Christendom’s Betrayal of Jesus’s Counterculture

Exploring the Roman Empire’s grotesque co-optation of Jesus

The CIA co-opted progressive rhetoric in an infamous advertisement about the agency’s inclusion of “woke” officers.

Former-president Donald Trump hugged and kissed the American flag at the end of his CPAC speech in 2020. Later that year, Trump demonstrated his contempt for American law and traditions when he staged a crude coup attempt and tried to steal the election which Joe Biden won.

During a protest over the George Floyd killing in 2020, President Trump directed the military to disperse the protesters with tear gas and riot control tactics, so he could walk from the White House to a church and stage a photo-op of him holding a bible.

The Nazis continued to call themselves “socialists” long after they demonstrated that they were much more interested in protecting a racial hierarchy than in promoting workers’ rights and overthrowing private property.

The list of such outrageous acts of Orwellian pandering could be greatly extended. But is there a paradigmatic case, a historic travesty so monumental and calamitous that it set the stage for a whole genre of shocking assimilations?

Christendom as the Paradigm of Cynical Western Assimilations

If we confine our search to a paradigm that shaped the Western history of such abuses, we need look no further than the Roman Empire’s adoption of Christianity. Grasping the scale of that perversion is the intellectual equivalent of climbing a mountain.

Before we explore this terrain, though, I need to dispel an oversimplification that’s popular in new atheistic circles. The abuse in question is not primarily Emperor Constantine’s. We needn’t posit a conspiracy in which Constantine plotted in the fourth century to use Christianity to consolidate his political power. As explained by this detailed review of Bart Ehrman’s book, The Triumph of Christianity, there was likely no such intention on Constantine’s part.

On the contrary, Constantine’s conversion was more like the decadent whim you’d expect from anyone who ends up with far more power than any human mammal could hope to wisely allocate. Constantine first chose to worship the Invincible Sun. Then he switched his allegiance to Christianity. This was like a wealthy and powerful person professing to die for one tasty combination of wine and cheese, before discovering that his or her elite tastes lie elsewhere, in an altogether different delicacy.

To be sure, even the ancient pagans took their religious beliefs and practices far more seriously than do today’s postindustrial consumers. Yet we can safely surmise that Constantine’s conversion grew not from a supernatural experience, nor from a political calculation, but from the luxuries afforded by his absolute power.

Thus, the shameful cynicism I have in mind is in the social consequences of the entire empire’s adoption of Christianity, a process that carried on for centuries and that morphed into the enthronement of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches, when the Roman Empire collapsed.

Subcultures of Subversive Spirituality

Consider, then, what the character of Jesus would have represented in the ancient world (in so far as that character was depicted in the New Testament). Jesus was a hero for the little guy. He was the ultimate underdog, representing the underclass of slaves, prostitutes, plebeians, and all untouchables, including the dirt poor, the disfigured, and the mentally ill. Jesus was a bohemian, dismissing social niceties and hypocrisies, arguing that moral purpose and spiritual duties are more important than following the letter of the law.

More decisively, though, Jesus denounced every trace of secular progress as an illusion. He said the world was in God’s hands, and that God prefers those who are “poor in spirit,” who are the downtrodden that forsake their chance for small-minded earthly happiness for love of the hidden divine dimension. Jesus said the world would soon end in God’s judgment of both our actions and our thoughts. God knows all our secrets, even the number of hairs on our hear, and what he wants from us isn’t just superficial obedience but an interior revolution, a flowering of faith and devotion to spiritual principles.

Jesus was hardly alone in making that case. Greek philosophers such as the Stoics and the Cynics were on the same page. Taoists, too, in China repudiated artificial sophistication in favour of more minimalistic, natural lifestyles. Buddhists likewise condemned greedy mindedness and the delusions that sustain the selfishness of so-called civilized folks. Jains did likewise, going to extreme lengths to carry out their vows of nonviolence, and Hinduism incorporated the tradition of spiritual asceticism in India.

Going back much further, we can trace the roots of these subversions to shamanism, and specifically to the shaman’s entheogenic flight to peak states of consciousness which made conventional social problems seem trivial.

The Character of the Roman Empire

In any case, Rome had no interest in the revolutionary renunciations these visionaries called for. True to its pragmatic and industrious form, Rome saw Jesus purely as a political threat, ignoring the content of his message and executing him on a charge of sedition, for threatening the Pax Romana.

