The Business About Religion

Two centuries after a historical episode called the ‘Enlightenment,’ a mind-set called ‘religion’ is very popular. In the midst of our terrifically modern ‘knowledge society’ it is not at all disgraceful to believe in a ‘hereafter.’ If anyone has to justify himself it is a person who is quite seriously ‘nothing,’ not Christian or Muslim or even receptive to something transcendental ‘somehow’ deep inside.

And this is despite the fact that times have definitely changed since practically everyone assumed that illnesses and the weather were caused by heavenly or hellish spirits, that every big star had a god living behind it, or right above the starry firmament an eternal father controlling people’s lives — hence called destinies — and that a group’s survival and an individual’s happiness depended on whose tribal deity was the strongest or if one managed to be on the right side on doomsday. Nowadays, even people unable to cite a single “law of nature” are aware that everything that happens in nature has causes that science can explain pretty well and modern technology knows how to exploit for human purposes. And when it comes to the human world in the narrower sense, it is common knowledge here, too, that people’s “fates,” which are usually quite stereotypical anyway, have more to do with such mysterious but not at all metaphysical things as a “labor market,” and the prevailing living conditions more to do with the cost of living, than with the decrees of a ruler of the universe rewarding good behavior with a bigger gross national product or testing his people by sending a slump in sales, a war, or new social welfare legislation. But this does not seem to bother those with a religious mindset too much. They still have their way of asking why — mostly along the lines of ‘Why ever…?’ or ‘Why me…?’ And when the going gets really tough they will pull the great nonsense question, first thinking of everything somehow piled up in a heap and then looking for a reason separate from it all: ‘Why does anything exist at all instead of there being nothing?’ By asking this they convince themselves that life is inexplicable, thereby opening up room for their irrational ideas, that ‘refuge of ignorance’ that a few clever thinkers already realized faith in God was centuries ago^[i]. And then they have that one really big question, which is not really an honest question but rather expresses the wrongheaded but indestructible need for an answer guaranteed to be satisfying in every way: What is it all for?

For one thing is clear. This question that quite a few people worry about would be answered correctly and in most cases quite exhaustively by saying, you are on earth to increase the capital of your company, the earnings of retail trade, and the power of your political rule! But such an answer would not satisfy either an employee letting himself be suitably used as long as it pays off for the company, or the company owner even if he might be quite proud of his life’s work; either a ‘consumer’ treating himself to what he can afford, or his merchant. It would not satisfy an average taxpayer, or his political leaders even though they at least have the chance to go down in history with their power over a great country. What those asking want to have is their very own individual “reason why” that perfectly matches their own personality. But again, not along the lines of the only rational answer to be given someone asking what he is living for, “You’re the one who knows what you want to do!” After all, once again it is no secret that people’s plans for life are never up to much, either in terms of their “realistic” goals or especially in terms of the results they get. A ‘why’ that could make it all worthwhile is hardly in sight and even harder to achieve; one has too little control over how life unfolds. But this does not make most people want to try and understand the — God knows, quite different kinds of — constraints and determinants governing their lives and society’s life process overall. That is to say, they don’t try to theoretically distinguish natural conditions from hostile interests, or social objectives that exist in the form of objective necessities, which would be the first step toward taking some kind of practical action against these interests and objectives, against the very clear ‘why’ that modern national locations for capital actually impose on their occupants. On the contrary, they are most prone to insisting on making no distinctions whatsoever, instead imagining that their existence is something that is basically not merely inexplicable but inaccessible. Which of course does not mean they give up fervently “asking” what it is all for, demanding a satisfying personal goal for this existence that no goal can be freely chosen for. How far they are from wasting a critical thought on how contradictory this demand is and how misguidedly it is seeking compensation.

It is in any case much more popular to regard human life as an unfathomable contradiction between an earthly existence where no real, freely chosen purpose in life can ever truly pan out as there is only unpredictability and injustice, and a deeper, hidden yet quite indestructible meaning, a ‘what for’ of such absolute validity that reason and reality must simply surrender in the face of it but people can be perfectly happy. This profound thought takes the familiar form of someone looking at his whole life in a quite sweeping and very blurred way, being more or less shocked and declaring, that can’t possibly be everything! Often enough, this discovery results in nothing more than a ‘midlife crisis,’ which a modern citizen generally deals with by indulging in some luxury or other so as to have a feeling of exercising free choice— and then going back to business as usual. But the reaction can also be more serious. Then sober citizens are overcome by a “borderline experience”; in particular by the thought that — as the psalmist says — life has an end and I must go!^[ii] And then they are unwilling to accept that this is exactly the way it is. It is a contradiction to be a living being with an expiry date while at the same time having a consciousness, so that one cannot help distinguishing between oneself and the world of objects, and therefore transcends the boundaries of one’s immediate physical existence to enter into an ideational and active relationship with the world, which comes to an end with one’s physical existence. It is a contradiction to thus have an idea of one’s own finiteness, and this contradiction is just as impossible to resolve as grief over the loss of loved ones. It has in fact been part of the deal since primates managed to achieve consciousness of self. But this is simply unacceptable to people who aren’t satisfied with their past or foreseeable lives — no matter whether for good or bad reasons — but stubbornly cling to the deep conviction of being profoundly entitled to be satisfied with life. Then memento mori spurs the silly need to somehow outlast one’s end.

Demand has long since created supply of various kinds in this regard too. Some people who have achieved some public renown during their lifetime look forward to surviving in their historical works — when it will of course escape them that they get nothing out of it. Others are forced to make do with the consolation of being remembered by their nearest and dearest — choosing not to focus on how fleeting that memory will be. Also popular is the mania for living on in one’s children, somehow — without this mania the sadly low birth rate would be even lower. A few rich Americans and ambitious doctors are now betting on the possibility of discovering and switching off the gene for aging, so that no longer just a few HeLa cancer cells in a Petri dish can enjoy immortality, but full-grown cancer patients in a cozy intensive care unit… Religious people are quite right to regard all these as ludicrous ersatz solutions. They themselves are in any case much more radical about delivering on the profound “insight” that the life a mortal spends between birth and death cannot possibly be everything. They postulate, and therefore piously like to be told, that the only way to find true, final, really indestructible satisfaction that compensates for all the suffering and injustice that “life” brings is to negate everything earthly and enter the “hereafter.” This epitomizes the madness of wishing for total compensation: the only goal in life that can meet this absolute need is one that has been set for a mortal worm, not one he sets for himself. It is a deeper meaning that attaches to his life without him creating the meaning; a purpose of existence that a higher authority pursues by means of him and that he faithfully serves, even if he does not truly understand it.

For it is an essential part of such a grandiose supreme purpose beyond all real purposes that all that can be said about it is the abstract function it has, i.e., to satisfy a deeply felt entitlement to be fully compensated for the suffering and injustices one has endured. However, this supreme purpose can be pictured; believers have imagined many paradises, including well-deserved hellfire for the wicked. But even such wishful images cannot be had without their own denial. The whole appeal of an absolute ‘what for’ lies precisely in its being neither explainable nor accessible; the postulated meaning of life is characterized by being fundamentally ungraspable. That is why, for some people inclined to brooding, it also consists in them being unable to find it, i.e., they don’t give up demanding it but are unable to fill the great void it opens up, and respond to its absence as best they can with despair. Others, who are more into meditation, are good candidates for the dialectical art of delving so deep into the great void that they realize that it is its own meaning. Christianity, on the other hand, teaches its seekers of meaning to mentally fill the place where they discover a lack of any satisfactory purpose in life with a kind of person, an omnipotent and omniscient one, who directs human history in general and each individual’s life story in particular according to a script that is mainly about guilt, atonement, and forgiveness. If the recipients of this message have trouble with it they don’t need to worry. Faith in the good Lord always includes a bit of negative dialectics as needed: the Lord is present when he is absent, being remote from God and in despair are the royal road to salvation, and the like. For simpler minds, however, it’s enough to imagine that death cannot possibly just be the end — in view of the lousy life one has been allotted up to now! — but Lord Jesus is waiting afterwards.

Christians will at any rate not hear a word said against Jesus. They can get very unpleasant about it. After all, they don't just have a world view to defend: their self-respect depends on others respecting their supreme Lord too.

