Part of my working through my own experience of trauma has been the reading of a number of books, two of which are by Miller, who was a Swiss psychoanalyst. Her best-known work is titled (in English) The Drama of the Gifted Child: The Search for the True Self. She gives an example of a child who asks a question of his parents and gets no response or else is brushed off. Thus, the child experiences humiliation because his parents don’t take not his question seriously. She writes that ‘probably the greatest of wounds’ is ‘not being loved just as one is’ (87). Elsewhere, she states that ‘the child has a primary need from the very beginning of her life to be regarded and respected as the person she really is at any given time’ (6). But, when this regard and respect are not given, ‘one such consequence is the person’s inability to experience consciously certain feelings of his own (such as jealousy, envy, anger, loneliness, helplessness, and anxiety) either in childhood or later in adulthood’ (9). To speak about my own experience, I was not heard and that has had profoundly negative results.

On Miller’s view, if a child does not receive the love that children need, such a person becomes a hostage. The child is unaware that being forced to keep silent or adopting the emotional stance of the parents will result in a loss of one’s own self. Of course, this is exactly how most little children survive. They learn how to cope. It is only later that it will become clear (assuming one does the hard therapeutic work) that the depression or PTSD one faces in life is closely linked to early infant and childhood experiences. Many people never reach such a state because they are unable to connect their depression or other mental illnesses with what happened to them as children. The trauma of later life cannot be connected to the original trauma and so the emotional and physical symptoms seem to have no origin.

One of the problems that Miller encounters over and over with her patients is that they have been so thoroughly brainwashed that they insist that their childhood was idyllic. Further, though strongly connected, children tend to blame themselves for the treatment they receive, as if they had done something wrong and deserving of punishment. Miller writes that ‘if they are aware of having been misunderstood as children, they feel that the fault lay with them and with their inability to express themselves appropriately’ (5). Put more blatantly, children are apt to blame themselves for the mistreatment they receive and not the persons who’ve actually caused the mistreatment.

When a child is not heard or not taken seriously, the child is unable to feel her own emotions. Instead, those emotions need to be suppressed because the child is expected to feel the emotions of the mother or father. When a child is only allowed the emotions expected of him, the child will feel empty and have feelings of futility. Most likely, such a child will develop a sense of rage and anger, for the child realizes at some deep level that something is wrong and that he or she is being deprived of feeling his or her own emotions. In a nutshell, here is the problem. If a child has not been given the love and respect necessary to create a sense of self and self-worth, there is no way that this can be rectified. Alas, for many people, their mourning consists of coming to terms with the fact that they were never really loved just for who they are. Instead, they have been ‘loved’ for ‘achievements, success, and good qualities’ (60).

Miller was writing when discussions of child abuse were becoming more public. She makes the point that, until very recently (and even today for many people), parents were thought to ‘own’ their children and thus able to do with them what they wished. She puts that as follows: ‘what adults do to their own child’s spirit is entirely their own affair, for the child is regarded as the parents’ property in the same way that citizens of a totalitarian state are considered the property of its government’ (74). Miller provides the example of a thirty-year-old Greek man, who had been beaten so severely by his father that he was unable to move for a week. When asked if he would beat his own children like that, he replied: ‘Of course. Beatings are necessary in bringing up a child properly. They are the best way to make people respect you’ (76). Another person, only identified as ‘a Czech author’, speaks of the beatings he received as a child in this way: ‘It did me no harm, it prepared me for life, made me hard, taught me to grit my teeth. And that’s why I could get on so well in my profession’ (77). Miller goes on to add this point: ‘And it was also for that reason that he could cooperate so well with the Communist totalitarian regime’. Beating children has the effect making them compliant, and that seems to be a major reason for why parents engage in such behaviour.

Miller give a long list of possible outcomes from either not being able to recognize how we have been hurt or from the forced denial of our own feelings. The first on the list is perfectionism. Evangelicalism is rife with perfectionism, with everyone trying to outdo one another in righteousness. David Morris has a very insightful piece here on Substack titled ‘The Evangelical Kids Who Never Got to Be Kids‘, in which he argues that Evangelical children are forced to become little adults very quickly. If you grew up in an Evangelical environment, you’ll probably be able to see yourself in his piece. One of the difficulties in all of this is that the love often offered to children by their parents is very conditional, which is going to promote perfectionism. Note that I’m not suggesting that many parents would say anything like ‘if you don’t obey me, I will not love you’. But I think that’s the message that those in high-control religions hear all the time, even though it is indirectly expressed. Miller quotes a patient who clearly had only received a conditional love, who says ‘a loved child learns from the beginning what love is. A neglected, exploited, and mistreated child like me can’t know it; she has never had the chance to learn it’ (51). Miller suggests that the child is effectively forced to engage in self-deception in order not to see what is actually going on. But a child does not have the ability to see that he or she is deceiving himself or herself. I think we should add here that the deception is often created and feed by those in authority, who want us to believe certain things.

In discussing abuse, Miller makes it clear that there are different kinds. It should be clear that sexual and physical abuse can be difficult to detect either by an outsider or someone on the inside. But emotional or psychological abuse is even harder to detect since it has no visible manifestation. Figuring out that one has been abused emotionally is often difficult for it is considerably less obvious. Further, if one has always experienced emotional abuse, it might be so common that it feels like it’s necessary. The mother of Hermann Hesse, Marie Hesse, thought her son was guilty of being defiant. It’s probably worth mentioning that his parents and grandparents were Christian missionaries who had very specific expectations from their child. When Hermann was three years old, Marie Hesse writes that ‘Hermann is going to nursery school, his violent temperament causes us so much distress’ (101). But then he was sent to boarding school. When he returned, Marie writes: ‘He was well behaved there but came home pale, thin, and depressed. The effects are decidedly good and salutary. He is much easier to manage now’ (101-2). What the Hesses couldn’t manage was that their son was brilliant and excelled in so many different things. Here I want to quote at length from Miller’s assessment of Hermann.

Hesse, like so many gifted children, was so difficult for his parents to bear not despite but because of his inner riches. Often a child’s very gifts (this great intensity of feeling, depth of experience, curiosity, intelligence, quickness—and his ability to be critical) will confront his parents with conflicts that they have long sought to keep at bay by means of rules and regulations. These regulations must then be rescued at the cost of the child’s development. All of this can lead to an apparently paradoxical situation when parents who are proud of their gifted child and who even admire him are forced by their own repression to reject, suppress, or even destroy what is best, because truest, in that child (101).

When I first found this description, I had to read it over and over again. It is so depressing to read that Hesse’s parents couldn’t deal with their wonderful, bright son. And it is precisely his sterling qualities that caused all the trouble. Were Hesse’s parents threatened by him? I suspect they were. My own experience in the academic world (and this is not confined to religious people) is that it is one of the most unfriendly places for putting forth a theory that is ‘new’ and ‘different’. I realize that most people think that universities are hotbeds of creativity, but only if that creativity isn’t too creative. Even in philosophy, one is often expected to argue a philosophical problem along the same lines it’s been discussed for years.

At this point, I’d like to turn to her book The Body Never Lies: The Lingering Effects of Cruel Parenting. If you’re a child, you really don’t have the luxury of labelling anything as ‘abuse’ because you’re not supposed to talk back and, besides, you wouldn’t have the category of ‘abuse’ when you’re six or seven, or even an early teen. But you could still sense that, somehow, something is really wrong. Here’s what Miller writes about this:

I call the violent kind of “upbringing” abuse, not only because children are thus refused the right to dignity and respect as human beings but also because such an approach to parenting established a totalitarian regime in which it is impossible for children to perceive the humiliations, indignities, and disrespect they have been subject to, let alone to defend themselves (28).

If you think about how punishment works, it has multiple desired outcomes. But I think that humiliation or disrespect is at the root of the punishment. The goal is to signal to the child that he or she is powerless, that resistance is futile. Long after the pain has subsided, the disrespect continues and usually results in increasing rage. In many cases, the child simply isn’t smart enough or experienced enough to recognize what is happening.

Miller provides the example of a study done in San Diego back in the 90s designed to see what kind of correlation there might be between people abused or mistreated as children and how they end up as adults. The results were shocking. Those who had been abused as children went on to have substantially more severe illnesses later in life. In contrast, those not abused had almost no significant illnesses in later life. What makes Miller’s work compelling is that she is able to provide many examples of how early experience shapes our adulthood. In discussing the development of Marcel Proust, Miller postulates that he, just as many intelligent children, probably thought something like ‘Mother, I am a nuisance to you. You would like me to be different from the way I am. You show me this all the time, and you tell me so as well’ (74). But Proust does not actually say that. Instead, he writes to his mother that he would rather be ill than displease her. It’s this disconnect that Miller is analysing. The parents supposedly love the child, but they want the child to be different from what he or she is.

You can see the problem. Proust does eventually come to realize that being with his mother has been painfully difficult. But he doesn’t feel he has the ‘right’ to criticize his mother. The problem here is that there is this fourth (or fifth if you’re Protestant) commandment: honour your father and mother. That commandment is the only one that comes with something like the promise of a reward: namely, ‘that your days may be prolonged in the land which the LORD your God gives you’ (Ex. 20:12). It’s a bit vague. Is the second part something like a reward as in ‘if you honour your parents, then God will make sure you’ll have a good long life’? Or is it, instead, honouring parents leads to a good and long life? The problem, of course, is that, if you’re honouring your parents to get something from God, then it doesn’t much qualify as true honour. Yet Miller suggests that our excessive emphasis on honouring means that children are forced to give an account of growing up in which everything was just ‘great’. We are unable to give an accurate account of what happened because we don’t want to disobey the commandment. But, in many cases, we are rewarded for keeping silent by a severe illness later in life. I was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis a few years ago. Having spent a good deal of time in therapy (the kind with a couch, not the kind with a treadmill), I can say fairly confidently that my illness is connected to the trauma I’ve suffered, though autoimmune diseases are often connected to other things such as diet or living conditions. Standing behind the fourth commandment, though, is what Miller calls the pedagogical commandment, which is ‘thou shalt not be aware’ (the title of one of her books). She believes that it goes back to the story of creation. Once created, Adam and Eve were told that they could eat of any tree they wanted except for the one titled Tree of Knowledge. Miller suggests that what this story tells us is that we don’t have the right to know. We must remain unaware. That’s how I was raised: who was I to question God? Best to keep quiet, but I was very bad at that.

Miller connects the parents’ demand of love from their children with the command to love God:

The strange idea of having to love God so that He does not punish me for my rebelliousness and disappointment, but instead rewards me with the love that forgives all, becomes just as much the expression of childish dependency and insecurity as the assumption that, like our parents, God is in desperate need of our love. But is this not a completely grotesque idea? . . . Such a being can be called God only by people who have never questioned their own parents or thought about their dependency on them’ (39).

That’s a very strong statement. On her account, once we are able to call our parents into question, then we can no longer have such simple and naïve ‘faith’ in a God who demands (just like our parents) that we love Him without question or doubt.

Next post: how Miller’s thought applies to Nietzsche. I promise that it will be interesting to see how much Nietzsche’s texts reflect the trauma of his childhood.

