Open Minds, Closed Minds and Christianity
by Colin Bower
(Aardvark Press)
Open Minds is an unusual book. It is not and does not claim to be a scholarly work, although it draws widely and eclectically on Christian and Judaic scholarship. It is not directed at theologians or biblical exegetes. It is an old-fashioned polemic, written in a popular style, aimed at convincing ordinary thinking people that Christianity is a preposterous and reprehensible belief system.
Bower’s larger thesis is a political one. Drawing on the political scientist Karl Popper, he argues that the Christian reliance on blind faith and submission to authority are inherently totalitarian. He has a particularly interesting take on St Paul as the totalitarian and megalomaniac inventor of a new theology largely unsupported by the Gospels. Like communism and fascism, where truth was dictated by political elites, the Christian faith is seen as a threat to the fully free and open society.
Bower’s first line of attack is the Bible itself. In massive, sometimes exhausting detail, he documents the evidence for a large human hand in the Old and New Testaments — the internal contradictions, the inconsistency with known historical truth, the tampering with original texts, the constant textual revisions with the unearthing of new manuscripts, the conflicting sectarian versions of the Bible, the influence of pre-Christian and other Middle Eastern mythologies, the imposition of Church diktats on four centuries of doctrinal wrangling, and so on and so forth.
This is useful ammunition for dealing with wild-eyed, pamphlet- waving evangelicals who tend to accost one in parking lots. The notion of the inerrancy of scripture, that every single word of the Bible is God-inspired and literal truth, will be seen as twaddle by everyone except the most stubbornly purblind.
But it also raises a ticklish conundrum for normal Christians, who would concede, for example, that the book of Genesis should be read as a folk myth. What, in the scriptures, must one accept as literal and historical fact to be counted Christian and win salvation? And which of Christianity’s endlessly schismatic sects sets the bottom line?
Indeed, the fallibility of scripture raises the even larger issue of the role of rational inquiry in matters of faith. The essential message of St Paul and St Augustine is that reason must be transcended in a leap of faith. But if reasoned discrimination has no place, why not make the leap for Islam, Scientology or a hundred other belief systems contending for one’s allegiance?
Bower’s polemic is leavened with intriguing gobbets of information and often amusing asides. Highlighting the radical discontinuities between the Old and New Testaments, particularly in their conceptions of God and the Messiah/Jesus, he playfully highlights Michelangelo’s dilemma in carving the penis of David — Roundhead or Cavalier? To his great shame, Bower writes, the artist left his subject uncircumcised, showing that the Old Testament is one thing to Christians, quite another to Jews.
There is much else that is worth reading here, including a discussion of the Iron Age roots of the crucifixion as a blood sacrifice and of the Jews as sacred executioners — a key source of Europe’s long and dismal history of anti-Semitism.
And yet … one cannot help feeling that the author overstates his case.
His explanation for Christianity’s mass following is that it is a flight from freedom born of the base human craving for certainty and leadership. But many Christians are not weak-minded slaves to the secular arm, and have shown extraordinary courage in resisting unjust authority — the theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer, murdered by the Nazis, being the prime modern example.
Equally, one could take issue with the sweeping claim that Christianity is ipso facto the enemy of freedom. Certainly, the medieval Catholic Church was a totalitarian institution — Open Minds drives home the point by documenting the powers of the Inquisition, which included the right to torture children of suspected heretics.
But because the Gospels depict Jesus as publicly excoriating the establishment of his time — the chief priests and elders, lawyers and the rich — and as ministering to the dregs of society, it has also inspired many of history’s emancipators.
Liberation theology was integral to the struggle against apartheid, but it has many antecedents. During the English Civil War, which unleashed a wave of lower-class radicalism, the Seeker leader William Erbury wrote: “God comes reigning and riding on an ass, that is revealing himself in majesty and glory in the basest of men.”
The fact is that many, perhaps most, modern Christians are harmless or active doers of good. The real problem is the Christian right — the hard-line Romanists at one end of the spectrum, and at the other the fat-cat American evangelists and their local offshoots, including the pious hypocrites of the African Christian Democratic Party.
Their doctrinal differences are less important than their shared vices: totalitarian certainty and intolerance for apostates and relativists, a kind of moral sclerosis, and the view that some ancient scraps of parchment, or the prejudices of a geriatric in Rome, trump considerations of justice and human welfare.
So it is that diehards of one or both stripes can bait homosexuals, even those in stable and loving relationships; ban the use of condoms amid a global Aids epidemic; bar women from the priesthood; condemn poor women with unwanted pregnancies to the knitting needle and the back-street sawbones; and deny those in the agonies of terminal illness the mercy of euthanasia.
Plenty of dogmatic rigidity here, plenty of standing in judgement — but not much evidence of Christian agape. These are the whited sepulchres of the modern age.
Bower is an honest man who has written an interesting book, but he could be accused of failing to concentrate his fire. It is the army of Christian reaction, not Christendom as a whole, that is the enemy of humankind.