A Recurring Pattern

(My struggle with computer and biological viruses continues, hence continued delays.)

There is a clear recurring pattern in the history of religion. Even when a religion is founded by a sincere person who has no aspirations to wealth or power, this person’s followers quickly establish a religious hierarchy.

The example best known to most of us is the Christian church. Jesus of Nazareth owned nothing of his own, and had to depend on his followers. He had the most tenuous of hierarchies: twelve disciples and seventy assistant disciples. He also did not say very much (in the quotations attributed to him) about theology. After his death, “The Twelve” followers quickly established a governing council in Jerusalem, led by Simon Bar-Jonah (whom Jesus had nicknamed “Rocky” (Peter)). Their theological proclamations were fairly minimal, such as telling the church members to stay away from sexual sins and from blood. They did not like being pestered by an outsider named Saul of Tarsus who renamed himself Paul and claimed to be an apostle like The Twelve. Paul went around the Mediterranean world preaching, and found that there was a tremendous variety of religious practices in the different, independent Christian congregations. His letters, especially to the Corinthians, represent powerful attempts to bring ecclesiastical order into a chaos of religious fervor. But it was not until the fourth century that Christian doctrines were standardized into creeds. Only after Roman emperor Constantine recognized the power of religious memes that he made Christianity into a Church that had authority over people, and he often abused that authority.

Dissatisfied with abuses of power and the deadness of a religion that was used only to dominate the minds and spirits of people, Francis of Assisi started his own movement. Within a century, the religious order started by a man who rejected all possessions and wealth became as abusive and acquisitive as the ones preceding it.

The Reformation was a rebellion against abusive Catholic authority, but soon the Protestant churches also became tools of repressive governments. A group known as the Puritans left England to escape from the authority of the Anglican Church. They found freedom of religion in the Netherlands. But freedom for everybody is not what they wanted. They wanted the freedom to impose their religion by law. So they sailed to Massachusetts, where they established a religious dictatorship that sometimes massacred the native inhabitants. Pilgrim leader William Bradford describes the way the colonists surrounded a Pequot village at sunrise. They set it ablaze and killed anyone who fled. Bradford wrote, “It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof; but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they [the colonists] gave praise thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully.” (I quoted this passage in an earlier blog entry.)

Religion is still the fountainhead of political power in many places. The Islamist (as opposed to benignly Islamic) movements, such as the Taliban and Al Qaeda, are examples too well known to require description here. Fundamentalist Christianity is famously powerful in American politics also. Many people assume that the Constitution created a wall of separation between church and state, but this is not quite the case. The first amendment states that Congress cannot establish a religion. But a state, apparently, can. If a state did so, the federal government would immediately cut off its funding. But in many states, fundamentalist Christianity remains the unofficial religion. In my home state of Oklahoma, religion is the single most important deciding factor in political elections, and people with extremely repressive religious beliefs are repeatedly elected to state office. At the university where I work, the major official functions begin with overtly Christian prayers, and even our Muslim faculty members bow their heads in acceptance of this unalterable fact.

This essay is part of my book Life of Earth: Portrait of a Beautiful, Middle-Aged, Stressed-Out World, recently released by Prometheus Books.