Two thousand years of Christianity is too much, yet somehow not quite enough, argues Shaun de Waal
The year 2000 looms. What are we celebrating, or about to celebrate? Two millennia of Christianity? Or a triumph of marketing in which we’ve forgotten the product but been dazzled by the catchphrase?
Not that it really is the end of the millennium, and not that it really represents 2 000 years since the birth of Christ: that was long ago established to have taken place between 7BC and 4BC. In essence, we’re celebrating a Big Round Number, an arbitrary calendrical cycle, a numerical symmetry, a turn of the clock. But is there something essentially religious in the urge to commemorate such cycles, or is it just evidence of the human need to impose meaning on an inscrutable universe? Is our obsession with Y2K more than a good excuse to join the crush of revellers and party, party, party?
Edifices such as Stonehenge and the pyramids tell us that deep in the human psyche is a mystic awe of the motions of the planets. Sometime in prehistory we linked the seasonal cycles of the earth, the very foundation of our continued existence, to the glittering orbits above. Later we tied the hope of human resurrection, in whatever form and on whatever plane, to such cycles: as the sun sets and rises again, as the planets turn, so we hoped our little lives would not be snuffed out but that we would somehow be reincarnated to participate in eternity.
The underlying basis of all mathematics was the attempt to calculate and thus predict the movements of stellar bodies, to reconcile the cycles of the sun and moon. Calendrical science was the holy preserve of the priests, and it is woven into the very fabric of religion.
As Christianity spread across the West, it borrowed from the Roman empire upon whose administrative models it had organised itself. It colonised local festivals: we erect Christmas trees at this time of year because trees were once revered in Northern Europe. We may even be worshipping, if we worship Christ, a strangely distorted vision of the ancient fertility gods who died and were reborn in a mythic echo of the return of springtime and the blooming of the earth.
The potency of orthodoxies is more secular than sacred. The centuries-long sway of mainstream Christianity over the West is a political triumph, not one of faith. Massacres and inquisitions were needed to enforce adherence to its tenets – those tenets, at least, which didn’t answer what humanity has always asked of religion. We ask that it explain the existence of the cosmos, and that it make our lives easier by propitiating the forces we do not understand.
Christianity, at least, offered the comfort of an afterlife to those whose suffering it could not assuage in this world. In its earliest evangelical phase, it spread chiefly among women and slaves – the disenfranchised of the ancient world. Today, it is once more strongest among the poorest of the earth, having declined precipitously in the richer West. In the Middle Ages, the church was almost the sole repository of learning; now, educated people are the least likely to believe. As the end of its second millennium approaches, Christianity is growing at its margins as it crumbles at the centre.
The conservatism of the present papacy has not helped. Pope John Paul II’s desire to keep the Catholic Church doctrinally static is matched only by his determination to be the second pope in history to bestride two millennia. His reactionary social views (abortion, homosexuality, the ordination of women) have ensured that the church seems ever more irrelevant to the modern world. He enthusiastically supported American capitalism’s assault on Soviet communism, but he turned away from the liberation struggles of his Third World congregants.
Protestant Christianity is in danger of fading into wishy-washiness, though fundamentalists, particularly in the United States, continue to fight a rearguard action against social progress. That is, when they aren’t fleecing their flocks with promises of material prosperity in return for donations.
Christ himself would not have been pleased – he drove the money changers from the temple. He denounced wealth, and propagated a gospel so radical that it was inevitably abandoned by his ostensible followers in later centuries: he told us to turn the other cheek, to love our neighbours as ourselves. He would have approved of Desmond Tutu, but he would have called Jimmy Swaggart a whited sepulchre.
It is not surprising that the capitalist world is undergoing a resurgence of folk religion in the form of a melange of New Age beliefs. Of those, astrology is probably the oldest, linking us to the distant past, though perhaps in fatally diluted ways. The overwhelming taste in this atomised postmodern society is for something tailored to individual quirks – ordinary people invent ceremonies, while celebrities such as Roseanne Barr and Madonna are sudden converts to Kabbalism. Like the gnostics of old, there are those who want a direct line to divinity, unmediated by dogma and clergy. If we want an experience of communal ecstasy, we go to rock concerts, raves or sports stadia.
Still, the spiritual need lingers – in the frissons of the projected Y2K bug we can see and feel something of the apocalypticism that lingers in the human soul. We have therapists to fulfil the confessional need; we have motivational courses to ward off evil and make us feel more in control of ourselves and our destinies. But, as the plethora of recent movies, television programmes and books demonstrates, still we need to believe in angels and similar sanctified fairy godmothers.
And science, which once promised to explain the cosmos to us, just keeps finding new mysteries. We are still faced with our fear of being alone in an unintelligible universe – let alone the task of dealing with the darkness within. We still have to find a way of fitting our brief existences into the vast spans of time that we can calculate, and to which we can allocate pretty round numbers, but can never quite comprehend.