First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth journal.
The counterfeiters and poisoners of ideas, in their attempt to
obscure the line between truth and falsehood, find a valuable
ally in the conservatism of language.
Conceptions and words that have long ago lost their original
meaning continue through centuries to dominate mankind. Especially
is this true if these conceptions have become a common-place, if
they have been instilled in our beings from our infancy as great
and irrefutable verities.The average mind is easily content with
inherited and acquired things, or with the dicta of parents and teachers,
because it is much easier to imitate than to create.
Our age has given birth to two intellectual giants, who
have undertaken to transvalue the dead social and moral
values of the past, especially those contained in Christianity.
Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner have hurled
blow upon blow against the portals of Christianity, because
they saw in it a pernicious slave morality, the denial of life,
the destroyer of all the elements that make for strength and
character. True, Nietzsche has opposed the slave-morality
idea inherent in Christianity in behalf of a master morality
for the privileged few. But I venture to suggest that his
master idea had nothing to do with the vulgarity of station,
caste, or wealth. Rather did it mean the masterful in human
possibilities, the masterful in man that would help him to
overcome old traditions and worn-out values, so that he
may learn to become the creator of new and beautiful
things.
Both Nietzsche and Stirner saw in Christianity the leveler
of the human race, the breaker of man's will to dare and to
do. They saw in every movement built on Christian morality and ethics attempts not at the emancipation from
slavery, but for the perpetuation thereof. Hence they opposed these movements with might and main.
Whether I do or do not entirely agree with these iconoclasts,
I believe, with them, that Christianity is most admirably adapted
to the training of slaves, to the perpetuation of a slave society;
in short, to the very conditions
confronting us to-day. Indeed, never could society have
degenerated to its present appalling stage, if not for the
assistance of Christianity. The rulers of the earth have
realized long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian religion.
That is the reason they foster it; that is why
they leave nothing undone to instill it into the blood of the
people. They know only too well that the subtleness of the
Christian teachings is a more powerful protection against
rebellion and discontent than the club or the gun.
No doubt I will be told that, though religion is a poison
and institutionalized Christianity the greatest enemy of
progress and freedom, there is some good in Christianity
"itself." What about the teachings of Christ and - early
Christianity, I may be asked; do they not stand for the spirit
of humanity, for right and justice?
It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that induced
me to choose this subject, to enable me to demonstrate that
the abuses of Christianity, like the abuses of government,
are conditioned in the thing itself, and are not to be charged
to the representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings
are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the denial
of life; hence responsible for the things done in their name.
I am not interested in the theological Christ. Brilliant
minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas Paine, and
others refuted that myth long ago. I am even ready to
admit that the theological Christ is not half so dangerous as
the ethical and social Christ. In proportion as science takes
the place of blind faith, theology loses its hold. But the
ethical and poetical Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our
lives that even some of the most advanced minds
find it difficult to emancipate themselves from its yoke.
They have rid themselves of the letter, but have retained the
spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the crimes and
horrors committed by orthodox Christianity. The Fathers of
the Church can well afford to preach the gospel of Christ. It
contains nothing dangerous to the regime of authority and
wealth; it stands for self-denial and self-abnegation, for
penance and regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of
every [in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.
Here I must revert to the counterfeiters of ideas and
words. So many otherwise earnest haters of slavery and
injustice confuse, in a most distressing manner, the teachings
of Christ with the great struggles for social and economic
emancipation. The two are irrevocably and forever
opposed to each other. The one necessitates courage,
daring, defiance, and strength. The other preaches the
gospel of non-resistance, of slavish acquiescence in the will
of others; it is the complete disregard of character and self-
reliance, and therefore destructive of liberty and well-being.
Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society,
whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of dependence
and misery, must turn his back on Christianity,
on the old as well as the present form of the same.
Everywhere and always, since its very inception, Christianity
has turned the earth into a vale of tears; always it
has made of life a weak, diseased thing, always it has instilled
fear in man, turning him into a dual being, whose life
energies are spent in the struggle between body and soul. In
decrying the body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter
to everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being in
the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his body rotted
away from the injuries and tortures inflicted upon it.