Remember that the Roman Empire only seemed admirably cosmopolitan in preserving the cultural integrity of the regions it conquered, and in allowing the local religions to flourish on the condition that they didn’t challenge Roman supremacy. This was a root of modern liberalism, as in John Stuart Mill’s harm principle, according to which everyone should be free to do as they please if they preserve everyone else’s comparable right.

The military hegemony of Rome guaranteed those rights in that period, just as the American superpower guarantees liberal society in the present one. And the Romans’ latent relativism and Philistinism would have been comparable to the corruption of late-modern liberals. In both cases, the condescending tolerance of all cultures is grounded in nihilism.

Indeed, the secretive, therapeutic personal salvationist movements known as the Mystery Religions likely channeled the masses’ spiritual longings that the brutal Roman Empire didn’t understand. Just as today’s global neoliberalism faces authoritarian backlashes, ancient Roman pragmatism and violent suppressions inadvertently fed revolts. The latter included not just those of the Jewish rebels or of the barbarian hordes that would eventually sack Rome, but the creation of Christianity itself as a synthesis of moralistic and monotheistic Judaism with the individualistic pagan Mystery Religions.

The Conflict Between Mass Culture and the Idealist’s Counterculture

However, Christians covered up the Roman antipathy to anarchic spirituality with theological shenanigans. Specifically, the four canonical gospels are notorious for scapegoating the Jews, for blaming them for conspiring to kill Jesus, and for whitewashing Pontius Pilate’s involvement. In Matt. 27:24, Pilate washes his hands and says to the Jewish crowd, “I am innocent of this man’s blood…It is your responsibility!”

That was only the start of an extensive, sordid business of papering over the obvious conflict between Jesus’s uncompromising otherworldliness, and the turning of his message into the creed of an organized religion that was run at first by the very regime that had executed that champion of the underdogs.

We could study enough to write multiple dissertations on the scale of that conflict, and we still couldn’t wrap our minds around it. Trying to appreciate the scope of this absurdity almost suffices for a mystical experience. How can something so topsy-turvy preposterous have come to pass?

But that’s not precisely the question at issue here. More importantly, we need to cower before the ugly Orwellian power that ascended in Christendom’s neutralization of subversive spirituality. We can set aside the historical question of how it happened and focus on appreciating that it happened.

Perhaps we can approach the alien scale of the monstrosity before us if we turn to an analogy somewhat closer to home.

Suppose that in trying to sell the Vietnam War to his critics, President Nixon dressed up as a hippie, wearing a wig, smoking cannabis, and talking in hippie lingo in his speeches. Suppose the transformation happened overnight, so the young left-wing radicals were only appalled at his audacity and couldn’t possibly take him seriously. Yet what if historians inexplicably treated the transformation as real, and later generations took for granted that Nixon was himself a hippie.

That’s the kind of bizarre absurdity we should be looking for in Christian history.

Notice, though, the difference between that Nixon scenario, and Bill Clinton’s famous playing of the saxophone to appeal to African Americans on the Arsenio Hall Show in 1992. Although Clinton wore sunglasses at the time, his pandering wasn’t over the top because Clinton could indeed play the saxophone. His skill was genuine so that was a legitimate side of himself he was free to show when he campaigned for president. Suppose, though, Clinton walked onto Arsenio Hall’s stage and played the sax wearing blackface. Then we’d be approaching the calamity of Rome’s adoption of Jesus.

The point is that, regardless of the intentions of the Roman or Christian authorities, the fusing of the two worlds was an abomination. No casuistry could conceal the contradictions involved in fashioning an imperial religion on the shoulders of the radical Jesus, although the Church would put that to the test with its flurry of scholastic dogmas and Jesuitical obfuscations.

There are musicians and novelists who are so appalled at the prospect of selling out their principles that they take drugs to dull their sense that their success has spoiled their personal integrity. When the drugs wear off and these artists find that they’ve painted themselves into a corner, they lash out in reckless behaviour that’s a coded cry for help, as in the cases of Britanny Spears or Princess Diana. When all else fails, they may kill themselves, as Kurt Cobain did in 1994.

Can there be any doubt that if Jesus somehow lived to see that he’d be the figurehead for Rome and then for the regimes that crusaded against Muslims, burned witches at the stake, and persecuted homosexuals in the US, he’d have instantly committed suicide to spare himself further humiliation?

