The Christian Victory

Even the most trenchant critics of Christianity will agree that it is an immensely successful religion.
At least, its early success can be partially attributed to its contact in high places. If not for a
particular Roman emperor named Constantine, the gospel might not have spread as far, and its
roots gone as deep as it has. Indeed, without the wealthy and royal patrons, Bible-armed
missionaries could not have ventured far. And everywhere they went, they never brought the Good
News of the Jewish Messiah without the Bad News of conquest and colonialism. What would the size
and shape of Christianity be on the world map sans the royal force that backed it up? Would it be a
world religion or merely the provincial Greco-Jewish cult it originally started as? Would people have
accepted it on the sheer merit of its theology? Christianity’s endurance cannot be explained fully
through its history. Something more is involved. It is the secret of Christianity’s enduring influence
and success.

The advent of Christianity meant for many people the terrible, bloody and tragic descent of their
native tradition and cultures. People were not merely given new rituals, prayers, and sacrifices. They
were imposed with a new conception of the Divine; an entirely foreign – and bizarre – spiritual
lexicon. For this reason, beyond the mere physical violence, it entailed a greater order of violence;
the assault on the psyche.

As a rule, Christianity first violated the psyche of its potential converts. (For this reason alone,
Christianity may be granted that it is a peaceful religion.) The first order of Christian business was
to disenchant the minds of its potential converts. This they accomplish by assaulting the pagan
Gods, derisively calling them idols. When their minds are rid of their ancestral deities, in the
moment of their greatest spiritual vulnerability, missionaries make the second move: assault on the
soul.

Here it would pertinent to briefly understand the unbridgeable differences between the Christian
and Pagan weltanschauung. The pagan was at home in this world. It was penetrated by the Sacred.
Gods warred in the heavens, conquered the chaos and established world. The underworld, while a
place of terrible suffering and pain, was also a place of insight that heroes could descend into and
emerge out of victoriously. It was not a profane place where sinners and heretics go. The pagan thus
had plenty of room for suffering and pain in his thinking, which he was able to see as natural, and
sometimes even necessary, in the grand scheme of things. Evil itself did not pose an existential
problem because the cosmos existed after all through a fragile bargain between chaos and order.
The pagan, therefore, faced the problem of pain and suffering, which eventually gave birth to the
tragic and heroic.

But Christianity, by affirming an omnipotent, omniscient and omnibenevolent God, created a new
problem with the facts of life, namely the problem of evil. Imperceptibly, the question mark moves
away from how (to overcome pain and suffering) to why (is there pain and suffering in a world made
by such a God). Suddenly, the world is no longer home, but a hostile, terrible terrain teeming with
evil that one has been exiled into, and out of which, if wise enough, would get out of quickly.
Christianity slowly alienates man from his immediate environment, from his fellow human beings,
from the very order of this life, by pointing towards another environment, state of being and order
of life. Man suddenly hankers nostalgically for a life he never had, for a type of sleep that he mistakes
for wakefulness. Those famous words of Marx on religion are pertinent here.

Now that pagan psyche is infiltrated, Christianity can carry out a full scale attack from within. Why
is the world so broken and evil? When the despairing pagan asks this question, he is done.
His soul is ripe for the plucking. And they introduce the dreaded word: Sin, with a capital S. The
world is broken because the First Man sinned. At the counsel of a talking snake, man and his wife ate
from the tree of knowledge, preposterously aspiring to become more than mere naked beasts
roaming God’s garden. (No wonder that Christianity compares its members to sheep and fishes.)

This sin mysteriously flows through blood, across generations, thus convicting all the ancestors. The
soul of man is hamstrung. He is no longer worth anything, nor his ancestors, nor his race. All worth
is transferred to the monstrous, malevolent, jealous God of the Bible who cannot bear any truth,
beauty or goodness existing except in him. He is the exclusive owner of all holiness. The entire
world is rendered profane. Not only does man not have any goodness in him, but he is also quite vile;
in fact, so vile is he that he is already judged and damned to hell. Now, the final and fatal move: since
man is a vile sinner who has no chance or hope of saving himself – fill in the blank – yes, he needs a
savior. That savior is a Jewish carpenter from Nazareth called Jesus Christ.

Now, we may fully understand why Christianity is so devastatingly successful. It has convinced man
that he is a worm in need of redemption. It has convinced also that he cannot change or even begin
to try to change as he is fully in the clutch of sin. In fact, he is so full of sin that he cannot even see
that he is in sin. Christianity is so successful because it does not deny facts, but provides a perverted
interpretation of them. It creates an artificial problem and offers a costly solution. But how did it do
it? It is extremely difficult to catch its sleight of hand. Once the basic premises are accepted, the
situation is doomed.

It begins with the assault on pagan gods, because the gods represent the highest values of the
culture that conceived them. An attack on gods is an attack on the ancestors and their race and
values, which is an implicit attack on oneself. Once the gods are dethroned, you are left disoriented
and estranged in an evil world. And evil results from sin; your sin being that you wanted to become
more than yourself. Like a true parasite, Christianity first brings down the defense system of its
host, which is pride, in yourself, your culture, ancestors and their gods.

Pride, in Christianity, is one of the worst – maybe the most primal of – sins. To find any purpose,
meaning and nobility apart from the Christian God is tantamount to becoming God himself;
insecurity at its most sublime. So the Christian God must constantly belittle, berate and besmirch –
and evil kill – man. Reading Genesis, one almost gets the feeling that God sees man as his
competition. Consequently, redemption does not take come through enlightenment, heroism or
goodness, but through insectival abasement, before Christ, his community and world.

It’s only when this elaborate spiritual assault fails does Christianity bare its fangs and show its true
face. What follows is conflagration and carnage.
Despite all this, Christianity in fact offers chance to man for a little pride. Given how the Bible insists
on the smallness of man’s stature vis-à-vis God, it is no mean irony that his actions can have such
cosmic consequences. Man may draw plenty of pride from this. Man has survived the Christian God,
and the onslaught of Christianity. While enduringly successful, Christianity has not managed to
conquer the entire world, which speaks volumes about Man, with a capital M. The old gods may have
been defeated, but their spirits endure in us, and they are pushing back now.