Prince of War
By Crispin Sartwell
In a recent column, Michelle Malkin decries ³the global war on
Christianity,² which she terms "the original religion of peace."
The idea
that there is a global war on Christianity is an expression of the desire of
people with tremendous power to be perceived as victims. In another context,
Malkin and here ilk would condemn the precisely parallel case of, say, tenured
women whining continuously about their supposed victimization.
It
is true that Marxist regimes in various parts of the world tried to expunge
Christianity. But they were equal opportunity destroyers: they were just as
unhappy with Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Moslems, and anyone else who was
peddling opiates to the masses.
Thatıs
mostly over. Now the most powerful country in the world projecting its
economic and political influence everywhere is governed by evangelical
Christians.
These
people are prosecuting a brutal war that they themselves conceive in
fundamentally religious terms.
As usual, no one who aspires to a
national position of power in this country can proclaim anything but a belief
in the Christian God.
Nor is this situation of Imperial Christianity anything new. Millions of
people whole civilizations have been put to the sword in forced conversions
by Christian missionaries. In the name of the lamb of God, the indigenous
civilizations of Africa and the Americas were annihilated.
Christianity was the fundamental excuse for the slave trade, for
example, in which perhaps 20 million people were killed with utmost brutality.
One of
the main pieces of evidence for the ³war on Christianity² for Malkin is the
fact that missionaries have been caught in the crossfire in various conflicts.
Even if the attacks were much more systematic and brutal, they could never
match the brutality visited upon the world by Christian missionaries
themselves.
Internally to
Christian nations, and without number, repressions, tortures, pogroms,
massacres, and superstitious idiocies from witch-hunts to prosecuting people
for rejecting geocentrism have been perpetrated in the name of the Christian
God.
Of course, the
usual defense of the ³religion of peace² is that the brutalities committed in
its name are betrayals rather than expressions of its basic doctrines. But
Christianity in its traditional forms teaches that salvation is only possible
through acceptance of Christ. Itıs astonishing to what prodigies of oppression
that doctrine has led.
The
church father Tertullian famously argued that the reward of the blessed would
be to witness the tortures of the damned, which he described in detail. And St.
Thomas Aquinas said this: "In order that the bliss of the saints may be
more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God
for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the
damned."
The religion
of peace has - not to put too fine a point on it - a tradition of unabashed
sadism, in which the reward and pleasure of some is precisely the suffering of
others. We might add that these imaginary sufferings have been actualized
wherever Christians got hold of non-Christians, or Christians of a slightly
different variety than themselves.
But of
course perhaps Aquinas and Tertullian, too, were betraying the spirit of
Christ. Several passages in the New Testament above all, the Sermon on the
Mount support this view. Jesus tells his followers to help the poor, to love
their neighbors as themselves, and so on. This is the ³Prince of Peace.²
But there is also another side
of Jesus, one that easily justifies the brutalities performed in his name and
the garden-variety intolerance of a John Ashcroft or a Michelle Malkin.
Jesus as portrayed in the gospels is concerned to sort the elect from
the damned, and to punish the latter with torture for all eternity: "You
are accursed, depart from me into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and
his angels" (Matthew: 25: 41). "The one who believes and is baptized
will be saved; but the one who does not believe will be condemned" (Mark
15:16). "Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown
into the fire" (Matthew 7: 19). These passages are typical.
Being burned at the stake is a trivial punishment compared to being
burned for all eternity at the behest of an angry God, while the blessed
(including, apparently, Jesus) delectate your pain. Hence brutality comes to be
called charity.
If
Christianity were indeed a religion of peace, world history would be an
infinitely more edifying spectacle.
Crispin Sartwell blogs at eyeofthestorm.blogs.com