On the Christian Faith^[iii]

1. God the Father

Anyone who argues with a Christian about whether God really exists, who actually demands proof, only to be indignant about the arguments he is presented, is beyond help. Such a person is confusing belief with knowledge, expecting faith, of all things, to meet the standards of knowledge, and celebrating the extremely cheap triumph of revealing that whenever a Christian sees proof of God he is “merely” professing his faith again. Instead of trying to understand what faith is, he contents himself with simplemindedly ascertaining that acknowledging a supreme being has nothing to do with knowledge.

Conversely, when a Christian seeks reasons for the existence of the Most High, he does always find them by calling on his intellect to serve his strength of faith. In one case, he can’t — because he doesn’t want to — imagine the “natural order” without one deciding actor to create and maintain it. In another case, he needs the same actor for a plausible idea of how things began; perhaps he fails to see any meaning in what he and those around him are doing, and because there has to be meaning God does the trick for him. A Christian is even able to deduce such a necessity from his own person and directly conclude from his belief in God that He exists. And modern Christians manage to draw this “conclusion” quite functionally: they argue on the basis of what their faith gives them — comfort, help, orientation, protection from despair, etc. That is, they simply announce that they need God and land a hit because he meets the need. They are coming pretty close to explaining religion, although exposing themselves to the suspicion of not having a “pure” faith but rather pinning their hopes on the Lord’s protective hand only to get them through bad times.

Whether people are true believers all their lives or “bad Christians” who only think of their Lord God once in a while, they are achieving the same thing. They are mobilizing their minds for the sole purpose of imagining a supreme creator and judge and thereby arriving at an extremely poor judgment of themselves. While God is all-powerful and all-knowing, present everywhere and determining the course of the world forever, a Christian deciding to believe in this God and be his voluntary servant is deciding quite a bit about himself. He is holding his mortality against himself, considering himself both powerless and ignorant, and accusing himself in all seriousness of being only human. This “only” is not referring to any actual deficiency, or any knowledge gap, and certainly not to an individual’s real powerlessness before the very recognizable powers of this world. It is acting as an absolute condemnation of one’s human nature solely due to one’s relationship with God. A rational reaction to noticing you don’t know or can’t do something is to be self-critical and try to remedy the shortcomings that bother you. If you attribute your failures to your ineptitude and feel shame, you walk around with a guilty conscience, an inferiority complex, or worse. But if you condemn your human nature and consider human efforts futile because you only have a right to exist as a creature and instrument of God anyway, then you have found a way to live with your guilty conscience by accusing yourself of being a sinner. Everything you do, everything that is done around you, either amounts to the vain work of man — and the imagination of man’s heart is evil from his youth, according to Genesis 8:21 — or has its meaning in God’s inscrutable will. Usually both.

If a sinner is doing well, he prays to God and thanks him for the undeserved grace, the divine reward. If he is doing badly, he knows how to see this as just punishment for his human worthlessness and to ask that he too may be given a tiny piece of the enormous cake of God’s love despite everything. Whatever it is he goes through in life he very self-assuredly interprets in terms of the relationship with God that he has established for himself.

This self-assurance, that effect that Christians so steadfastly attribute to their faith — their comfort, courage, and strength rather than despair and anger at the earthly brethren who cause them so much trouble — is actually the key to the self-righteousness that believers are capable of. Unlike self-critical individuals who look for reasons for their failures both in their own actions and in those of others, and unlike types who deal with themselves psychologically and regard themselves as losers, Christians have a very thorough way of proceeding. They want their self-accusation to be understood as an attitude everyone else should have too; they peddle this attitude on a mission. And whenever they fall on deaf ears, they can enjoy the satisfaction of at least exclusively confessing the sinful nature that everyone has. By denigrating themselves they know how to distinguish themselves, and both the Old and New Testaments tell them stories of the godless being hit by one or another adversity harder and much more justly than the children of God. As followers of the right faith, both professional and amateur Christians have at their disposal the entire repertoire of those endearing nasty attitudes to others that range from sheer envy to schadenfreude. All they have to do is go to the trouble of translating people’s actions to make them match their devout image of God and man — and God's justice has struck with good reason yet again.

For the same reason, both professional and amateur Christians have that fabulous understanding and compassion for all wretched creatures at home and far away, i.e., the feelings that spare them the annoying question of why such poverty, misery, and violence exist. They suffer along with others even when they happen not to be dealing with any major misfortune themselves. They would never presume to determine “on their own” the very worldly, economic or political causes when something doesn’t suit them. For them, belief in their Lord, which requires no proof and also allows no refutation, replaces both the knowledge and the will that are needed to give those in charge in this world a rap on the knuckles. Christians take it for granted that being sinful people they can only botch things, but being believing sinners they can definitely do no wrong, as long as they do not have the insolence to want to change the way the world works themselves and for the sake of their own human concerns. They would rather add their own sacrifice to those imposed on others than give up their boundless opportunism towards worldly power, being taught by Romans 13:1: “Let every soul be subject unto the higher powers. For there is no power but of God: the powers that be are ordained of God.” And this holds just the same when democratically brought-up Christians in the centers of imperialism soothe their consciences by admiring “liberation theology” in distant countries.

When a Christian decides to believe in God this does not mean he is giving up using his brain; he is instead putting it at the service of his religious worldview. This is why there is no point trying, like so many in the past and present, to enlighten a Christian by pointing out the contradictions within his faith in order to expose the absurdity of his conception of God and man. Children of God are not about to use their brain to understand any refutation of the Lord of Hosts because they are using it from the start to make the “unbelievable” graspable. So anyone who comes along and tells a religious person that it’s a fine image of himself that God has placed on earth in those myriads of sinners; that people are never the way he wants them to be, so that the Most High is never satisfied with them and has to punish them and straighten them out; that people keep using their God-given reason for themselves instead of for living a pious life, misusing their mind for the purpose of sinning, etc., etc. — such a person is preaching to the choir. Believers have been dealing with doubts of this caliber from the very beginning, and religious fancy has long since had the Holy Scriptures handy to answer such questions. The Book of Genesis already explains the business with the “tree of knowledge” that man should not eat from. In Genesis I 6:6 “it repented the Lord that he had made man on the earth, and it grieved him at his heart.” And anyway, dealing with doubts is part of religion from day one, since rational beings have to justify their resolve to interpret their situation on the basis of not knowing.

2. God the son: The revelation

A believer’s brain has to accomplish more than a heathen’s. On the one hand, it is needed for taking care of earthly business just like that of anyone else who has to work and gets to budget, marry, and vote, and sometimes even wage war. On the other hand, it has to cope with the additional task of interpreting all the not-so-great experiences of earthly existence as God’s work and will. And while the hardships of his earthly journey sustain a Christian's desire for the Absolute Spirit who is his true home despite everything, they also batter him with doubts whether his faith is strong enough. Many a day goes by when a humble sinner does not think of acknowledging God but wonders if God has not forgotten him; or worse still, he is tempted to blaspheme in the face of the injustices done even to righteous people like him. Luckily, the forebears of modern Christians already had the same problem, along with the solution: God responds to the agonizing questions of doubting creatures by redeeming a promise that he will reveal himself when the time is right. The doubting brain gives faith an invaluable boost when it spins out the logic of God as the lord, and man as the servant, to dispel all reservations about God’s existence and works by means of the Christian revelation that the New Testament vouches for in many places, e.g. John 3:16, “For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son…”

Though the life and teachings of Jesus are a splendid thing for stabilizing the certainty of faith, they have a shortcoming that cannot be overlooked. One has to believe in them, in the works of the Son of God, who in human form demonstrates Christian renunciation and how it will succeed! As pleasant as it may be for a Christian to have a figure that can be visualized and has a detailed biography alongside “abstract God” — whom he cannot imagine and is not allowed to make plaster casts of — it undeniably causes the believer additional mental trouble to handle the birth, teach-ins, miracles, and Passion of Christ. For the gospels have been methodically worked out and thus present the believer's brain with many a stumbling block:

