Christianity

Christianity is a varied group of religious creeds stemming from the New Testament and the teachings of its central figure Jesus of Nazareth. According to the New Testament, Jesus was a divine being capable of performing miracles, but also shared human traits and focused on human issues such as equality, oppression, poverty, and ethnic division. Christianity has historically been the dominant religion of Europe, and often has served just as willingly as a tool of oppression as a weapon against it. With the rise of colonialism and imperialism, the Christian religion was imposed on various other populations around the world by their colonial masters.

For most of European history, only one Church existed in any given place at a time, and its authority over religious matters was total. But starting in the 14th century, the Western Church began to face serious threats to its influence from the urban bourgeoisie and the peasantry alike, and by the close of the bourgeois revolutionary era the Church had been unseated and splintered into an endless number of sects. The ruthless dissection of Christian ideology, from the time of Martin Luther and John Calvin to Thomas Paine and Voltaire, served bourgeois interests at every step.

Major sects of Christianity include the Roman Catholic Church in western Europe and its (ex-)colonial holdings, the Eastern Orthodox churches in eastern Europe, and the various Protestant denominations and splinter groups starting in the 16th century. There are, of course, also endless other strains which do not fall neatly into these categories; cults such as Aum Shinrikyō and the Moonies, for example, could be considered Christian sects.

History

Early movement

The existence of Jesus

Critical scholars have doubted the historical existence of Jesus since at least the 18th century. In the past hundred years, based on historical details in the Bible and independent historical sources, scholars have come to the near-unanimous position that Jesus was a historical figure. However, beginning in the 2000s, online atheist and anti-theist communities saw the rise of mythicism, a theory which explained the figure of Jesus as a combination of figures from various ancient mythologies. Prominent atheist scholar Richard Carrier is by far the foremost proponent of this view. His books have been the subject of scholarly criticism.

Bourgeois critique

My own mind is my own church.

— Thomas Paine, The Age of Reason

The eruption of bourgeois philosophy, known in bourgeois historiography as the Enlightenment, consisted of ruthless critique of existing institutions, especially religion and superstition. Bourgeois critics of Christianity and Christian dogma include:

• Thomas Jefferson, a Deist who physically cut out all text in his Bible that referenced the supernatural
• Thomas Paine, supported Deism in The Age of Reason
• Voltaire: "Ours is assuredly the most ridiculous, the most absurd and the most bloody religion which has ever infected this world."
• David Hume

Leftist critics

• Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity
• Marx and Engels
• Auguste Blanqui: "No gods, no masters!"
• Mikhail Bakunin

Political significance

Nothing is easier than to give Christian asceticism a Socialist tinge. Has not Christianity declaimed against private property, against marriage, against the State? Has it not preached in the place of these, charity and poverty, celibacy and mortification of the flesh, monastic life and Mother Church? Christian Socialism is but the holy water with which the priest consecrates the heart-burnings of the aristocrat.

— Karl Marx, The Communist Manifesto

If Jesus were alive today, he would be a guerrillero.

— Camilo Torres Restrepo

The political content of Christianity is an unresolved issue within the Left. Some of the disagreement clearly stems from a tendency to focus on the idealist Christian superstructure, especially as it appears in the Holy Bible, rather than actual Christian behavior; in fact, Christians have never lived entirely by the mandates of the Bible, primarily because it is often self-contradictory on social questions and largely silent on economic ones. The Old Testament presupposes a clan or nomadic pastoralist society, and taking it out of this context is an act which itself is selective and bound to inherit the reader's biases; the same applies to the ancient Roman setting of the New Testament. Most modern Christians acknowledge this fact and consider their practice to be an adaptation of the historically progressive and liberatory spirit that the Bible represents, a perspective which itself implies that this progressive character can be objectively understood.

Reactionary role

Christianity is the largest religion in the world and the United States. Polling consistently shows that American conservatives consider themselves to be "very religious"; however, American Christianity is in decline in all demographics.

Relationship to leftism

While the progressive forces of the 18th century were overwhelmingly reformist or even atheistic, the 19th and 20th centuries saw some radical Christian groups and figures. The Russian author Leo Tolstoy held Christianity to be inherently anarchist, and advocated a pacifist form of Christian anarchism:

The Anarchists are right in everything; in the negation of the existing order and in the assertion that, without Authority there could not be worse violence than that of Authority under existing conditions. They are mistaken only in thinking that anarchy can be instituted by a violent revolution.

— Leo Tolstoy, On Anarchy

Christian leftists may argue that Jesus represented the socialist ideal or was even himself a proto-socialist. Non-Christian leftists often do the same, usually in order to portray right-wing Christianity as hypocritical or inconsistent. Some radical instances of Christianity include the liberation theology of South American guerrilla movements - in Nicaragua, for instance, the Sandinista movement received crucial support early on from sympathetic Catholic priests.

In any case, it is clear that the language of the Gospels is penetrated with themes of social class:

• "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God." (Matt. 19:24)
• "Even now the axe is laid to the root of the trees; every tree therefore that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire." (John the Baptist, Matt. 3:10)

Whether this upheaval is intended to be a purely spiritual one or a real restructuring of society is less clear.