The Advocate

Don't Compromise with Imperial Christianity

“It's good to appear to be pious, faithful, humane, honest, and religious, and it's good to be all those things; but as long as one keeps in mind that when the need arises you can and will change into the opposite.” – Machiavelli

We’ve all heard more than we ever needed to know about “moral values” and their role in the re-election of George W. Bush. The mainstream media has eaten up the Republican Party line that the “moral values” in question—anti-choice on abortion and a fierce opposition to gay marriage, in particular—are an essential characteristic of “real Americans.” The New York Times, for instance, opined that

“Rural voters […] stunned Democrats by placing moral values over their own economic interests and even Iraq and terrorism. That suggests the party faces years in the political desert if it doesn't address the basics of rural culture.”

The essentialist foundations of this type of thinking contribute to its inevitable failure to ask the most basic questions about what these values are and why Americans hold them. While you wouldn’t know it from the last election, Christian thought has not always carried the pro-war, right-wing flag it carries today. Many early Christians, for instance, refused to serve in the Roman army even under the threat of death. This refusal was not just about political opposition to Rome—it stemmed from a deep religious respect for the human body as the masterwork of the divine hand, which inspired Tertullian to state in the second century that “Under no circumstances should a true Christian draw the sword.”

When Constantine adopted the Christian faith as the official religion of the state, however, the church abandoned its anti-war position. This shift is worth considering. Christianity acting against or outside the power of the state appears to have been a “humanist” doctrine: humans are created in the image of God and must therefore be treated with respect wherever they are found. In league with state power, however, the benefits of violating the human body become too tempting, and the message becomes distorted. Christian beliefs become instruments necessary to bring unfortunate infidels into the fold (of “freedom”) by military force. Our sympathies, it follows, are reserved for those with US citizenship.

The majority of American Christianity passed through the Constantinian gate some time ago (the Cold War era, for instance, saw a major increase in the conflation of Church and State) and we may now look upon mainstream religion in the US as a distinctly imperialist form of thought. The basic reason for saying this is the sense of American exceptionalism which has become so fused with the conservative Christian movement, and according to which God is smiling down on the US, “blessing” us and approving of everything we do. If we consume much of the world’s resources while constituting just a small fraction of its population, God loves that, interpreting it as a new rendition of “the white man’s burden,” with the American economy serving as the locomotive of progress. If we use violence to tilt the balance of global power in our favor, God loves that too, after all, ours is a war of “good” against “evil.” And if we want to portray ourselves as kindly dedicated to “freedom” as we do this, all the better to God.

Admittedly, most Christians don’t consciously think like this—they really do care about morality and want to see themselves as moral people. Meanwhile, the media and the government play on their desires, petting their egos and telling them that their country is doing the right thing. This was the true core of Bush’s “values” appeal—telling Americans that they are essentially good people who believe in marriage and children and “hard work,” and that their country’s role in the world is a beneficent Christian one. Just how well have they honed this message? Consider that opponents of the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s attempted, but never succeeded, in masking their racism as a “value.” The homophobic Right is doing this today with unprecedented success.

The state and media charlatanry behind these “values” makes it hard to point a condemnatory finger at Christians and hold it there without mercy. American Christians are trying to hew a positive self-image for themselves out of the corporate, pro-state message that they are offered. Jesus casting the money lenders from the temple? Poo! Blessing the peacemakers? Pfaw! And, yet: point we must.

Any religion that values the lives of one nationality over those of another has become a nationalist faith. When that country begins to exercise its hegemonic power against others in the name of “preemptive strikes,” religion will surely become one of its chief ideological organs, throwing a curtain of righteousness over piles of dead civilians overseas, while conjuring comforting images of families and domesticity to assuage feelings of guilt at home. Such religions are distortions of their own tradition and a disgrace to their prophets and purported tenets. The American Left must not make concessions to imperial Christianity. It’s fine to have an open debate with this group, and to listen when they make sense, but we must see the corrupt, non-religious root of their ideology and point it out every time we see it.