• As the savior of all people, who shows them how to conquer bad human nature by voluntarily making oneself a servant, God’s Son is a human being. Only as such is he able to take upon himself those sufferings that can serve as a model of self-denial to a degree that is hard to match.
• The first consequence of this is the way believers are supposed to imagine Jesus’ birth: his earthly existence starts right off with a miracle that theologians count among their finest mysteries.
• The next consequence is an equally tough test for the brain as a means to believe. That Jesus is no ordinary person but endowed with God’s omnipotence also needs to be proven. After all, he is a man who stands for the dawning kingdom of God, for overcoming sin, and being delivered from it. So Jesus occasionally performs a miracle to prove God’s omnipotence,
• and is promptly misunderstood by the doubter within the believer. For the doubter likes to think miracles are a good reason to believe — which is not at all what they are meant to be. Miracles override the laws of nature and are therefore a critique of the human mind, which imagines it knows a bit about the world and can benefit from that. How outrageous if people are keen on miracles as proof that Jesus is credible, i.e., if they want to be convinced. The Lord had to make that clear: “Except ye see signs and wonders, ye will not believe” (John 4:48). This is his rebuke of those whose faith is conditional, of the rationalists among his children.
• In his Passion, Jesus, fully human now, shows other people the right way to deal with their mortality. Self-denial is the way to redemption; this is how the spirit overcomes the flesh! However, God’s Son is giving the believers as rational beings their next shock. Instead of victory over mortality, they first see defeat, God’s Son is dead — and that he must not be. So it goes into extra-time, when he is resurrected: “O death, where is thy sting? O grave, where is thy victory?” (1 Corinthians 15:55).
• So one also has to believe in resurrection if one wants to partake of God’s love, which leads the calculating creatures whom Jesus endures all this for to have a great deal of misconceptions about life after death. They keep forgetting — resurrection of the flesh or not — that it is the believing spirit that is getting its money’s worth and that heaven is not a recreation center with free admission. Time and again, Christians not adept at the logic of salvation history let themselves be guided by their materialistic fancy, picturing eternal life as a collection of all earthly delights minus the trouble that goes with them down here on earth…

In any case, the gospels as testimonies of revelation do well not only to report what deeds and sufferings of Christ are to be believed. Always heeding how contrary the human mind can be, they also expertly make clear what mistakes can be made in the struggle between believing and doubting. One has to resist many a temptation, overcome one’s obsession with proof, etc. For one has to believe the Passion of Christ as a demonstration of self-sacrifice without a trace of any calculation, and only God’s faithful sheep are able to interpret the affairs of the world and their own role in it correctly, i.e., to lead a Christian life.

The first place where Christian life takes place is:

3. The spirit of the congregation

The Spirit of the Lord appears to believers and only to them. “For where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20). For once, this is not a miracle, but rather very (tauto-)logical. Those who, citing the revelation, see to preserving the faith are answerable for the presence and teaching of God, the Father, and the Son, and are thus filled with the Holy Spirit. Its descent among them as a dove or whatever, confirming Jesus as the Messiah, again presupposes that one believes, but who cares? The existence of faithful witnesses proves the faith and passes on the proof of God in the world and for it. It was clear from the beginning that faith proves itself, and its followers solemnly declare that the human mind cannot grasp it all anyway.

This contradiction should not be belabored too much. After all, it is human beings who are using their minds to conduct their church service. Certainly, church is not where logical arguments are used and people are convinced by correct thoughts about the world; it is where believing is celebrated and sung about because all are happy to have their faith. But some contortions of the mind are even required for communally enjoying one’s faith in the Trinity, for self-righteously demonstrating that one is in the right club. When celebrating the insight that their human nature is not worth much, Christians even have to be careful that their profession of faith does not contrast too much with what they do outside church and, above all, they have to demonstrate being sinners without obviously wanting to distinguish themselves by their humility — Jesus already commented knowledgeably on this too! If they remember that, then they go all out and humble themselves in prayer, be scolded and comforted in the sermon, and be uplifted by song. When the sacraments are administered they are in full cry. They become partakers of God’s grace — and again have to really watch out not to imagine that taking part in the mumbo jumbo will bring them anything for themselves. When they imagine they are not imagining that, then they can start gaily baptizing babies, but not innocent children, for the little ones cannot waive the original sin they have inherited. Then romantic relationships turn into a church service, and this is the only way a Christian views that embarrassing matter of the flesh. In confession, Christians reach the pinnacle of their hypocrisy by inwardly undoing their evil deeds through repentance and penance, which is of course only Christ’s achievement. Otherwise one would not be capable of mystical union in the Eucharist (Communion), through which one lets the Spirit of the Lord enter oneself in a very natural way.

Thus, devout Christians are busy all the long lovely church year repeating the life and teachings of Christ, following his example to talk themselves into scorning the Material, the Worldly, and the Natural enough to make you sick. Of course, even Christians cannot get rid of the world and what they do in it. But they have brains enough to abstract from their ordinary life, see it as a mere transitional stage and test of faith, and take a slightly different view of everything.

4. The kingdom of God on earth

But it would be playing down the Christian faith to reduce it to a somewhat far-fetched personal opinion that some people have adopted over the centuries — people who otherwise do the same things in life as everyone else. Like any other brand of moral worldview, faith is not an additional theoretical luxury existing alongside the workaday life that obeys the iron dictates of productive forces and production relations “behind the backs” of those involved, beyond their consciousness and will. Religious views and insights always serve those living in any given era as guidelines for their conduct. Depending on their tenor, they are good reasons for all sorts of ways of going along with things or rebelling against them, of changing existing social conditions or submitting to them. And Christian teaching, covering practically all aspects of life, has never left any doubt that it is instructing everyone how to live. Anyone who studies the New Testament in its ancient languages will learn all the imperative verb forms from Jesus, because the Son of God not only knew how to take it but also how to dish it out — namely, all the rules of conduct for being a righteous Christian.

He did not want to let the art of teaching other people morals die out with him (his father was waiting for him, after all). So he also commanded that the faith be proclaimed, preserved, and explained. These activities that had consumed him were to be continued by the apostles on his behalf — otherwise he would have lived and died in vain. This made immediate sense to his confidants, who while accompanying him had lived through all the standard situations of religious erring and were qualified to fulfill this mandate. Just like their followers, who are still alive even today. If they practice “Imitating Christ,” celebrate the Lord Jesus as the founder of the church, and sometimes dream up wild titles for their club, this is understandable on a personal level. They live in him and for him, and from him, as best they can. That is why the church seems to them not only like the “holy people of God,” but also like the “bride of Christ” and his “body” — and obviously as a social structure modeled on the interaction between shepherd and flock.

With the commandment to be always “bearing witness” everywhere, with the Pentecostal exhortation to “Go ye into all the world…” (Mark 16:15), the Christian message has simply made it an integral part of faith to found and maintain an organization. This organization spreads its next-world-based advice about righteous living so that it can exist and act in this world. So it must position itself in such a way that more and more people find their way to it. Successful mission is absolutely essential if the Christian word of God is not to suffer the way of all earthly things and be filed away in the archives by “history.” The children of God have in every era had a lot to do to provide the church with the number of members that can alone ensure faith and service to God will be steady enough to save humanity.

At the same time, they were always competing with similar movements with an alternative conception of God that also felt the need to grow. According to trustworthy reports, the disputes on the agenda were worked through not only by vying for the finest interpretation of God’s word and will. But what else could they do if they didn’t want to betray the Lord’s legacy? Especially as this competition over the ideological scrap and — out of necessity — over the material surplus that early societies and states had to offer, was faced with considerable supply shortages. The conditions prevailing in countries where the modern dogma of scarce goods would have been applicable may not have been so unfavorable for preaching the renunciation of worldly things — but poor productive forces are not so conducive to the growth of an organization that has orders from above to spread.

Thus, the congregations of Christ — although his kingdom is not of this world — also came to violate the worldly powers’ turf. Modern church leaders are still happy to tell of the persecution that Christians had to endure because the reigning lords temporal couldn’t stand “parallel societies” even then. Christianity jeopardized their subjects’ loyalty to them and their unrestricted access to their human material’s labors. The teachers of the faith are not so happy to recall the consequences that church history likewise reveals. Where it was possible, the Church came to an arrangement with one or another government and made peace with their wars. It is even said to have taken secular responsibility into its own hands for a trifling few centuries — where it was possible, and only to maintain God’s presence on earth. After all, the good news could be spread much more effectively if the faith was a veritable “state religion.” And every soldier of Christ could not only pray for one of the competing kingdoms of God on earth, but also fight and die for it.

