To What Degree Does Christian "residue" Exist In Our Culture?

[Vomit Comet]

I'm not just talking about an agnostic who still carries residual Catholic guilt, like this one girl I know. Max Weber's "The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism" is a prime example of this on the sociological level. He claims that a specific brand of Protestantism helped lead to the rise of modern capitalism in northern Europe. Here's his socio-historical theory in a nutshell:

 

Wiki: Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism

 

1. During the Renaissance down in the Mediterranean countries, life was pretty laid back, and leisure was a priority. It's still like this if you go to Italy today, when compared to more northern European societies (including the USA).

 

2. Lutheranism emerged up in Germany. The "German Mystics" along the Rhine (barbarians by refined Italian standards) were already known for their austerity, religious simplicity, and their rejection of Renaissance humanism and other decadent excesses. At the core of Lutheranism was what Weber called "worldly asceticism." Basically, asceticism wasn't for cloistered monks anymore. The lay believer had to set themselves apart, they had to sacrifice, they had to seek God on their own, be their own priest, much like the monk, but living and existing out in the mundane world rather than behind the walls of a monastery.

 

3. Calvinism was particularly bleak. You can never know if you're saved. The number of saved was predetermined, and you have know way of knowing for sure if you are one of the elect.

 

4. Pietism was a variation of Calvinism, and was where Puritanism (England and the American colonies) came from. You could never know for sure if you were one of the elect, but evidence that you might be among them could be seen in your life. The most tangible way to measure such "fruits" was material success. So what do you do? You work your ass off while living like a tight-ass miserable ascetic. You work long hours instead of going home at 2 p.m. for wine and good food like those lazy French and Italians liked to do. You eschew luxury and decadence, and live a bare bones tight-ass existence. And since you're not spending all those profits (from working all those long, miserable hours) on luxuries, you plow them right back into your business. So what happens? You start making money. More money than those who are not your co-religionists.

 

5. *BOOM* The Netherlands, and then England along with her colonies (particularly New England) starts to shoot ahead in the emerging world market of the time.

 

6. However, by the time things get rolling, the descendants of the Pietists/Puritans aren't so religious as their forefathers. Cotton Mather was already bitching in the mid-late 17th century that the current generation had strayed from the faithful ways of the pilgrims they were descended of. And this new generation was a little more able to enjoy their wealth. However, they still worked like their salvation depended on it, though if you asked them why they worked so hard, they would tell you it was for the sake of their families.

 

The modern bourgeois work ethic as we now know it was born. Doesn't quite resemble life as a Medici or a Borgese, eh?

 

7. Not only that. You don't have to be directly descended of New England Puritans or Dutch Reformed congregants to get caught in the web. Because this becomes "the way" to work, the way to do business, because it's so effective... everybody has to do it. To quote Max Weber, "the Puritan chose to live this way, but we are forced to." The "way" of doing things loses its explicit religious content, but still, from religion it came. It keeps its "rational" content, however. It is instrumentally rational to work like a dog, to live like a tight-ass eschewing luxury, and to plow the $$$ back into your enterprise (or your savings account or whatever). That is, it is instrumentally rational towards the goal of accumulating wealth, which is the ultimate end of modern capitalism.

 

8. So that's why we Americans don't get to live like those laid-back, life-loving Italians. (The English and Dutch are a little better than us, though with the Dutch, the Calvinist influence still runs deep even though their society is more secular than ours.) Or even the French for that matter. Fucking Calvinist tight-asses who were trying to soothe their neurotic obsession over not going to hell. In the words of Max Weber, "and then Merry Olde England became cold and dark."

 

9. So that's the most prime example of how "religious heritage" effects even those of us who are secular-minded.

 

How else might this be the case? In terms of work, economy, politics, sexuality, you name it.

[Vigile]

So in a nutshell people's delusions led to a formula that included a strong work ethic, or something to that effect right?

 

I'm probably going to get myself in trouble here but my unscientific observations have always had me toy with a personal theory about the work ethic that has nothing to do with religion.

 

Northern cultures have always had to deal with the winter so they required a more organized, thoughtful plan of action to ensure they had supplies to last them through the winter months.

 

Cultures closer to the equator haven't had to rely on careful planning historically and food is more naturally and readily available to those living in the tropics.

 

End result, a dominant and more economically successful northern culture.

 

I realize this is an overly simplistic model and that the success of the north and failures of the equatorial states have more causes. I think this had to have a big influence on how the chips fell though don't you think?

