Since about the 4th century, when the church and the State entered into an alliance, there has been a battle within Christianity. The church exhibits two wildly different personalities.
Some want to use Christianity as a form of social cohesion and control. For them, the role of the church is to uphold, support, legitimize, rationalize, and sanctify the State and the “Christian culture.” At worst, they use Christianity to enforce national adherence to moral standards designed to maintain the status quo and fund the power of social elites. They reduce “morality” mainly to sexual conformity. They invent religious rationalizations for war, colonialism, slavery, torture, genocide, and other atrocities in the name of a “Christianity” that is wedded to a particular race, nation, or culture, and therefore subservient to its agenda, no matter how perverse. Theologian Stanley Hauerwas has adopted the term “Christendom” to denote this system.
The other understanding of Christianity comes from, well, Jesus Christ. He was hounded and finally executed by people who pressed religion into service as a way to instill and reinforce cultural moral discipline. He expresses his low opinion of such uses of religion quite clearly in Matthew 23. Jesus establishes his gospel community as a counter-cultural egalitarian peoples’ spiritual movement. Following his example and empowered by his Spirit, they seek to live in the world according to his teachings, which are characterized by healing, compassion, forgiveness, and inclusion.
Fortunately, in our time, the subservience of Christianity to the State has deteriorated. This is due to two factors. In the first place, the world has become “smaller.” It is both more diverse and more knowledgable. The official propaganda is harder to maintain. It is harder to hate the “other” when your kids and theirs play on the same soccer team. It is more difficult to swallow the establishment’s white-washed version of history when we learn of the experience of its victims, from its victims.
Secondly, the church was led by the Spirit to pay more attention to “Jesus Christ as he is attested in Holy Scripture.” That phrase comes from the Theological Declaration of Barmen, written in Germany in 1934, when the collision between Christ and Christendom was particularly acute. It urges us to turn away from Christendom’s false caricature of Jesus as a heavenly cheerleader for capitalism, militarism, nationalism, colonialism, sexism, racism, and the “moral discipline” those ideologies demanded.
Unfortunately, Christendom is not going quietly. William Barr, the current Attorney General of the United States, is quoted as saying that “Judeo-Christian moral standards are the ultimate utilitarian rules for human conduct.” “Religion,” he says, “helps frame moral culture within society that instills and reinforces moral discipline.” Therefore, he apparently seeks to bring a false version of Christianity back into the center of American culture. It’s about using religion for control.
Actually, to a point I agree with him. Christian faith is indeed intended in part to “frame moral culture within society.” That’s what Jesus means when he talks about how is followers are to function as “salt,” “light,” and “leaven” in society. They are to bear witness to his love, according to his teaching and example, in all that they do. Their presence does subtly flavor the society, moving it more in the direction of the beloved community of God’s shalom. That has always been part of the church’s self-understanding, as given by its Lord.
But if by “Judeo-Christian moral standards” we mean the dominance by wealthy, heterosexual, white men of everyone else, if we mean using religion to support oppression and violence, if we mean justifying the economic hegemony of owners over workers and the poor, then this is something Christians must resist in Jesus’ Name. True Christianity is not defined by the dictates of the elites. Christendom’s maintenance of values and practices utterly foreign to Jesus Christ is a cynical perversion and corruption of Christianity. Only Jesus Christ defines what faith in him looks like. And it looks very little like anything of which William Barr would approve.
As a Christian I can think of nothing that would be so monumentally disastrous to the mission of the church than an attempt to impose by force of law a ghastly, hateful, and false version of “Christianity” on a population. Christianity is already in decline in America especially among younger people, because it is identified with bigotry, racism, capitalism, hypocrisy, sexism, and nationalism. Who imagines that allowing ourselves to be used as the Gestapo to enforce the interests of rich, paranoid, smug white men is going to help us preach the gospel?
I grieve that there are so many among us in America who already hold this opinion about Christianity, based on the venal, self-serving, corrupt hypocrisy of several well-known public figures.
The choice then for Christianity is this: a domesticated, locked-down Christendom designed to enforce social conformity and economic exploitation?
Or Jesus Christ? Which is to say compassion, inclusion, non-violence, generosity, forgiveness, joy, and humility.
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