The Christian religion and morality extols the glory of
the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to the
horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of self-denial and of all
that makes for pain and sorrow is its test of human worth,
its passport to the entry into heaven.
The poor are to own heaven, and the rich will go to hell.
That may account for the desperate efforts of the rich to
make hay while the sun shines, to get as much out of the
earth as they can: to wallow in wealth and superfluity, to
tighten their iron hold on the blessed slaves, to rob them of
their birthright, to degrade and outrage them every minute
of the day. Who can blame the rich if they revenge themselves on the poor, for now is their time, and the merciful
Christian God alone knows how ably and completely the
rich are doing it.
And the poor? They cling to the promise of the Christian
heaven, as the home for old age, the sanitarium for crippled
bodies and weak minds. They endure and submit, they
suffer and wait, until every bit of self-respect has been
knocked out of them, until their bodies become emaciated
and withered, and their spirit broken from the wait, the
weary endless wait for the Christian heaven.
Christ made his appearance as the leader of the people,
the redeemer of the Jews from Roman dominion; but the
moment he began his work, he proved that he had no
interest in the earth, in the pressing immediate needs of the
poor and the disinherited of his time. what he preached was
a sentimental mysticism, obscure and confused ideas lacking originality and vigor.
When the Jews, according to the gospels, withdrew from
Jesus, when they turned him over to the cross, they may
have been bitterly disappointed in him who promised them
so much and gave them so little. He promised joy and bliss
in another world, while the people were starving, suffering,
and enduring before his very eyes.
It may also be that the sympathy of the Romans, especially of Pilate, was given Christ because they regarded him
as perfectly harmless to their power and sway. The philosopher
Pilate may have considered Christ's "eternal truths"
as pretty anaemic and lifeless, compared with the array of
strength and force they attempted to combat. The Romans,
strong and unflinching as they were, must have laughed in
their sleeves over the man who talked repentance and
patience, instead of calling to arms against the despoilers
and oppressors of his people.
The public career of Christ begins with the edict, "Repent,
for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."
Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that
was supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people
suffered and endured enough; had they not earned their
right to deliverance by their suffering? Take the Sermon on
the Mount, for instance. What is it but a eulogy on submission
to fate, to the inevitability of things?
"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the Kingdom
of Heaven."
Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in spirit
live there. How can anything creative, anything vital, useful
and beautiful come from the poor in spirit? The idea conveyed
in the Sermon on the Mount is the greatest indictment against the
teachings of Christ, because it sees in the
poverty of mind and body a virtue, and because it seeks to
maintain this virtue by reward and punishment. Every
intelligent being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty
of the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and misery, of all
the injustice and crimes in the world. Every one knows that
nothing good ever came or can come of the poor in spirit;
surely never liberty, justice, or equality.
"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth."
What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery,
inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true that the
meek can inherit anything. Just because humanity has been
meek, the earth has been stolen from it.
Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and governments
have used to force man into dependency, into his
slave position. The most faithful servants of the State, of
wealth, of special privilege, could not preach a more convenient
gospel than did Christ, the "redeemer" of the
people.
"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be filled."
But did not Christ exclude the possibility of righteousness
when he said, "The poor ye have always with you"?
But, then, Christ was great on dicta, no matter if they were
utterly opposed to each other. This is nowhere demonstrated
so strikingly as in his command, "Render to Caesar
the things that are Caesar's, and to God the things that are
God's."
The interpreters claim that Christ had to make these
concessions to the powers of his time. If that be true, this
single compromise was sufficient to prove, down to this very
day, a most ruthless weapon in the hands of the oppressor, a
fearful lash and relentless tax-gatherer, to the impoverishment,
the enslavement, and degradation of the very people
for whom Christ is supposed to have died. And when we are
assured that "Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be filled," are we told the how?
