How does loving thy neighbor lead to drowning him in blood? This is the question that Shadia Drury considers in her new study Terror and Civilization: Christianity, Politics, and the Western Psyche. Her attitude is refreshingly direct. The standard line concerning the burning of witches and heretics, the killing of gynecologists, the persecution of gays and the slaughter at the World Trade Center is that such horrors are not the fault of the Bible or the Koran but of crazed individuals who twist their message of love into the opposite. But Drury, a political scientist at the University of Regina in Saskatchewan, is having none of it. "It is time to ask if these sacred texts do not lend themselves to the political extremism, violence, and intolerance perpetrated in their name," she declares. Instead of accusing the suicide bombers and antiabortionists of misinterpreting such texts, her modest proposal is that perhaps their crime is interpreting all too correctly texts that everyone else either extols or ignores.

It is to Drury's immense credit that she takes aim not at Islam, which has gotten a pretty bad press of late, but at Christianity. Although everyone remembers Christ's line about the meek inheriting the earth, she points out that the Gospels are in fact studded with apocalyptic warnings of the terrible fate awaiting those whose only sin is to question whether he is the messiah. "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of hell?" a decidedly ungentle Jesus tells such doubters at one point (Matthew 23:33); "if ye believe not that I am he, ye shall die in your sins," he declares at another (John 8:24). For Drury, such words go to the heart of what is most troubling about Christianity. Telling people how to behave is one thing, but telling them what to believe means invading every intellectual nook and cranny in order to root out contrary ideas. It means robbing the individual of his last shred of privacy. From Christ's demand for complete psychological surrender, Drury contends that it was only a step to the great heresy hunts, book burnings and religious massacres of the Middle Ages. As late as the early twentieth century, she notes, Pope Pius X required every Catholic diocese to appoint a "vigilance committee...to find out and report on writings and persons tainted with the heresy of Modernism"--to seek out not only those advocating Modernism but those who had allowed it to color their thinking. "The totalitarian regimes of the twentieth century were equally preoccupied with the control of thought," Drury writes. "But in comparison to their more successful antecedent (i.e., the Church), they were mere amateurs."

Drury's argument, like Bulliet's in The Case for Islamo-Christian Civilization, is well intentioned but also does not stand up to intellectual scrutiny. Of course, Christianity is about belief--this has been its great strength. Previously, the Palestinian ideological system that we now know as Judaism was all about law, how to interpret it, how to apply it, where it comes from, etc. But Saint Paul, the great innovator of the age, stood things on their head by replacing the old doctrine of obedience with a new doctrine of faith. Instead of requiring Christ's non-Jewish followers to obey Jewish law, he required them to believe, which in some respects was much more difficult. The result was to open a new front in the ideological war. Not only were members of the new Christian ecumene expected to wrestle with others' ideas, they were expected to wrestle with their own. Not only did Christianity expand outward, like Islam, but it expanded inward as well. While this led to new forms of tyranny, it also led to new kinds of self-criticism and to a more dynamic concept of the human personality. This is why left-wing thinkers from Engels and Karl Kautsky to Pier Paolo Pasolini have found early Christianity so fascinating--because it engaged and mobilized the individual psyche in a new way in order to transform society.

Drury is not a Marxist, alas, but an unabashed liberal who thinks that "the religion of Jesus is zealous, immoderate, and unwise" and that, as a result, "Jesus cannot be totally absolved of the savage history of the Church." Rather than mobilizing the individual psyche, she is out to shield it from bishops and left-wing agitators alike--to privatize it, in a sense. But this leads to a curious lapse. Because she thinks that what a person believes is his or her own business, she never gets around to asking the most elementary question concerning the nature of Christian beliefs, which is to say whether they are true. For her, Christianity is a collection of values and effects, some decidedly negative. But it never seems to occur to her that one reason the Church became so oppressive is that it continued to insist on a series of false ideas concerning the existence of God and the nature of Christ long after European society was ready to move on. The problem was not belief per se but belief that was increasingly at war with reality.

• « Previous
• 1
• 2
• 3
• 4
• 5
• 6
• 7
• Next »

• Get The Nation at home (and online!) for 75 cents a week!
• If you like this article, consider making a donation to The Nation.