You Are Not to Be Like the Hypocrites

One of my Facebook friends, a lovely person but very much into the Culture of Therapy in its Christian forms, shared this meme the other day.  It annoyed me because it went beyond the Culture of Therapy into the paranoid delight in persecution that characterizes historical Christianity, so I wrote a comment on it:

No one should be "afraid" to pray anywhere. Rational people should not be afraid to doubt the prayers' good sense or basic humanity, of course.

What does "afraid" mean here? Can't you bring yourself to pray unless EVERYBODY is standing there and cheering for you? Do you have to be a majority? I'm an atheist, of course, but I know a lot about Christianity, and one thing Jesus never taught was that his followers should be comfortable. As an atheist, I feel the same way. I don't have to be in a majority. I don't have to be comfortable. All I have to do is try to figure out the truth, and go by it.

This is a sore spot with me in general.  I was also annoyed when a student's attempt to block official prayer at his commencement was defended, not on First Amendment grounds, but because "They just wanted to be able to attend their commencement without feeling like an outcast."  Being in a minority doesn't by itself make you an outcast.

Today I took another look at the meme, and remembered a teaching of Jesus from the gospel of Matthew (6:5-6, NASB), that most Christians seem to prefer to forget:

"When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.

"But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you."

Maybe people should be afraid to pray "anywhere," since Jesus implies here that they won't get their reward, or pay, from their heavenly Father if they flaunt their piety in public -- and the reward is eternal life, the Kingdom of Heaven.  But of course it's a mistake to take Jesus' teachings literally, so no doubt when he said not to pray in public he meant the exact opposite; that's Christianity.

But don't forget that Jesus and his disciples went around behaving provocatively in public, which led to public controversies with their fellow Jews.  As Graham Shaw wrote in The Cost of Authority (Fortress Press, 1982, p. 246):

But the stories [of the disciples’ violation of Torah] also portray a fundamental contradiction in the religious viewpoint they convey.  For paradoxically the refusal to conform to demands for public religious observance is itself intensely visible; so that the criticism of religious visibility acquires many of the characteristics of exhibitionism.  Repeatedly they attract hostile attention to themselves and their master.  Invisible spiritual religion thus proves to have a highly public face.

I noticed some other intriguing stories about public religion this weekend.  A Missouri middle-schooler claimed that his teacher forbade him to read the Bible, "his favorite book," because "'he don’t believe it, because he feels like he’s shut down,' the boy said."  Well, who knows?  A lot of unbelievers seem to feel they're "shut down" by other people's religious practice (like the student I mentioned above), but when the boy's parents complained, the story "went viral," and the principal investigated, it appeared that the complaint was unfounded.  I'd like to hear more details about what actually happened, but things seems to have settled down and that's probably for the good.

Then I saw an article -- can't find it now -- by Frank Schaeffer, who's evidently an atheist this week, though he still prays.  Maybe he'll eventually cycle back to the evangelical Protestantism of his youth; that would be the logical next step.

A Paranoid Delight in Persecution

(Another post from the Drafts folder.)

It just occurred to me that, thanks to xkcd, I've used more expletives than usual in the past two posts, possibly more than I've used in the past run of this blog put together.  That trend will continue in this one.  Onward!

I learned here about Candida Moss's 2013 book The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom, so I went to the library, found a copy on the shelf, and read it within a day.  It's fascinating, and persuasive on the whole.  Moss is a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame University, and she isn't arguing that early Christians were never persecuted: she's arguing that when it did happen, persecution was sporadic and usually local, and that most of the time Christians flourished in the Roman Empire in the days before Christianity became the official Imperial brand.  The "myth" she's talking about is that of ongoing, universal official persecution of Christians throughout the first four Christian centuries.  (Compare Robert Wilken's The Myth of Christian Beginnings, which acknowledges that Christianity had a beginning but criticizes the official story about that beginning.)  She supports her claims by analysis of early stories of Christian martyrdom, which she shows to be flawed as historical accounts.