You might know that I’ve written a book titled Pious Nietzsche: Decadence and Dionysian Faith. Part of the strategy of that book is to show that Nietzsche actually moves from German Pietism, which is almost totally focused on this life, to his Dionysian Piety which is also focused on this life. In other words, the two varieties of pietism aren’t all that different from one another. That book begins by considering the poems and prayers of Nietzsche, who was known as ‘the little pastor’ because he often would begin quoting Scripture or singing a religious song. In the wake of that book, a Nietzsche scholar (I won’t say his name, but he’s the general editor of the Stanford translations of Nietzsche) made a vague comment about people who take Nietzsche’s early poetry and writing ‘seriously’. It was pretty clearly a reference against me (though not just me alone). Even when people say rude things like this, I try to respond in a polite manner. I don’t know exactly what I managed to say at that time. But his comment got me to thinking and so I was grateful.

If you’ve not grown up in fundamentalist world—in which so much is prohibited and so much prescribed—then I don’t think you’d be able to understand what that would be like. Similarly, I don’t know what it is like to be brought up with no particular religion or in an anti-religious household. Put another way, reading how pious and devout Nietzsche was as a child, it would be highly unlikely that Nietzsche would simply drift away from Christianity without saying a word about it. The problem with accounts like that of Young is that Nietzsche’s behaviour is only puzzling if you think he began life in a loving household that didn’t require much in the way of belief or practice and was lax in discipline. Young claims that Nietzsche’s father ‘was uninterested in dogma and held the niceties of theological belief to belong within the privacy of individual conscience’ (pp. 4-5). Young provides part of the text that Nietzsche’s uncle wrote to him in 1862, after he had something like a conversion experience. Here’s a portion of that letter. ‘Jesus Christ, crucified and resurrected and ascended into heaven, still lives and rules today; he is now my only Lord and the king of my heart, him alone will I follow’ (p. 5; KGB I.I, To Nietzsche 58). Young claims that none of Nietzsche’s family agreed with such a position that he terms ‘born again’ because they were much more open minded and thus weren’t religious fanatics.

In his article ‘Friedrich Nietzsche and Pietism’, Martin Pernet provides us with a very different interpretation. Like myself, he believes that ‘Nietzsche’s religious environment during his childhood and youth seems to me to be of vital importance for an adequate understanding of his later writings—particularly those in which he deals with Christianity’ (p. 474). Although Pernet recognizes that Nietzsche’s family (which, after his father’s death, consisted of his mother, his two aunts, his grandmother, and his sister) had varying religious beliefs, he says that ‘what is striking, however, is the dominance of the pietistic-revivalist influence’ (ibid.). Pernet claims that these ideas came to Nietzsche from both his parents, his maternal grandparents, his friends Pinder and Krug, and from his religion teacher Robert Buddensieg at Schulpforta (the very demanding Gymansium that he attended). Nietzsche’s father—Carl Ludwig Nietzsche—was highly influenced by what is usually termed ‘rationalistic’ Christianity.

But Carl Ludwig also became interested in and began intensive reading of revivalistic sermons. Pernet writes that Carl Ludwig ‘went to prayer meetings and missionary events, gatherings which, of course, revivalism had brought into existence. He himself regularly held missionary prayer meetings’ (p. 477). Most of his friends were from revivalist circles and he moved away from rationalist Christianity. On the other hand, Nietzsche’s paternal grandmother retained her belief in rational Christianity and we know that she tried to influence the young Fritz in that direction. Nietzsche’s mother was the daughter of a pastor named David Oehler, who had become friends in seminary with a professor who greatly supported the revivalist Lutherans. Thus, both Nietzsche’s grandmother and his mother have similar approaches to theology. Oehler had raised his family to have a ‘Bible-oriented, lived faith without insistence on dogmatic formulations’ (p. 478). Thus, Nietzsche’s mother, Franziska, ‘preferred an emotional sincere and quiet piety to a dogmatic Christianity based on prescriptions’ (ibid.).

Nietzsche’s father dies when he was four years old. That meant that the family needed to leave the pastoral manse. They moved to Naumburg and it is here that Nietzsche meets Wilhelm Pinder and Gustav Krug, who became life-long friends. Pinder’s father was good friends with prominent revivalists such as Tholuck and von Gerlach. ‘Die Erweckten’ (those who had been excited or inspired; in short, ‘woke’) were only a small group in Naumburg, but Nietzsche spent much time with them. Nietzsche was impressed by the way his friends’ families lived out their Christian faith. But, again, their idea of Christianity, as mediated by German Pietism, was very much like that of Nietzsche, or Christianity₂. In The Anti-Christian, Nietzsche writes that it is not ‘a faith that distinguishes the Christian: the Christian acts, he is distinguished by acting differently; by not resisting, either in words or in his head, those who treat him ill; by making no distinction between foreigner and native, between Jew and not-Jew’ (A 33). You may remember that Jesus tells a story about the great judgment in Matthew 25. He says that those who have helped feed a hungry person or have visited prisoners or helped in other ways have done all that is required. In other words, in that chapter, Jesus makes it clear that the criterion for whether you’re a ‘good’ person comes down to these simple acts of kindness. If you’re the kind of person who does things like that, then you’re the kind of person Jesus wants as followers. In other words, Jesus isn’t asking or requiring theological belief to be part of his community. It’s a matter of action not thought. After all, the vast majority of things that Christians believe were ‘invented’ long after Jesus’ time.

Pernet describes the basic structure of the pietistic revivalism to which Nietzsche was exposed as the sense that one is ‘living in a world which, although it was mysterious, was always governed by God and regulated by Him down to the smallest detail’ (ibid.). As a vivid example of that attitude, this is the prayer that Nietzsche wrote when he was thirteen:

I have firmly resolved within me to dedicate myself forever to His service. May the dear Lord give me strength and power to carry out my intention and protect me on life’s way. Like a child I trust in His grace: He will preserve us all, that no misfortune may befall us. But His holy will be done! All He gives I will joyfully accept: happiness and unhappiness, poverty and wealth, and boldly look even death in the face, which shall one day unite us all in eternal joy and bliss. Yes, dear Lord, let Thy face shine upon us forever! Amen! (I quote this in my book Pious Nietzsche, p. 15; German original KGWI/1. 4[77]).

It's hard to imagine a prayer more in line with such pietistic trust. The prayer is not about heaven or sin and salvation. Instead, it is an intense display of utter devotion and faith in God, one which is highly personal. As we will see, this prayer turns out to be paradigmatic for Nietzsche, for it is a prayer that both the young and the adult Nietzsche could pray.

Nietzsche studied at Schulpforta, a highly respected Gymnasium (i.e., a college preparatory school) founded in what had been a Cistercian monastery. That monastic discipline was still part of the school when Nietzsche attended: it was a highly regulated form of Christian life. At Schulpforta, Nietzsche studied with Carl Eduard Niese, who taught biblical exegesis and textual criticism. Niese was a rationalist whose conception of Christianity was based largely on knowledge, with the focus on theology. Yet Nietzsche’s favourite professor was Robert Buddensieg, who became something like his spiritual father. Buddensieg was a revivalist and Nietzsche attended both his confirmation classes and his regular lectures. Buddensieg was also the person who confirmed Nietzsche, an event that he described to his mother as being ‘holy’ and ‘important’ (KSB I:150). Alas, Buddensieg died shortly thereafter, which meant that Nietzsche lost his spiritual mentor at the moment when he began to have so many theological questions. Pernet notes that ‘Buddensieg had impressed Nietzsche not so much as a teacher but rather of as a person, through the way he lived his spiritual convictions’ (p. 480).

When Nietzsche went to study at Bonn, he intended to study both theology and philology. But he found out that wouldn’t be possible, so he enrolled as a philology student. Among the books he read was Renan’s Life of Jesus, which affected him deeply. Renan’s Jesus is one who is at peace with the world and has no desire to preach dogma or set up a ‘system’. Although Nietzsche later was critical of Renan, the model of Jesus that Renan sets up becomes a template for Nietzsche’s version of Christianity. Another text he read was David Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, which affected him deeply. Strauss presents a version of Jesus that is wholly ‘this-worldly’ and without the usual metaphysical apparatus (no miracles, nothing supernatural). While Nietzsche finds Strauss illuminating, he believes that Strauss is so far from Christianity that he no longer should speak of himself as a ‘Christian’.

At the time Nietzsche was studying in Basle, the revivalist movement was making its way into Switzerland. Pernet notes that the continental version of revivalism was characterized by its passion. Nietzsche was very impressed by the ardent way in which the Basle pietists lived their lives. In Basle, Nietzsche discovered a community of what Pernet terms ‘religious but simultaneously worldly aristocrats’, who ‘saw themselves bound to the pietistic-humanistic Christianity’ (p. 484). A window into Nietzsche’s thought comes from his friend and roommate, Franz Overbeck. A text written by Overbeck, but in conversation with Nietzsche, is particularly helpful in understanding Nietzsche’s thought: ‘How Christian is Our Present-day Theology?’ While Overbeck is critical of Protestant traditions that focus on rationality, he warmly endorses pietism, which he describes as ‘a kind of Christianity that strives, as far as possible, to assimilate the world of its present time to original Christianity’ (Pernet, p. 485; my translation). In effect, the opposition is between rationalistic Christianity and pietistic practice. What marks the latter is its concern with action. In The Anti-Christian, Nietzsche writes: ‘To reduce Christianity, to reduce being Christian to a set of claims taken to be true, to a simple phenomenonalism of consciousness, is to negate Christianity’ (A 39).

What’s important to see here is that Nietzsche’s view of Christianity (or Christianity₂) remains more or less the same throughout his life. In contrast, Nietzsche was exasperated with Christianity₁ and he continually grows to loath it throughout his life. In the next post, I will be examining how the trauma from Nietzsche’s early life ends up affecting him both physically and mentally. We can’t understand Nietzsche without considering his life and the trauma he endured.

Part One

Christianity is essentially a matter of the heart . . . . The main teachings of Christianity only relate the fundamental truths of the heart . . . . To become blessed through faith means nothing other than the old truth, that only the heart, not knowledge can make happy. (Letter to Gustav Krug and Wilhelm Pinder, 27 April 1862 (KSB 1:202).)

The ‘kingdom of heaven’ is a state of the heart—not something that is to come ‘above the earth’ or ‘after death’. . . . it is an experience of the heart; it is everywhere, it is nowhere. (The Anti-Christ(ian) 34; KSA 6:207—written in late 1888)^[1]

If you know anything about Nietzsche, you’ll probably be surprised to read these quotations. Keep in mind, though, that Nietzsche is one of the most misunderstood philosophers in the whole tradition. Note that the first of these quotations dates back to when Nietzsche was eighteen. The second of them was penned only days before Nietzsche went permanently insane. You’ll notice that the quotation comes from Nietzsche’s work that is the inspiration for this Substack—The Antichrist or The Antichristian. Most people (including most Nietzsche scholars) think that Nietzsche was raised as a Christian and then simply left that all behind. But how we were raised has deep implications for the shape of our adulthood. Children who’ve been abused in one way or the other are often the ones in therapy. I don’t think it’s remotely the case that Nietzsche could simply step out of his old skin and step into another. For the kind of indoctrination into conservative Christianity that Nietzsche received would not be something one could simply ‘leave behind’. Indeed, I think we can say that, for the mature Nietzsche, Christianity remains a dominant force.

