Wednesday, November 5, 1997
Original sin isn’t justification for oppression
POWER Claiming humans are inherently evil doesn’t vindicate
controlling regimes
Paul makes me crazy. I don’t know what to make of Paul. But he
is everywhere, although we might not realize it.
You know Paul. He was the Jewish Pharisee who persecuted
Christians, had a vision of Christ, and converted to Christianity.
He converted large numbers of gentiles to the new faith, and also
affected Christian doctrine at its most basic level.
His primary thesis, which he hammered on relentlessly, was that
all humans can be saved, but only by faith in God and not by
adherence to Mosaic law. Oh, and he invented the doctrine of
original sin. One may argue that redemption by faith has its
foundation in the gospels; but Jesus never said a thing about
original sin. That was Paul’s invention, and its influence upon
theology has been vast.
Original sin: the notion that Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden
has been conferred to all of his descendants, so all human beings
are automatically sinners. Even babies, and natives on distant
islands, are condemned to Hell by default; only faith in God can
save them.
This vision of human nature as innately evil, in need of
salvation, has naturally affected all Western cultures. But the
question of whether human nature is good or evil is a fundamental
issue in the makeup of any social or political system. Different
answers to the question of human nature lead to vast differences in
human societies, Western or non-Western.
The problem with original sin was that the notion immediately
made Christianity enormously popular with every would-be tyrant and
intolerant demagogue in the Western Hemisphere. Paul invented the
basis of control-freak Christianity, although it wasn’t his primary
intention. He mostly wanted people to believe in God fervently.
It’s easy to see why control freaks are attracted to the notion
of humanity as innately evil: They are immersed in feelings of
alienation, misunderstanding and anger, of which they are not
aware, because they consider it the norm of human experience.
They feel the natural need for companionship, but they fly into
a lunatic rage when anyone has a different opinion or way of life.
This description applies equally to Joseph Stalin, Fray Tomas de
Torquemada and Pat Buchanan. Suddenly, with the concept of original
sin, control freaks find an ideology that explains their worst
emotional conflicts. They think "everyone disagrees with me because
they are innately evil, but after they are ‘saved’, they will all
agree with me, and be just like me in every way. By forcing other
people to think, feel and live like me, I’m actually doing them a
favor."
Now, before all you left-wing progressive types start pumping
your fist and yelling "Right on!" I’m going to point out that
progressives are often just as bad, but in a different way.
Moreover, just because tyrants and demagogues like an idea, that
doesn’t prove the idea is not right. Paul might be right anyway.
There are good reasons for believing human beings really are
inherently evil and in need of salvation, which I’ll get around to
discussing.
It’s a mistake to portray Paul as the bad guy who messed up
Christianity. He’s complicated and a little strange. In his first
letter to the Corinthians, he writes, "I want you to know that the
head of every man is Christ; the head of a woman is her husband" (1
Cor 11:3). OK, so he’s an authoritarian jerk. But then, just a few
lines later, he follows this with some of the most beautiful and
oft-quoted lines in Christianity, the passage stating, "There are
different gifts but the same Spirit" (1 Cor 12: 4). And then, "Love
is patient; love is kind. Love is not jealous, it does not put on
airs, it is not snobbish. There are in the end three things that
last: faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is love" (1
Cor 13, 4-13). You can’t just throw Paul away, as much as you might
like to.
Still, it’s true that those Christians who needed to justify
authoritarianism have universally used the image of humans as
innately depraved. Because we cannot be trusted to make decisions
about how to lead our lives, control is necessary for our
salvation. If they "save" me, they have done me a big favor by
controlling my life. And if I never get saved, then I am a bad
person who deserved to be deprived of freedom anyway. The belief in
the innately evil nature of man is necessary to justify extreme
social control.
This was the norm of Christian societies throughout the Middle
Ages, a time of political monarchy and ideological intolerance,
when no European nation possessed anything close to the democracy
and human rights that they now take for granted. The mentality of
the Middle Ages has never died out, but exists today in the form of
religious fundamentalism of various sorts. Christian
fundamentalists in America and Muslim fundamentalists abroad share
common doom-and-gloom visions of universal moral depravity in the
absence of strict hierarchies of authority (wife obeys husband,
child obeys parents, everybody obeys
priest/minister/ayatollah).
