Everyone in the world is Christ, and they are all crucified. — Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio
I’ve been thinking a lot about why people are attracted to Christianity, and I think I have a few answers.
I’d like to break this down, so I’ll start at the beginning.
First, I think people are basically decent, and then life happens and gets them to act in a bunch of ways that hurt other people. We call those ways “evil.” Fair enough. But the people themselves are innocent.
If you look at someone, examining their thoughts, actions, etc. from the cradle to the grave, I think you’ll find a clean line from the obviously innocent newborn to the last breath. You’ll see the innocent baby, and then see life happen to them, tearing them apart in all kinds of ways, and the ways life tears them apart and builds them up will all contribute to how they are in the world. At no point will they have behaved illogically or irrationally evil, given the circumstances and their history. It would all make sense.
This is why people think they’re good people. It’s because they are. They know what it took to get them from their origins to the present moment, and they had their innocence all the way through, even when some of the ways they have learned to act to cope with life hurt people.
So, in that sense, we’re all innocent. But we are also all ostracized by society when we don’t do what society wants us to do, or when some of our actions hurt other people. And that image of us as “evil” people that other people create clashes with our conviction that, if you really understood us, you’d see our innocence, and we experience that clash and its aftereffects as guilt.
Christianity resolves the contradiction by going back to the innocent beginning, the origin, and it labels that “God.” And through recognizing God — this “innocent” origin — you can be made clean and innocent. Here’s the thing: this God doesn’t even have to be real. It can be a philosophical function created by “worshippers” who see “God” or “Christ” in a wider range of people, long story short.
I know that sounds abstract, but I think this is part of why billions of people are Christians. The bigger reason, one may argue, is that Christianity enabled Christians to have a good excuse for invading lands, and then getting the people there to forgive them. So I’m not saying this is a good thing. I often rail against conditions on this “innocence” that really hurt people who buy into it and those around them.
At the same time, it seems needed in some lives, desperately, because the rest of the world or their own circumstances condemn them and this is their only real source of salvation.
In atheism, I haven’t really seen a mechanism to such “salvation.” I mean, there is the relief of being out from an often stricter Christian morality, but nothing like an epic story of redemption; it’s drastically scaled down. This has a lot of benefits. We are more vigilant against people getting hurt. We don’t license bad things as much. We rebel against would-be leaders who try to control us on strings.
That said, there’s also a lot of ugliness in atheism. That’s why Milo Yiannopoulos was able to do what he did. Milo believed, if you look into his theology, in the Christian concept of total depravity, and that’s why he resonated with atheists who were insistent on protecting the majority population from offense (even at the pain of the minority), who ostracized people for anything short of conventionally acceptable norms and beauty standards, who rebelled against the “establishment.” It’s condemnation of humankind through judgment. Basically, total depravity without salvation.
And this leads me to thinking that it might be a good idea to look into this concept of salvation. I’m curious to see how it would work. I mean, sure, it works partly because it licenses injustice by the ruling class and then absolves them of guilt in the eyes of the masses, like a charm. But also, it works among the masses because it is their redemption, as well.
Christianity “works” because it recognizes the innocence in people that they see in themselves and that we so often refuse to grant them, basically. I’m not saying that’s right or wrong, necessarily. But I think that’s probably why its message is so effective.
It’s also why in conversion stories, you usually will see that conversion happens when someone goes through a traumatic or depressing event in their lives. When they were “at the end of their rope.”
We know, as psychologist Dan Ariely has noted, that if you want someone to be good, telling them they are bad, constantly, is the wrong way to do it. They will simply see themselves as bad and keep acting bad, in many cases — it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy. The thing to do is give them a clean slate. And giving them a clean slate can actually help them improve their behavior to match up to the identity.
Now, this can be a very manipulative psychological tool. But it is a psychological effect either way — whether you are condemning or giving them a clean slate, you’re affecting someone else’s psychology. Which is why, when some Christians say, “I wouldn’t be the person I am today if I wasn’t a Christian” they may be telling the gospel truth.
Just stuff I’ve been thinking about…
Thanks for reading.
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