Of course, if the New Testament has any basis in historical truth, Jesus martyred himself at the very beginning of his spiritual movement, siding with his principles against secular and religious hypocrisies. It’s as though he foresaw what Christendom would become and abandoned ship before it sunk.

The Christian’s Hollow Rejoinder

Now, a Christian will say there’s no institutional co-optation of the counterculture here because Jesus triumphed over the demonic powers that have always been at work in our vain godless civilizations. The only conflict in Christianity was between God and the rebellion of fallen angels, the latter being the source of so-called progressive humanism. The merger of Jesus and Rome was only an imperfect prelude to the eventual second coming and the kingdom of God. That is, Christians struggle to turn back the demonic tide before God will arrive to finish what Christianity started, in an apocalyptic transformation of the created order.

But this is just ludicrous spin. If the Roman Empire and the institutions of Christendom, from the Catholic Church to American Evangelical Christianity were on Jesus’s side, why are they almost always such colossal embarrassments, from anything like Jesus’s standpoint? For example, why didn’t the Christianized Roman officials love their neighbours and sell their possessions, dedicating themselves to the divine power that dwarfs everything that transpires in the material universe? Why has Christendom’s hypocrisy been so consistent and egregious?

The answer is clear: the hypocrisy is as necessary as the internal conflict — between Jesus’s counterculture and Christendom’s mass culture — has always been stark. The very concept of Christendom, of an organized religion based on Jesus’s teachings and practices is as grotesque as Frankenstein’s monster.

The latter fictional monster is a corpse that’s brought back to life by a mad scientist’s ambition. Given the natural order, that kind of “progress” is perverse since a corpse serves the function of nourishing other organisms. Bringing a corpse back to life is like the contradiction of squaring a circle. And it’s like a cynical, hypocritical institution’s ruse of preserving the perennial antisocial counterculture.

The Idealist’s Folly and the Grim Struggle in Life

You see, one way to defeat your enemies is with honour: you beat them in a fair fight, or you refute the opposing side’s argument. Alternatively, if you’ve no honour to speak of, you can defeat your opponent with a subterfuge: you can pretend to befriend your enemy, as in the Machiavellian aphorism, “Keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” That way, your enemy lowers his guard, enabling you to corrupt him or her with your antithetical principles.

In Christianity this is known as “conversion,” but what the Christian doesn’t appreciate is that her religion began with an opposite kind of conversion. The Roman Empire, Christendom, and the degradations that sustain mass culture twisted Jesus’s counterculture a lot more than the latter affected the former institutions. Human, godless civilization neutralized Jesus — and by extension all the other visionary countercultures — by turning Jesus into a worldly organization’s figurehead.

Just imagine how cheap hippie culture would have seemed if even Nixon had long shaggy hair, wore dirty bell bottom jeans, and publicly smoked joints and listened to rock music. Or what would it mean to be African American if President Clinton had been permitted to walk around in blackface?

What becomes of socialism if the Nazis could discredit that alternative by calling themselves “socialist,” in a perfect Orwellian gambit of double-talk?

How hollow must American principles be if the unscrupulous, anti-American con artist extraordinaire, President Trump could hug and kiss the American flag, and stage a photo-op of him with a bible without instantly being run out of town?

How shallow must be the “woke” progressive discourse if the CIA, perpetrator of countless shady deeds around the planet could feel proud about adopting that language in describing itself in an advertisement?

And how much deeper was the idealistic, bohemian, spiritual (i.e. existential) underclass buried when the Roman Empire adopted Jesus as its mascot and symbol? How much meaning can be drained from a symbol before the symbol turns into a profanity?

No, there was no second coming of Jesus, contrary to the New Testament’s explicit prophecies of how the world’s end was imminent two millennia ago. Perhaps that’s because, watching from his perch in Heaven Jesus was disgusted by the audacity of all so-called Christians who live as if there were no God while pretending to dedicate themselves to Jesus as their “lord.”

Or perhaps Jesus and his early followers could only hope that the world would soon end, to prevent the inevitable betrayals that the institutionalization of his message would set in motion. Those desperate idealists were wrong, of course, because “spiritual” ideals are indeed antithetical to the natural order. There’s no deus ex machina to fulfill the idealist’s vision. We alone can realize the dream with hard work and with unwavering contempt for self-deceptions.

Our grim resolve must be diamond-hard if we’re to keep imposing our will on the fearsome wilderness. That’s the deepest conflict on this planet, the war between meaningful life and nature’s mindless, amoral self-creation.