Christianity Demonizes Modern Progress

But makes superficial peace with humanistic pride (and thus with Satan)

Superficially, Christians have made their peace with modernity, which is to say with science, skepticism, runaway technological progress, freedom of thought, and with all the other personal liberties in politics and economics that secular humanists have championed.

That is, compared to Islam, for example, Christianity has been modernized. Wars were fought over how Christians should compromise their founding principles, and how they should marginalize their fundamentalist sects that take their scriptures too literally.

This religion, then, has become a retro styling of perspectives and institutions that have been independently established. The Pauline theology that’s been crucial to this religion since Christianity’s first century means little to most Christians’ lifestyles. The old creed about how God died as a human to spare us his wrath for our racial sin isn’t the basis of a modern way of life but ends up being handy for terminating unproductive religious speculations.

The Christian point is that God saved us, so we need perform few rituals or sacrifice little of our intellectual integrity to benefit from that divine plan. Whether the plan is real is practically irrelevant since the Christian is free to ignore the gospel as he or she navigates the modern status quo that’s founded instead on secular humanism.

Protestantism provided that religious freedom by making Christian religiosity mostly private and unfalsifiable. What matters to modern Christians is faith, not works, and faith can be faked.

The Christian demonization of secular humanistic pride

But there’s an anti-modern vestige of Christian theology that speaks to this religion’s original apocalyptic, countercultural vision. This vestige is the demonization of Satan, of God’s rebellious angel who tested the merits of Creation by applying skepticism to God’s plan. Christians conflated the Jewish concept of Satan and of his fellow rebels with pagan gods, reducing them all to angels and demonizing those that were most antithetical to the Christian message. John Milton epitomized this conflation with his portrayal of Lucifer as a Promethean antihero.

Prometheus can be thought of ironically as the god of secular humanism, since in the Greek myths he protects or even creates humanity, stealing fire from Olympus and enabling us to defend ourselves and to progress with technology and the other arts. And like Jesus, the Titan Prometheus is punished for his efforts, since Zeus chains him to a rock and tortures him for having set our species on an independent path and endangering the cosmic harmony.

This pagan mythos resonates with the secular humanist’s pride, and because this pride is the chief sin, according to Christianity, Prometheus had to be demonized. In Christianity, the character of Lucifer or Prometheus becomes the evil Satan who dared to divert God’s creation by tempting our species to disobey Yahweh, whereupon we were cursed to flounder in attempting to progress outside the paradise of Eden.

And again, according to Christian theology, our guardian spirit, Satan, too, who presently seems to rule over nature as a demiurgic figure, will be punished in an expected cataclysm on the day of final divine judgment. Satan and his vain human loyalists will be cast into a lake of fire, and only those who had rejected Satan’s false promises of secular, godless progress will join God as adopted members of his utopian kingdom.

You see, then, that the root of Christianity in the New Testament’s otherworldly apocalyptic vision wasn’t opposed just to the audacity of ancient Roman imperialism, but to the arts and technologies that sustain civilization itself. Civilization is inherently progressive, which is to say that we civilizers are arrogant in aiming to establish our artificial independence from nature (that is, from God’s supposed creation). In short, civilization is the human, Promethean creation that would rival God’s.

To be sure, most ancient civilizations papered over this rivalry by depicting humans as imitating the gods. The gods were plural, so they enjoyed a human-like civilization, too, and our social classes were modelled on the hierarchy of high and low gods. The earth reflected the heavens, so harmony was reestablished — despite the apparent anomaly of personhood in the animal kingdom.

Monotheism destabilized that mythic apology for the implicit secularism of civilized progress. After all, monotheists are purists who restrict the options for theological rationalization. The one true God became too lofty to personify, so we could no longer boast that our societies were modelled on the pantheon’s amoral frolics in the heavens. God became supernatural, and his ways were mysteries known not by mythic tales but by sparse reports of miracles and by the desperate faith these elicited.

For most monotheists, there’s God’s way and there’s the highway — to Hell. There is no natural, earthly imitation of the one true God. Consequently, there’s no such thing as secular, godless progress on earth. What seems progressive in human civilization is only an illusion from which God will rudely waken us.

Now, Christianity plays fast and loose with the difference between polytheism and monotheism, having it both ways. God the Father is beyond all idolatrous images (as this religion’s Jewish basis emphasizes), but the essence of God is supposed to be adequately represented by Jesus the man, and since we can imitate Jesus’ selflessness, we can imitate God, after all. We can resort to casuistry to go on thinking of ourselves as monotheists in the Jewish tradition, despite the obvious plurality of the Christian’s divine Trinity, plus all the saints and angels (virtual gods) of Christendom.

The surprising essence of Christianity

What, then, is the essence of Christianity, given that this religion has survived by utterly transforming itself from Jesus’s uncompromising prescription of self-sacrificial love that’s antithetical to the progressive faith of secular civilizers, to an appendage of worldly empires such as Rome’s, Britain’s, and America’s? Christianity can’t be identified with a creed that means little to most First World Christians’ daily experience. What, then, is Christianity?

The essence is found, I think, in the concept of the catholic, a concept that derives from the Greek “katholikós,” meaning general or universal. What’s crucial to the kind of Christianity that’s continuous with first-century Pauline theology and twenty-first century American televangelism is just the art of winning broad religious appeal with sophistry. Paul of Tarsus was the first Catholic in that sense since he confessed as much in 1 Corinthians 9:19–23, where he said,

Though I am free and belong to no one, I have made myself a slave to everyone, to win as many as possible. To the Jews I became like a Jew, to win the Jews. To those under the law I became like one under the law (though I myself am not under the law), so as to win those under the law. To those not having the law I became like one not having the law (though I am not free from God’s law but am under Christ’s law), so as to win those not having the law. To the weak I became weak, to win the weak. I have become all things to all people so that by all possible means I might save some. I do all this for the sake of the gospel, that I may share in its blessings.

What’s distinctively Christian about the Church’s demonization of civilization’s Promethean, secular humanistic ambition is precisely the duplicity of this feigned religious purity. Again, the Church joined forces with secular empires, beginning in the fourth century with Constantine and Theodosius the Great. The Church could bless civilization if the techniques of earthly progress were cast in superficial Christian terms. Perhaps most infamously, the Church blessed the Crusades, despite how obviously Jesus would have been opposed to such wars.

In the late-modern age, Christians can be businesspersons, politicians, soldiers, or anything else, provided that they wear a cross around their neck, say a prayer once in a while, celebrate commercialized holidays like Christmas and Easter, give a pittance to charities, and pay lip service to some theological claptrap about how Jesus was God incarnate and how he died on a cross to pay for human sins. But what makes these practical secular humanists “Christians” is the superficiality of their compromises, their nonchalance in conflating polytheism and monotheism, and the sacred and the profane.

Christians can have it all, in that they can feel righteous in having atoned with God, even as they dedicate the bulk of their life, in practice, to the techniques of Prometheus, techniques which Christianity mythically demonizes as Satanic. And Christians can do this because the essence of their religion isn’t any creed or religious experience, but the casuistry itself that establishes catholicity.

There are many kinds of sophistry, of course. But what’s Christian is the will to be superficial and duplicitous, to have it both ways in the religious context, to emphasize the dubious compromise between spirituality and, say, their religion’s politicization or commercialization.

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