 

Moreover, couldn't it then be said that the work ethic that evolved out of Calvinism was already there and that Calvinism simply adapted to it rather than caused it? Certainly Calvinism isn't appealing on it's own merits right? The culture would already have to be primed a certain way before the tenets would be considered appealing enough to attract members by its own right.

[Dagan]

This is an absolutely massive topic. As someone with historiological training I can see how someone could make a career writing books about this for the rest of their life.

 

But I'll focus on one specific example -- Mennonites, my ancestry, Anabaptists. They were reformers when Luther was around, and they were persecuted by the Catholic church and Luther/Calvin's followers, driven from Switzerland and the Netherlands across Europe until they were offered free land and asylum by Catherine the Great in Russia. She just wanted cheap labour to farm the land, and that's what she got. But the Mennonites settled in colonies, grew and became prosperous.

 

Until the Russian revolution. Many fled Russia, leaving prosperous farms and families behind, for Canada, the USA and South America. They settled in new lands and became prosperous once again. Would the history of Europe have been different without them and their theology? Definitely. Would the history of Russia have been different? Certainly. And would the history of North America have been different? Absolutely. Maybe the over-arching narrative of history might be the same but the details would be very different. But it is very difficult to play what-if with such a huge topic like this. All I can speculate is that if they hadn't have come here, I would have never been born, and that's just the most important event ever in my world

[Loren]

I strongly agree with both what VC and Vigile said. Obviously, you two have done enough study to be well aware that simple, single-cause effects are the rarest of animals in sociological and historical studies. One of the things I'd like to add is that for a long damn time, I've observed that as far back as we can see (Ur, anyone?), people who've been willing to do what ever it takes to gain and keep power have known what a tremendously useful tool religion is for controlling and manipulating large groups of people. It seems pretty patent to me that directly out of this comes the pathological worship of authority, which still afflicts so much of our doings today. It's one thing to respect authority when it's worthy. But ascribing divinity or at least divine backing to authority forces society to cross a threshold into an area where ethical responsibility takes a back seat to subservience, and obedience is raised to just about the highest possible humanly achievable virtue.

 

We see it in our politics today. One of the direct results which rankles me endlessly is that religious and political authority figures who are owned and operated by faceless power brokers and movers and shakers who operate from the shadows attack and very effectively slander their political opposition by hammering relentlessly at how "ungodly" they are, i.e., disobedient, for the clear goal of helping the wealthy and powerful to consolidate their wealth and power. I've noticed in the last ten years or so, that one of the talking points used ad nauseum by propagandists disguised as "godly and scholarly intellectuals" (How that gags me to even write those adjectives of these men!) such as Ravi Zacharias, D. James Kennedy, and R. C. Sproul is that one of the greatest and most pernicious of dangers from our Satanically secular culture is what they've redefined as, "moral relativism." Their basic point is that without the perfectly moral authority of God, there can be no moral compass and they trot out their favorite whipping boy, the misrepresented idea that there is no absolute truth; Therefore, everyone is free to do what ever they want.

 

Aside from the slanderous misrepresentation and broad brush painting, the thing that makes me so furious about this attack is that in the literally hundreds of times I've heard these pond scum pieces of shit promulgating these lies to their wide-eyed and slack-jawed faithful in the most fatherly and scholarly of tones, using big important sounding words with plenty of Latin and Greek thrown in (To buttress the unquestionability of their own authority, of course.), I've never once heard any of them come clean and point out that when obedience to authority is raised in importance above truth and integrity, it sets the stage perfectly for authority figures of any kind to abuse power. It short-circuits the ability of the abused to address the abuses. With all the endless reiteration of how terrible such "moral relativism" is, they never admit that placing obedience to authority above any other ethical consideration is, itself a moral relativism of a far deeper perniciousness, since the morality of the actions of authority is gauged relative to the authority figure's position in the hierarchy of power. The higher they are, the more unquestionably sinless their actions become, until one eventually gets to God, who, as we've all seen, can do any damned thing what so ever, and no matter how much of a moral atrocity it may be, it's defined as morally perfect by virtue of the fact that it was done by God, the highest authority of all.

 

What they preach is the most vile and societally dangerous form of moral relativism.