Of course, if you looked at the citations carefully, you would have noticed that there are four references to ‘heart’ and its distinction from ‘knowledge’. That should clue you into the fact that Nietzsche has a very particular conception of Christianity in mind in these two passages. It’s a conception of Christianity that Nietzsche thinks is the right conception, and stands in stark contrast to the usual definition of Christianity in which sin, salvation, and heaven play substantial roles. At the risk of sounding a bit too academic, let’s speak of the ‘common’ notion of Christianity as Christianity₁ and Nietzsche’s version as Christianity₂. For now, I’ll be speaking primarily about Christianity₁, but the goal of this Substack is to move far beyond Christianity. Over my lifetime, I’ve heard so many people try to define ‘Christianity’ in various ways and claim that they had found the one true Christianity. I’m done with Christianity. Virtually everything about it is not merely false but evil. However, I’m not at all done with talking about what Jesus taught. One of the thrilling aspects of his teaching is that it not prescriptive in a simple sense. Another way of putting this is that Jesus is asking his hearers to think. Even though many ‘religious’ people (priests, pastors, theologians) have taken his teachings and tried to argue for a meaning that is very specific, Jesus is calling his listeners to think about and then act on what he says. But the action is not one prescribed in detail—as in ‘this is the right answer’. Instead, Jesus calls any who would listen to constantly be asking ‘am I acting toward my neighbour in a way that I would act toward myself?’ We call this the ‘Golden Rule’ since it provides a lens through which we can examine our actions.

My goal, then, in this Substack is to put everything about Christianity into question. The philosopher Jacques Derrida can be credited with taking the rather obscure French word ‘deconstruction’ and making it a cornerstone of his philosophical project. Alas, many people who have heard this term think that it simply means ‘destruction’. Actually, that’s the term that Heidegger uses—in German, dnstruktion. By this term, Heidegger means to say that thinking of the past has both handed on the tradition and yet obscured it at the same time. But Derrida insists that the idea of ‘destruction’ is too radical. Further, while Derrida thinks that part of the task ahead of us is deconstruction, that is only the first part. The second part is reconstruction, putting things back together in a different.

The focus of this Substack is to develop an understanding of Jesus that has nothing to do with Christianity. For this project, I think that Nietzsche is an excellent guide. As things develop, it will become clear that Nietzsche and I differ on some important matters. For instance, he thinks that the emphasis in Christianity on compassion or pity ends up being a way to make oneself feel superior. While I find this criticism frequently correct, I think there are versions of compassion that do not have this problem, or at least not to the extent that Nietzsche thinks it’s a problem. But there are so many points on which we agree. To give an example, Nietzsche thinks that the proper definition of Christianity is not pie in the sky by and by; it’s about living life here at the moment. The first of the two opening quotations come from a letter that Nietzsche writes to his friends Pinder and Krug. Christianity is only about this life, not some other life to come. Note that this version of German Pietism is something with which his friends would have completely agreed. Indeed, the milieu in which Nietzsche lived was suffused with Pietism. With that definition in mind, Nietzsche writes that Christianity is the highest form of ideal life and that he has never been against it. But we’ll get to that later.

In contrast to Nietzsche’s conception of Christianity, most Christians think of their belief as being about the world to come. It’s about overcoming sin, gaining salvation, and going to heaven to be with God. That’s the version of Christianity which Nietzsche abhors. He doesn’t merely think it is wrong; he thinks it denigrates this life and this material world by holding up the immaterial world, the ideal world, as the one true world—when, in fact, such a world doesn’t even exist. This explains why Nietzsche thinks Platonism and Christianity are ultimately the same: both posit an ideal world that is labelled the ‘true world’. For Plato, this is called the realm of the forms. For Christianity, this is called heaven. Put simply, Nietzsche believes that there is no such thing as an ideal world and that such a belief negates this life—which Nietzsche thinks is the only life we have. At some point in this Substack, I will be looking at the strange evidence we have that might lead us to question whether this life is the end. But that’s a very different issue.

Nietzsche quotes the classical writer Pindar (not his childhood friend Pinder) as saying: ‘become who you are’. Nietzsche thinks this is an excellent piece of advice and takes it as his life motto. What Nietzsche means is this: become who you are, not someone other people want you to be (or, putting it more strongly, despite whatever pressure they might use to cause conformity to a mould). As we examine Nietzsche’s childhood, it will become amply clear that there were various forces in Nietzsche’s early life that were directing him to be someone he wasn’t. And I’ll also be talking about the abusive forces in my life—forces that tried to mould me into something I’m not. Alas, for Nietzsche, he was not able to see that those childhood experiences would mess with his mind until the very end. In contrast, we now know that trauma experienced in childhood almost always has deep effects on us. But that is a very recent understanding. What normally happens is that adults who were abused end up getting cancer, having heart attacks, and being stricken by chronic diseases (I’ve been diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis). If this sort of thing seems new to you (and you want to do some reading), let me suggest The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. It’s the most up-to-date book on how trauma causes disease in later life.

What I’ll be arguing is that Nietzsche grew up in a world that’s pretty much like the world in which I grew up. Let me put this a different way. If you’re a conservative Christian or self-identify (or previously identified) as an Evangelical, it might be easy to think that Nietzsche’s upbringing must have been radically different from your own. As we will see, that is not actually the case. Of course, my view doesn’t line up with the ‘standard’ view on Nietzsche’s upbringing. If you take a look at the secondary literature, the standard line goes something like this. R.G. Hollingdale, in his book Nietzsche: The Man and the Thinker, says that Nietzsche’s grandfather Pastor David Oehler ‘strikes one as being about as devout and other-worldly as Laurence Sterne’ and that his role as a pastor ‘is not evidence of exceptional piety (or necessarily of any piety at all)’ (p. 3). Hollingdale argues that, just as it was possible for Swift to become a dean of an Anglican cathedral and Berkeley (that’s the guy after whom Berkeley, California is named) could become a bishop, then it’s possible to imagine German clergymen as being less than devout. He points out that becoming a pastor during Nietzsche’s day would have been a way to advance in society. Thus, one cannot make assumptions about the spiritual lives of those who become pastors or priests.

As a basic statement about the Lutheran and Anglican churches, this seems to be a correct observation. However, the complication here is the following. Anglicanism (not the pseudo Anglicans here is the US but the real Anglicans who are in communion with Canterbury) is usually defined as follows. ‘Broad church’ Anglicans are the more liberal variety. ‘Evangelical’ Anglicans are often remarkably close to American Evangelicalism, though this depends on the particular parish. I’ve been part of an Anglican parish that seemed remarkably like the Evangelical churches I attended as a child without major exception: the church had a bar in the basement so people could get drinks after the service. The other kind of Anglican would be called ‘high church’. These are Anglicans whose worship often seems more Catholic than Protestant. I’ve attended one of these kinds of churches and, on the last Sunday of every month, we sang a hymn to Mary.

In his splendid biography, Friedrich Nietzsche: A Philosophical Biography, Julian Young gives almost the exact same account as that of Hollindale. Like Hollingdale, he mentions that being a member of the clergy was a way to advance one’s standing in society. Indeed, that is correct. He writes that ‘the Nietzsche/Oehloers surrounded the children with authentic Christian lives, with unforced manifestation of Christian virtue. This is what makes the ferocity of the mature Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity a biological puzzle’ (p. 5). Given what I’ve already said, Nietzsche’s attack on Christianity shouldn’t necessarily surprise us. Nietzsche makes the distinction between what he thinks is ‘true’ Christianity, which is wholly focused on this life and posits no life to come, and ‘fake’ Christianity, which is wholly otherworldly. Once that distinction is clear, then we can understand how Nietzsche can at one point praise Christianity and at another point can curse it. Here's how Young describes the situation. Even though Nietzsche was surrounded by pastors, Young writes that ‘it would be a mistake to see his later attempted assassination of Christianity as a reaction against a fundamentalist or puritanical background’ (p. 4).

In the next post, I’ll be showing why Young is wrong—and also why Nietzsche is so much more interesting than the standard view would suggest.

^[1] KSA is the standard abbreviation for the paperback edition of Nietzsche’s complete works. KSB is the abbreviation for his complete letters. All references to Nietzsche texts will be to section numbers (which means you’ll be able to find the quote, or something similar, in whatever translation you have).

If one goes back to the beginnings of Christianity—before it even becomes ‘Christianity’ and Jesus is just another rabbi—one might be tempted to say, as Gertrude Stein famously said of Oakland, CA, ‘there’s no there there’. By this, she meant, nostalgically, that what she had experienced in Oakland as a child had disappeared, so there was nothing to return to. But I think we tend to have the opposite problem from that of Stein: presuming there was a ‘there’ there when there really wasn’t much there. Kierkegaard speaks of later followers of Jesus as being disciples at ‘secondhand’. The advantage that secondhand followers have over the original disciples is that they are able to see how everything turns out. Which is true, of course. But there is the opposite problem that we can put like this: over the two millennia in which Christianity has existed, there have been some significant developments in Christian doctrine.

Conversely, what ‘doctrine’—what theological belief—was there to believe when Jesus was actively teaching? Certainly, one doctrine found in both Judaism and early Christianity was simply that God exists. Every first-century Jew reciting the Shema would surely have affirmed God’s existence. However, the religion that grows out of the teachings of Jesus is one that reshapes Jewish beliefs in rather substantial ways. The first gospel—Mark, going back to 60-70 AD—presents the disciples as continually confused about who Jesus is. ‘Who do people say that I am?’ asks Jesus (Mk. 8:27). He gets answers such as John the Baptist, Elijah, and one of the prophets. Then he asks ‘who do you say that I am?’ (my italics) and Peter answers: ‘You are the Messiah’ (Mk. 29). Since the category ‘messiah’ was highly contested in terms of its content, that Peter recognizes him to be such doesn’t—on its own—tell us much more than that Jesus was recognized as someone very special. But what exactly does Jesus teach? While the basic message boils to something like ‘follow me’, what that means gets defined—by Jesus himself—in continually different terms.

Yet there is another way of thinking about faith that makes sense of what Jesus means when he says that his followers must have faith in him. In Hebrews 11:6, we read that ‘without faith it is impossible to please God, for whoever would approach him must believe that he exists and rewards those who seek him’. The term translated as ‘believe’ here is pisteusai, which is not about believing a proposition about God but believing in God. It doesn’t mean believing that God exists; instead, it means something like having trust in God or Jesus. In both the Hebrew and Christian scriptures, the verb pisteo never means intellectual assent to a proposition for which there is insufficient empirical proof. Do you see the difference? It’s a rather stark difference. Largely because of the Enlightenment, religious believers came to be described as having ‘faith’. Indeed, theologians often talk about various ‘faiths’ meaning various ‘religions’.

