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Title: The Failure of Christianity
Author: Emma Goldman
Date: 1913
Language: en
Topics: anti-christian, atheist, religion
Source: Retrieved on March 16th, 2009 from http://dwardmac.pitzer.edu/anarchist_archives/goldman/failureofchristianity.html][dwardmac.pitzer.edu]].  Proofread online source [[http://www.revoltlib.com/?id=633, retrieved on July 3, 2020.
Notes: First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth journal.

Emma Goldman

The Failure of Christianity

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. Everyone 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.