The times when the missionizing idea was realized in such a crude way are over, thank God. In a painful learning process that only lost wars can set going, the Church has not only been weakened by divisions but has also become aware of its real tasks. In the era of colonialism, when powerful states enlarged their territories and degraded both nature and people in remote areas to material for their enrichment, organized Christians endowed the natives of foreign climes with dignity. They were able to win the souls of many hitherto clueless savages believing only in superstitions, giving them the awareness of being free servants of the one true God, and thus increasing the flock of proper believers. Their pioneering role in the area of development aid, which was still frowned upon at the time, as well as their resolutely acting as NGOs of the nations they came from, brought the missionaries and thus the Christian church more recognition than did the Crusades.

These unmistakable signs of purification can also be seen in the second area of the Church’s work: seeing to and pepping up its members, who are eager to find out the consequences of their deciding to believe in Trinity. First there was a period when the church(es) struggled fiercely to assert themselves, with the communities being quite preoccupied with security — there were heretics and apostates to be persecuted, science was emerging and had to be put in its place, the Inquisition required all forces to be mustered, etc. But after that those responsible for a modern church resolutely continued all the traditions that could be found since it was founded.

Such orientation is urgently needed when it comes to the high task of Christian pastoral care. First of all, God’s Word must be proclaimed as faithfully as possible so that mortals searching for orientation can find out all the things they “logically” believe once they are convinced that they are creatures and instruments of the Most High. However, it is not enough to keep reciting the Holy Scriptures. While they are the indispensable basis of all religious training, they must be interpreted; after all, the stories and parables have a meaning that is not immediately apparent to every reader or listener. It is even more complicated for the church to give authentic interpretation of the word of God because the properly understood Bible has a meaning for life — so this too must be taught to the faithful. Pastoral care is a service to our brothers and sisters, who come to church because they need guidance in their earthly existence, so often not knowing what to do and what not to do. Distinguishing between sins and good works, explaining the consequences of each for one’s relationship with the Most High, is aimed at bettering humankind. A person who is of the opinion that — “some” — God may well be directing the miracles and accidents of life but who considers this opinion to be quite inconsequential, is no Christian.

Christians profess their faith in God, take the revelation vouched for in the Bible seriously after learning its meaning in the church from Christian teachers — who have made faith their profession — and strive to demonstrate the strength of their faith in the midst of worldly life. They have taken the first step towards this by recognizing the Church as the norm of their faith, i.e., by going there and listening in. They take the second step when they derive from the teachings of Scripture and its interpreters the important consequence that their responsibility before God translates into all kinds of duties towards the Church. Then they are, thirdly, busy going through the more or less entertaining rituals of the religious community according to the rules, and sacrificing time, money, and energy to congregational life so that the church can fulfill its tasks and grow.

*

This program was initiated by the apostles at the behest of Jesus and has been pursued by their successors over the centuries. And it has been shown time and again that the idea of a well-organized religious community is well received, meeting with an audience that is willing to put their faith into practice and “live” it jointly with like-minded people. But it has also turned out that those who feel called to guide and lead the children of God can considerably disagree. There are quite a few churches, and all of them have gone through their schisms, leaving plenty of corpses along the way. The main actors in the splits blame their respective competitors; nonpartisan attempts to explain unerringly end up discovering that even the noblest cause will come to naught because those who pursue it are fallible human beings unable to get rid of their defects. This is a profoundly religious approach, which is once again very popular. But the trouble is it sees no reasons for dispute in the project itself — this being the one thing that is endorsed and not attributed to the wicked endeavors of sinners.

In fact, the very foundation of faith, which when shared creates the organized cohesion of a church, is first of all good for creating all sorts of controversy. After all, misusing one’s mind to construct incontestable necessities that end up in a monster called religious truth cannot be taken for a rational line of argumentation. The latter could be checked for correctness and accepted; if incorrect, it would have to be rejected. However, if it is a fancy bent on believing that is coming into its own and generating what is supposed to be believed, very different stuff “follows” from even the finest beginning. Recent (2005) major international affairs — the wretched war against “Islamic fundamentalism”! — have induced some well-meaning observers to suggest avoiding a “war of religions,” saying the world religions — Christianity, Judaism, and Islam — ought to bear in mind that “Abraham” is their common starting point. With this founder legend in tow they really don’t need to go at each other! Unfortunately, such observers are overlooking the fact that the religious denominations they are calling on to make peace do not celebrate the same thing when it comes to God’s encounter with Abraham. One of them rejoices in God’s choosing the people of Israel, another in the “Old Covenant” — and every smart mullah considers it absurd for God to make agreements with a mortal! Every “consequence” that faith-mongers draw from the only real common ground — the Lord God! — opens up wonderful differences. Every “therefore” that they attach to the most abstract of all religious certainties — to teach their followers what role God has to play in their lives — harbors alternatives that undermine the congregation’s unity. One only has to think of such “concrete” elements of religious instruction as the qualities of the afterlife, and the right of access to it that has to be obtained on earth! Differences like these always suit zealous believers fine for firmly distancing themselves from the others who subscribe to heresy; and they definitely suit church leaders, because every deviation in doctrine, if it meets with approval, weakens the congregation.

The unity and size of the congregation therefore also plays its part in the works of pious fancy in every era. When traditional doctrines are corrected, the meaning of a Bible passage elaborated, especially when it comes to what it means nowadays for living a life pleasing to God — such never-ending pastoral tasks are always done in a calculated manner. Just as the products of religious inventiveness always take on the form of necessities inherent in faith, it is common to take account of what is regarded as urgent topical considerations in terms of the congregation’s success record, the political situation within the nations where the church is active, global political trends, etc., and incorporate them into the doctrines of faith as logical consequences. What the church decides in favor of, and what it therefore urges its members to do in the manifold conflicts of political and economic life, is in any case rooted in what is expected of professing children of God.^[1]

While church policy decisions are clearly transformed into faith-based advice in order to secure the existence and success of God-fearing people’s organization, “setting the course” in this way easily turns into dissent and disrupts the church’s cohesion. In addition to the disputes about how to understand and interpret Scripture, there are now also arguments about whether there is a match between adhering to religious principles and taking political sides. For when a conscience well versed in the Bible pipes up, it very quickly comes into conflict with the no less Christian dictate of conscience to serve the church’s cause. As soon as zealous Christians speak up and give priority to one of these two obligations, there are suddenly parties face to face accusing each other of betrayal — either betraying the common stock of teachings telling us how to spend our short stay on earth, or betraying the unity of Christians that alone fortifies God’s will on earth…

Those who since Jesus’ departure have felt the call to do missionary work and teach God’s word have been confronted with this problem from the very beginning and to this day. And Christ’s first successors, following his words and leadership qualities, already made the only correct decision. They thought it absurd that “religious truths” could be examined, much less proven, with the help of human reason, which makes judgments and convinces others on its own account. After all, the value of lowly mortals’ intelligence is settled once one commits to believing, and is itself an integral part of the doctrine. It was also clear to them that the trove of biblical maxims specifying what’s what was there for droning out rules for what inveterate sinners were allowed and supposed to do — after all, that is what religious certainties were invented and worked out for. So — and this is one conclusion the human mind has been up to drawing in all eras — the validity of the doctrine, its foundations and its rules of behavior to be followed throughout the vicissitudes of history, had to be secured against dissenters. And this avowedly had to be done without the tools offered by the advent of science. It became a question of survival for the church to courageously ward off heresy — which also included the growing knowledge of the laws of nature — even if, indeed precisely because, the doubters themselves were acting in the name of God and an absolutely correct faith. Contesting the binding nature of current Christian teaching meant contesting the competence of church leaders to provide moral guidance for humankind — a competence that in the good old days corresponded quite a bit to secular rule. Diligent church fathers found a solution to this problem that is known to have survived the centuries. It did entail losing the glory that goes with worldly rule, because the battle for state sovereignty is decided not by dogma but by money and force. It could not stop a major schism either, nor the founding of numerous smaller clubs each striving to foster the only true faith in their own way while proceeding on the same pattern. But what has survived thanks to the introduction of an ecclesiastical legal system is an actual world religion, along with several popular churches that have a certain standing in many nations, both important and unimportant ones.