The problem with the term ‘faith’ defined in this way is that it is can only ever be an inferior version of knowledge. The rise of the Enlightenment came about during the time the physical sciences came to be celebrated as the one true path to knowing. And the very notion of ‘Enlightenment’ implied that those poor saps in the Middle Ages lived in intellectual darkness. Of course, this means that empirical knowledge—the kind that’s based on our five senses—comes out looking quite superior to mere ‘faith’, since ‘faith’ usually gets defined as belief with little or no evidence. This is why we talk about science as giving us knowledge whereas religion merely gives us ‘faith’—beliefs that have very little basis. But, when Jesus talks about ‘faith’, he doesn’t mean that. He's not talking about believing something without much evidence. Instead, as Wilfred Cantwell Smith points out (in his book The Meaning and End of Religion), to have faith in Jesus means ‘to hold dear’ or ‘to be loyal to’ or ‘to value highly’—or, simply, ‘to love’ Jesus. For Jesus’ disciples to believe in him, they would certainly have had to believe that he existed; that would have been a necessary but not a sufficient condition. However, their belief in Jesus was not a commitment to a proposition but a commitment to him. To follow Jesus meant choosing a way of being and the choice here was whether to follow Jesus. Let me add a further aspect that may help clear up this confusion. When the translators of the King James Bible were forced to render certain Greek terms in English, they came up against a problem. The word translated as ‘faith’ (pisteo) is both a verb and a noun. In other words, Jesus asks his followers to ‘faith him’, which makes no sense in English but is perfectly clear in Greek. ‘Have faith in me’ is how we would say this in English. But, unfortunately, the translators chose the term ‘belief’ and that seems to imply theoretical commitments.

Let me quote from someone who might not seem to fit in this discussion: Alvin Plantinga. While Plantinga’s work has focused on belief—justified, true belief—he makes it clear that belief is not the only thing at issue. Consider this passage from James 2:19: ‘You believe that God is one; you do well. Even the demons believe—and shudder’. The difference, says Plantinga, is one of affections: the believer believes but also loves God. Plantinga is exactly right on this point. These affections and these beliefs are formed, nurtured, and put in action by Christian liturgy. But I think the affections are more fundamental than the beliefs. As far as I can tell, that is the clear message of the book of James.

Or consider this statement: ‘Christianity is not an intellectual system, a collection of dogmas, or a moralism. Christianity is instead an encounter, a love story; it is an event’. That quotation comes from someone one might not expect: Cardinal Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict. Given Benedict’s nickname while Cardinal—God’s Rottweiler—it is safe to conclude that this statement could hardly mean that doctrine or dogma is unimportant. His time as Cardinal Prefect at the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith (1981-2005) was marked by a vigorous defense of the faith and denunciation of many for their heretical views. So, at least in his case, there is nothing like a ‘choice’ between ‘lived’ theology and what we might call ‘academic’ or ‘speculative’ theology. Instead, it becomes a question of emphasis or primacy: namely, what really is the driving force behind Christianity?

Benedict is right that Christianity is an encounter and love story, which can only be understood by doing and being. It is not incidental that Benedict’s first encyclical is Deus caritas est, which begins as follows:

“God is love, and he who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him” (1 Jn. 4:16). These words from the First Letter of John express with remarkable clarity the heart of the Christian faith . . . . Saint John also offers a kind of summary of the Christian life: ‘We have come to know and to believe in the love God has for us’.

Liturgy that simultaneously relates us to God and to our neighbour and community is more fundamental to Christian faith than that of dogma, both historically and logically. I will follow that order—history and logic—by first sketching out the earliest days of Christian history and then turn to the logic of liturgy and doctrine. Working out the all of the implications of the thesis that liturgy is primary to Christianity is a task that that I can only begin here.

However, before going any further, I need to make clear that my thesis does not boil down to something as simple as ‘practice is more fundamental than theory’. The reason for this is simple: I do not believe that the practice/theory distinction can hold in any strong sense. There is no practice without theory or theory without practice. So any attempt to separate them into independent parts is impossible. Aristotle is the first to make a distinction between theoria and praxis, and it is a useful distinction—at least to some extent. The problem with the distinction, though, is that it could imply that there either is or could be something like a theoria divorced from praxis or a praxis divorced from theoria. Aristotle never makes such a claim. Neither do I. For instance, theoria is something we do, making it ultimately a form of praxis. Put otherwise, thinking about God and making arguments for God’s existence are practices. Even believing in Jesus is something that we do. Thus, there can be no simple distinction between theory and practice or belief and practice.

In saying that ‘liturgy’ is primary for Christians, I am saying that lived out beliefs have a primacy over beliefs found in catechisms and creeds. Here it’s important for you to understand at whom such a comment is directed. The subdiscipline known as Philosophy of Religion is almost completely concerned with explaining doctrines, providing arguments for God’s existence, and examining the problem of evil (namely, why a good God would allow evil to exist). It doesn’t take much observation to realise that Philosophy of Religion is more or less Philosophy of Christianity. The God who gets defended looks remarkably like the Christian God. Sure, the other monotheisms—Judaism and Islam—are also implicated in this discussion. But the actual history of the development of the subdiscipline of philosophy of religion shows us that it develops not merely specifically from Christianity but even more specifically from ProtestantChristianity. That’s the reason that most of it is concerned with beliefs. While there are Roman Catholic philosophers of religion, philosophy of religion still has little room for or interest in practices like prayer, meditation, and attending church. The main reason for this exclusion is that, from a Protestant point of view, having the right practices isn’t nearly as important as having the right beliefs. The Protestant bias comes out in the sense that practices are seen as not all that rational. Yet anthropologists have made it clear that religious practices across the world are not merely rote, irrational, and meaningless. Practices always embody theory. They are ways of knowing. My point is that theory is dependent upon practice for its meaning. By saying that liturgy is the primary element of Christian life, I am saying that it is more basic to Christianity than official statements of belief found in creeds and catechisms. Or, put differently, how we interpret creeds and catechisms is always in light of liturgical experience. Put even more strongly, when liturgical practice is at odds with creeds and doctrines, those either implicitly change (we interpret them in a different way) or they are explicitly amended to reflect the liturgical life of believers.

Consider the following point: to follow Jesus was originally designated as being part of ‘the way’. Jesus identifies himself as ‘he hodos’—the way—in Jn.14:6. In Acts 9:2, Luke tells us that Saul was looking for anyone ‘who belonged to the Way [tes hodou]’ (NRSV, capitals in the translation). What, though, is the meaning of this term ‘hodos’? In short, it has a very concrete meaning—in which it can mean such things as road, path, journey, expedition, and way. Yet it likewise has a much richer, metaphorical meaning as the sense of life’s direction or motivation.

When Jesus asks the twelve, ‘Do you also wish to go away?’ Simon Peter answers, ‘Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life’ (Jn. 6:67-68). In effect, Jesus is saying: are you going to follow me? Have you thrown in your lot with me? With some rather significant lapses along the way, they did follow him. So then what? In his classic study on early Christianity, Wayne A. Meeks points out that the church’s ‘beginnings and earliest growth remain in many respects mysterious’ (The First Urban Christians, 1). We don’t know all that much about what exactly Christians believed in these early years, though we do know that beliefs varied widely and that many early beliefs came to be seen as heretical, even though it often took decades or centuries for a specific belief to be identified as a heresy. For instance, church historians now think that most followers of Jesus in the first century AD were Docetists—that is, they believed that Jesus didn’t have a normal material body like the rest of us. The name for this view comes from the Greek term ‘dokein’, which means ‘to seem’, as in ‘it seemed Jesus had a normal human body’. While the exact beliefs of Docetists varied, many of them did not believe that Jesus was ‘actually’ crucified and resurrected.

Further, it was not as if those early followers of Jesus had no doctrines at all, since they were Jews and would have faithfully gone to Temple just as Jesus himself did. All that Jesus taught them was set within a Jewish context of belief. For them to recognize him as Messiah required a thoroughly Jewish context. Yet, even in the years depicted in the book of Acts, that Jewish context is already changing. Certainly, the vast system of doctrines that came to be part of Christianity over centuries simply did not exist for the early church, which means that there was no way in which they could have believed them. What propositional content could the thief on the cross have had about Jesus? He simply says: ‘Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom’ (Lk. 23:41).

Even with little explicitly ‘Christian’ doctrine, the early Christians had liturgy—a way of being. The best account of the very early church comes from Acts 2. That chapter begins with the story of Pentecost, in which 3,000 converts were reportedly baptized. Then Peter preaches a sermon in which he says that Jesus is Lord and Messiah and that in order to follow him they need to change their direction in life, be baptized, and be filled with the Spirit. He tells his astounded listeners that Jesus forgives sins, that he is God’s son, and that he had risen from the dead. These teachings would have been the propositional backbone of early Christian liturgy—and one can say that they are still an encapsulation of basic Christian belief. Which is to say that liturgy needs some kind of beliefs in order to function. But, you might be asking, what is liturgy? The term comes from the Greek ‘leitourgia’ [a compound of leito=public—from laos=people and ergos=working or service]. The usual translation of this term is ‘the work of the people’, though the translations ‘public service’ or ‘public works’ are much more accurate. What was this work? Originally, it was the wealthy people of Athens providing funding for sporting events, banquets, and religious ceremonies. Such persons were called ‘liturgists’ [leitourgoi].

Given that ancient Greece was thoroughly religious, one’s service was by definition a religious service. This broad sense of liturgy is likewise to be found in the Christian scriptures. Variants of ‘liturgy’ are used to describe such actions as ‘ministering’ or ‘ministry’, along with ‘service’ and ‘serving’. For instance, Paul praises the Philippians for their ministry [leitourgias] to him (Ph. 2:30) and the Corinthians for their financial leitourgias (II Cor. 9:12). Luke at one point uses the term in a way that’s closer to the way it is use today, for he describes the church in Antioch as ‘worshipping [leitourgountôn] God’ (Acts 13:2). But what exactly was this ‘worshiping God’? If we go back to that account in Acts 2, we find that these early followers of Jesus ‘devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of bread and the prayers’ (Acts 2:44). But their ‘liturgy’ doesn’t end there. We are also told that ‘all who believed were together and had all things in common’, that they ‘spent much time together in the temple’, and that ‘they broke bread at home and ate their food with glad and generous hearts, praising God and having the good will of all the people’ (Acts 2:44, 46-7). What is striking about Luke’s account is that he doesn’t make any distinction between what we today would consider the ‘worship service’ bits and the ‘serving the community’ bits. Or, better put, all of this together constitutes their worship. Spending time in the temple, breaking bread together, and sharing things in common are all part of their liturgy.

One of the reasons for examining the birth of Christianity is that we can see how Christian theology grows out of liturgical experience. Of course, theology is itself a liturgical practice. In this respect, the term ‘orthodox’ [orthos + doxa] is instructive. In ancient Greek, doxa had to do with belief or opinion. But, in the Septuagint (the translation of the Old Testament or Hebrew Bible into Greek), doxa is used to translate the Hebrew word for glory. So ‘orthodoxy’ takes on a dual meaning, both proper belief and proper praise. In the Christian scriptures, these meanings are totally intertwined: doxa always means a good opinion of someone that results in honor, praise, and worship.

