The Pnictogen Wing

I suppose "never" is a big word indeed; maybe it's somehow possible for Christianity to retain some kind of cohesive identity and do the requisite soul-searching and cultural evolution necessary for Christianity to become a good citizen among world religions. Maybe Christianity can still change. (For now, I'm guessing that Christianity is likely to break up, with different fragments coalescing around radically different senses of religious identity.)

There's one thing I don't think will ever change, however: Christianity, whatever form it takes, will never be cool. There might have been some alternate historical path for Christianity to take in which it remained forever sundered from Rome, and unalterably opposed to brutal Roman authoritarianism. If Christianity is still able to pose sometimes as a liberating force and breaker of tyrants, it's largely because of the genuine bravery of certain Christian martyrs who were able to cling to the promises about Jesus in the face of certain death at the hands of Roman autocrats. Not all the saints are fake. Yes, there's a probably a lot of rebranded gods and demigods among the Catholic saints, a lot of people who likely never existed outside of legends and hagiographies, and (especially in recent centuries) there's all the saints who were little more than big-name church bureaucrats awarded sainthood almost out of routine, like prominent British citizens getting awarded honors and peerages. There was a time when people died in the name of Jesus, with nothing and nobody else to back them up as they faced death; there was a time when martyrdom wasn't a mere pose.

But that time ended long ago; in my opinion it ended the moment that Roman emperor Theodosius made Christianity not merely legal in Rome (that was Constantine's doing) but mandatory, and Roman soldiers and Roman Christian gangs went around smashing statues and murdering priests of other cults. The moment that Christianity became the necessary thing to be, necessary because otherwise some Roman thug would stick a sword into you, Christianity ceased forever to be cool. Christians can still be rebels; there's still a crumb or two of hope, I hope, in things like liberation theology. But that comes from Christians rebelling against their own orthodoxy, which means that such a liberating force must always be anticohesive to Christianity itself. Christian rebellion seems to be, in the end, self-defeating. Eventually the rebel is forced to choose between staying "Christian" in some sense that's socially acceptable to Christianity generally, or plain apostasy—and not everyone has the courage or foolhardiness to be an apostate.

Reactionary Christians have attempted the absurd feat of clinging to "rebellion" (in some purely aesthetic and mostly imaginary sense) as a point of pride, while simultaneously clinging to a pride in normality, and the effects are grotesque. It's the "silent majority" lie peddled by Richard Nixon, i.e. the idea that the "normal" people of America (and Christendom) are somehow both the true voice of the mass and also embattled outsiders shouted down by the mob. I don't think it's possible to embrace such a self-contradiction without being driven towards frank bigotry. At some point you'll be forced to reject the very humanity of most people, in order to paint yourself as both "true majority" and "rebellious outsider" at the same time.

~Chara of Pnictogen

It's been a gradual process, accelerating after the "Renaissance" and the consequent Protestant Reformation, but Christianity has pushed all sense of mystery, of fundamental unknowability and mystic paradox, out of itself. These days the typical Christian ideologue pretends to be the very incarnation of Facts and Logic: they've copied and coöpted the snide rhetorical pose of "rationalists" so completely that Christian extremists are successfully posing in public as the truest possible defenders of Science and Reason. To be a hardline Christian today is to be certain that you have all knowledge, all the answers that matter.

It is fundamentally impossible to banish uncertainty and doubt and mystery forever from a religion, especially from one that makes claims as improbable as Christianity's claims about itself. No free human being is obliged to believe in God, or a Son of God, or in one Book that pretends to tell the entire story not merely of humanity or the Earth but indeed the entire Universe—for to the most committed Christians, nothing meaningful exists outside the story told by the Bible, and thus such Christians feel free to redraw the Cosmos into different shapes, ones in which Earth is all there is and the rest of the heavens are reduced to a backdrop. Such reductive explanations for things cannot help but be dissatisfying to most human beings. In seeking to purge all mystery from the world, the Christians have instead posed us with a bigger one: how can we believe that one book of stories, partly incoherent, its exact contents a matter of constant dispute, somehow sums up all of existence?