 

And it works like a goddam charm. It does exactly what it's supposed to: It undermines the power of the abused to defend themselves while at the same time giving them a payoff in the form of authorized permission to see themselves as absolved of the consequences of following orders. It provides a tacit and very illusory understanding that it is possible to be free of taking responsibility for our actions by being obedient. It also remorselessly betrays the believer (overtly religious or otherwise) in this doctrine by shamelessly throwing them into a morally relativistic bottomless swamp where they are allowed no way to judge morality for themselves. They can't emulate the actions of the authorities they follow, since they are below such authorities, and what's clearly criminal for the low-level person is virtuous for those above them. Further, they can't get past this by resorting to the idea that there are hard and fast moral absolutes, because they'll immediately run afoul of the "moral absolutes" concept the very first moment they see some authority figure like God, the Right Honorable Senator Blather or some damned highly respected captain of industry committing some crime which clearly violates these moral absolutes. In this morally relativistic swamp, the only truly absolute and reliable rule is:

 

You Can't Win.

 

The same spiritual leaders and authority figures who cast the individual into this swamp have freighted the importance of the victim getting things morally correct with the threat of eternal damnation, thereby taking the neurological sabotage down to the same level as the drive to survive and riveting the two inextricably together. Is it any wonder when such a hapless victim thrashes about looking for any solid thing at all to grab on to in order to save their life? And guess what the one seemingly solid thing is that they can find in this swamp. You've got it:

 

There's safety in obedience.

 

Consolidation of power by manipulating the masses is the only possible point of being a sun-king. Of you guys who've made an actual study of history, can you think of any sun-king family or individual (going all the way back) who was ever known to say to the people they sought to govern, "We are the sun-kings! But you folks can go ahead and do what you want and live your lives as you will. We just want you to be happy?"

[Vigile]

Of you guys who've made an actual study of history, can you think of any sun-king family or individual (going all the way back) who was ever known to say to the people they sought to govern, "We are the sun-kings! But you folks can go ahead and do what you want and live your lives as you will. We just want you to be happy?"

 

Of course you are correct Loren. And it saddens me to see the US grow ever more authoritarian. Realistically the US has been authoritarian for a long time but in recent years it seems to have switched into overdrive. I won't pretend to offer a solution. The only solution I've ever been able to come up with with this problem is an individual one. One of the main reasons I have chosen to live in Russia is its broken governmental infrastructure. Russia is at least as authoritarian as the US if not more so, but the reality is I have very little dealing with the authorities here so essentially I am free to just do what I want and be happy.

[godlessgrrl]

Well - I'm more familiar with the way that religion has shaped attitudes towards women and sex over the centuries, and it's definitely had a huge impact. But as has been said already, a topic like this is enormous. One could spend a lifetime focusing on trends in just one area, unraveling connections and issues and events and whatnot, on and on.

 

I've got a bit of training in history too, and one thing I remember is that everything is intertwined - nothing in a culture develops in a vacuum. That's part of the challenge of piecing history together. I mean, did religion cause sexism? Or did religion grow out of cultures that were already sexist? And why were they that way? And what influences did things like economy have on gender roles, as relates to things like manual labor or gender-segregated skills? It's all interwoven together, so it's hard to say what impact some specific part of a culture had on another, or on the way we see the world today.

 

My favorite hypothesis about the roots of sexism are that it started when two things happened: 1) the rise of agricultural societies, and 2) the discovery of paternity. I think that a concept of ownership crystallized when farming gave people more resources than they needed; a surplus of goods led to concepts like luxuries and class structure, and the need to figure out who was going to get your stuff when you die. When men had enough experience with animal husbandry to understand the concept of paternity, then patrilinear inheritance popped up, and suddenly what children belonged to what man became very important - and the only way for a man to know his wife's children were in fact his was to control the wife's sexual activities. Then it just snowballed from there, over the years, with cultural institutions developing to reinforce and justify cultural habits that were already in place.

 

This is of course a very gross oversimplification, and it's just a hypothesis too, but one I find interesting enough to study.

 

But it always goes back to a sort of chicken vs. egg thing, and the fact that a lot of times you've got a synthesis of several things happening all at once that end up changing a culture and leading to new developments that turn into habits that influence other developments and become reinforced, etc. etc. etc...

 

Quite the labyrinth, really.

[Vomit Comet]

So in a nutshell people's delusions led to a formula that included a strong work ethic, or something to that effect right?

 

Yeah. But the work ethic spread beyond the sects (e.g., the Puritans) that originated it. This was for two reasons: 1) non-members had to adapt that work ethic in order to compete; 2) the descendants of those original sect members were less and less faithful. Puritanism as an actual sect is largely a thing of the past, but the motherfuckers saddled us with their work ethic. And even if, like me, you are a lazy bum at heart, you're forced to play by those rules.

