What Love Could Cost
from cannibal cultists to colonizers to the modern western self, none of us are God. we should accept that relief.
Here are some loose, numbered thoughts on Christianity.
Early Christians were persecuted for being treacherous incest cannibals.
Civic religion was foundational to the Roman imperial world, so denying that religion was seen as tearing at the fabric of society. On top of that, early Christians called each other ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ and also kissed each other, plus they held secret meetings where they ate some guy’s broken body every week.The transformation of Christianity from a religion by and for penniless outlaws to a religion of Kings and Colonizers and Billionaires is a fascinating one.
The Anglo-American tradition of limited government can be seen as one big conflict with the Catholic Church. The Magna Carta was signed after King John fought the Catholic Church and lost, leading the church to align with nobles to limit his power. The English Bill of Rights, which the American Founders leveraged quite a bit, was signed after Parliament literally invited a Dutch nobleman to invade and depose a Catholic king. Many other examples obtain.
The Spanish Inquisition was a program of ethnic cleansing carried out by the Spanish crown after they re-conquered the Iberian peninsula. 2/3 of what is now Spain/Portugal was Muslim territory for hundreds of years until 1492. After they finished the Reconquista the Spanish crown kept the violence up by rooting out internal enemies, Muslims and Jews who had (they claimed) falsely converted to Catholicism.
It is a great coincidence of history that the completion of the Reconquista coincided with the “discovery” of the new world. The Spanish took this self-confident, conflict-oriented flavor of Christianity with them as they marched across America.
It’s interesting to me how Christianity evolved at the core vs at the periphery. Spain and Russia were forged on the frontier, in constant conflict with non-Christian powers like the Moors and the Turks and the Mongols. France, sitting in the comfy geopolitical core, didn’t need a crusader mentality to survive. French Catholicism turned inward, developing a delicious decadence with respect to art, sex, and philosophy.”
Part of the reason “raised Catholic” became synonymous with guilt and harshness is because, outside of the European core, Catholicism became synonymous with perpetrating or resisting colonial oppression. Even in the US, Catholics were seen as foreign usurpers until well after the Civil War.
The protestant Reformation is where what we call “modernity” was truly born, at least philosophically. The reformation rejected the authority of the hierarchical church, insisting that every believer had an immediate relationship with God and the holy word. This moved all kinds of philosophical activity out of the church and into the minds of individual believers, creating space for early rationalism and empiricism. The wars of religion that erupted in Europe left people having to respect and justify themselves to people with different religious confessions, leading to liberalism and pluralism and nationalism.
The discovery of the “new world” was a critical part of the shift into modernity, disclosing an entire continent of people who had lived and died for thousands of years without ever hearing of “Jesus Christ”. The Reformation was another shift, as was the (later) invention of the telescope and the rise of heliocentric worldviews. The story the Christian West told about itself for a thousand years was humbled, piece by piece. With AI, we may be living through another such humbling today.
Christianity, as I understand it, shares a profound message of humility, solidarity, and unconditional love, bound together by a foundation of finitude. Put simply, you are not God, and neither am I. Neither you nor I are infinite in our capacity for knowledge, justice, or power. This is what “original sin” means, to me - the fundamental condition of being a finite being.
I don’t find “everyone is a sinner” to be a depressing message. I think it’s worse to say “you are scared and sad and tired all the time because you are too weak or too lazy to be perfect”.
“Unconditional love” means “you literally couldn’t be unworthy of love if you tried”. In the Gospels, Jesus is depicted as forgiving the very people who are right in the middle of murdering him. This challenge - to love unconditionally - is what makes the Christian story a profound and compelling one. If this were an easy thing to do, or if Jesus had said “uhh, boundaries??” then we wouldn’t be talking about it.
“Unconditional love” is something that, practically speaking, only God can give. I can recognize and accept that I am loved in spite of my finitude, while also acknowledging that my actions can make it impossible for people to give me the love that I need and that I’ll always have at least some work to do.
I spoke with a Christian playwright who complained that it’s hard to write religious plays because there’s no room for any drama or conflict. If God’s love is infinite then we all already have everything we deeply need and we’re fighting over scraps of nothing.
At some point in history Christians tossed the cross aside and picked up the sword and the state. Despite that trajectory its core image won’t let me go - the image of a man who endured the absolute worst that humanity has to offer, from intimate betrayal to institutional corruption, and actively forgave the very people who were torturing him. He forgave them in real time, not from a safe distance, not from a space of quiet reflection. He forgave them in the depths of his agony. Whether or not he later rose from the dead and what his followers did afterwards is much less interesting to me. I see Christianity as a story about what love could mean, and what it could cost to actually mean it.
The challenge, then as now, is to stop trying to be God and to accept the relief of being human.