Let me provide a concrete example of how liturgy leads to theology. With the conversions of Barnabas and Paul, the faith spread considerably wider and this expansion required a new conception of liturgy and a new ethnic conception of who could be included in the ekklêsia. The problem was entirely practical and entirely theological. As long as Christianity remained simply a Jewish sect, being part of it required taking up Jewish practice. However, when Paul proclaims that ‘there is no longer Jew or Greek’ (Gal. 3:28), he makes possible a new liturgical identity and practice. Greek converts would not be required to engage in classic Jewish rites (such as circumcision) nor abstain from eating foods forbidden to Jews. Of course, this transition from Jewish sect to world religion does not come without a fight. Even after Peter’s vision in which he comes to see that the euangelion was for Gentiles as well as Jews (Acts 10), some Jews in Jerusalem still insisted that Gentile converts needed to observe Hebrew customs. Yet Paul responds that there is a fundamental difference between following Torah and following the euangelion. To follow the latter is to be freed from the former. Is this reversal on Paul’s part ‘theology’? Of course. But it grows out of a liturgical context—the very real existential problem of Jews and Gentiles worshipping together and asking which Jewish customs Gentiles would need to follow to be part of the community. It would not be difficult to analyse various Christian doctrines to show how they grow out of liturgical practice—how worshipping Jesus as Lord must inevitably lead to questions about divinity and humanity.

The Primacy of Practice

Here it’s helpful to turn to the interaction between a philosopher who writes on liturgy and a specialist on ritual. Terrence Cuneo writes: ‘Christianity comes in many varieties, and not all are all belief-centered . . . . This is certainly true of various forms of the Roman Catholic, Anglican, and Mennonite traditions, for example—and might also be true of so-called non-liturgical traditions such as Quakerism’. He goes on to say that his tradition, Eastern Christianity, is particularly orthopraxic in nature and that it ‘has much in common with Bell’s description of Judaism and Islam’ [both of which Bell identifies as largely concerned with practice]. We’ll come back to this shortly. More important, Cuneo recognizes the following:

For Eastern Christians, the liturgy functions as the centerpiece of the Christian way of life. It is the paradigmatic expression of the tradition’s mind—the sense of the term ‘mind’ referring not simply or even primarily to various doctrines or claims but also to ways of conducting oneself and viewing the world, whose rich character and significance might be difficult and perhaps impossible to capture in wholly propositional terms. (Ritualized Faith, 19)

While I think what Cuneo says applies to far more of Christianity than simply Eastern Christians, I see three important points in this quotation. First, Cuneo rightly gets that Christianity is first and foremost a way of life. It’s about one’s very being. Second, liturgy is not primarily about affirming a set of doctrines but about ways of seeing and being in the world, which would clearly include doctrines but not have them as a primary focal point. Third, and closely connected to the second point, liturgical practices are central to the ‘mind’ of the Christian—they are ways of knowing that perhaps cannot be reducible to propositions, even though the church has always worked to explain its liturgical practices by way of theological beliefs.

While Cuneo speaks of liturgy as ‘ways of conducting oneself and viewing the world’, his book still ends up talking mainly about what we do on Sunday morning, albeit something that in Eastern Christianity lasts quite considerably longer than an hour. However, our conception of liturgy needs to be expanded from a few hours to each and every day. In trying to think about how such a broader conception of liturgy might go, it is helpful to follow the distinction made by two Episcopal priests regarding what they call two kinds of liturgy. They speak of ‘intensive liturgy’ as ‘what happens when Christians assemble to worship God’. In contrast, ‘extensive liturgy’ is ‘what happens when Christians leave the assembly to conduct their daily affairs’. Of course, they immediately qualify this distinction by saying that ‘the two types are mutually dependent’. In fact, they are so dependent that one cannot be thought without the other. Intensive liturgy alone results in what my Southern Baptist friends in Texas called ‘Sunday Christians’ (not meant as a compliment). Conversely, extensive liturgy alone would result in lone individuals divorced from the kind of community needed to sustain them. Thus, ‘as our intensive liturgies drive us into the world to do our extensive liturgies, so our extensive liturgies bring us back week by week to the Christian assembly’. (Liturgy for Living, 296)

Let me begin with extensive liturgy, though it will quickly be seen that it connects to intensive liturgy. Central to the gospel is the idea of metanoia. If we simply extrapolate from ‘meta’ and ‘nous’, the roots of this term, we come up with the literal meaning of ‘afterthought’. But the real meaning is ‘changing one’s mind’. The Gospel of Mark opens with John “preaching a baptism of metanoios” (Mk. 1:4). Similarly, Jesus speaks of ‘metanoian’ in Lk. 24:47. The usual translation is ‘repent’ or ‘repentance’. Tertullian insisted that ‘paenitentiam agite’ [confession of sins or repentance] was an incorrect translation of metanoia and many have agreed that ‘repent’ is a bad English translation, despite the fact that it is common. The first problem is that metanoia doesn’t really carry the idea of sorrow or looking back upon one’s life with regret. There’s a good Greek term for that and it’s metamelomai. The second problem is repentance doesn’t begin to go far enough. You could simply be sorry about how you’ve lived your life but not sorry enough to do anything about it. Instead, metanoia is really about a change of mind or heart. It is conversion. To be converted is not merely to think differently but to act differently. Conversion requires a significant change in one’s way of being.

I should point out here that much of my thinking about the lived nature of Christianity is strongly influenced by the French philosopher Pierre Hadot, who vigourously reminds us that philosophy for the ancients and the medievals was first and foremost about living well—a way of life. There were many theories involved in this, to be sure. But the theories were formulated precisely so that one can live a better, more-fulfilled life. Central to achieving such a life was askēsis, a Latin term which he translates as ‘spiritual exercises’. For Hadot, ancient philosophy was concerned precisely with practicing such exercises so that we ‘let ourselves be changed, in our point of view, attitudes, and convictions. This means that we must dialogue with ourselves, and hence do battle with ourselves’. The result of such a dialogue is ‘a conversion which turns our entire life upside down, changing the life of the person who goes through it’ (Philosophy as a Way of Life, 297). What’s odd about all this, of course, is that we tend to think that philosophy is really about theory and that practice is, at best, secondary. If Hadot is correct (and I think he is), it is rather the other way around.

One can find this emphasis on practice in numerous places in the Christian Bible. In Romans, Paul talks about presenting one’s body ‘as a living sacrifice’ and he defines this act as ‘spiritual worship’ (12:1). Romano Guardini writes: ‘The practice of the liturgy means that by the help of grace, under the guidance of the Church, we grow into living works of art before God’. Lest this be thought of as strange way of thinking, consider that Paul also speaks of human beings as God’s ‘poiēma’. While this is usually translated as ‘workmanship’, one could instead say that human beings are God’s poem or else work of art. Indeed, this way of thinking about the human persons as works of art is as old as the ancient Greeks and as recent as Nietzsche and Foucault. Here is how the Greek church father John Chrysostom puts it:

As therefore happens in the case of painters from life, so let it happen in your case. For they, arranging their boards, and tracing white lines upon them, and sketching the royal likeness in outline, before they apply the actual colors, rub out some lines, and change some for others, rectifying mistakes, and altering what is amiss with all freedom. . . . Consider that your soul is the portrait; before therefore the true coloring of the spirit comes, wipe out habits which have wrongly been implanted. (Instructions to Catechumens, 2.3)

But there is another way in which we can make the point that practice is central to following Jesus. The philosopher Ninian Smart has created a taxonomy of the seven different dimensions of religion: 1) ritualistic, 2) experiential, 3) mythic, 4) doctrinal, 5) ethical, 6) social, and 7) material. While we need not be concerned here with the exact contours of Smart’s taxonomy, it does show us that doctrine is a relatively small aspect of religion. If we take Smart’s taxonomy at face value, doctrine is 1/7^th of what constitutes religion. However, if one considers the contours of the discipline known as ‘philosophy of religion’—particularly in the analytic philosophical tradition—then it quickly becomes clear that these six other dimensions have been given remarkably little attention, both in general and proportionally. As Kevin Schilbrack incisively notes:

The doctrinal dimension of religions has received the lion’s share of the attention from philosophers of religion. But the task of developing and defending religious doctrines tends to be the work of literate elites, typically from a leisured class and typically male ... the interest in religious doctrines and arguments is a relatively small fraction of the lives of religious people, even in those communities that do make such issues central. (Philosophy and the Study of Religions, 15)

If we were speaking of religions in general, it seems safe to say that most religions are not concerned with expounding and inculcating people with doctrines. But, even within Christendom, the number of groups or denominations that define themselves primarily in terms of specific doctrines is limited. Further, even in groups that have strong doctrinal traditions, the average person in the pew is either not very familiar with them or else has only a limited understanding of what they are supposed to mean. Consider the distinction Catherine Bell makes between what she calls “orthodoxic” and “orthopraxic” forms of religion. Of course, she recognizes that the distinction between these two forms of religion is a matter of emphasis, rather than a concern with one against the other.

Whether a community is deemed orthodoxic or orthopraxic can only be a matter of emphasis, of course, since no religious tradition can promote belief or ritual at the total expense of the other, and many would never distinguish between them at all. Moreover, whatever the overall emphasis in a tradition as a whole, it is easy to find subcommunities stressing the opposite pole. . . . terms like ‘orthodoxy’ or ‘orthopraxy’ cannot be used effectively if accorded too much rigidity or exclusivity. (Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions, 190)

Most Christians would not even be able to explain the difference between orthodoxy and orthopraxy. Still, Bell claims the following about Christianity: ‘As a result of the dominance of Christianity in much of the West, which has tended to stress matters of doctrinal and theological orthodoxy, people may take it for granted that religion is primarily a matter of what one believes’. (Ibid). To be sure, there are people who think of Christianity as a set of beliefs to which one subscribes. However, most people who identify as Christians would be hard pressed to explain in much detail even the most basic Christian doctrines.

And the reason for that is simply that doctrine is not a primary concern, and probably not even a secondary concern. Christianity, in other words, is not principally about belief but life. If this is the case, then we can ask whether what we know as ‘Christianity’ is really life-giving. In the upcoming posts, I’m going to be arguing that most of what we know as Christianity is not life-giving but enervating. There’s an old joke about ‘Jesus’ being the right answer to almost any Sunday School question. But my worry is that Jesus is, at best, kind of a sidelight in the whole Christian show. In a nutshell, this is my problem with Christianity. Moreover, I do not see this problem as something from a long-ago period of time. What we see in Christian Nationalists is that they reject much of what Jesus says about turning the other cheek or loving one’s enemies or even simply loving one’s neighbours. It should be clear that there is nothing ‘Christian’ about Christian Nationalism. But, if people who claim to be Christians ignore what Jesus teaches, what are they? You can see that the term ‘Christian’ isn’t all that helpful if it can be applied so randomly.