This wise decision, which generations of men of God have increasingly elaborated, is the basis for taking a rather drastic approach to the doubts about and objections to “religious truths” and religious obligations that church members struggle with. When proselytizing strangers who already believe that God is in control of their lives but are not sure, the clergy are very accommodating. They do their best to talk the prospective church members out of their doubts — with whatever arsenal of arguments — and promise faith will be enjoyed if it is unconditional and resolute, i.e., does not waver whenever something unpleasant happens. The clergy are also very understanding when dealing with the uncertainties that afflict members who wonder whether they are actually on the right path with their loyalty to the church and fear of God. For such tribulations show how well their instructions have struck home; Christians are examining themselves in accordance with church guidance on their own, and are open to any further admonitions from their pastor. However, things look different when people have already settled into church life and are participating in a more or less prominent position, and then start doubting whether certain old or newly introduced rituals, certain statements on what is proper in a Christian life, certain internal church customs, etc., are even in keeping with the will of God and are really necessary as such. In such cases, alleged brothers in Christ are actually acting like alternative church leaders and founders, taking the liberty of accusing the incumbent servants of God of violating the faith. And that is aimed at nothing other than subverting the existing church, at destroying what teachers and those taught have achieved in the history of the church. And there can be no understanding for that.

When church authorities decide to treat the congregation to statutes that show who determines what is to be believed in God’s club; when they distribute the relevant powers over hierarchical levels of authority so that everyone in their place knows who to obey; when recognizing ecclesiastical authority becomes the criterion for whether someone who wants to partake of God’s grace is really serious about it — then the professional men of God have been inspired by the organization of political power. They are claiming the policy-making power for all those who belong to the church. The “reason of state” and corresponding rules and regulations, the exercise of rights and duties and what they entail, are not up for discussion — for then they might also be challenged. There are of course discussions at synods, and corrections can even be made to the ironclad “religious truths” — but only by those who are authorized to do so according to the statutes. The rest of the congregation must abide by the results of such deliberations: those who teach, by quoting these results and advocating them as the valid norm; the many others, by respecting the results and acting devoutly in conformity with the norms. This conformity shows the congregation and above all the teaching and examining clergy crew how things stand with the laity’s religious progress.

It is therefore just as unobjective as it is unfair when those in tune with modern times criticize the Catholic Church for not recognizing the spirit of these times, being too attached to tradition, and so on. When the competing Protestant religion distances itself from Catholicism, it in any case objects not so much to its notorious conservatism as to its excess of innovations that end up falsifying the genuine, original doctrine. For example, the Catholics managed to set up a dogma of the “Assumption of Mary into heaven” (defined by Pope Pius XII in 1950) honoring the Mother of God as an instrument of the Lord just as all other Christians do too, but also wanting the Virgin to be seen as an exemplary instrument, so as to do justice to her unique position in salvation history. This meant providing the faithful with a new authority to appeal to for intercession, which in turn has brought the Queen of all Saints a myriad of rosaries, pilgrimages, and even apparitions. Another radical change was made by the Catholic Church with its dogma of “papal infallibility” (Vatican Council I, 1870). Instead of letting the matter rest with everyone just being supposed to heed the decisions of church officials — which other Christian factions consider just as pressing — the Catholics came up with the idea, which non-Catholics find totally improper, of making this need of theirs an attribute of someone who walks and preaches among us in the flesh. Catholic theologians have to defend themselves against the accusation of going too far and not sticking to the tried and tested Old and New Testaments as the source of valid dogmas, and this they do valiantly. They academically explain that the Pope is of course not infallible when crossing the street on Tuesday, but “only” when he is defining a “religious truth.” And anyone who can pull off a thing like that, one must admit, really is infallible.

One needs to be in a pretty good mood to find pleasure in the debate between Christian factions. After all, they are using the intellectual tools that theologians fabricate at universities and pass on to prospective teachers to argue about the only kind of truth that Christian doctrine finds interesting. The theoretical necessities that the devout parties of God throw at each other relate, firstly, to the fundamental question of what must be believed? Which leads, secondly, to the same question of how must teaching and observing of the faith therefore be organized? One can’t laugh for long at the cavalcade of nonsense that results when God’s appointed servants go about finding arguments for their answers, because they are being serious — in laughter-provoking contrast to the nonsense — about something that is not at all pleasant. They are outlining a complete submission program — for “each one of us” — with the church clergy taking on the role of supervisor. From their “Christian conception of man” and the prescribed rituals of worship to the liberating, prayerful, and repentant self-abasement that remains a futile effort, like old Sisyphus’s, but is an achievement in itself: with all this, enthusiastic priests pursue the ideal of a voluntary slavery that they help along as religious authorities.

It is sad to see that enlightened democracies include a public realm with well-informed voices who do not object to such activities, although the state (which evidently doesn’t object either) has given them a license to criticize. When talking about any cult, free-speech elites see through the perfidious persuaders and how their victims are consistently deprived of the right to make their own decisions, but when it comes to the official churches they consider them and their history to be an invaluable contribution to our culture and to the success of Western society. Like the state that gives our writers and journalists their freedom of speech, they hold the function that the large Christian churches perform for the polity in such high esteem that they do not find the religious communities’ genuine program at all suspicious, let alone offensive. Now that the question of power has been settled between church and state, enthusiastic democrats are certain that God’s earthly agencies have worked their way towards being useful to the state, so that it has even become customary to lament the congregations’ negative growth and to advise their leaders — this is what criticism looks like today! — to fulfill their mission by making themselves more attractive, being more responsive to people’s need for meaning today, and exercising more tolerance in certain matters. This is how ignorant a type of “critic” concerned about the churches’ popularity and everything officially recognized as Good can be when judging a bunch of people whose mission consists of no less than conscientiously executing “religious truths” — and who thereby make it clear, even before adding their highly theological statements, that they are not big fans of tolerance and, like many others, only respect the freedom of thought because it is required by law. At the same time, it is really no mystery what the church needs churchgoers for.

Officiating Christians, as already mentioned, tend to call their pastoral care a “service to our brothers and sisters.” They are unmistakably out to appear as exceptional figures who are up to nothing but doing complete strangers a favor. They simply claim there is a need waiting to be satisfied. A person who has this need will find that the pastor, who apparently has felt it himself, knows how to fix the problem he is encountering. He quickly designates his help-seeker as “brother” or “sister” and sees to them. However, there is a good reason why the need does not go away, not even for a while like hunger or thirst, and that reason is the way it is served. For this need is a requirement, and its persisting shows that the pastor’s care has been successful. This is all very peculiar.

The church sector is commonly viewed as a stroke of market-economy luck with supply and demand coming together so neatly as to make the automotive industry turn green with envy. This view still holds even when supply is looking good but demand dries up. And it is always correctly understood and applied when church and clergy are being run down. Then such denigration of the institution is rejected, not on the grounds of its achievements and usefulness — it is defended solely in view of there being a clientele that obviously needs it. What the church actually does is justified simply by the existence of churchgoers.

Not every branch of business is accorded such respect, nor is every need so readily granted the right to be served — no material need of course, but not even needs arising in the human imagination. We are talking here about people who have not spent any time comprehending what is happening; who are busy assuming that there is something behind whatever they are experiencing and going along with. And before they know it, before they start looking into the suspicion that there might be a hitherto undiscovered necessity to the business of everyday life where some things they do and other things are done with them, everyone is talking about who is behind it. Then it’s not far to the address that says ‘God’ and promises more information. What will definitely not happen now is someone advising them to try using knowledge, which already proved so useful in building bridges, developing television, and flying to the moon. Now, no one is going to reject their need for one secret power and its personification for them to engage with in everything useful or useless they do in life. They do not need to know anything any more — Faust found all his erudition pointless! — because they have just found what they were looking for. They have found the way to faith in the Lord, so that under the church’s care they will now be able to prove themselves by serving God, whether at church or in everyday life. “Serving our brothers and sisters” simply turns the tables: the need to believe only gets its money’s worth by placing itself at the service of God and the church. The need to seek meaning is the only one that pastors respect without criticism, while they mercilessly attack quite a few other desires the believer has. And they demand nothing less than lifelong self-criticism according to the recipe provided by the Bible, dogmas, and other pastoral letters. Thus, the “fishers of men” — this metaphor from the story of Peter is not seen by the missionary clergy as an insult, but as a compliment — see to people’s souls: whoever they catch by the right tail of their false consciousness they instill with a conscience as enduring as possible, thereby committing their will to the concerns of the church — both within the congregation and outside it — because that is precisely what an instrument of God is meant to do and finds fulfillment in. Pastors have so deeply internalized their hypocrisy of serving people and of the church being at one with believers that it actually affects their physiognomy. In their divine office they seek this sort of power over people — and have no qualms bypassing strenuous missionary work to exercise their handiwork on children who are pushed into religious instruction at school by Christian-leaning legislation (in Germany at least).

