Do Modern Liberals Owe Everything to Christianity?

The red herrings in David Bentley Hart’s haughty case against new atheism

What do you get when a pompous, rancorous Eastern Orthodox theologian writes a book in response to the new atheists who flourished within the decade or so that followed the 9/11 terrorist attacks?

You get David Bentley Hart’s Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and its Fashionable Enemies.

To give you a taste of Hart’s self-assured tone, here’s what he thinks of new atheists:

There is no serious science in Dennett’s “science of religion;” and there is no genuine moral cogitation or rigorous reflection in any of the moral indictments of religion advanced by him or his fellow “New Atheists.” These are attitudes masquerading as ideas, emotional commitments disguised as intellectual honesty. However sincere the current evangelists of unbelief may be, they are doing nothing more than producing rationales — ballasted by a formidable collection of conceptual and historical errors — for convictions that are rooted not in reason but in a greater cultural will, of which their arguments are only reflexes.

Oddly, though, Hart turns to history in his condemnations of atheism and of secular modernity. Whereas the main point of new atheism was that religious fundamentalism is preposterous, not just dangerous, Hart doesn’t defend the truth of Christian theology in that book. Instead, he argues that everything that’s worth preserving in modernity we owe to Christianity.

So, Hart’s main objection is that new atheists don’t know their history when they appeal to the Enlightenment metanarrative that modern atheism was just a result of Reason’s having won the culture war with Faith in the West. That narrative was sheer propaganda, says Hart; moreover, it was mistaken from the outset and it’s gotten only more outlandish in the new atheist’s retelling of it.

There’s a kernel of truth in Hart’s version of Christian history since that religion certainly influenced modern Western thought, if only in acting as its foil. But what’s distinctively Christian about Hart’s book is the obnoxiousness of its passive-aggressive portrayal of the Church’s greatness.

Hart on Christianity’s creation of morality

Christianity was supposedly a moral revolution that shook the world, that was utterly unique, that gave us not just the liberal’s egalitarian principle of the worth of every person, but the very concepts of “person,” “goodness,” and “conscience.”

Christianity gave us morality as such, according to Hart, whereas the prior pagan religions were pragmatic and naturalistic in contenting themselves with castes based on social power inequalities. Might made right in the pre-Christian world, and Christianity alone replaced that naturalism with a supernatural basis of morality.

Moreover, says Hart, modernity dooms itself by attempting to free itself from Christianity since all that’s left in a post-Christian world is “nihilism,” in the sense of alienating freedom from any worthy moral code. Hart says, “To be truly nihilist, in this sense of the word, is simply to have been set free from subservience to creeds, or to religious fantasy, or to any form of moral or cultural absolutism, and so ideally to have relinquished every desire to control one’s fellows.”

Consequently, there’s no religious or moral defense against modern atrocities, such as the genocides and world wars of the twentieth century or the rapacity of industrial “progress.” The reason we face a modern crisis of the lack of meaning in life, says Hart, is that we’ve forgotten the Christian basis of all good things.

In Hart’s words,

Even when modern persons turn away from Christian conviction, there are any number of paths that have been irrevocably closed to them — either because they lead toward philosophical positions that Christianity has assumed successfully into its own story, or because they lead toward forms of “superstition” that Christianity has rendered utterly incredible to modern minds. A post-Christian unbeliever is still, most definitely, for good or for ill, post-Christian. We live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution — social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual — the immensity of which we often only barely grasp.

Hart even puts to work Nietzsche’s famous criticism of Christianity:

The Christian vision of reality was nothing less than — to use the words of Nietzsche — a “transvaluation of all values,” a complete revision of the moral and conceptual categories by which human beings were to understand themselves and one another and their places within the world. It was — again to use Nietzsche’s words, but without his sneer — a “slave revolt in morality.” But it was also, as far as the Christians were concerned, a slave revolt “from above,” if such a thing could be imagined; for it had been accomplished by a savior who had, as Paul said in his Epistle to the Philippians, willingly exchanged the “form of God” for the “form of a slave,” and had thereby overthrown the powers that reigned on high.

For instance,

Try though we might, we shall never really be able to see Christ’s broken, humiliated, and doomed humanity as something self-evidently contemptible and ridiculous; we are instead, in a very real sense, destined to see it as encompassing the very mystery of our own humanity: a sublime fragility, at once tragic and magnificent, pitiable and wonderful. Obviously, of course, many of us are quite capable of looking upon the sufferings of others with indifference or even contempt. But what I mean to say is that even the worst of us, raised in the shadow of Christendom, lacks the ability to ignore those sufferings without prior violence to his or her own conscience.