The religion scholar Talal Asad argues that ‘religion is a modern concept . . . because it has been linked to its Siamese twin “secularism”’ (‘Reading a Modern Classic: W.C. Smith’s The Meaning and End of Religion’, p. 221). The idea that there is something like a ‘sacred’ realm only makes sense if it can be differentiated from something like a ‘secular’ realm. In other words, the distinctions between theology and philosophy, faith and reason, belief and unbelief ultimately have a political dimension, just as they did for the ancient Romans, and just as they did for Jesus and Paul. For the distinction is really between the authority of the Church and the authority of the State. The theologian William T. Cavanaugh points out that what was at issue in the so-called ‘wars of religion’ was actually ‘the very creation of religion as a set of privately held beliefs without direct political relevance’. In American society, such a separation has been part of the very bedrock of the social and political order ever since the revolution, though recent events remind us how fragile and problematic this distinction really is. If religion is about the things we take to be most important, how could such beliefs not spill over into the political realm? We are now living in a time in which these differences—which were largely papered over to achieve political stability—are becoming more apparent. While one could see this problem in terms of differences between religions, simply the differences within Christianity itself are already problematic—as current conflicts regarding abortion, the #MeToo Movement, and Black Lives Matter in the United States make clear.

What we’ve seen is that the concept of religion starts out with religio—the belief in something sacred that binds all those who share the same conception of the sacred together. We’ve seen how religio turns into ‘religion’ that first only includes forms of Christianity. Then we looked at how ‘other’ religions came to be defined using the assumptions of Christianity about what a religion should look like. Were those other religions invented or were they discovered? By now, you should be able to see why answering such a question is really difficult. Buddhism, for instance, simply didn’t operate as a religion for Buddhists because they didn’t have the notion of religion and so couldn’t possibly have seen what they were doing as ‘constituting a religion’. It was only other people who saw what they were doing and classified it as ‘religion’. But this point goes even deeper. Even in the Christian west, where the concept of religion originates, many Christians simply wouldn’t use the term ‘religion’ to define what they do. It’s a word that seems foreign. The religion scholar Jonathan Z. Smith has made the point that the concept of religion comes from scholars—it doesn’t arise organically.

But let’s jump about a hundred years from Kant to an event that helped create the very idea of ‘world religions’. In 1893, the World’s Columbian Exhibition was held in Chicago. If you’ve ever heard that Chicago is known as the ‘windy’ city, you might be interested to know that the most likely explanation for that moniker has nothing to do with the weather. Instead, it has to do with how boastful Chicagoans were about their city. That exhibition was designed to show just how cool Chicago was. It was a massive event lasting six months and drawing twenty-seven million people from across the world—given that there was no air travel, that’s an impressive number of people.

The largest of the Exhibition’s many congresses was the ‘Parliament of World’s Religions’. This is the very first formal instance of interreligious dialogue. Although this event was not taken seriously by scholars at the time, it was the first time that representatives of Eastern religions were able to speak on their own rather than having Western scholars speak on their behalf. Despite that remarkable achievement, the attendees at the congress were overwhelmingly Christian, with Jewish people coming in second. All of the religions of India were represented by just one person and one American Muslim represented all of Islam. There were no representatives of any of the indigenous religions of North America or Africa. The group decided that there are exactly seven world religions: Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism. If you consult current world religions textbooks, you will see that there has been some expansion of the category to include Baha’i, Jainism, Shinto, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism. That brings the list to twelve.

Since it is widely recognized that there are thousands of religions in the world today, it is hard to understand why only these twelve religions are included. You might ask: what qualifies something as a ‘world’ religion? If the matter is simply one of size, then it’s hard to see why Judaism would qualify. There are less than 15 million Jewish people in the world. By contrast, there are about 0.5 billion Hindus, 1.1 billion Buddhists, 1.8 billion Muslims and 2.3 billion Christians. Perhaps, then, ‘world’ means something like ‘across the world’. But then it’s hard to see how Confucianism, Taoism, Jainism (and perhaps others on the list) qualify, since they are comparatively localized. As it turns out, there simply is no consensus on what makes something a world religion. It seems to be an honorific without an actual definition.

Does the term ‘religion’ fare any better? Consider this example from the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy in which Charles Taliaferro defines ‘religion’ is as follows:

A religion involves a communal, transmittable body of teachings and prescribed practices about an ultimate, sacred reality or state of being that calls for reverence or awe, a body which guides its practitioners into what it describes as a saving, illuminating or emancipatory relationship to this reality through a personally transformative life of prayer, ritualized meditation, and/or moral practices like repentance and personal regeneration.

Let me start by saying that I know Charles and I think he is a very fine scholar. Yet there are some obvious problems with this definition.

First off, to what extent do religions have a ‘body of teachings’? Many religions are simply not oriented around such things as ‘teachings’ and are instead oriented around practices, which is what Taliaferro goes on to mention. Christianity is the example of a religion that revolves around teachings; no other religion puts that kind of emphasis on doctrine. Christianity is a total outlier in this respect. For many Christians, what makes you ‘Christian’ is that you believe a certain set of doctrines. Moreover, Christians make distinctions between different kinds or varieties of Christianity on the basis of which doctrines a particular group believes. Calvinists believe in predestination; Anabaptists don’t. Roman Catholics believe things about the Pope and Mary that most Protestants simply reject. Of course, we need to continue to keep in mind that this is a particular feature of Christianity that came about for a very specific reason—namely, the Reformation. It’s only when you have competing versions of Christianity that you need to find ways to separate and define them.

In contrast, Judaism, which most people would think is the closest religion to Christianity, places very little emphasis on what one believes. Judaism is a religion of action and practice. The same is true about Islam. Christians assume that Islam is just like Christianity except Muslims believe different things about God. But the reality is quite different. The imperative in Islam is obey. Whereas many Christians, particularly American Evangelicals, think there are certain things you must believe in order to get to heaven, Muslims don’t think ‘getting to heaven’ is about belief. It’s about obedience. And let me add that a fundamental problem with American Evangelicals, and probably Americans as a whole, is that they have remarkably little understanding of Islam.

How about the next phrase in Taliaferro’s definition: ‘an ultimate, sacred reality or state of being that calls for reverence or awe’? Many religions are ‘non-theistic’, which means they are not about God or gods. Buddhism is the largest of the non-theistic religions with just over a billion adherents. Yet do those practices necessarily relate to ‘an ultimate, sacred reality’? In a religion in which ancestor worship is central, ancestors may be taken to be ‘sacred’ in some sense, though it would be hard to think that they should be regarded as ‘ultimate reality’. Further, does religion always have a ‘salvific’ or ‘transformative’ effect? Again, this is true regarding Christianity, but it is less obviously true regarding many religions. Here we probably need to distinguish between something being ‘transformative’ (for example, following the teachings of Confucius could help shape one’s life) —and ‘salvific’ (which implies that there is something wrong with the human situation or the world at large that needs ‘saving’). Yet the idea that we need religion (or something like religion) to ‘fix’ something in the world is not a basic concept found in all religions.

Admitting that his definition is problematic, Taliferro then suggests the following:

But rather than devoting more space to definitions at the outset, a pragmatic policy will be adopted: for the purpose of this entry, it will be assumed that those traditions that are widely recognized today as religions are, indeed, religions. It will be assumed, then, that religions include (at least) Hinduism, Buddhism, Daoism, Confucianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and those traditions that are like them. This way of delimiting a domain is sometimes described as employing a definition by examples (an ostensive definition) or making an appeal to a family resemblance between things. It will also be assumed that Greco-Roman views of gods, rituals, the afterlife, the soul, are broadly “religious” or “religiously significant”. Given the pragmatic, open-ended use of the term “religion” the hope is to avoid beginning our inquiry with a procrustean bed.

In other words, when given the chance to deepen the superficial definition of religion, Taliaferro simply avoids the question. But, on the basis of what we’ve seen so far, it should be clear that coming up with anything like a definitive definition of religion is futile.

Let’s approach this from a different angle. Given the way most people think about religion, three obvious candidates for defining what religion is emerge: 1) worshipping gods, 2) conceptions of the afterlife, and 3) belief in the spiritual or supernatural.

If we take the first, it’s clear that ‘belief in gods’ is not found in Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and many other religions throughout the world. Moreover, even if we could make sense of religion being about believing in a God or gods, what those gods are like varies considerably. The ancient Greeks, for example, thought of gods as physical beings who resided on Mount Olympus. In the Hebrew scriptures, God is said to “walk” in the garden with Adam and Eve, the three visitors to Abraham are called both “men” and “angels,” and Moses is told that he cannot see God’s ‘face’. Although Judaism is today considered one of the three monotheistic religions, ancient Judaism had the same polytheistic framework as other Near Eastern cultures of the time. Yahweh was worshipped, but the Israelites also worshipped El, Asherah, and Baal. Judaism only became monotheistic over time. Even if we could say that religion is primarily about gods, then, it’s not clear what kinds of gods we are talking about.

If we take the second, it’s likewise clear that many religions do not have a concept of an afterlife: death is seen as the end of life and that’s it. Even in Jesus’ day, a major group of Jews were the Sadducees, who did not believe in a life after death. At that point in time, there was a vibrant debate in the Jewish community about what happens to us after we die. I think it is a safe generalization that religions provide ways of dealing with death. But that’s about as far as the similarities go. Some religions prepare us for a life to come; some help us come to terms with the reality that there is no other life. All of them have ways of helping those who are left behind.

If we consider the third criterion, it becomes clear that the vast majority of religions do not make any distinction between the natural and the supernatural. While one might assume that the lack of such a distinction means that the material world is seen as empty and meaningless, the exact opposite is often true. For many cultures, the very material world in which we live is enchanted and is itself ‘supernatural’. One does not need some other realm for the supernatural, so the distinction ends up being meaningless. Even in Christianity, the idea that there is something like a distinct ‘supernatural’ realm only becomes possible with the advent of modern science—which allowed for a conceptual division between the natural world, guided by the laws of physics, and the supernatural world, which is not subject to such laws. For medieval Christian thinkers, the ‘supernatural’ is not some world distinct from the ‘natural’ world.

The present meaning of the word ‘supernatural’—'some force beyond scientific understanding or the laws of nature’—is distinctly modern. We tend to think that religion concerns that which is ‘spiritual’, but even in Christianity the idea that there is a spiritual part of our being that is utterly unlike the material part of our being is a relatively late development. The terms for ‘soul’ in the Hebrew Bible are ‘nefesh’ and ‘ruah’; the terms in the Christian Bible are ‘spirê’ and ‘pneuma’. These terms mean wind, breath, air. They are what make us alive. They do not indicate some separate ‘thing’ but simply mean ‘living being’. There are no uses in either sets of scriptures that denote anything like an ‘immortal being’ or ‘soul’ in the Platonic sense. It is only later in Jewish history that Platonic overtones creep into the Jewish conception of nefesh and ruah. Only in early Christian theology—and quite specifically with Origen—does the idea of an immortal soul begin to be read back into these religious texts. Put another way, Jesus didn’t have any concept of the soul as being immortal.