One of the most interesting points she makes, to my mind, is that the archetypal stories of martyrdom, laden with gory details and sexual overtones, were mostly written (and especially popular) after Constantine established official toleration of Christianity and what persecution there was, had ended.  Moss compares the popularity of these stories to that of modern slasher films.  They were often completely invented, and some were borrowed from other religious or cultural traditions.  This was established not by Moss but by a centuries-long research project on the lives of the saints initiated in the 1600s by a Dutch Jesuit named Heribert Rosweyde, and taken up after his death by Father Jean Bolland, under whose name the work continued into the 1800s.  It was the Bollandists who found how inaccurate the martyrologies often were, and how many of the saints had never existed.  This wasn't, apparently, their original intention but a conclusion that emerged as their study proceeded.

A better analogy than slasher films might be certain contemporary urban legends.  A good many people clearly want to believe that thousands of children are abducted in shopping malls to be sold into sexual slavery; that thousands of women are killed in front of cameras to make snuff films, which are available under-the-counter at your family video store; and so on.   In the same way, many Christians like to believe that -- in a country which not only has Constitutionally-mandated freedom of religion, but in which they are the overwhelming majority of citizens -- they are persecuted, fearful of confessing their faith in public, hiding in the catacombs from gay secularists who hate God.  Being called a bigot, or even a Bible-thumper, is exactly like being thrown to the lions.  There are other parallels, such as the many people who believe (without very good evidence) that America's schools in general are failing, though they think their local public schools are doing a fine job.  Or the way that even right-wing jingoist Americans romanticize the American Indian and like memes that depict Columbus, the Pilgrims, George Armstrong Custer, or other European invaders as illegal immigrants: it's safe to do that now that the Indians are no longer raiding our settlements.  In a familiar pattern, the great Christian mystic St. Teresa de Ávila wrote in her autobiography that as a child, she and her brother were "seized by a passionate desire for martyrdom, and they planned to run away to North Africa, preach the Gospel, and be beheaded by the Muslims – but their parents would not allow it."   Held back from their holy vocation by these enemies of Christ, "we decided to become hermits; and we used to try very hard to build hermits' cells in an orchard belonging to the house".  Centuries later, after the danger is past, children play Cowboys and Indians.

Huh.  How about that?  I didn't use any expletives in this post after all.  The Xkcd Effect must have worn off.

Our Having Parents Seemed to Us a Great Hindrance

I'm still plowing through Michael Gaddis's There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ (California, 2005), which is full of material with fascinating parallels to contemporary disputes over values, activism, persecution, and martyrdom.  One of my favorite bits quotes St. Teresa Ávila's autobiography, in which the great mystic told how, "when she was a little girl, she and her brother had been seized by a passionate desire for martyrdom, and they planned to run away to North Africa, preach the Gospel, and be beheaded by the Muslims – but their parents would not allow it" (165).  Held back from their holy vocation by these enemies of Christ, "we decided to become hermits; and we used to try very hard to build hermits' cells in an orchard belonging to the house..." (165, note 43).

That sounds like a pitch for the next Disney animated feature, but much of the history Gaddis discusses isn't as cute.  While Christian bishop and terrorist leader John Chrysostom, later sainted by Orthodox and Roman Catholic schismatics alike, went into his first exile from Constantinople in 403, there were riots among his supporters.  But something surprising happened; Gaddis quotes the polytheist Byzantine historian Zosimus:

While the city was in an uproar, the Christian church was taken over by the so-called monks.  (These men renounce lawful marriage and fill populous colleges of bachelors in cities and villages: they are useless for war or any other service to the state.  Moreover, from that time to this, they have taken over most of the land and, under the pretext of giving everything to the poor, have reduced almost everyone else to beggary.)  These men, then, took over the churches and hindered the people from coming in for their customary prayers.  This enraged the commoners and soldiers, who, anxious to humble the monks’ insolence, went out when the signal was given, and violently and indiscriminately killed them all, until the church was filled with bodies.  Those who tried to escape were pursued and anyone who happened to be wearing dark clothes was struck down, so that many died with them who were found in this garb because of mourning or some other tragic chance [224-5, quoting Zosimus' New History 5.23].