Mysticism and esoteric spirituality isn't content with limiting our understanding of reality to a single text. Christian mysticism does exist still; it used to be a flourishing occupation in fact, but the visions and revelations of mystics tend to clash with rigid interpretation of religious texts and doctrines strictly enforced. Hence Christianity has slowly banished mysticism from itself, and made it a forbidden subject—I suggest that this is partly why Christians tend to be attracted to pseudoscientific twaddle, especially racist twaddle. Pseudoscience tends to wear a cloak of mystery, posing as the One Truth that They don't want you to know; Christians who are dead certain about God and Jesus and their formulae for salvation have therefore transferred their sense of mystery to science and other things that the rest of the world regards as certain and trustworthy. Their fundamental sense of the solidity of reality is not the same as that of outsiders. We doubt the Bible; they doubt that people who disbelieve the Bible are in fact real people.

It's a dangerous mindset. It's a frightening problem to confront: how do you communicate with people who would rather blur the lines of reality itself rather than let go of their religious formulae?

~Chara

I wrote an unsatisfactory piece recently in which I attempted to elaborate on the paradoxical kinship that seems (to me) to exist between extremist Christianity and extremist atheism. (q.v. https://cohost.org/pnictogen-wing/post/1644033-the-kinship-between)

These things have come to be more alike than different, in Western discourse, and I think the case can be made that obnoxious "New Atheism" and right-wing Christianity in fact prop each other up to some extent. But they do differ as well, and I'd like to try to explain that difference in a general way, without reference to specific ideological concepts. And that's tough, especially with Christianity, which maintains its grip on Western society partly by controlling language about "religion" and insuring that certain Christian concepts are always kept near the forefront of discourse. Christians want very much to pretend that the concepts of their religion are settled facts about the Cosmos, as obvious and irrefutable as electrical charge or gravitational attraction.

So how do you talk about Christianity without using Christian concepts? I think perhaps the best approach is through the general concept of mystery. "Mystery" is a word with many meanings but here I mean something philosophical, even spiritual: a mystery is a fundamental truth about the Cosmos that isn't just unknown, but unknowable. If you accept the existence of mystery in this philosophical sense, then you accept that there are certain things about the universe that no amount of inquiry or experimentation or analysis will ever uncover. The Heisenberg principle might be considered as a scientific formalization of mystery, for example: the more accurately we can predict a particle's position in space the less we know of its momentum, and vice versa.

Not all human minds are comfortable with fundamental unknowability, and I would hazard to guess that the Western mind in particular has not been good with mystery. Indeed "mystery", in common parlance, means something that can be solved. Our entertainment and popular culture are saturated with ostensibly complete and final explanations for mysteries—purported solutions to old crimes, declarations about the true meaning of movies and video games, elaborate "theories" about incongruous events from news and history. Western culture places such an enormous social value on presenting oneself as having a godlike command of all facts and knowledge that hardly anybody these days is satisfied with anything being shadowed by doubt and uncertainty. the "rationalists" and New Atheists claim that Science™ has solved, and will continue to solve, all conceivable problems; the Christians have faithfully imitated the "rationalist" pose.

And that's led to a perplexing phenomenon, in right-wing Christian culture, when it comes to mystery, because unlike the "rationalists" and atheists, Christians still take pride in having an understanding of spiritual mystery. Search around online a tiny bit and you'll find loads of pompous Christian editorials about sacred mysteries and the importance of the unknowable (here's a right-wing Catholic example: https://archive.is/i8d7t) and probably you'll stumble across the claim that Christianity has inherited the spirit of the Greek mystery religions—for Christianity has sought, from time to time, to position itself as the true continuation of pagan spirituality, its fulfillment and culmination you could say.

But this is a problem: Christianity tries to have it both ways. They claim that they're the custodians of sacred mystery, but they also claim that they have all the answers—i.e. their "mystery" is no mystery at all. Indeed it's difficult to imagine a human being with less sense of sacred mystery than the typical right-wing Christian fanatic; such persons are apt to claim to have definite and "objective" answers for everything, and even to claim that their "objective" answers are scientifically proved. The "rationalist" people, at least, are consistent in their believe that mystery simply doesn't exist at all—everything has a definite reason and explanation, to a rationalist. the Christian would like to behave that way but they also want to keep some sort of grip on mystery, because mystery is useful to them; it's concealment for crimes.

Why do so many Good Christians™ abuse and molest their children?

It's a mystery. It's God's ineffable love...somehow.

~Chara of Pnictogen