We’ve covered a lot of ground here. What I’ve tried to do is present what scholars take to be the original meaning of religio and then show how much that meaning has changed. Yet it should likewise be clear that those two aspect of religio—the idea of the sacred and the binding of a community to the sacred—are still part of religions today. For many people, including scholars, the days of religion are nearly over. Obviously, I don’t agree with that at all. I don’t see how any of us can function without some concept of what’s important in life—which we might call the sacred. And, if we consider certain things to be sacred, it only stands to reason that we will see others who have the same or similar notions of the sacred as people with whom we want to associate.But we’re still left with a basic question. What about Christianity is worth saving? Is it time to abandon the whole thing?

However, before answering such a question, we need to figure out what Christianity actually is.

Perhaps you’re thinking: hang on, isn’t this Substack is dedicated to the deconstruction of Christianity? So why do we need to ask such an abstract question?

The simplest answer is this: if we are going to deconstruct something, it’s really helpful to understand it before the criticism begins. By the way, we usually assume that being ‘critical’ or carrying out a ‘critique’ would be negative. But we get these words from an Ancient Greek term (krinein), which simply means ‘to weigh’ and that could result in ‘positive’ criticism (yes, that’s not an oxymoron) or ‘negative’ criticism.

So we first need to come to terms with what ‘religion’ is. Alas, as with so many things, almost everyone thinks they already understand what it means. This assumption of ubiquity of understanding means that, rarely, does anyone ever clarify what they mean by the term. For instance, David Brooks and Ross Douthat, both conservative columnists for the New York Times, often write about religion and yet I’ve never seen either define the term. Instead, they use the term ‘religion’ even when they are merely talking about Christianity. Indeed, even most philosophers—when they work in ‘philosophy of religion’—rarely feel the need to define the term ‘religion’.

Let’s embark on a short history of the term ‘religion’, shall we?

We get the word ‘religion’ from the Latin ‘religio’. The reason why I’m using the ancient Latin term is that, as we’ll soon see, it means something different from what we meant today by ‘religion’. One of the earliest surviving examples of the use of the term occurs in a play from second century BC in which the word means something like ‘conscientiousness’ or ‘being scrupulous’. A person with religio was someone who both had a sense of duty or moral obligation and acted on that obligation. Note that these early uses of religio have nothing to do with gods, the supernatural, and the afterlife. They only have to do with a sense of duty. The original meaning of religio tells us that it is about being a responsible person and responsibility always presupposes a someone to whom one is responsible. We could say that the essential feature of religiosity is ethical in nature. The philosopher Emmanuel Levinas is widely known for his claim that ethics about responsibility to those we encounter.

But where does this sense of obligation come from? It’s possible to imagine obligation based internally or externally. In the first instance, the ethical command comes from within: we compel ourselves to do the ‘right’ thing. In the second instance, what compels us is something outside of ourselves. One might immediately think that what compels us from outside would be God. But there is no reason to think that is necessarily the case. Levinas believes that our obligation to treat other people with respect is based simply on the fact that the other exists. Levinas insists that it is the sheer presence of the Other that demands our respect, rather than some abstract moral or religious proposition. If I take something or someone to have the status of religio, I feel obliged to do something: to keep my oath, to fulfill my obligations to my family, or whatever it is that I think is required of me. That something is required need not have anything to do with a supernatural realm or to a higher power, let alone God.

Here we’re talking about something like ‘the sacred’. I realise that, as soon as I use that term, your mind likely jumps to God or heaven or some other ‘religious’-sounding category. But the sacred need not be a god or a heavenly place. It can simply be an obligation—as in the phrase ‘my sacred duty’. I can have a sense of duty to my country, my parents, my friends and neighbours. On such a reading, not doing one’s duty is a ‘sacrilege’. We tend to associate duties and ceremonies with a transcendent reality. But the sense of duty found in religio is to whatever we consider ‘sacred’. If we say that human life is sacred, something that many of us would affirm, that immediately says that we have an obligation to our fellow human beings. In this sense, ‘sacred’ means whatever we particularly value.

Let’s consider a recent example that helps clarify what it means to think of something as ‘sacred’. In 2012, the Swedish government officially recognized the Church of Kopimism as a legitimate religious organization. Its sacred symbols are CTRL+C and CTRL+V—the shortcuts on a computer for copy and paste. In the Church of Kopimism, file sharing is considered to be sacred because the church is committed to making information available to everyone. That’s right: the sacred of Kopimism is file sharing. Okay, I realise that you’re probably thinking: ‘that’s ridiculous. Religion can’t possibly be about file sharing’. And you might point to the fact that the ‘founder’ of said religion was 19-year-old philosophy student. But I don’t think this is ridiculous at all: if you realise that having information is a kind of power, then this ‘church’ is about allowing that power to flow to everyone. While you might think ‘these people just want legal protection for downloading stuff from the internet’, there is no reason that ‘sharing information’ cannot be seen as ‘sacred’. The real problem is that we are so conditioned to use the term ‘sacred’ in regard to gods and ‘established’ religions that such a use seems, well, a bit crazy. But that says more about our assumptions than anything else.

However, there’s another aspect of religio we need to consider. Many scholars speculate that term goes back to an even more ancient term that means something like ‘binding together’. If we consider religio from this vantagepoint, we can say that religio is whatever connects us are fellow human beings. An obvious example of people being ‘connected’ is certainly worshiping a particular god. But people can be connected by various things: a love of sport or respect for democracy or an urgency to end world poverty. Apart from the fact that we are not used to speaking this way, there is no reason in principle to say that such thinking makes no sense. Indeed, I suspect that many people across the world think of each human life as ‘sacred’. They may do so because they see human beings as created in God’s image, but they may equally do so simply because they consider human beings to be inherently worthy of respect.

What we’ve seen so far is that religio involves a sense of the sacred and the binding of a community together. In other words, we can think of religio as constituted both by what we take to be sacred and how that taking something to be sacred binds us together. If you value democracy, then you will likely see other people who value democracy as allies or friends—people with whom you have something deep and important in common. In a nutshell, that gives you religion. Put another way, you may actually be more religious than you think. Just because you don’t find yourself in an established, organized religion doesn’t mean that you aren’t religious. And you can probably guess where I’m going with this. If religion is about the sacred that binds a group of people together, then you are almost assuredly ‘religious’ in some way—and, most likely, in many ways.

But you might be asking at this point: so how did we get to the place where the word ‘religion’ means something so different from religio? Let’s follow the history of the term. ‘Religio’ was first applied to Christianity around the year 1200 to indicate specific religious orders. The Benedictines were one religio; the Franciscans were another religio. However, the term ‘religion’ began changing significantly around 1500. Sociologically, as long as the Church remained united, it was quite possible to define someone as being a ‘Christian’ on the basis of that person being part of a social group (namely, the Church). One could even meaningfully speak of a country as being ‘Christian’, since the essential properties of the whole could be meaningfully ascribed to each of its individuals. Yet, once the western church (i.e., Roman Catholicism) came to be divided, such classification was no longer possible. To be sure, the very idea that one could determine whether someone ‘counted’ as a Christian by way of adherence to doctrine goes back at least as far as Roman times, when Christianity was first persecuted as a deviant religious sect and then became the state religion. It is precisely at this time (325 AD/CE) that the emperor Constantine brought various Christian leaders together in Niceae to produce a document that defined the official doctrines of the Church. If you think about it, such a move was necessary if Christianity were to be the official religion of something as large and powerful as the Roman Empire. Having a creed was intended to define who was in and who was out. That was even more the case with the Code of Theodosius of 380, which required that everyone in the Roman Empire affirm the Trinity. Those who chose not to affirm the Trinity were beheaded—and, yes, there were actual people who were beheaded because they believed the wrong thing. Of course, one can hardly imagine that all of those Romans and Europeans were thoroughly versed in the Nicene Creed and understood exactly what it was they were supposed to be affirming on each and every line. Further, there is nothing more complex in Christian doctrine than the Trinity. I suspect that, if each Christian had been interrogated as to their views regarding the Trinity, thousands of people would have been killed. Of course, the vast majority of people in medieval Europe were illiterate and mass was said in a language that they did not understand. They had very little idea of exactly what it was that the Church affirmed. Still, they were part of the Church and through the Church came salvation.

However, the Reformation changed all of that. What had been a system of salvation based on being part of an institution turned into a system based on holding to the right set of doctrines. The term ‘religion’ (the English term) was created around 1500 to help make sense of all of the different forms of Christianity that began to arise in the wake of the Reformation. In other words, the word ‘religion’ was first used to speak of differing forms of Christianity. Back then, it had absolutely nothing to do with ‘other’ religions—it was only about Christianity. So one could speak of Roman Catholicism, Lutheranism, Anglicanism as different ‘religions’. We don’t normally talk like that today, though I do remember when I was studying at a Roman Catholic seminary that one of the students asked me what religion I was. I was taken aback—my reply was ‘the same as yours—Christianity’.

With the advent of the marketplace of Christian denominations, religion became—by necessity—a personal, private matter. One could cite the United States and the founders’ unwillingness to designate a state religion. But one could simply point to any place where freedom of religion became the norm in Europe or elsewhere. There simply was no way to allow all of these different conceptions of Christianity to have a part in politics. So religion needed to be rethought as something private, something you believed on your own time, something that you couldn’t bring into the political realm.

However, in order for this change to take place, there needed to be a coherent conception of what counted as ‘religion’. Remember, this is a relatively new word in English and so it needed some kind of definition. In 1624, Lord Herbert of Cherbury published a text that proved highly influential in defining what counts as a religion. For Herbert, ‘religion’ is composed of: 1) beliefs (particularly those regarding a supreme power), 2) practices (primarily about the worship of that power), and 3) ethics (a code of conduct for life that effects eternal rewards and punishments). That was the first attempt to define what made something ‘count’ as a religion. Then, three years later, Hugo Grotius publishes a text titled On the Truthfulness of the Christian Religion, in which Christianity is depicted as primarily a set of doctrines to which one could assent. Given that there were so many different Christian doctrines which one could believe, there arose various denominations and such basic distinctions as Arminianism and Calvinism. Bear in mind that such a contrast requires seeing the various versions of Christianity as being primarily defined in terms of doctrine. Let me add something to that: Christianity is the only major religion in which belief is so important. Particularly in Protestantism, the true Christian is defined in terms of doctrine much more than by religious practices).

But, to get to a way of thinking of religion in terms of Christianity which is in turn defined primarily in terms of doctrine, John Locke’s The Reasonableness of Christianity (1695) provides us with ‘the lowest common denominator of belief in Jesus as the Messiah’. In other words, Locke is saying that all Christians believe that Jesus is the Messiah. Locke takes this to be the most basic belief of Christianity. But Locke’s point is that each denomination of Christianity has different ideas of exactly what it means to say that Jesus is the Messiah and how that belief gets worked out in practice.

But Locke only provides a way of thinking about how the various Christian denominations relate to each other. It was only with the philosopher Immanuel Kant that western thinkers were able to get to a truly essentialized conception of religion.