Moreover, in early Christianity

we see something beginning to emerge from darkness into full visibility, arguably for the first time in our history: the human person as such, invested with an intrinsic and inviolable dignity, and possessed of an infinite value. It would not even be implausible to argue that our very ability to speak of “persons” as we do is a consequence of the revolution in moral sensibility that Christianity brought about. We, after all, employ this word with a splendidly indiscriminate generosity, applying it without hesitation to everyone, regardless of social station, race, or sex; but originally, at least in some of the most crucial contexts, it had a much more limited application.

What Christianity did was portray God as a slave who called for an uncompromising principle of charity. Thus,

the Christians of the early centuries won renown principally for their sobriety, peacefulness, generosity, loyalty to their spouses, care for the poor and the sick, and ability, no matter what their social station, to exhibit virtues — self-restraint, chastity, forbearance, courage — that pagan philosophers frequently extolled but rarely practiced with comparable fidelity. And these Christians brought something new into the ancient world: a vision of the good without precedent in pagan society, a creed that prescribed charitable service to others as a religious obligation, a story about a God of self-outpouring love.

The contrast between Christianity and the paganism, for example, of the Greco-Roman world was stark, for Hart:

The more vital and essential victory of Christianity lay in the strange, impractical, altogether unworldly tenderness of the moral intuitions it succeeded in sowing in human consciences. If we find ourselves occasionally shocked by how casually ancient men and women destroyed or ignored lives we would think ineffably precious, we would do well to reflect that theirs was — in purely pragmatic terms — a more “natural” disposition toward reality. It required an extraordinary moment of awakening in a few privileged souls, and then centuries of the relentless and total immersion of culture in the Christian story, to make even the best of us conscious of (or at least able to believe in) the moral claim of all other persons upon us, the splendor and irreducible dignity of the divine humanity within them, that depth within each of them that potentially touches upon the eternal.

Consequently, Hart implies, we should thank the Church for having destroyed much of the pagan world, and should even lament that the destruction wasn’t more thorough:

Simply said, it was time for the gods of that age to withdraw: for too long they had served as the terrible and beautiful guardians of an order of majestic cruelty and pitiless power; for too long they not only had received oblations and bestowed blessings but had presided over and consecrated an empire of crucifixions and gladiatorial spectacle and martial terror. The real reproach that should be brought against the victorious church is not that it drove out the old gods but that it did not succeed in driving them or their ways sufficiently far off.

Christianity’s dependence on other religions and philosophies

Now that you’ve had some gusts of Hart’s longwindedness, let’s begin to set the record straight. Notice, first, that there’s no such thing as just Christianity, as a monolithic, universally accepted body of doctrine or practice that’s known as that religion. For instance, the Jesus movement of the first two centuries of Christianity can hardly be compared to the organized religion that later fuelled Christendom. In both cases, however, Christians borrowed wholesale from Jews and pagans, contradicting Hart’s claim of Christian originality or uniqueness.

Hart concedes that this happened in the case of the early Jesus movement since his Eastern Orthodox sensibilities attract him to the Gnosticism, Orphism, and Neoplatonism that ran from some leaders of the so-called Axial Age through the Greco-Roman mystery religions to the Church fathers. In Hart’s words, the Hellenistic period that gave rise to early Christianity was a time when

religion and philosophy alike were increasingly concerned with escape from the conditions of earthly life, and when both often encouraged a contempt for the flesh more absolute, bitterly unworldly, and pessimistic than anything found in even the most exorbitant forms of Christian asceticism. Various mystery religions provided sacramental rites and imparted secret knowledge that could grant eternal life, leading the soul out of the dark prison house of this world and carrying it beyond the reach of the material order’s endless cycles of birth and death. The longing for salvation often took the form of a quest after secret knowledge or mystical power and sometimes fixed itself upon “saviors” like Simon Magus, the sorcerer and Gnostic messiah, or Apollonius of Tyana, the Neo-Pythagorean sage and miracle worker; in every case, salvation was understood as emancipation from the bondage of the material universe. Not only is it wrong, in fact, to say that Christianity imported a prejudice against the senses into the pagan world; one should really say that, if the Christianity of the early centuries was marked by any excessive anxiety regarding the material world or life in the body, this was an attitude that had migrated from pagan culture into the church.

Did you catch that last point? Hart concedes that early Christianity was Neoplatonic or “pagan” in its dualistic condemnation of nature on behalf of God and spirit. Hart goes as far as to say that “Obviously, Christianity was, no less than any other mystery religion, a way of salvation; and, just as obviously, it shared with many other creeds a belief that this world is governed to a great extent by evil.”

Yet Christianity is supposed to have distinguished itself from Neoplatonism or from the mystery religions’ proto-Gnosticism, with the Church’s more optimistic view of nature’s fate. Thus, Hart adds, “At the same time, however, it [Christianity] was obliged to proclaim, far more radically than any other ancient system of thought, the incorruptible goodness of the world, the original and ultimate beauty of all things, inasmuch as it understood this world to be the direct creation of the omnipotent God of love.”