 

To drive this home, Weber opens his book by quoting a lengthy passage from Benjamin Franklin extolling the virtues of the blacksmith (paraphrased) "where you can hear his hammer ringing late into the night while his friends are whiling away at the tavern drinking beer and playing billiards." Franklin was, of course, no friend of religion. But the secular bourgeois work ethic he was extolling was largely Puritan/Calvinist in origin.

 

Also, according to Weber, this was unintentional on the part of those original sects. They would not have approved of the bourgeois lifestyle of the 18th century and beyond, even if that way of life was made possible by the economic behaviors pioneered by those sects.

 

Northern cultures have always had to deal with the winter so they required a more organized, thoughtful plan of action to ensure they had supplies to last them through the winter months.

 

Outside of the Chinese empire, the Romans were just about the most organized people in the world; while the Greeks specialized in the philosophy of existence, Roman thought had largely to do with social organizational matters such as law. Modern legal thought is by and large derived from Roman thinkers. The Romans also had their ethic, Stoicism.

 

The Greeks on the other hand were indeed lazy at heart, and the Romans thought they were total imprudent pervs. We think of Roman orgies, but really, the Romans were pretty uptight compared to the Greeks. The Greeks viewed labor as being for suckers. The highest position one could attain was to have slaves and servants do all the work for you, so that you could sit on your ass all day sipping wine and thinking deep thoughts. Sounds pretty damned good to me, actually! Basically, the ideal was to be among the idle rich, a notion met with disdain by most hardworkin' Americans. Ever hear about people who work at a cheese factory in Wisconsin who win the Lottery but who don't quit their jobs? Yeah, I don't get it, either.

 

With the Northerners. Some of our very, very earliest written accounts of Germanic people come from Julius Caesar's 'The Conquest of Gaul.' In those days, the Germans were the ones who lived east of the Rhine, whereas the Celts lived west of it; the Belgae (the namesake of Belgium) were kind of in between the two. The Germans were a branch of the Celts that had gone off on their own; the word "German" is derived from "true people" in Latin, because the Germanic warriors that the Legionnaires encountered were as wild and bad-ass as the undomesticated Celts that their grandfathers had fought. So anyways, here's how Caesar evaluated the Germanic folk:

 

Basically, he thought they were lazy. He described them as loafing around when they weren't hunting, fighting, or tending their meager herds. He thought that their straw huts built in the mud were emblematic of this inborn sloth.

 

He chalked this up to several things. First, he thought their large size made them energy inefficient. They had to eat big piles of meat to keep going, and then they'd conserve energy by loafing around most the day. He thought they would never be able to compete with the Italians, because Italians are shorter, smaller, and therefore more energy efficient, and that's why Rome was able to build massive works out of stone. He also thought they had to conserve energy due to the cold climate, whereas Italians could expend energy while not worrying about staying warm. So in other words, while the Germans were good for a brawl, they weren't well suited for the purposes of civilization.

 

He also noted that the Gauls were scared shitless of the Germans, and hated the Belgae for their alliances with the Germans. He figured that the nice, pleasant climate of Gaul had made the Gauls comparatively soft, whereas the not-so-nice climate of Germany made the Germans scary, mean, and death-obsessed. Caesar also described the Gauls as irrational, emotional, superstitious, and easily manipulated, unlike the Romans. So while Gaul enjoyed the same nice climate as Italy, the Gauls didn't have their shit together like the Italians did. Of course, the Gauls were shortly thereafter Romanized and integrated into the larger Roman society. Which is one reason why they got spanked by the Franks when the empire fell apart; this is also why the Britons were in trouble when those Anglo-Saxons started showing up.

 

Cultures closer to the equator haven't had to rely on careful planning historically and food is more naturally and readily available to those living in the tropics.

 

African summers can be as much of a bummer as German winters. Although I was hanging around with these Samoan dudes once, and they told me what it was like back on the island. They said you didn't have to worry about starving; if you were hungry, all you had to do was walk 20 feet into the forest and pick fruit. Sounded pretty sweet to me, and Samoans are renowned for being laid back. As are Hawaiians. Although Hawaiian society did attain a remarkable amount of organization once the islands were unified into a single empire. You know, roads, strict social organization, etc. etc. The Aztecs also did pretty good for a people without the wheel, beasts of burden, or iron. The city plan of modern Tokyo was inspired partly by Tenochtitlan; in its time, it was the largest and most rationally organized urban center in the entire world.

