Atonement

It is the Christmas season, which for most people just means materialism and religious rituals and images. But for some people, religious or not, it is a time to think about “peace on Earth, goodwill toward men.” One of the main ideas in traditional Christian belief is that Jesus brought “atonement” between God and humankind. According to this view, human sin had caused a rift between God and humankind, and Jesus’ incarnation and later his crucifixion atoned for that rift.

I wondered recently what “atonement” means to conservatives. They claim to believe in the atonement brought by Jesus Christ. But what do they mean by this? They think that they obtain atonement from God every day when they pray and every week when they go to church. But then they continue doing the same evil things as they did before, the same things that the Old Testament prophets denounced, such as grinding the poor into the dust. Apparently, to them, atonement means that God forgives them in advance for whatever they might do, sort of like the pope conferring indulgences in advance for whatever rape and pillage the Crusaders might do once they reach the Holy Land.

The conservative viewpoint is very male. Males seem to be like medieval knights: they enjoy jousting with one another, pennants and draperies waving in the air, while the people around them are sick and starving. Congress (which is mostly male) recently created an artificial budget crisis, not all that different from medieval jousting matches, so that they could joust while ignoring the real problems that bring suffering to the masses. And they fantasize that females drool over their jousting sticks. Male thinking, like male reproduction, is an ugly ramming, unlike the nourishing roundness of the female body and female thinking. Conservatives, whether Christian or Muslim, generally believe in the right of males to dominate females, which includes the primacy of male ramming over female nurture. Atonement, then, to their way of thinking, must mean to wash away female niceness and replace it with male ruthlessness.

This view of atonement is completely different from the original Christian meaning, back when Christians were a little socialistic altruistic band and before Christianity became a political force.