Then how did American concepts of human rights and democracy
come into existence? The European Enlightenment happened. America
became the first human system to put Enlightenment ideas into
practice. The founding fathers’ faith was that all humans possessed
reason, and therefore differences in belief could be resolved by
non-violent methods. The institutions created by the Constitution
were the embodiment of non-violent conflict resolution. Humans
could be trusted with freedom of speech, belief and worship,
because, if left to their own devices, most of them would listen to
reason most of the time. The idea that humans inherently possess a
common sense of reason is necessary to justify human rights. This
is not the same as believing humans are innately good, but it’s
close.
Left-wing ideologies are no improvement. Communism appears to be
very different from control-freak Christianity, but this is only a
superficial difference (one is focused on humanity’s rewards in the
next life, while the other insists that the masses get their payoff
in this world). Lenin and Mao assumed that humans would naturally
return to capitalism if left to their own devices. This worked out
well for Lenin and Mao, because it justified dragging out their
dictatorship indefinitely. Again, the assumption that humans are
innately evil is used to justify the deprivation of human
rights.
Having said all of this, I now claim it’s all irrelevant to the
question of human nature raised by Paul. Even though this idea is a
convenient one if you happen to be a tyrant, it’s still possible
Paul was right anyway, and human beings really are innately evil.
Consider the sorry history of humanity.
John F. Kennedy is an example Americans can understand. Here was
a genuinely inspiring leader, 100 times more inspiring as a public
speaker than any president after him (with the possible exception
of Reagan). He was also having sex with starlets in the White
House; he approved the Bay of Pigs invasion; he probably lied about
that P.T. 109 business; and he really didn’t want to get us out of
Vietnam. But look at every other leader, American or otherwise,
that you might name. They all had some big weakness. I could go on,
but you get the idea. Spotless heroes exist only in Hollywood
movies and not in real life.
Hmmm. Looks like original sin to me. Consider the society we
live in, more a product of Enlightenment assumptions than Pauline
ideals, a secular humanist culture where we all live in fear of
crime, homelessness, and social and familial disintegration. Every
time a woman, with her heart pounding, grips her car keys in her
fist while crossing a parking lot at night, she is acknowledging
that humans are not inherently good. Our American institutions are
a tremendous success, but our American community is a failure. We
should be open minded enough to consider that maybe Paul was
right.
We, as a society, need a new paradigm. We may have to move
beyond the secular humanism that has impoverished us. If we do
this, what will happen to our human rights? Can we reconcile
original sin with American democracy, and especially freedom of
conscience? Or will fundamentalists use this as justification for
eroding our human freedoms?
If Paul is right, it means that human beings are naturally so
attached to their own selfishness that only a supernatural force –
the grace of God – can break our attachment to it. This seems a
reasonable idea in light of human history.
However, when fundamentalists try to use this as justification
for authoritarian systems, they need to be reminded that
governments are not the same as the grace of God. Governments are
temporal institutions, and their power is physical, not spiritual.
When children are forced to pray in public schools; when people are
forced to stop reading certain books or stop listening to certain
records; if all Americans were forced to acknowledge Christianity
as a special religion possessing rights not enjoyed by minority
religions; such extensions of physical force would be the acts of a
temporal government, which cannot enforce the salvation of even one
single citizen.
Extensions of governmental power may or may not be convenient;
they may or may not make society safer; but they can’t save any one
of us.
If anything can save us, it might be the grace of God. Grace is
subtle and appears in a million forms, and we usually don’t
recognize it when it comes along. But I have become certain that it
does not take the form of power-hungry congressmen blaming
homosexuals and welfare moms for every problem in society.
For leaders to believe that, by expanding their own physical
power over us, they may force our salvation is both un-American and
theologically wrong. It is the most inexcusable kind of
arrogance.
Frank Petit