 

Also, up until the 15th/16th century, and after the fall of Rome, feudalism was the dominant economic mode in Europe. Studies show that primitive hunter-gatherers have the most leisure time of all humans; modern industrial societies of course have the least, and pre-modern agrarian societies are in the middle. The shift to an industrial mode of production was actually quite abrupt for the peasantry. First, there were a lot of vagabonds roaming around (largely serfs who had been kicked off the estates), and many were forcibly rounded up and herded into the cities. Furthermore, these former peasants actually had to be taught how to be good workers; for example, a system of punishments and incentives had to be devised just to get them to show up to work on time, to prevent them from going home too early, or to get them to show up six days out of the week. It was during this shift that we started to see the beginnings of modern psychology, management studies, etc., and behaviors not congruent with being a good industrial worker were pathologized, whereas before nobody had paid such traits much mind. Well, that's if you believe Michel Foucault's account.

 

The work ethic had to be imposed top-down onto the former peasants. It had to be inculcated via new, modern institutions. It wasn't previously there, to the extent that former peasants could easily transition into their new role as proletarians.

 

The guys working for American companies in Iraq often complain about Iraqi workers. They don't save money, they stay home from work and live off the money. In Iran, developers experimented with paying workers twice as much. What ended up happening is that they would go home early to be with their families, because they only had to work half a day to make the same amount of money. Well, these Americans doing the complaining; their ancestors lived this way centuries ago.

 

I realize this is an overly simplistic model and that the success of the north and failures of the equatorial states have more causes. I think this had to have a big influence on how the chips fell though don't you think?

 

In the West, the Mediterranean world, including the Fertile Crescent, was uncontestedly dominant for millenia. Sure, the Germans came sweeping in when Rome crumbled, but Rome had to crumble for that to even be possible. Also, by then many German tribes such as the Goths had Roman training, Roman martial organization, and in many cases Roman arms and armor; they weren't just a bunch of dumb blond beasts running around like Conan. Keep in mind also that the Eastern half of the Empire didn't fall until the mid 15th century when the Turks took over.

 

Power did not shift from southwestern to northwestern Europe until the 16th century with the Protestant Reformation and the early rumblings of capitalism, which really took off in the Netherlands. Also, during Elizabethan times, the English figured out how to mass-produce textiles, which basically pulled the rug out ("thank you, thank you, I'm here all week...") from under the Italian city-states. This set the stage for the industrial revolution, which would kick off in England during the late 18th century; England would be A-1 by the early 19th century with the fall of Napoleon. Otherwise, during the Renaissance and certainly prior to then, England was an also-ran.

 

In the 16th century, the Spaniards and their Genovese bankrollers were the dominant power in Europe; like Rome, their wealth was based on expansion and conquest. Of course, they wrecked their own economy with the inflation caused by the oversupply of New World silver. Then came the Dutch to fill in the gap. The Dutch were the financiers of Europe and the undisputed masters of world trade, but then Napoleon came along. With Napoleon's demise, the British became A-1. The British were smart: they had paid off all their debt to the Dutch so that they wouldn't be peons to them, and then they kicked Napoleon's ass.

 

Since the world wars, it's been America's turn to be the hegemon. But now India and China are picking up steam, we've got debt coming out of our ass, and one of the things dumbass Bush did was to discourage the world's best and brightest from coming here and staying here.

 

Moreover, couldn't it then be said that the work ethic that evolved out of Calvinism was already there and that Calvinism simply adapted to it rather than caused it?

 

Dutch urban architecture from the 17th century, when they became the financiers of Europe with the relative decline of the Italian city-states, is often described as austere, plain, and unassuming compared to the baroque architecture of France, Italy, etc. This has been attributed by scholars to their Calvinism.

 

Prior to the 15th/16th century, the dominant value system was feudal/aristocratic. But there was a town-and-country schism emerging. In the Middle Ages, towns were little more than trading posts or administrative centers. Merchants were seen as pissants by the aristocracy. However, the cities slowly began to grow and establish stronger and stronger networks between one another. During this era, there was a saying: "city air is free air." It used to be if a serf ran away to a town, the lord's toughs would show up, and the city would return the serf to them. Increasingly, cities maintained their own garrisons and they would tell the lord's thugs to fuck off, and the runaway serf would become a free man.

 

This was accelerated in the aftermath of the Black Plague. There were less thugs to keep the serfs down on the farm, there were less lords and many estates were abandoned (making small landholding possible), and many guild members had died off, which broke the control of the guilds and caused a labor shortage and room for independent entrepreneurs.

