Christianity and Hypocrisy

 

In my book Playing the Indian Card, I point out that Christian missionaries coming to Canada had every reason to try to preserve Canadian First Nations cultures, and they did. This is the opposite of the usual claim. They are commonly scapegoated as supposed cultural imperialists. In fact, most of what we know today about Canadian First Nations culture comes from their work and writings. For the natives had no writing system.

This makes sense purely in terms of self-interest. Keeping the natives separate from the civil culture magnified the authority of the missionaries as intermediaries. But more nobly, the Jesuits and Recollets were concerned with the depravity of the general culture. Far better for the souls of their charges that they not venture into the cities with their alcohol, prostitution, and sharp trading.

My editor objected. Surely they were imposing on them their culture, their Christian religion?

Only the irreligious see religion as culture. To the religious, religion is counter-cultural.

Andrew Breitbart famously said “politics is downstream from culture.” Similarly, culture is downstream from religion. True, adopt Christianity, and you are liable to come up over time with things like empirical science, liberal democracy, and the Enlightenment. But Christianity, or Catholicism, is highly culturally diverse.

For people who are not religious, it is true, religion is their culture. These are the people who have never thought about it, or read the texts. They just do it because those around them do it. They celebrate Christmas, because it is a party, and everybody does. They get married in a church, because that is the way it is done.  They attend mass because their grandmother did, and their father.

But this attitude is the very opposite of true religion, which is above all a search for the truth: for the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

And it produces something social that is the opposite of true religion. It produces a dull uncreative social conformity. It produces “happy happy joy joy” Hallmark-card-sentimental self-satisfied “be nice and get along” attitudes and behaviour.

Christianity is profoundly counter-cultural. If that is not obvious to you, consider that its founder figure was crucified by his culture as the worst of criminals.

So are the other great religions, but for Islam.

A recent example of how different the cultural facsimile is from the real article: one of Xerxes’s readers, a United Church minister, recently opined that she saw no distinction between secular and sacred Christmas songs for her services. “After all,” she remarked, “We are called to be a people of this world.”

This is the opposite of what the Bible says. 

1 John 2: 15-17:

Do not love the world or anything in the world. If anyone loves the world, love for the Father is not in them. For everything in the world—the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life—comes not from the Father but from the world. The world and its desires pass away, but whoever does the will of God lives forever.

John 17: 14-17:

I have given them your word, and the world has hated them because they are not of the world, just as I am not of the world. I do not ask that you take them out of the world, but that you keep them from the evil one. They are not of the world, just as I am not of the world.

John 15: 18-9:

If the world hates you, keep in mind that it hated me first. If you belonged to the world, it would love you as its own. As it is, you do not belong to the world, but I have chosen you out of the world. That is why the world hates you.

The cultural Christianity almost systematically asserts the opposite of the actual Christian message. It generally asserts what is most comfortable, especially for the rich and powerful.

It is, in itself, proof of the existence of the Devil.

We are warned of this, of course, in the Bible. This is the hypocrisy of the scribes and Pharisees.

This is why everyone should actually read the Bible for themselves; and Catholics should read the Catechism of the Catholic Church.