Alas for Hart, that optimism wasn’t original to Christianity either since it derived from Zoroastrianism and was transferred through the Babylonian captivity to Judaism and thus to the early Christians. Zoroastrians focussed their optimism on the apocalyptic end of time, informing Jewish and Christian messianism. Jews modified the narrative of that process theology, by linking the beginning and the end of time in a common state of divine harmony, leaving the middle period as that which must be redeemed. Still, the necessity of good’s victory over evil wasn’t a Christian invention since it came from Zoroastrianism.

Indeed, Hart’s book says little about Judaism’s well-understood impact on Christianity. He speaks only vaguely of “the singular achievements of the culture that the Christian synthesis of Judaism and Hellenism produced,” and “of the ideals of justice for the oppressed the church took from Judaism.” And Hart points out that “Christianity entered the ancient world as a faith strangely incapable of alloy with other creeds, a characteristic it shared with the Judaism from which it sprang.”

The reason Hart downplays the fact that Christianity began as a Jewish sect is that he wishes to contrast what he calls Jewish “particularism” with Christian “universalism.” Jews, he says, were “a people intransigent in their religious particularity, who refused either to have their God numbered among the gods of other peoples or to submit to the invasion of their devotions by foreign deities.” In contrast with that Jewish ‘obstinate insistence upon creedal and ritual purity, was Christian “universalism,” with its promiscuous indifference to local customs and cultic loyalties.’

However that may be, the fact is that when it comes to what for Hart is the all-important issue of universal morality, Jesus symbolized Jews’ self-image of being both righteous and downtrodden. The gravitas of Jesus’s hidden identity on the cross in the Christian narrative was due to the pagan appreciation of how Jews maintained their faith in an invisible God despite their nomadic status in the ancient world.

True, Jews didn’t focus on proselytizing, but the Christian idea of a high moral calling is implicit in Judaism: an apparently lowly person like Jesus could have been deemed one with God only because that’s how Jews thought of themselves: often conquered by powerful earthly empires, but holding themselves spiritually aloft so that they were sometimes accused of being antisocial.

The ancient Greeks and Romans had their stories of the unjustly punished hero too. Socrates, for instance, was also executed by the state, despite being regarded as the wisest man in Greece. And the Stoics and Cynics took themselves to be enlightened despite what might have been their lowly material status. What mattered to the Stoics was their state of mind, not their natural fate which was out of their control. The Cynics practically luxuriated in squalor, comparing themselves to dogs and thus contrasting their higher virtue with their abysmal social status. All of that fed into Christianity too, via the Essene-like, Hellenistic Jewish radicals, as represented in the New Testament by John the Baptist.

But the essence of Christianity’s “revolution” in morality hardly has just those precedents. Rather, this was the point of the entire Axial Age. In India, centuries before Christianity, Jains and Buddhists proclaimed that their inner worth matters more than their lack of material wealth. These ascetics were “poor in spirit,” as Jesus said, since their otherworldly intentions were pure.

Then there’s later, organized Christianity, the religion that betrayed Jesus’s uncompromising vision a thousand times over. That religion was obviously paganized since the religion was formed by the union of the Jesus movement with the Roman Empire. The politics of managing Christendom infected Church theology, leading to the schism between Western and Eastern orthodoxies, and to the fracture of Western Christianity, to the proto-modern Protestants’ repudiation of the Catholic Church for its corruption.

The Christian inversion of pagan values

Hart acknowledges that the Church has often been ungodly. What he insists on, though, are the originality of Christian morality and the influence of that religious conception on modern liberalism. This Christian morality is supposed to have presaged secular egalitarianism, the modern conception of personhood.

Yet this is quite dubious, as Hart should have been able to see from his adoption of Nietzsche’s formula of the transvaluation of values. According to the New Testament, Jesus said the first will be last, while the last will be first. How does that abolish the pagan presumption of social hierarchies? All Jesus did was remove the crown from the rich, unrepentant sinner’s head and place it on the head of the person who is poor in spirit. Social inequality remains very much in play in Christianity, even unto the afterlife in the separation of the sheep from the goats. Again, according to the earliest Christian documents, the separation of Heaven and Hell is everlasting.

It’s telling, then, that many Christians view Hart’s universalism as heterodox. Hart can likely cherry pick from passages written here and there in the two thousand years of Christian theology, to back his claim that Christianity was unique in positing a mystical vision of universal morality, according to which those in Hell will eventually be saved or at least extinguished. But there’s at least as much material in that history to portray Christianity as a mere inversion of the naturalistic pagan hierarchy.