And as mentioned, this free exercise of religion is not only approved by the state, which, like its economy, needs a sound false consciousness in the heads of the people dependent on both of them, so that people will quite freely go along with all the necessities that are prescribed because they are dictated by practical constraints. Religion is also wholly accepted by critical thinkers in the relatively most perfect social system on earth. Rather large cults go about organizing and ideologically consolidating an ignorant, because believing, humble stance in order to utilize it; they turn a tenacious special case of false consciousness into their specific business.

5. Church and state today

With its grip on the thinking and will of people in search of meaning, the clergy is an active component of that ideology management that all political rulers find vital because they need citizens subject to their rule to be loyal. However, the ever conflict-ridden symbiosis of “throne and altar” ceased to exist with the rise of the modern bourgeois state, which is based more on capital growth and military strength than on articles of faith and has now made those its ‘reason of state.’ It recognized the churches’ hold on society’s worldview and life maxims as obstructively competing with its own free power over the living conditions in society to be generally accepted. It called that into question and answered the question its own way using laws and force, thereby putting church dignitaries in their place with a vengeance. The worldly authority has limited their autonomy in proselytizing, preaching, rebuking, etc., not merely in the sense that it only wants to hear praise of its activities and explicit incitement to civic obedience from the pulpits, it has limited the church in a more fundamental sense. It decrees that all — or almost all — denominations are equally valid, allows even an open profession of atheism, and thus puts a stop to any pious attempt to exercise secular power in competition with the state monopolist by propagating an alternative mindset under the banner of religion.

It has not done away with all the time-honored mumbo jumbo, of course. Now that the modern secular constitutional state has asserted itself against the power of the church — and God knows not by means of some domination-free dialog — it has reached a historic compromise with the defeated: they are given a prominent place within its power structure. With due regard for its monopoly on the use of force, they are allowed to make themselves right at home, even encouraged to make full use of this concession and, within the bounds of the prevailing order, actually be responsible on their own for exercising the bit of politically relevant power that is always involved in organized efforts to influence the convictions and life decisions of a large number of people.

Those in government who advocate the secular-state idea have good reasons for this magnanimous concession. They openly state them when they claim that what is keeping their society together is values — sometimes without any specification, but often explicitly Western, Christian ones — and even declare that their polity stands on a foundation of traditional ideas, although they themselves are concerned all day with using state force. The thickly laid-on hypocrisy need not be taken at face value, of course, but it does indicate that the much-vaunted Enlightenment formula that old Kant had Old Fritz^[iv] say — ‘Argue as much as you please, but obey!’^[v] — is not the whole truth about citizens in a modern class state. Citizens, too, ‘argue’ while obeying; so the arguments they come up with should be suitable ones. Which already rules out correct ones; real insights into the reason for and nature of rule and service in bourgeois society never provide any good reasons for participating. But wrong ideas can also be quite unsuitable for the great goal of universal loyalty, even arousing defiance. And the ban on translating one’s free opinion into action that is included in the fundamental right to freedom of opinion does not satisfy liberals advocating the license to think whatever one likes either. They, too, feel the imperative need, indeed the political necessity, to make sure of the citizens’ will and therefore to steer the way they freely form their will a little bit — a political longing that not only betrays the mistrust that those in power — modern democrats no different from old dictators — always have of their citizens’ civic obedience; it also reveals that they know the secret of success for stable rule: voluntary participation.

Pushing free will in the right direction — that can be done in many different ways. At some point the ‘political class’ of the capitalist class-state realized this and also how counterproductive it is to tie the legitimation of its power to one specific system of dogma that, while useful, also excludes other equally useful alternatives. That is why it established the great principle of the ideological neutrality of state power and prescribed its citizens the corresponding virtue of tolerance — thereby documenting anything but its disinterest in the convictions circulating among the people, and declaring people’s thoughts to be of equal validity. With its principle of conceding freedom of thought, the bourgeois state is not out to throw any wrong thinking away; on the contrary it wants to utilize every bit of it that ends up providing a good reason for civic obedience. It wants to mobilize whatever people come up with in terms of suitably affirmative convictions. And all responsible bourgeois politicians, as well as the free thinkers worrying about society on a more theoretical level, know how valuable the Christian churches are in this respect.

For one thing they are certain of is that people who believe are guaranteed to be thinking right, as long as they are not listening to papal supremacists or Islamist firebrands but to proper church leaders preaching in the local language. It is not only that they don’t get into trouble while they’re sitting through a church service. Such people are mentally and emotionally busy coming to terms with bad experiences in a constructive way, i.e., seeing them as a divinely ordained test, rather than wanting to know the real reasons for them and maybe even trying to change something. Such people turn all the bad things that happen in the world into a matter of their own conscience, have preachers direct them to react to the consequences of exploitation and the use of force at home and abroad by doing charitable deeds, and meekly add their own sacrifice to those exacted by worldly powers. For that is always the practical quintessence of what the clergy teach their churchgoers. And exactly that is what the ideologically neutral state appreciates its devout corporations for so highly that it otherwise allows them every freedom, respects their internal autonomy, and really doesn’t pay attention to all their other opinions and preachings on how to follow Christ. In some countries it even collects taxes for them, finances military chaplains and theology professors, and demands that capital come to a standstill every seventh day and even on a number of church holidays. But the bourgeois welfare state also does capital a favor by drawing a quite material gain from the church-organized practice of religion: it has church charities do a lot of the dirty work seeing to the social hardships that its market economy produces and that are too much for its tightly budgeted welfare funds. The ‘poverty-pleading’ state doesn’t hesitate to utilize all the devout willingness to make sacrifices that is mobilized, and puts entire departments of its society’s life, even parts of the public school system, under the church’s direction.

None of this revokes the separation of church and secular power. Instead, the bourgeois constitutional state that achieved this separation is epitomizing the purpose and substance of it. Disempowering the clergy means that the earthly monopolist on the use of force is making the religious life they organize serve it, giving them in return a place of honor and a legally guaranteed special position within the system of secular power. The bourgeois state has broken the clerics’ claim to steer people’s morals ideologically and in practice: not in order to free its citizens from such spoon-feeding, but in order to make exactly that, in every useful variety, functional for itself. It has disempowered the church in order to monopolize what the church’s power is good for.

The Church now values this relationship itself as well. It no longer fights against having to heed a secular legal system when exercising its faith-based dominion over its faithful souls and its general policy-making power when it comes to what is proper. It obeys the law, fully utilizing its freedoms and testing its legal limits, and not minding that its work is supposed to be contributing to the common good and body politic. On the contrary, with its efforts to educate the public and provide social care, it offers itself as a valuable, indispensable, uniquely commendable mainstay “also and especially” for a modern society with its great need for “orientation.” As an institution that, on the one hand, only takes care of people’s souls, it acts, on the other hand, as an autonomous social care facility and as a constant extra-parliamentary ‘force,’ sometimes more on the government side, sometimes more on the opposition side. And as ‘permanent representation’ of its supporters, it comes up with suggestions for improvement on all major political issues, which those in power actually listen to. Of course, there are still frictions between its dogmatic notions of an impeccable Christian-cum-freedom-based lifestyle, and the maxims that first get on the political agenda and then become binding for all citizens when a state is legally managing its location for capital. For by no means everything that a modern state considers simply necessary in matters of social justice and saddles its citizens with as an additional “trial of fate” fits in with the notions that Catholic social doctrine, for instance, has in its repertoire with regard to a combination of poverty and inner bliss as God might ordain. And, as the clergy see it, a modern state’s tolerance in dealing with the civil rights and liberties of pregnant women, singles, and other deviants goes against everything that God’s plan has shown man as the path to his betterment since Adam and Eve and Sodom and Gomorrah anyway. But that is definitely no reason for God’s servants to advocate revolt against those who make and shape the legal framework of secular moral law. They insist on speaking out against “murdering children,” which they see the removal of a clump of cells on the placenta to be, and on obstinately carping about everything they identify as defiling the sacrament of marriage or some other sacred thing. One can sometimes even hear a ‘critique of capitalism’ from those valiantly fighting the devil’s work of materialism. But at the same time they also let it be known how their whining is to be understood both by the government they are complaining about and by their church-going public. They are by no means about to resume a church struggle against the secular state to abolish the separation now existing between the one heavenly ruler and the many real ones. Rather, their interfering with everyday political affairs testifies to the weight that the churches have within the division of labor for looking after the collective moral body known as ‘the people’ and their convictions, a weight they have been granted by the state — and sometimes use against it for that reason. They too are adept at citing dissatisfaction — all believers being dissatisfied with the current state of justice in secular life. It is out of responsibility toward God that they must do that, and out of responsibility for the success of God-ordained morality on earth they regularly do it in the way that is proper in a secularized state. If the state does not prevent those who want abortions from murdering fetuses, then they will step in on behalf of the state and God and do their best to ‘counsel’ the pregnant women so as to turn their distress into a genuinely Christian hell of moral torment.

