower and middle classes in antiquity, there was actually a strong disdain for the elite and aristocratic and their lofty ideas, and a strong reverence for respectable men of their own class. This is indisputably evident among the ancient Jews and just as much among their pagan contemporaries.
¹⁰

There were many popular working-class gods, from Hephaestus the black-smith to Orpheus the musician. The resurrected demigod Pollux was a professional boxer. Romulus started out as a poor orphan herding sheep. Of course, they were all revealed to be supernaturally awesome. But then, in his own myth, so was Jesus. Such a rise from humble origins to supreme glory actually made him
typical
, not unusual, and what's typically successful needs no further explanation for its success. This is especially true since what Jesus did while on earth was irrelevant to what he could do for you now that he was exalted to the highest throne in heaven, and it was the heavenly Jesus that was sold to the masses, not just some dead carpenter from Galilee.

WAIT…YOU'RE NOT JEWISH, ARE YOU?

But why would a world filled with anti-Semites ever flock to a Jewish demigod? The ancient world wasn't really that anti-Semitic. Jews weren't uniformly popular, but neither was it Nazi Germany. We already know that many Gentiles were flocking to Judaism even before Christians came along, either converting to it, supporting it, or holding it in high esteem.
¹¹
Judaism was at that time evangelistic—converts were actively sought, and anyone who entered the covenant by circumcising themselves and holding themselves bound by God's law was considered fully Jewish (exactly as God had commanded: Exodus 12:48). And Jews of the Diaspora (meaning outside of Palestine) were more liberal and culturally integrated, speaking the same languages as their pagan neighbors; they also often had much more in common culturally with those pagan neighbors than with conservative Palestinian Jews. We know Christianity was most successful in its first hundred years within exactly those groups: Diaspora Jews and their Gentile converts and sympathizers.
¹²

Once Christianity had saturated that market apparently as far as it could, it began de-Judaizing the religion in order to make it palatable to more Gentiles. We see this process begin in the early second century CE, and some scholars claim to see it beginning already in the Gospels or even with Paul. But this move had become increasingly necessary after two failed Jewish wars against Rome (in the 60s and 130s) had lost the Jews a lot of their earlier public support and sympathy.

Those early Christians who began to make their religion more philosophical, more Hellenistic, and less Jewish (all the while claiming to have rendered Judaism obsolete) then had the most marketable version of Christianity, which is why it is only that version that continued to grow. Thus, even when its Jewishness really did become a problem, Christianity just got rid of it. Had Christianity remained obstinately Jewish, it would have failed—and as a matter of fact, the original Jewish sects of Christianity did fail.

Even in its first century, although Christianity was still the most successful among Diaspora Jews and their pagan sympathizers, it
also
made some early inroads into groups outside that category for the simple reason that Christianity made it easier to convert. A large deterrent against conversion to Judaism was its intense list of arduous social and personal restrictions and its requirement for an incredibly painful and rather dangerous procedure of bodily mutilation: circumcision (in a world with limited anesthetics and antiseptics). Once the Christian evangelist Paul abandoned those requirements for entry (barely a decade after the movement had begun), he had on his hands a sect of Judaism that was guaranteed to be more popular than any previous form of it. Thus, far from Christianity's increased success being impossible, it was now guaranteed. The already significant inflow of Gentiles toward the Jewish religion was certain to become significantly greater for its Christian sect. Meanwhile, Christians continued poaching the entire market once targeted by Jewish evangelization with a much cheaper product. Just like flooding the market with twenty-dollar iPhone knockoffs, their market dominance was a sure thing. No miracles needed.