How? Christ never takes the trouble to explain that. Righteousness
does not come from the stars, nor because Christ
willed it so. Righteousness grows out of liberty, of social
and economic opportunity and equality. But how can the
meek, the poor in spirit, ever establish such a state of
affairs?
"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and persecute
you, and say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my
sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your
reward in heaven."
The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait that
has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket which does
not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of truth have
been, and still are, reviled; they have been, and still are,
persecuted. But did they ask humanity to pay the price? Did
they seek to bribe mankind to accept their ideas? They
knew too well that he who accepts a truth because of the
bribe, will soon barter it away to a higher bidder.
Good and bad, punishment and reward, sin and penance,
heaven and hell, as the moving spirit of the Christ-gospel
have been the stumbling-block in the world's work. It contains
everything in the way of orders and commands, but
entirely lacks the very things we need most.
The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who
understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and industrial
system can do more for himself and his kind than
Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done for
humanity; certainly more than meek patience, ignorance,
and submission have done.
How much more ennobling, how much more beneficial is
the extreme individualism of Stirner and Nietzsche than the
sick-room atmosphere of the Christian faith. If they repudiate
altruism as an evil, it is because of the example contained
in Christianity, which set a premium on parasitism
and inertia, gave birth to all manner of social disorders that
are to be cured with the preachment of love and sympathy.
Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to such
sickening artificial love. Not because of any reward does a
free spirit take his stand for a great truth, nor has such a
one ever been deterred because of fear of punishment.
"Think not that I come to destroy the law or the
prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."
Precisely. Christ was a reformer, ever ready to patch up,
to fulfill, to carry on the old order of things; never to
destroy and rebuild. That may account for the fellow-
feeling all reformers have for him.
Indeed, the whole history of the State, Capitalism, and
the Church proves that they have perpetuated themselves
because of the idea "I come not to destroy the law." This is
the key to authority and oppression. Naturally so, for did
not Christ praise poverty as a virtue; did he not propagate
non-resistance to evil? Why should not poverty and evil
continue to rule the world?
Much as I am opposed to every religion, much as I think
them an imposition upon, and crime against, reason and
progress, I yet feel that no other religion has done so much
harm or has helped so much in the enslavement of man as
the religion of Christ.
Witness Christ before his accusers. What lack of dignity,
what lack of faith in himself and in his own ideas! So weak
and helpless was this "Saviour of Men" that he must needs
the whole human family to pay for him, unto all eternity,
because he "hath died for them." Redemption through the
Cross is worse than damnation, because of the terrible
burden it imposes upon humanity, because of the effect it
has on the human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the
weight of the burden exacted through the death of Christ.
Thousands of martyrs have perished, yet few, if any, of
them have proved so helpless as the great Christian God.
Thousands have gone to their death with greater fortitude,
with more courage, with deeper faith in their ideas than the
Nazarene. Nor did they expect eternal gratitude from their
fellow-men because of what they endured for them.
Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great
martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists, Francisco
Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a poor figure
indeed. Compared with the delicate, frail Spiridonova who
underwent the most terrible tortures, the most horrible
indignities, without losing faith in herself or her cause,
Jesus is a veritable nonentity. They stood their ground and
faced their executioners with unffinching determination,
and though they, too, died for the people, they asked nothing
in return for their great sacrifice.
Verily, we need redemption from the slavery, the
deadening weakness, and humiliating dependency of Christian morality.
The teachings of Christ and of his followers have failed
because they lacked the vitality to lift the burdens from the
shoulders of the race; they have failed because the very
essence of that doctrine is contrary to the spirit of life,
exposed to the manifestations of nature, to the strength and
beauty of passion.
Never can Christianity, under whatever mask it may
appear-be it New Liberalism, Spiritualism, Christian
Science, New Thought, or a thousand and one other forms
of hysteria and neurasthenia-bring us relief from the
terrible pressure of conditions, the weight of poverty, the
horrors of our iniquitous system. Christianity is the conspiracy
of ignorance against reason, of darkness against
light, of submission and slavery against independence and
freedom; of the denial of strength and beauty, against the
affirmation of the joy and glory of life.