*

On balance, the two sides come to terms with each other. With all the cynicism typical of bourgeois rule when it comes to lofty and exalted matters, the secular side subsumes organized faith under its useful services motivating people to go along with everything no matter what. And with the opportunism the religious side has to resort to in a bourgeois state, the church takes every social function it is needed for, every bit of recognition it is granted, and enjoys the highest power’s public hypocrisy when it now and then has itself and even its weapons blessed, as if its legitimacy ultimately came from on high after all. Yet church and state came to an agreement in the course of a single century in different ways.

Fascist rulers thought they owed it to themselves as anti-communists and anti-materialists to claim their rule was based on a supreme mandate — Providence, for example — that their entire people had to show unconditional respect for. Many of these leaders sent for the national church to verify this wake-up call. And the church agreed, against the opposition of a small radical minority. It could easily recognize its own ideal of a morally united people of God in the fascists’ “Gleichschaltung,” forcing uniformity on class society, and in their violent “class division” between decent citizens and communists corrupting the people. Moreover, it was rewarded for approving the secular dictatorship with much honorable recognition, sometimes even being given the status of an additional morality squad. There is no record of church officials no longer enjoying worship service under any Duce, Caudillo, or Pinochet or because the state caused another bloodbath. In Hitler's Germany some bishops did protest because they found the extermination of “life unworthy of life” a case of worldly rule exceeding its competence, flagrantly encroaching on the Creator’s decision-making authority. They also found that the government’s racial fanaticism was going too far by attacking even converted Jews. The church terminated any agreement with the Nazi state once and for all after this state capitulated unconditionally to democracy.

It soon became clear that it was not necessarily this style of bourgeois rule that was to be judged as definitely ordained by God and fundamentally pleasing to God from a religious point of view. It was in fact the secular powers that pursue their interests making use of democratic methods in an exemplary, namely successful way. Conversely, the heads of democratic states have found organized Christianity politically pleasing.

In some national business locations, perfectly normal democratic parties concerned with the success of capital and state power in the global competition of companies, moneys and nations, and not at all seriously caring how their polity stands before the scrutinizing eye of God, have appropriated the name of Christ in order to mobilize church-biased souls for themselves as voters. In some cases, Catholic parties loyal to the Vatican have, after losing the “church struggle,” turned into parliamentary rallying points for dissatisfied believers and found their way to the “political center.” This has put the task of making faith functional for developing an affirmative political stance in good hands. The new symbiosis of party power and altar has met with little protest from the pious community. Christian politicians’ competitive calculus is still working out quite well because, conversely, the official churches — against the opposition of a small radical minority who do not want to find Christian convictions in just one party — are happy to lend their name to democratic campaigners who guarantee them influence on legislation in disputed matters of national morals, along with permanent positions on all ethics commissions.

Against the great archenemy of freedom-loving capitalism, the Soviet communism that was victorious in the Second World War, organized Christian faith fought for itself, against being abolished as planned. This fight was waged in the higher spheres of philosophical debate between dialectical materialism and belief in creation, but above all it was waged, wherever the church was allowed, over the minds of peoples who simply could not stop asking about the meaning of a life in ‘actually existing socialism.’ A kind of ‘historical compromise’ was reached there too, which in retrospect is held against the men of the church as excessive opportunism. The truth is that the ruling state parties were admitting defeat in the struggle for their people’s consent, which was no longer supposed to be based on a fundamental willingness to make sacrifices, but rather on well-founded material hopes for the future. When a Polish bishop was elected Pope, the Catholic Church in Poland then went on the offensive. It by no means just wanted the right to an undisturbed inner dialogue with God, it wanted the status of a powerful, unignorable grassroots organization of the Polish people, the placeholder for a new, truly national state. It got the new nation-state, albeit in the form of a democracy where the national church, with its re-Catholicization program, found itself “merely” in the role of a section of the Polish people that was at least multiply represented in parliament. The fruits for the democratic world system were less ambivalent: NATO and ‘globalization’ totally triumphed over the “proletarian internationalism” of the former Soviet bloc, also thanks to the pious intransigence of Catholic-Polish nationalism. The heads of the imperialist world paid their thankful respects to the Polish pope’s body, thereby definitely giving the position of his church a boost in the global power structure.

Finally, as far as the leading power and standard-setting model country of democracy, the USA, is concerned: this state is stricter than almost all the others in separating secular power and religion officially and in terms of constitutional law, even if every dollar bill reiterates that the nation trusts in God. It decrees freedom of confession at home and, for the rest of the world, makes the ‘human right’ to freedom of religion one of the decisive dividing lines between good rule and rogue rule. And it has a president (George W. Bush) who never ends a speech without passing on God’s blessing to his people and his listeners, who opens every cabinet meeting with a prayer and lets the whole world know about it, who publicly and even successfully promotes himself as the best man for the post of supreme ruler and commander-in-chief by citing an intimate conversion experience that saved him from the bottle, who without batting an eyelid declares that a good rapport between the Oval Office and God is an essential basic qualification for the job of “most powerful man in the world.” With this perfect example of sanctimoniousness, the great “land of the free” makes it clear (yet again) how its basic secular-state principles are meant. Religious freedom is the freedom of every individual American to profess, in their own personal way, every day and together with like-minded people if possible, the God who America recognizes as the one authority above itself, because he has conversely picked out America as his chosen country and made it the unbeatable success story among all nations. That is why stubbornly godless but otherwise well-intentioned fellow citizens are allowed to profess the flag and the basic national truth that the USA leads the world even if they make no explicit reference to God. Religious freedom is in particular the freedom for every church, sect, and congregation to interpret their God as the Lord who America places above itself so exclusively, to stage their cult around this God as an attractive variation of the American way of life, and to plunge into free competition for members on that basis. All world religions are admitted to such competition, including devout followers of Muhammad and his ‘holy Koran’ — so much for “crusade”! Religious freedom as a distinguishing criterion in world politics and as an imperative for other states is the demand that all rulers have the spirit of this freedom-loving American godliness take hold in their country and grant all missionary sects and pious NGOs from the United States an unrestricted concession. In this way, democracy as a world power takes religion into its service, giving it in return a firm preferential place in the system of high opinion that American imperialism has of itself.

And then a Bavarian actually becomes Pope. What more does the church want?

6. Tough times for faith

The Holy Father in Rome is not satisfied. Even in the midst of the euphoria of mourning for his predecessor, between the funeral and the conclave, he finds powerful words to address an evil defining the spirit of the times, which the Church must counter with a dogmatically clear line. Relativism has been spreading, a moral and ideological superficiality, a culture of arbitrariness, which has already caused religious life to almost disappear in many places, specifically in the formerly Christian West.

The man is in any case not fooling himself. If at the beginning of the third millennium of the Christian era his church is worrying about anything, it is neither state oppression nor a powerful rival, but its followers simply losing interest. It is understandable that he blames them; after all, as an infallible leader, he is already professionally convinced that the Christian message and its messengers are indispensable, that his only true organization is both irreplaceable and timeless. However, this does not alter the sobering finding that a great many, and ever more, people, especially and surprisingly in traditionally Christian countries, can do without faith and even more so the church that stands up to proclaim it. They do not even struggle with it, they just ignore Christianity; the community’s base is shrinking. And that is very bad for the church, in several respects, quite apart from what a damning indictment it is of the anti-spirit of the times. The church is losing the ‘critical mass’ it needs in order to be considered the national authority it sees itself as. It will soon hardly be able to act as an institution that can influence, maybe even direct, “the people’s” world view and behavior. Although it might not be explicitly losing its conceded right to act as a co-determining force in the bourgeois political system, it cannot do much with it if it is no longer able to impress the bourgeois state with the size of its following, in the end possibly not even with a basically pro-church party that can mobilize votes.