 

The city-dwelling merchants/entrepreneurs, or burghers (which the term "bourgeoisie" comes from), became an increasingly powerful middle class. Still, they didn't work their fingers to the bone. From England to Italy it was the norm to do business informally, work maybe five or six hours a day, take frequent holidays, etc. etc. This is why, even today, the Catholic countries are stereotyped as being lazy and decadent, unlike the industrious Protestant north.

 

So basically, it comes down to Marx vs. Weber. Marx saw one economic mode surpassing the previous based on inherent efficiency (capitalism overtaking feudalism, and agrarian slave societies overtaking hunter-gatherers), or due to systemic collapse (feudalism filling the Roman vacuum). Weber acknowledged this historical-materialist assessment but he accused Marx of material reductionism. Weber's whole thing was to show how culture played its part. One of his memorable quotes: "ideas are the switchmen of history."

 

Certainly Calvinism isn't appealing on it's own merits right?

 

 

I often wonder what pagans--who enjoyed drinking and fucking and who had a very casual, even cynical view of their gods--would have seen in early Christianity. Historians of religion claim that early Christianity appealed to two groups: the poor, and upper class women. Even in the Pauline letters, Paul gives thanks to many Roman matrons of impressive pedigree who were bankrolling the upstart sect. It was a way for them to acquire status denied them by Roman society. Who knows, maybe it would have died out were it not for their matronage?

 

With Pentecostalism, even most illiterate hillbillies thought it was outrageous, ridiculous, shameful, and heretical, and early Pentecostals were often violently attacked by their neighbors. To this day in Appalachia, proper Baptists will speak with dread and disdain about the "snake handlers" further up the mountain. But a certain subset of those illiterate hillbillies latched onto it. We can also ask what appeal Mormonism had; although if I were a guy back then, the whole polygamy thing might have appealed to my lecherous ass. All the variety you can handle, but you don't have to worry about going to hell for womanizing and whoring.

 

In England, I would speculate that Puritanism appealed to uptight busybody assholes with an authoritarianism complex, who were dissatisfied with the perceived laxity of the mainstream Anglican church. Enough of them got together to make quite an impact (Cromwell). The rest of England got fed up with the Puritans, and the Dutch thought they sucked too, which is why they retreated to New England. This is probably why New England was more prosperous than the rest of the colonies despite having nasty winters and whatnot; in Virginia you had a comfortably Anglican pseudo-aristocratic planter class lording it over slaves and indentured servants. The descendants of those comfortably Anglican pseudo-aristocrats went off to Harvard and Yale on daddy's dime, most of them returning to be idle rich landholders, until the interwar years with the collapse of cotton prices (which also kicked off the black exodus to northern and west coast industrial cities). The descendants of those slaves and indentured servants became the fundy denizens of what we now call the Bible Belt. (Yes, I know that not all Southerners are fundies.) The descendants of the Puritans became America's bluebloods.

 

The culture would already have to be primed a certain way before the tenets would be considered appealing enough to attract members by its own right.

 

It was not a smooth, seamless transition.

[hereticzero]

Residuals exist that affect how we think because that type of moral mentality has been passed down from generation to generation with the leaders of the world quoting scriptures and religious people of whom they know nothing about. Because world leaders take it upon themselves to quote such trash, the mindless masses suck it up and believe that what they hear is true. So, even those who do not believe still have a bit of Christian doctrine stockpiled in their brains whether they want it or not. Over time people have come to assume that what they have heard about Christian history, the white-washed versions, are true and the babble stories are just as true. Modernists cannot sort fact from fiction when it comes to our culture. And, we have those who believe the USA is the lost tribe of Israel, we are now living in the promised land god should have given the Jews. they also believe the pilgrims and puritans are warm fuzzy christians who were picked on so badly they had to leave the godless European countries and travel to the US where they established the True Church®. That definitely makes us god's chosen. So there!

[Dagan]

I often wonder what pagans--who enjoyed drinking and fucking and who had a very casual, even cynical view of their gods--would have seen in early Christianity. Historians of religion claim that early Christianity appealed to two groups: the poor, and upper class women. Even in the Pauline letters, Paul gives thanks to many Roman matrons of impressive pedigree who were bankrolling the upstart sect. It was a way for them to acquire status denied them by Roman society. Who knows, maybe it would have died out were it not for their matronage?