Gaddis comments:

Monks, zealous men of Christ, had been slaughtered by the dozens if not more, their blood spilled within the very precincts of the Hagia Sophia, at the hands of an enraged mob and of armed soldiers.  Such a lurid picture of sacrilegious violence might recall other massacres, such as the attack that fell upon John’s supporters in their church in the middle of baptismal rites a few months later, or the brutal assault made by the Homoian bishop Lucius against the Nicene congregation of Alexandria thirty years previously.  And yet no Christian source reports any expression of sympathy for the victims of this massacre, and there is certainly no evidence that the slain monks were venerated as martyrs or even that any such claim was ever made on their behalf.

In fact, no surviving Christian source mentions the incident at all [225]...

Gaddis speculates that the reason this massacre left no trace in Christian history was that it violated the good guys vs. bad guys model of most lives of the saints, as well as later Christian historiography.

The case of Chrysostom was considerably complicated by the fact that not only John but also several of his most bitter opponents came to be venerated in later Christian tradition as saints.  If both sides in such a battle could claim the mantle of holiness, their disputes could not easily be presented as struggles on behalf of the faith and could at best cause confusion and embarrassment.  Socrates’ report of the confrontation between John and Epiphanius, monk and bishop of Salamis, presented the curious spectacle of two holy men, equally beloved by God, hurling curses at each other.  Epiphanius prophesied that John “will not die a bishop” and John countered with the prediction that Epiphanius would never again see his home country.  The holy man’s curse, a public prediction or invocation of divine vengeance upon an evildoer, is a common feature in hagiography.  But in this case, the cursing was reciprocal.  Since both men were saints, both predictions came true: John was soon deposed, and Epiphanius died on his way back to Cyprus [225].

Gaddis says early on that Christian holy violence wasn't necessarily the norm in the first centuries of the Christian Roman empire; it's hard to say just how widespread it was.  To his credit, he recognizes and mentions parallels between Christian holy violence of this period and modern holy violence by Muslims, Hindus, and others.  (Though he doesn't say so, Jesus' "Cleansing of the Temple Court" provides a model for later militants.)  He shows how "extremism" can put "moderation" on the spot, as in cases where Christian clerics destroyed pagan, Jewish and "heretical" Christian places of worship and refused imperial orders to pay for their replacement, on the grounds that doing so would constitute endorsement of the enemies of God.

Extremists can answer any questioning of their tactics with a simple retort: whose side are you on?  Ambrose upended the normal paradigm of law and order and redefined the situation in terms of a new emphasis religious identity that transcended all other considerations … The bishop and the monks were Christians, and the emperor claimed to be a Christian.  If Theodosius forced the bishop to pay restitution, he would in effect be siding with Jews against Christians, an act of apostasy no matter what the circumstances.  In Ambrose’s apocalyptic presentation of the issue, the rebuilding of a synagogue would be a humiliation to the Christian religion on a par with Julian’s planned restoration of the Jerusalem temple: the Jews would celebrate this “triumph” over Christ for centuries to come.  Ambrose acknowledged that the bishop was “too eager” but argued that the Christians’ zeal for Christ merited clemency… [195].

In somewhat milder form, this position is familiar today.  If you opposed Bush's invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, you were obviously on the side of Al Qaeda and wanted to see America conquered.  If you're critical of President Obama, obviously you want the Republicans to take over the country and take away all our rights.  If you don't want Mozilla to fire Brendan Eich, you obviously want GLBT citizens to be deprived of their rights, and you probably wouldn't care if Mozilla was run by a white supremacist.  The fact that the latter accusations are milder doesn't change the fact that they are constructed from the same manichaean logic.  I don't want to blame it on religion, though, since not all religion accepts this position all the time; sometimes it overtly and explicitly rejects it, and some atheists accept it.  (If you're critical of Science, you must think that the world is 6000 years old!)  But it's easy to see how the trope found its way into religion; it's clearly an easy position for human beings to invent and reinvent when the going gets tough.