The head of the church is not at all prepared to react to this dangerous development opportunistically by trying to adapt, but presents a fundamentalism that he doesn’t want to be branded as such. This certainly betrays a strong desire for those “old times” when going to church on Sunday as a family affair was still the bourgeois norm and even the common practice; when sermons and pastoral letters were not yet thrown into question; when young people grew up in church groups and into the congregation if for no other reason than the lack of alternatives; when premarital and extramarital sex were still sins that weighed on the conscience; in short, when the Western world actually still looked a bit like the “Islamic parallel society” that today’s enlightened zeitgeist accuses of being stubbornly backward. Whatever morals were really like in Josef Ratzinger’s^[vi] youth, they have indeed changed quite considerably. And the new pope is undoubtedly right that the Church’s attempts to “move with the times” and act as if the change in Western morality had been invented by progressive clerics have not paid off.

How could they! The change that has taken place in the course of half a generation in terms of what is taken for granted ideologically and morally, known as the ‘zeitgeist,’ by no means only affects the church’s offer of religious instruction and pastoral care as far as its methods of presenting itself and communicating credibly are concerned. A “skeptical” post-war “generation” did scornfully criticize the official church, together with its extensive stock of public hypocrisy, merely because of “rigid old rituals” being continued without rhyme or reason after “no one could understand them any more.” There was way too little “democratic, grass-root participation”; the clerical “establishment” was “out of step with the times” and far removed from “people’s real problems,” in particular the hardships of the poor in the “Third World” and their needs, because it was too opportunistic towards “the powerful,” and so on. And these accusations were — and are, insofar as zealous “grassroots groups” are still making them — anything but the prelude to shaking off the spoon-feeding that seemed so stuffy and reactionary and was therefore more annoying than inspiring. On the contrary, self-confident church citizens petitioned their fallible shepherds — and still do — to give them better, more convincing, more modern guidance and let them play a more active role in being spoon-fed. This wish could be granted and was. The liturgy became snappier, the pastor more understanding, some dogmas even more open to interpretation, and the figure of Jesus definitely “closer to life.” However, the innocent, entirely well-meant wish to “play a greater part oneself” in collectively praising God, for example with rock music and self-authored meditations, already indicates the psychological shift in bourgeois morality now “taking hold of the masses,” and making it difficult in a quite fundamental way for the church to instill its message in the modernized Western individual’s mind.

After all, these individuals have learned pretty fast from very different authorities than the clergy — from role models with mass appeal, “crowd favorites,” “dream girls” or “guys,” life coaches in magazines, independent psychologists, a new generation of teachers and journalists, etc. — that what is important “nowadays” is to make something of yourself. Everyone basically has what it takes, the “human capital,” to succeed in life, and must do everything possible to tease out these talents, whatever they may be, without being directed by anyone else, and use them to assert themselves. There is basically only one “sin,” and that is to fail at “realizing one’s potential.” And success basically depends on only one virtue, but an absolutely essential one: a person must believe in himself. This does not necessarily rule out believing in a God somehow hovering above and directing everything, but it is more or less diametrically opposed to the humble stance, the decidedly bad opinion of oneself and one’s peers and of humankind’s autonomous capabilities altogether, that is required for believing in an absolute Lord above — even if this is hypocritical and even the most self-satisfied dignitary feels obliged to play the part for decency’s sake. Every sports reporter, and then every idiotic athlete, has started dispensing the maxim that it is only one’s self-confidence that decides if one will win or lose, and that anyone can basically do anything they want if they only really believe they can. The common consensus is that you will only be able to cope with life and take all its beatings if you think you yourself are pretty “good” — then you will even cope beautifully and inevitably become even “better.” People who are constantly told all this may go mad; they will most likely start continually reflecting on themselves as psychological cases, as being unable to believe in themselves; they will almost certainly become show-offs of the kind now found everywhere and not only in television commercials. But they will not so easily become sinners, who humble themselves before God and his representatives (only before them but then most profoundly). They will not be likely to share the pious insight that pride is one of the worst transgressions a poor human creature can commit. And this kind of alienation from the spirit of religion can indeed not be countered just by sprucing up the church’s image. If the clergy are too willing to accommodate they will risk giving rise to the misunderstanding that the good Lord now likes cool guys better than worms struggling with their conscience.

It is an open question whether this ‘culture’ of psychological self-obsession is really more “superficial” and less serious than that of hypocritical humility and proactively obeying the Church’s message of salvation, as Pope Benedict thinks. Modern individuals are certainly not making their lives any easier that way. While they are sparing themselves the trouble of seeing themselves as sinners, it is at least as strenuous to try and succeed at showing off and to cope with the inevitable “fear of failure.” But psychological and religious morality are fairly incompatible; that is what the intellectual in the Vatican who has been elected to the position of chief shepherd makes clear by rejecting the “relativism” of the current “zeitgeist.” He admonishes his lower shepherds to be non-relativistic and cultivate the kind of false consciousness the Christian message needs — i.e., must either encounter or create — taking it as the starting point for their pastoral work. The modern ideal of the sovereign individual who can easily cope with the world relying entirely on his own tremendous sense of self is no good at all as a yardstick for a Christian conscience. People must admit to themselves that they are experiencing being little creatures in the grip of “anonymous social powers” and totally unable to deal with the tribulations of this world on their own. Or if they think of themselves as big shots they must at least admit that in the grand scheme of things they are no more than a speck of dust, and must keep in mind that they will soon turn back into a little pile of dirt. Then and only then will they be open to the legend of the original sin that got them into this mess and the redemption that will get them out.

It is one thing for the pope to consider this old dialectic of “vale of tears” and “opium” to be forever young and new and simply everlasting — what else, given his job? Another is the prospect of success that he sees for his non-relativistic message of salvation, and which he finds confirmation for in the mass hysteria surrounding his predecessor’s death and in the powerful approval of sympathetic heads of state. To the pope and his church, seeing earthly life as basically nothing but one huge damage case that leaves anyone who honestly asks about the point of it all no other option but to hope for an infinitely merciful while infinitely just compensation, is not just an article of faith but a fact of experience. People can be distracted from this for a time by the abominable ‘culture of superficiality,’ letting themselves be fobbed off with substitute material satisfactions — for Christians, even avoiding all the damage of a normal bourgeois life would merely be a poor substitute for the great compensation in the hereafter. But at some point this fact of experience will break through again, the official church is sure — it may already be happening in the new “younger generation” who are searching for meaning and orientation! At some point, even in the “de-Christianized” West people will simply have to notice how ill-served they really are by social reality and the happiness offered by the free market in their striving for success!

It’s not as if the ambassadors of salvation were wishing for bad times in Europe in order to be more popular with people in distress. But they can actually see practical proof. Disasters like the attack on the Twin Towers or the tsunami in the Indian Ocean fill the churches. The death of a loved one and especially one’s own imminent demise — the same thing in miniature — makes even frivolous types start doubting their psychological delusion that any success is doable, and calling for the “consolations of Holy Mother Church.” Manifest misery of the masses in the Middle East drives them to the mullahs — a downright enviable example that makes the Old Continent’s “lack of religion” really noticeable like the infirmity of old age! Religiously reinterpreted, it even makes them willing to make sacrifices to the point of death — for a deplorable cause, to be sure, but still…

It doesn’t have to get that bad; who would wish for that. But it is certain that hard times have always been good for faith. And the church leadership in Rome already sees it coming that people find it harder to turn a cool and self-confident blind eye to the misery of an average earthly existence, as the pope accuses the apostles of the “wellness culture” of doing. Poverty is growing and will make people feel their true need for spiritual assurance again. Even in the affluent parts of the world, mass unemployment will bring about a desolation that should also make the secular authorities realize how useful, indeed essential, the Church’s pastoral care of the people and charity work are. And when all this comes, the church will definitely be ready with clear guidelines. Then there will be no more relativism or feel-good mania as a substitute for religion. The church will once again be able to show what it is capable of when it comes to beguiling, comforting, dumbing down and pacifying the people — more than any secular competitor in any case. Then the pastors will go at it again, bringing joy to God and pleasure to earthly lords.

© GegenStandpunkt 2025