 

VC, you make two excellent points here. I think the appeal to pagans of Christianity was the fact that the officially Christian Roman Empire kicked their asses, so if you can't beat them, join them, right?

 

Second, I believe your point about wealthy matrons bankrolling Christianity is absolutely bang-on. Otherwise it's awfully strange the role women play in the gospels, given they were written by authors immersed in a misogynistic, patriachal society where a woman's testimony was worthless in any court. I've heard sermons about how that's proof the stories must be true, but I think they were written that way to appeal to women in the early church, a previously-untapped source of wealth and followers.

 

Women, don't take this the wrong way, I do not intend this to be a sexist comment at all, but Christianity still appeals more to women, at least in North America. Very few churches hold any appeal at all for men, who are not interested in singing love songs to Jesus or looking at flowery margins around every single item in the bulletin or working on their "relationship" with Jesus.

[Vigile]

The guys working for American companies in Iraq often complain about Iraqi workers. They don't save money, they stay home from work and live off the money. In Iran, developers experimented with paying workers twice as much. What ended up happening is that they would go home early to be with their families, because they only had to work half a day to make the same amount of money. Well, these Americans doing the complaining; their ancestors lived this way centuries ago.

 

Here in Russia the construction companies use Belorussians, Uzbeks, Kazaks, etc... instead of Russians because they are the cheap labor. Like companies in the US that us Mexicans. They work them 7 days a week with a 1/2 day on Sunday. The reason they do this is these guys are all living away from their families saving money to buy an apartment back home. They will come up here and work hard for 2-3 or more years and then go back home and buy an apartment. But if they have a day off they get wildly drunk and don't show up for work the next day. Thus 7 days a week doesn't give the the opportunity. They still have trouble on payday.

 

The British were smart: they had paid off all their debt to the Dutch so that they wouldn't be peons to them, and then they kicked Napoleon's ass.

 

Yeah, very smart. Since it is debt to the west that is primarily keeping the equatorial states down at this point in history. I'm pretty sure the world bank was established to ensure this order continues along a sort of twisted status quo, while at the same time encouraging more industrialization in these states so that the G-8 countries can get cheaper and cheaper goods but not be threatened by new up and comers.

 

I often wonder what pagans--who enjoyed drinking and fucking and who had a very casual, even cynical view of their gods--would have seen in early Christianity. Historians of religion claim that early Christianity appealed to two groups: the poor, and upper class women. Even in the Pauline letters, Paul gives thanks to many Roman matrons of impressive pedigree who were bankrolling the upstart sect. It was a way for them to acquire status denied them by Roman society. Who knows, maybe it would have died out were it not for their matronage?

 

You raise an interesting point here. Xianity appealed to the downtrodden groups but the Calvinist work ethic then raised this group up and made it more dominant than the upper classes due to the emergence of industrialization. Right?

 

So if you carry this thought further it begs the question, the industrial countries have moved from the bourgeois class to the proletariat class and the bourgeois countries have moved toward service. However, we seem to now experiencing more shifting as even service jobs are moving and can no longer be dominant in any one country like the US. Will xianity be finally crowded out by emerging dominant classes that are Hindu or Buddhist or something else?

 

You have a real gift VC. With your big picture grasp of a large number of subjects your future students are going to be quite privileged to have you as a prof. Hopefully you take it upon yourself to write a few books along the way so that others can enjoy your perspectives as well.

[Vomit Comet]

Here in Russia the construction companies use Belorussians, Uzbeks, Kazaks, etc... instead of Russians because they are the cheap labor. Like companies in the US that us Mexicans. They work them 7 days a week with a 1/2 day on Sunday. The reason they do this is these guys are all living away from their families saving money to buy an apartment back home. They will come up here and work hard for 2-3 or more years and then go back home and buy an apartment. But if they have a day off they get wildly drunk and don't show up for work the next day. Thus 7 days a week doesn't give the the opportunity. They still have trouble on payday.

 

Seven days a week? I wouldn't willingly do that, no matter the job, unless it meant I could retire comfortably at 35.

 

Yeah, very smart. Since it is debt to the west that is primarily keeping the equatorial states down at this point in history. I'm pretty sure the world bank was established to ensure this order continues along a sort of twisted status quo, while at the same time encouraging more industrialization in these states so that the G-8 countries can get cheaper and cheaper goods but not be threatened by new up and comers.

