I’ve always regarded the world’s religions as cultural products, by which I mean artifacts of human inventiveness. As such, religions bear the characteristics of the cultures that created them and the times of their creation. They tend to share one characteristic: they claim that they disclose universal and eternal truths. While other cultural products make no such claims, religions assert that they communicate everlasting truths about how and why the world and its inhabitants are as they are, and who directs and oversees those inhabitants and judges their actions.
In particular, religions differ radically from that other cultural artifact: science, which is careful to always describe its findings as provisional. Science explicitly tells us that whatever it currently believes to be the case may well be amended, or even disproven, by future research.
For many versions of Christianity, those unalterable truths are contained in ancient documents that survive and therefore constitute permanent records of their doctrines. I don’t deny that those documents reflect an understanding of human nature that’s basically sound. Its authors knew about our species’ good and bad qualities: our selfishness and greed, our proneness to anger and violence, as well as our capacity to love, understand and respect one another. However, those authors had next to no understanding of extra-human reality. They were ignorant of the laws of nature, of how the earth came to be, of how life began and how living creatures evolved over millions of years. As a result, though Christianity’s moral rules are basically sound (though by no means entirely so), the faith’s recorded account of everything else is the product of what, by current standards, is complete scientific ignorance.
One product of Christianity’s time and place of origin is its conception of proper social structures. In the time of Christ, virtually everyone was subject to the rule of human dictators. The numerous gods of the time themselves constituted a stratum of rulers, possessing exceptional powers and authority over the natural world, demanding allegiance and obedience from their human subjects in the form of regular worship and gifts. The Judaic god, who became the Christian god, was unusual in that, for his believers, he had no co-rulers. For Christianity, then, God eventually became the perfect, all-knowing and infallible monarch whose word is law, and who has unlimited power to reward and punish. Which is to say: authoritarianism is the God-ordained order of things, and, as the occurrence of original sin demonstrated, obedience to authority is crucial.
Christianity may teach that all humans are equal before God, but it never translates that belief into a call for democracy. Let’s remember that democracy as a political structure was not unknown in Roman times; the Greeks had tried it a few centuries earlier. But Christianity assumes that equality is relevant only when God judges us because it explicitly accepts the authority of the existing political order. Romans 13:1 tells us: “The authorities that exist have been established by God.” Mark 12:17 tells us that Christians are to “render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.”
Seventeenth and eighteenth-century European monarchs took full advantage of Christianity’s belief in authoritarianism, just as Trump is now trying to do. Those monarchs placed themselves at the apex of a this-worldly pyramid, claimed a close, obedient relationship with the Christian god, and a power on earth that imitated his, i.e., their words were law, and they were accountable only to God.
I suspect that Christians, to this day, see obedience to a ruler as a God-approved form of social order. They see autocratic rule as not only natural among God’s non-human social animals, but equally appropriate for humans. It’s not really puzzling that tens of thousands of conservative Christians in this country seem quite willing to abandon democracy for autocracy (at least if that autocracy establishes Christianity as the state religion).
Another element of ancient bias and ignorance that Christianity carries with it is its insistence that the human species is superior in value and privileges to all other living things; that it’s God’s will that we humans have authority over, and can kill and otherwise exploit, all “lesser” creatures. That hierarchy of creature value entails directing humans to be fruitful, multiply and subdue all earth’s other inhabitants. The result has been that earth’s humans have multiplied from about three hundred million in Christ’s time to over eight billion today, contaminated land and sea with their waste and chemicals, altered the climate, and caused the extinction of millions of those “inferior” non-human species.
And then, of course, Christian doctrine includes all those other remnants of pre-scientific thought: miracles, resurrection of the dead, original sin, devils, heaven and hell, eternal life, virgin birth, immaterial beings, souls, Eden, sexual relations between a God and a human, a God who is both one person and three, the apocalypse, etc.
What is one to make of someone who believes such doctrines? For many Christians, such a person is a “true believer”; one who has managed the “leap of faith”, as though believing in the reality of improbable things is an accomplishment (or perhaps even, as some Christians aver, a gift from God himself). I think it not unlikely that some “true believers” build an intellectual wall between their religious beliefs and what they know to be reality. For still others, I imagine that belief in the doctrines is simply feigned in order to acquire the socially advantageous appearance of being a “believing Christian” and therefore trustworthy and truthful.
For those who can’t swallow those doctrines, some take an “I don’t know, but nobody knows” position and call themselves “agnostics.” That’s just a polite way of saying that you deny the truth of Christianity, for it was long thought that it was offensively impolite to self-identify as an atheist.
How might believing Christians react to my claims? They might argue that Christianity’s archaic doctrinal components are beside the point; that what matters is their faith’s inculcation of moral principles. For those religionists, I pose this final question: Christianity’s moral teaching aims to improve inter-human relations and social welfare. Does a review of history from Roman times to the present in those countries that are, or have been, predominantly Christian, testify to the accomplishment of that aim?
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