Saturday, December 23, 2006
By His Stripes
Fran here. I try to avoid thinking or writing about the war on Christianity; the subject elevates my blood pressure too sharply to be safe for me. But here we are, two days before Christmas, so the topic is especially timely.
Many Americans are dismissive of the notion that there's a semi-organized campaign to demonize Christianity and Christian allegiance. Nevertheless, it's a real and ongoing thing, with significant, well-funded organizations involved in it. David Limbaugh's book Persecution provides a useful and wide-ranging account. More recently, my secret heartthrob Alexandra von Maltzan -- whoops! Cat's out of the bag now, isn't it? -- has amassed some striking examples of the thing, with which the pooh-poohers ought to grapple for a while. It might impel them to moderate their next round of dismissals.
Particularly striking among Alexandra's citations is this one:
In a press release this week, "Beyond Belief Media has formally declared war on Christmas, the December 25 holiday in which Christians celebrate the birth of the mythical figure Jesus Christ, the company announced... As its opening salvo, Beyond Belief Media has purchased advertisements this week in the New York Times, USA Today and the New Yorker magazine..." BBM president Brian Flemming stated, "Wherever the mythical figure Jesus is celebrated as if he were real, we... will undercut the idea that there is any point at all to celebrating the 'birth' of a character in a fairy tale."
Don't take Alexandra's word for it; go to Beyond Belief Media's Website and form your own conclusions.
Mind you, given that 74% of Americans self-identify as Christians, a case can be made that we're in no ultimate danger even of social exclusion. That large a majority could set the laws to anything it wants. The anti-Christians -- do not confuse them with Amiable Agnostics and similar benign sorts! -- are mostly aware of the odds against them. Unlike the Islamists, they won't be strapping on suicide-bomb vests and sashaying into Saint Patrick's or Saint Augustine's any time soon. But they're serious about their antipathy, nevertheless. They mean to dissuade young Americans, whose educations are incomplete and whose attitudes have not yet jelled, from any interest in the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. They'd love to see hostility to Christianity become dominant among the secularists who mostly operate our mass media and our organs of state.
Why?
We have no hope of answering that question without familiarizing ourselves with the subject at its center: Jesus of Nazareth, the Man who, two thousand years ago, walked the lands around the Sea of Galilee proclaiming a New Covenant between God and Man.
Let's not trouble ourselves over whether Jesus really existed. Of course, being a Catholic Christian, I believe that He did, and that the Gospel accounts of His life are substantially accurate. But that's less significant than what He is reputed to have done. Keep uppermost in your thoughts the assertion by the anti-Christians of Beyond Belief Media that He is merely a "mythical figure," a "character in a fairy tale."
What is Jesus reputed to have done?
- He preached a message of Divine love and forgiveness, and a greatly reduced set of Divine requirements organized around those themes;
- He offered hope to the downtrodden of Judea for their perseverance in humility and piety;
- He counseled those who followed Him to love, generosity, forbearance in the face of insult and oppression, and trust in the goodness of God;
- He healed the sick and cast out demons from those afflicted by them;
- At the last, He accepted a horrible death, in testimony to the truth of His message and to redeem Mankind from its sins.
If we postulate, solely for the sake of argument, the contention of the anti-Christians that Jesus did not really exist, we must then ask them: What is it that troubles you so about this "mythical" character? What aspect of His message to Man do you find so objectionable that you've resolved to eliminate him from public consciousness?
Don't expect an honest answer to that question. You'll get nothing but backing, filling, changes of subject, and ad hominems to the effect that it's your "irrationality" at issue, not their duplicitousness and insincerity.
Anti-Christians are not uniform in their motivations. Many are hostile to the notion of divinity. Others dislike any assertion of a moral standard higher than that imposed by man-made law. Some merely practice a thoroughgoing skepticism about anything they can't verify by the direct and immediate report of their senses. And some are consumed by envy at the serenity enjoyed by the majority of Christian adherents, a condition unaffected by variations or fluctuations in their worldly estates. No doubt there are others with other reasons.
But they cannot point to one single thing that the "mythical" Jesus ever said or did to which a decent man could raise the slightest objection. For to do so, they'd have to take issue with:
- The desirability of spiritual peace and forgiveness of others' sins;
- Gratitude for the gift of life in a lawful universe and honor to those who are the temporal reason for it;
- The prohibitions against murder, theft, fraud, and covetousness;
- Last but most striking of all, Christ's denial of the rightness of enforcing religious precepts with temporal force, as exemplified dramatically in His treatment of the adultery of Mary Magdalene.
Many creatures of darkness live in our accumulated cultural consciousness. Some are historically well attested: the great mass murderers of the Twentieth Century, for example. Others, such as Attila and Ghengis Khan, are more remote, with more uncertainty attached to their deeds. A few villainous names survive in the epics of deep antiquity, but their stories are most uncertain of all. None of these are worshipped; they're held up to the young of today to illustrate what horrors are possible to Man. Even evil figures whose actual lives are entirely uncertain present useful profiles in human depravity; we reflect upon them because we can sense that the stories attached to their names are things men might really have done -- that no degree of malice is inherently beyond us.
A single Figure to which no stain can attach shines through the ages as an icon of goodness. This is the Man whose adversaries we speak of today.
Regardless of the anti-Christians' motivations, one must regard them as truly pitiable. For they would not hesitate to agree that men are capable of any deed of depravity or viciousness. Yet they cannot allow even the fantasy that a Man once walked above all such baseness, preaching, healing, and exemplifying an ideal toward which every man should strive. A Figure of such surpassing merit cannot be tolerated and must not be venerated; the very idea demeans us all. He must be scrubbed from our minds, His "myth" scorned and derided at every opportunity, all mention of Him forbidden.
But he was wounded for our transgressions, he was bruised for our iniquities: the chastisement of our peace was upon him; and with his stripes we are healed. [The Book of Isaiah, 53:5]
A merry and holy Christmas to you all. May the peace of Our Lord Jesus Christ, the ever-living Son of God and Redeemer of Mankind, be yours this blessed season and throughout the New Year. Check back tomorrow for your Christmas presents from Eternity Road; I'll try to make it something that won't put too much of a bulge in your stockings.