For most Greeks and Romans, for instance, the nobles were pragmatically wise, not world-renouncing mystics. The nobles or patricians excelled both internally and externally since they moderated their impulses to carry out their social duties and were naturally rewarded for doing so. Jesus followed the more radical pagans, such as the Stoics and Cynics, in dismissing that kind of pragmatic success, and holding out the neo-shamanic journey as the more crucial life project.

Just as the shaman leaves behind the material world to enter the “spiritual” one (psychedelic interaction with the unconscious), social outsiders can redeem themselves by acquiring a satirical perspective on life, one that belittles worldly success and lauds those who succeed in some more surprising, countercultural sense. The positing of that latter sense was the revolution of the Axial Age, which Christianity doesn’t own.

It’s worth pointing out also that the reason the established Church left behind the radical absolutism of the early Jesus movement and battled subversive heresies that kept cropping up is that Jesus’s vision was unworkable for a large organization. Only a realistic, naturalistic ideology will do if you want to run an empire. You can tell farfetched stories to mesmerize the masses, but the hierarchy’s upper echelon must understand esoterically (conspiratorially) that those myths are only propagandistic.

This is why Christianity became compatible with medieval feudalism, in which the lords are worth more materially than the peasants who work the land. It wasn’t Jesus who demanded such a compromise with pagan realism or naturalism, since he said we should sacrifice our chance at earthly happiness to please God and win favour in the afterlife. No, it was Christianity’s ideological role in the empire of Christendom that demanded Christian rationales for feudalism, wars, torture, and the like. And Church leaders like Augustine and Aquinas obliged by supplying them.

The secular source of liberalism

The relevance of that, though, is that if the Church itself dismissed Jesus’s radicalism, it’s likely that modern liberals did too, which means Hart’s contention that the liberal conception of personhood derives solely from Christianity is farfetched.

And as it happens, the secular origin of that liberal conception is evident since it’s science. Like Aristotle, early modern thinkers were encyclopedists, or empirical categorizers. They charted the array of natural phenomena and sorted them into species, and they did the same with humans. Despite the racism and sexism of the early modern period, eventually scientists reached a consensus about the key physical features of the human body, namely our brain structure and genetic code. Men and women, young and old, rich and poor, light-skinned and dark-skinned — all are human persons in that essential, natural sense.

There’s no need, then, for Christianity to ground that universality since nature generates such broad patterns.

But I can hear Hart starting to object that the naturalistic fallacy stands in the way of crediting the membership in our species with any positive value, on that scientific basis. It’s one thing to say that all people are the same in having biologically human bodies, but it’s another to say that people have inherent rights. Is Christianity needed to establish that humanistic evaluation?

Of course not, as the history of modern philosophy attests. After the death of God, secular thinkers from Descartes onward sought an independent foundation of civilized norms. They argued back and forth, and the line of thought that won out in the Anglo-American tradition was classic liberalism. People have value because we’re godlike compared to animals and physical objects. We have the freedom to create ourselves and to transform our environment. We have the intelligence to understand far-flung cosmic realities, and the technological power to enact our will and to rule the world.

Hart calls that humanism “nihilistic,” the insinuation being that there’s nothing without God. But that insinuation is unfair since what’s left without a personal deity would obviously be our existential condition of being people in nature. That’s not nothing, and the philosophical search is for principles that do justice to that condition. The archaic myths of Christianity no longer suffice since the Christian’s theistic justification of people’s worth is naïve and preposterous.

Indeed, Jesus’s radicalism was falsified by his apparent failure to have arrived a second time. What generated enthusiasm for the apocalyptic vision of everyone’s oneness in relation to God was the fear that the world was about to end in early Christianity, a fear generated by the cataclysmic Jewish-Roman wars in the first century CE. Yet the world didn’t end, so Jesus’s radicalism was more easily dismissed. After two thousand years of the continuing absence of Judgment Day, that dismissal is easier than ever.

To be sure, there’s no guarantee the search for a worthy atheistic philosophy will succeed, just as there’s no guarantee that secular societies won’t destroy themselves, taking much of the biosphere with them. The search for truth has always been dangerous, as the political philosopher Leo Strauss pointed out, which is why convenient lies are more popular than philosophy. The happiness of well-adjusted members of society runs on shared fictions, not on unvarnished theories.

But even if there’s a social role for myths, there’s no need to settle for clichés. Not only can we keep searching for the truth, without counterproductive dogmas, but we can keep comforting ourselves with fresh stories.

I collect my Medium writings in paperback and eBook forms, and I put them up on Amazon. Check them out if you’d like to have them handy and to support my writing in that way. The newest one is Questing for Epiphanies in a Haunted House, and its 600 pages include 99 recent, wide-ranging articles of mine.