It is no surprise that the followers of new Christianity serve as pawns for atheists who want to plot a clash of civilizations, or for Jews who want to commit genocide in the Middle East with impunity.
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Both Christian and atheist apologists have adopted a Nietzschean version of ancient history: the Greeks and Romans were heroic and ruthless warriors, until Christianity emerged as a counterforce to these civilizations and imposed compassion for the weak. I say that this is a Nietzschean version because this compassion is, quite simply, the “slave morality” that Nietzsche accused Christianity of introducing into the wonderful ancient world. The difference between the Christian apologist and the Nietzschean is only the name: what Nietzsche pejoratively called slave morality, the apologist praises as a special Christian compassion.
Lately, the person who has been bringing the two strands together is Tom Holland, an English pop historian and an atheist in the style of Dawkins. This type of atheist got tired of calling religious people stupid and, faced with the Islamic threat (real or imagined), started to praise Christianity for its civilizational qualities. It is a liberal alliance between scientific atheists and Christians who sympathize with Israel. The backdrop is Samuel Huntington’s theory of the “clash of civilizations.” In short, after Fukuyama’s prophecy failed to come true (because Russia and Iraq did not become free-market democracies), Huntington replaced him as ideologue, stating that there is an inevitable clash of civilizations. The problem of the Russians and the Arabs is civilizational, cultural. If not all peoples adhere to liberal democracy and free market, it is because their civilization is in a clash against the Western Judeo-Christian civilization.
But let us return to the supposed civilizational antagonism stated by Nietzscheans. Is there any very ancient civilization that shows compassion and care for the weakest from the beginning? I don’t think so. It is a well-known fact that the God of the Bible softened between the Old Testament, written in Hebrew, and the New Testament, written in Greek during the Roman Empire. On the other hand, it is easy to find advanced civilizations that, even amidst opulence and technological progress, chose to maintain inhumanity towards the weakest. Examples of this are ancient Egypt and the Aztec Empire – or even the highly advanced Third Reich. The Greco-Roman world underwent a peculiar softening, prior to Christianity. The civilizations of Socrates and Cicero had already been developing a universalist notion of good that values man and advocates being humanus towards the weakest. Human was already a complimentary adjective among the pagans of Cicero’s time, and had the same meaning today. Thus, every ancient civilization had its harsh times, but only the Greco-Romans developed a humanitarianism, from which Christianity sprang.
We can say that the soil in the Roman Empire was prepared to receive the new religion that emerged on its periphery, created by Hellenized Jews who wanted to break down tribal barriers and convert all of humanity. If Christians want to represent the moral transformation promoted by their religion as something miraculous, they would do better to use the history of Mexico, either because of its previous morality, or because of the scientific enigma that is the tilma of the Indian Juan Diego. An investigation into the morality of the Aztec Empire might lead the Nietzscheans on duty to conclude that the Übermensch, the Hyperborean, has a dark complexion, and that Christianity brought by whites imposed on him a slave morality…
Well then: a certain humanist universalism is not an essentially Christian thing, since it precedes Christianity and, in a certain way, prepared the ground for it; on the other hand, Christianity, at its root, is universalist and humanist. Both Greco-Roman morality and the Christian religion are exceptional in the history of humanity, which is generally riddled with bellicose tribal particularisms.
Throughout the history of modernity, there have been attempts to get rid of Christianity while keeping this universalism. Liberalism, positivism and communism were attempts of this nature: one created Human Rights, another created the Religion of Humanity and another waited for the transformation of the entire earth into paradise.
What I want to point out, however, is the attempt to get rid of Christianity, transforming it into a kind of witchcraft that serves particular ends and has no moral content. Of course, Calvinism has been much criticized for its exclusivism; but what we have seen since the advent of televangelism is a reduction of Christianity to an utilitarian witchcraft. If modernity wanted to throw out Christianity and retain universalism, postmodernity wants to throw out universalism, hiding its radicalism by maintaining a de-Christianized Christianity. Christianity has been, in practice, replaced by New Thought.
The New Thought Movement was invented in the United States in the 19th century by a charlatan named Phineas Quimby. His idea is the one we see spread around anonymously: that our thoughts have power, so we should think positively to achieve the things we want. In the beginning, this was aimed at curing illnesses. If the patient did not get better, it was his fault for not thinking correctly. If the patient got better, it was proof of the effectiveness of the new method.
Failing at the health field, New Thought took root in esotericism, self-help and… Protestant sects. In the 19th century, a patient of Quimby named Mary Baker Eddy founded a religion called Christian Science, in which prayer works like positive thinking and is responsible for healing. As a result, members of this church have long faced lawsuits for quackery and medical malpractice. In any case, prayer became a form of magic in the United States in the 19th century, and in Brazil, after televangelism, it is easy to see believers saying that they will “prophesy” so that a certain thing will happen.
To see the de-Christianization of Christianity, there is nothing more useful than observing the goals of the faithful. At least in Brazil, evangelical churches already have themed calendars: on different days of the week, they offer health, resolution of family or love problems and money issues. Therefore, the faithful go to church to ask for the same things that people ask a fortune teller or a sorcerer: health, love, family peace and money. It is common to point out the African influence in this type of religion. In fact, one thing does not exclude the other, and New Thought has been joined by features of African paganism. In this religion, possession by spirits is recurrent (in Ecstasies: Deciphering the Witches’ Sabbath, Carlo Ginzburg observes that outside of Africa there is the figure of the shaman who visits the world of the dead; in black Africa, however, there is only possession by spirits). In the USA, this striking African trait was reinterpreted by Pentecostals as possession by the Holy Spirit and it fit like a glove in countries with a significant black presence. In some black areas of Brazil, it is possible to see black evangelicals spinning to the sound of drums and speaking in tongues, possessed not by Xango or Oxum, but by the Holy Spirit…
In any case, in traditional religions of African origin, there is a solid hierarchy and very laborious rites. In this new Christianity, there is the so-called “fast food faith”. What’s more, there is even the figure of the “unchurched”, since it is possible to achieve blessings using one’s own positive thinking, i.e., “prophesying”. The faithful care so little about the truth that they choose their churches based on their social profile: there are surfer churches, churches for young people that look like nightclubs, churches for homosexuals, churches named after neighborhoods… They offer services, and services can be offered by competing companies.
Thus, for the first time in the history of Western civilization, we see the spread of a religion devoid of any universalist or even social content – since praying to win the lottery or to bring back a loved one are personal things, and are the most that the devotees of this religion aspire to.
Deprived of any moral content, they are left with utilitarianism. Thus, it is no surprise that the followers of this new Christianity serve as pawns for atheists who want to plot a clash of civilizations, or for Jews who want to commit genocide in the Middle East with impunity. The relationship between these Christians and these Jews, in fact, is the best proof that the key to their religiosity is utilitarianism. The Scofield Bible, which they use, tells Christians to bless Israel in order to be blessed—not because Israel is good, not because the Palestinians are bad, but because they want to receive those blessings.
These amoral, individualistic Christians are willing to do anything, as long as they have a comfortable life. Because their own well-being is the only thing that matters, and their God exists to serve them. They have gone beyond Calvinism, and they no longer even care to see signs of divine favor. Instead, they are willing to buy it in order to satisfy desires that are ends in themselves.