There may certainly be different historical confessions, although these have nothing to do with religion itself but only with the changes used to further religion . . . . And there may be just as many religious books. . . . But there can only be one religion which is valid for all men and at all times. Thus the different confessions can scarcely be more than the vehicles of religion; these are fortuitous, and may vary with differences in time or place. (Kant’s Political Writings)

Let’s try to unpack this statement. Kant is saying that religion is a universal thing; everyone has it, though there are different beliefs and books that embody it. Islam has the Koran, Buddhism the Tripitaka. But Kant is assuming that, while there are many forms of religion, in the end they are all the same in the sense of embodying this thing called ‘religion’. Of course, it should not surprise you that Kant assumes that the ultimate form of religion—the truly, truly real religion—is Christianity. All the other religions are pale imitations of Christianity. Put another way, the very way religion has been defined has made Christianity the supreme example of ‘religion’, meaning that all the ‘other’ religions were assumed to be pale imitations of the one true religion.

If you think I’m about to go on a rant about western hegemony, however, you’re going to be disappointed. The philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer makes the point that we all understand things in relation to what we already know. So, of course, we are going to make sense of the new and different in terms we understand. The difficulty, however, is that we tend to forget or even overlook the fact that we’ve tried to understand the new by way of the old. It often takes someone else to remind us of this point, someone to whom our assumptions are not automatic and obvious. You might think that someone who reminds you that your view of the world is not shared by everyone is a pest. I would counter that such a person is a gift. To have someone there to remind us that not everyone shares our assumptions helps us put ourselves in perspective. No doubt, this is truly an example of western hegemony. But think of it this way: if another culture had come up with the idea of religion, don’t you think they would have used their own ‘religion’ as the model for all the rest? Today, we realise just how problematic such an assumption is. But, bear in mind, it was only around the end of the 20^th century—that is, roughly 300 hundred years after Kant makes this statement—that scholars started to realise that starting with Christianity as the ‘model’ for all other religions is a problem on many different levels.

In any case, with such an assumption, anthropologists could go across the world and ‘discover’ a wide variety of religions—anything that roughly fits into the paradigm of Christianity. It has become a commonplace that ‘all cultures are religious’. But that is only true because anthropologists started with a western conception of ‘religion’—which is to say Christianity—and then applied it to whatever they saw in another culture as somehow like Christianity. Given the complexity of Christianity, you can always find something in some other culture that seems at least similar. Moreover, however well-intentioned Christian missionaries may have been, they often attempted to portray Christianity as the true religion toward which any indigenous religion has been pointing all along. For example, Jesuit Christian missionaries to China ‘wished the Chinese to regard Christianity, not as a replacement, not as a new religion, but as the highest fulfillment of their finest aspirations’ (here I’m quoting from Owen Chadwick’s book The Reformation). But then, whatever culture is being evangelized, that culture’s religion must be interpreted as some kind of inchoate form of Christianity, something that’s been pointing to Christianity all along. On this view, the problem with a particular culture’s religion is not its form but its content, since all religions are the same in terms of form, the form of Christianity. Of course, I should add that, for Kant, religion has always been about morality—and Christianity gives us the highest form of morality.

As an example of what we’re talking about, when the British colonized India, they invented the term ‘Hinduism’ (the term only goes back to 1871). Buddhism, Confucianism, and Taoism all came into being due to Christian missionaries and scholars who went across the world and labelled anything that seemed remotely like Christianity as a different ‘religion’. Put another way, the very idea that all cultures have a religion is an assumption that only arises in Christianity. Not too surprisingly, those Christian missionaries (and even secular anthropologists who grew up in Christian cultures) are the ones who decided that all cultures are religious, using Christianity as the template for all religions.

However, there is another aspect to the development of the concept of religion that is crucial. With religion becoming a private matter—something held inwardly and not shared politically—there arose the distinction of ‘sacred’ versus ‘secular’. If religion can no longer be taken to be a corporate matter (due to the fact that countries were now composed by various denominations of Christianity), then it must become the province of the individual. One can argue that both the Reformation and the Enlightenment greatly contributed to the idea of the individual, autonomous self—one who is able to choose on her own. Since there were a robust set of competing options in Christendom—and since belonging to one meant that one did not and could not belong to another—the various splinters of Christianity needed to define themselves in concrete ways, most usually by way of doctrine though also by ways of worshiping. A claim that captures both of these aspects might go like this: ‘we’re the people who believe you need to be dunked in order to be properly baptized; those other people think merely pouring water over your head is good enough’. Of course, to many of us such a controversy seems trivial at best and divisive at worst.

But I’ll stop there—it’s more than enough for now. The next instalment continues the story.

Subscribe now

You might be wondering whence the title of my podcast comes. I confess that, in a way, I’m borrowing it from Friedrich Nietzsche. Even relatively few Nietzsche scholars realize that one of Nietzsche’s most famous book titles has an alternative translation. The title is usually translated as The-Antichrist. But an equally correct, and I think better translation in terms of expressing what Nietzsche is trying to do, is The Anti-Christian. In German, Christ can refer to Christ/Jesus or to a person who follows Christ. Of course, Nietzsche loves word play and I’m sure that the ambiguity greatly appealed to him. Yet the basic lines of the critique in the text are primarily about Christianity, which means that Nietzsche is not so much ‘anti-Christ’ as ‘anti-Christian’. Nietzsche is overall positive about Jesus, but his criticism of Christianity is scathing. Nietzsche thinks that Christians have effectively obscured and distorted what Jesus taught. I have to come to think that he is largely correct.

Growing up in a very conservative Evangelical home (‘very conservative’ may be an unnecessary qualifier), Nietzsche wasn’t on my radar. Instead, I was being trained in righteousness, though looking back it seems like a good deal of it was ‘self-righteousness’. I was taught that we Evangelicals had the corner on the theological truth. What a hubristic thing to think! More recently, it would seem that most Evangelicals now think they have the corner on all truth, that they alone should govern, and that only ‘Christian’ perspectives have a place (though they get to define ‘Christian’, which is another reason to get beyond Christianity). But, of course, the definition of ‘Christian’ being used often seems at odds with what Jesus actually taught. I was speaking to an Episcopal priest and mentioned the title of this Substack. He didn’t know anything about Nietzsche, but he had an immediate response: ‘You mean the fact that institutional Christianity and Jesus seem to have nothing to do with one another?’ ‘Yeah, in a nutshell, that’s what I mean’, I replied. My point here is that you don’t really need to read Nietzsche to understand that what Christianity has become is something far removed from Jesus and his teachings. But Nietzsche is really helpful in working out the problem.

I taught at Wheaton College for over two decades. My specialty was/is 19^th and 20^th century European philosophy, which meant I gave courses and seminars on controversial figures like Nietzsche and Derrida. Finding that I wasn’t freaked out by such philosophers, it wasn’t surprising that many students made their way to my office with questions. I spent a lot of time talking through theological issues (which is to say ‘questions’ and potential doubts). In my early years of counselling such students, I would ask if they had doubts about particular doctrines (things like the virgin birth and inerrancy). But it soon became clear that, while they might also have very specific questions/doubts, the problem was more along these lines: how was the whole thing supposed to fit together? Put another way, Evangelicals have quite a number of ‘just so’ stories that are taught to you over time. They become so ingrained in your mind that you no longer even ‘see’ them. Since they are about God and morality and all that is sacred, questioning them seems almost evil. You must simply believe and obey.

I wouldn’t at all characterize myself as having a rebellious youth. To be sure, I argued with my grandmother beginning around age six, usually about theological matters. The response was often (from both grandmother and parents): Don’t talk back! I can’t think of any expression that better characterizes what it felt like—or at least for me—than that. But I couldn’t help myself. If we Evangelicals cared so much about truth, so I reasoned, shouldn’t we be asking questions and trying to figure things out? Over time, I came to see that Evangelicals have not been very much interested in truth, even though they talk about it a lot. They’re more interested in power and money, as well as doctrines designed to keep people in their place. Nietzsche is often misunderstood about his notion of ‘will to power’. Many interpreters (including those who should know better) think this idea simply means ‘to overpower’ and control. While this is a misinterpretation, such a conception of the will to power (in this bad sense) would seem to apply to Evangelicals, who claim they want religious freedom. As always, of course, in Evangelicalism, the word ‘freedom’ means something like “you will do what we tell you to do—that is freedom.” Without going into detail here, I have come to see that Evangelicalism is, not always but often, abusive. Which means that many of us have trauma from our upbringing. That will be a focus of ‘The Anti-Christian’.

Let me say a few words about my educational and professional background. I received my doctorate from the University of Leuven in Belgium and I have sent over thirty students there to study philosophy. During my studies, I received a Fulbright grant, which allowed me to spend time with Hans-Georg Gadamer, who was then the leading German philosopher. I’ll definitely have more to say about Gadamer, but for now let me say that his work helped me understand my own history and, more important, how to relate to that history. After finishing my doctorate, I ended up teaching at Wheaton. A number of years later, I was able to teach at Union Theological Seminary and take two seminars with Jacques Derrida when I was a visiting scholar at the New School, as well as teach at Union Theological Seminary (both in New York City). Some of you may know that it was Derrida who took the unremarkable French term ‘deconstruction’ and made it philosophically significant. Derrida is another person who has greatly influenced my thought. Contrary to what many people (again, including those who should know better) say, Derrida is not a relativist. In fact, I consider him one of the most diligent searchers for truth.

I’ve mentioned Derrida because, at least in the Evangelical world, ‘deconstruction’ has become the default term for questioning or leaving one’s religious faith. Whether that’s good or bad is hard to say, but the popular conception of this notion of deconstruction is not quite what Derrida had in mind. For one reason, deconstruction is not negative for Derrida. In deconstruction, we take the various features of an idea or a book or a philosophical system and examine them. That could lead to positive or negative or simply mixed result. In my case, I’ll be using deconstruction to disconnect Jesus from Christianity. You might ask “how can you separate Jesus from Christianity?” and my quick response would be “easier than you might expect.” But the real task is that of interpretation: to try to read without the lens of Christianity. In one sense, this is difficult, since we read so much of what Jesus says in light of Christian theology. In other words, we normally take doctrines that were developed many centuries after Jesus and then read those doctrines back into what Jesus says. In contrast, I’m suggesting that we need to take ‘Christianity’ and disconnect it from Jesus. You might know that the German theologian Dietrich Bonhoeffer spoke of a ‘religionless Christianity’, by which he meant one that is not focused on doctrine and ritual. I’m not exactly proposing that, though I have found Bonhoeffer helpful in thinking about how to reimagine religion. I’m not going for ‘religionless’; instead, I’m trying to think about religion differently. You might be surprised, but I’m completely cool with religion and ritual. In fact, I think both are absolutely essential to our lives. Of course, not all religious ideas or rituals are conducive to a healthy life, so we need to think deeply about these ideas and rituals.

Nietzsche once proclaimed himself to be ‘dynamite’. Perhaps you’d like to join me for the destruction of Christianity. Shall we light the fuse together?

Subscribe now