Christianity and Christianityism

Last updated on: September 3, 2015 at 5:19 pm by D. G. Hart

Christianity and Christianityism 2015-09-03T17:19:42-04:00 D. G. Hart

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Some observers of international affairs distinguish Islam from Islamism. The former is a religion usually peaceful, the latter is a political ideology that threatens social order. Because Islam came into existence with political consequences, distinguishing the religion of Islam from the politics of Islam is always difficult. But Islamism is a modern phenomenon that rejects compromise with secular politics. According to Samuel Helfont:

In Egypt, where modern Islamism had its beginning, the early 20th century saw intense debates over political identity. Proponents of Egyptian nationalism competed with pan-Arab nationalists and with socialists whose political consciousness was rooted in their class. The Islamists argued that they were Muslims before anything else, and that their Islamic identity should form the foundation of the political order. With this focus on Islam came inclinations toward piety and religious fundamentalism. In 1928, Hassan al-Banna relied on these ideas to form the first Islamist party, the Muslim Brotherhood, in Egypt. Banna and his Islamist followers spoke of a golden age of Islam, which they sought to restore. They felt under assault by Western colonialism and the rising liberal secularism, which they saw as colonialism’s byproduct.

So what happens when Christians imitate Muslims and openly oppose secular politics because it reduces faith to a private matter? Are Christian activists, whether on the left or the right, guilty of Christianityism because they too adopt a political ideology antagonistic to modern liberal society?

This may seem like a preposterous comparison but it is actually one with much greater poignancy for Christians because they do not come by politics honestly. Bernard Lewis, one of the leading interpreters of Islam, explains why:

Secularism in the modern political meaning – the idea that religion and political authority, church and state are different, and can or should be separated – is, in a profound sense, Christian. Its origins may be traced in the teaching of Christ, confirmed by the experience of the first Christians; its later development was shaped and, in a sense, imposed by the subsequent history of Christendom. The persecutions endured by the early church made it clear that a separation between the two was possible; the persecutions inflicted by later churches persuaded many Christians that such a separation was necessary.

The older religions of mankind were all related to – were in a sense a part of – authority, whether of the tribe, the city, or the king. The cult provided a visible symbol of group identity and loyalty; the faith provided sanction for the ruler and his laws. Something of this pre-Christian function of religion survives, or reappears, in Christendom, where from time to time priests exercised temporal power, and kings claimed divine right even over the church. But these were aberrations from Christian norms, seen and reciprocally denounced as such by royal and clerical spokesmen. The authoritative Christian text on these matters is the famous passage in Matthew 22:21, in which Christ is quoted as saying, “render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s.” Commentators have differed as to the precise meaning and intention of this phrase, but for most of Christian history it has been understood as authorizing the separate coexistence of two authorities, the one charged with matters of religion, the other with what we would nowadays call politics.

In this, the practice of Christianity was in marked contrast with both its precursors and its competitors. In imperial Rome Caesar was God, reasserting a doctrine that goes back to the god-kings of remote antiquity. Among the Jews, for whose beliefs Josephus coined the term “theocracy,” God was Caesar. For the Muslims, too, God was the supreme sovereign, and the caliph was his vice-gerent, “his shadow on earth.” Only in Christendom did God and Caesar coexist in the state, albeit with considerable development, variety, and sometimes conflict in the relations between them. (What Went Wrong? Western Impact and Middle Eastern Response, 2002, 96-97)

In other words, Christianity and secularity go hand in hand unlike the other historic world religions. Even before modern secularism, Christianity distinguished the church as a spiritual realm from the temporal (or secular) order of the Roman Empire. Of course that all changed when the Emperor became a Christian. Between Constantine’s conversion and the French Revolution, Christians regularly conflated the secular and the sacred even while always distinguishing the church’s eternal mission from the state’s temporal goods. But today’s opposition by Christians (again whether conservative or liberal) is out of step with what was one of Christianity’s distinguishing marks.

If Jesus could advocate secularization, why can’t his followers? It’s the sort of position that could have helped out Kim Davis.

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