As a New Yorker growing up in the 1980s, I didn’t have a high opinion of Christians. I don’t mean my Irish-Italian friends who were nominally Christian, but what we thought of as the “religious right,” those joyless scolds who took it seriously. Who were they to lecture me about the music to which I could listen, or what my teenage girlfriend and I could do in private?
The Christian Right, it seemed, wanted to control you, force their beliefs on you, knew what was best for you and were absolutely certain about what would happen to you if you were not “saved.” I didn’t even like Judaism, my own religion — I was never Bar Mitzvah’d — and contemplating the dull drudgery of synagogues, Sunday schools and chapels filled me with boredom and dread. Religion was for simpletons, and I wanted nothing to do with it.
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Everyone knows the untold evil that has been committed in the name of religion, and Christianity, from the Crusades to the Inquisition to the Salem witch burnings is no exception. But that’s not especially relevant for those of us in the post-enlightenment modern west where practicing one’s religion, especially in adulthood, is increasingly voluntarily. That is, most Christians I encounter have made a conscious choice to place their faith in Jesus and his teachings. No one is forcing them, and they are not forcing anyone else, either.
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Many people in the west have rejected traditional organized religion, but that does not mean they’ve defeated the powerful urge to believe in something larger than themselves, something to root their experience in the world. I have witnessed this religious mindset often, whether people were lecturing me about “trusting” science, never mind that science is based on distrust and verification, or the hilarious “you are not an epidemiologist” during the covid pandemic. Titles, degrees, credentials, blind faith in the technocrats and appeals to authority mirrored to an uncanny degree the behavior of religious subjects terrified to run afoul of clerical edicts in eras past.
If you dissent from such edicts, you are now guilty of misinformation (the modern word for heresy), and you might be deplatformed or lose your livelihood and friends (excommunicated). These super rational non-believers went along with forced injections at the behest of pharmaceutical conglomerates, and when it was obvious the injections didn’t work to stop the spread, they pivoted to nonsense about “occupying ICU beds” in accordance with the new commands of their church.
We were told we could take off our masks while eating in restaurants but had to put them on again while getting up to use the restroom. And we weren’t supposed to gather in large numbers, except for the George Floyd protests because racism was “the real pandemic.” And people swallowed this because, after all, it was Science, not some kind of primitive, superstitious backwards religion.
But the illogic and abuse of sense-making wasn’t just restricted to covid. The two-plus-two-equals five brigade told us a woman could have a penis, men could get pregnant, that biological males belonged in women’s locker rooms and sports competitions if they self-identified as such. I view these deliberate distortions of reality as loyalty tests of sorts — if you can defend the indefensible, you are surely a trusted comrade.
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My experience objecting to this new merger of Science with the whims of the party has been eye opening. Quite often those who were most ruthless in mocking and gaslighting people like me were from my own social circle — college educated liberals, laptop class professionals, those who use words and spread sheets for a living.
And many of those standing up for civil liberties and personal autonomy were not who I would have expected. Wealthy people who didn’t depend on their peers’ good graces to live comfortably, it turns out, were often cowardly beyond belief. Academia, which purports to value truth and open inquiry, were among the most compliant, in many cases enforcers of the party dogmas to the point of abetting the US government in illegally censoring dissent. Even some of those I had most thought of as independent thinkers like Nassim Taleb, Noam Chomsky and “the bad boy of radio” during my formative years, Howard Stern, capitulated abjectly and totally.
So who was willing to resist authoritarianism? Who had the back of the ordinary citizen that simply didn’t want to inject himself with experimental chemicals because someone in a lab coat said so? On my timeline it was disproportionately Christians. People with profiles like “God and family,” “Jesus is No. 1,” and “Follower of Christ.”
Apparently they believe in something bigger than the State and its power, which is why one of the aims of Soviet Russia was to supplant Christianity (and other religions) with state atheism. It’s harder to control people who bow to something other than earthly might. If Jesus went to the cross for them, surely they could endure the wrath of their employers, condemnation by their government, vitriol by all the good people who knew for certain what was best for us.
The roles were now reversed. Instead of the Christian Right being the joyless scolds who knew what was best for me, they became a bulwark against the indoctrinated technocrats doing the same.
What a relief to have such a large swath of the population so resilient to the corrupting forces of the State. That is not to say Christians are perfect people just by virtue of believing or to paint an unrealistic picture of them, only that when the Big Bribe was offered, a large number of them had the wherewithal to turn it down.
As I said, I am not a Christian, but I am sure glad they exist.