 

The Dutch had the rest of Europe by the balls when they reigned as Europe's financier; England was smart enough to quietly pay them off over the years, and then Napoleon came along and hit the Continental reset button, with the English saving the day. Debt peonage (seed and supplies from the company store at highly inflated prices) is what also prevented the sharecroppers from striking out for greener pastures, that is, until the collapse of the cotton market after World War I. Debt is truly a weapon of the powerful to control the weak, right up there with directly coercive enslavement or serfdom, and the relationship between the core nations and peripheral nations of the world are the latest and greatest example of this.

 

You raise an interesting point here. Xianity appealed to the downtrodden groups but the Calvinist work ethic then raised this group up and made it more dominant than the upper classes due to the emergence of industrialization. Right?

 

The work ethic is particular to Pietism. Calvinism said "you may or may not be one of the elect" and then left you hanging. Pietism was an addendum to that, because Calvinism 1.0 left too many people in the lurch in regards to assurance of salvation, and some people started figuring that it didn't matter what the fuck they did. "You may or may not be one of the elect, but if you are successful in life, it will serve as evidence that you are probably one of the elect." Helping little old ladies across the street like a saint would do is nice and all, but material gains were quantifiable measures of a successful life.

 

Also, Calvinism emerged within Switzerland if I'm not mistaken, which had a peculiar republican political structure. Also, by the 17th century, the aristocracy was already on the downward slide with the burghers being on the up-and-up, which would be accelerated in the late 18th century with the French Revolution in France and the Industrial Revolution in England. Even during the Renaissance, the Medici were the wealthiest family in all of Europe, and in their heyday they were no-names who had emerged from modest poverty not too long ago. Cosimo's grandfather was, IIRC, a poor miner. This was a major reason why their rivals, such as the Albizzi, despised them so; they were not nobles, they were commoner upstarts.

 

I would say that sects like the Puritans excelled above their bourgeois peers, who as a class were excelling above the aristocracy. The Medici and others demonstrated that no-name commoners could become more powerful and influential than noble rivals by economic savvy and by cultural patronage. Of course, the Medici family had become royalty (Dukes over all Tuscany) by the time of Galileo, and it didn't hurt that there were two Medici Popes in a row during the Renaissance prior to their ennoblement. It was a Medici Pope who was running the show when Luther came along.

 

It was sects like the Puritans that perfected bourgeois traits such as delayment of gratification, long miserable hours of toil, scrounging and scrimping and saving, and reinvestment in one's own enterprises. Put in a modest enjoyment of luxury in one's off-time and take out the neurotic religious element and you have the secular bourgeois ethic that we remain saddled with. All because some fucking pilgrims were chewing their fingernails over the possibility that they might be going to hell. I also forgot to mention the idea of a "calling." You know, every man a priest and all that. Basically, this is where the notion of your profession being your identity comes from.

 

It wasn't them that started capitalism. Capitalism was already well underway. But they accelerated it and helped it spread. They showed everyone else how to do it. But whereas their way of life was a religious calling, a choice, the rest of us are forced to live that way. We may not be driven by the fear of hell, but we are driven to engage in the same economic behaviors (but with a little bit of leisure added back in, though not too much) in order to keep up. It is not a choice for us.

 

So if you carry this thought further it begs the question, the industrial countries have moved from the bourgeois class to the proletariat class and the bourgeois countries have moved toward service. However, we seem to now experiencing more shifting as even service jobs are moving and can no longer be dominant in any one country like the US. Will xianity be finally crowded out by emerging dominant classes that are Hindu or Buddhist or something else?

 

The Chinese politburo and its academic allies have actually been quite influenced by Weber's ideas, though Weber would probably not be so enthusiastic about their reception. They've been throwing around the notion of a "Confucian Ethic", which is supposed to be analogous to the Protestant Ethic. (Even cultural conservatives today are, in the face of the current crisis, claiming that the Chinese are better exemplars of the Puritan economic values that America used to be driven by.) But Weber wasn't writing about the formula for economic dominance for future nations to follow; he was writing a tragedy of the West. He was very depressed by the historical developments he uncovered, and he claimed that because of those bloody Pietists, we modern people are trapped in "an iron cage of rationality." To reiterate, whereas the Puritan lived that way by choice, we are forced to.

 

What will happen to Christianity in America if the Chinese and Indians surpass us? Or if the world becomes multi-polar and is no longer presided over a sole hegemon (currently us Yanks)?

 

Fundamentalism has been growing since Colonial times, back when we partly functioned as the dumping ground for Europe's bat-shit crazy sects that nobody liked. It didn't hit its peak until the early 1980s, and today (and by a longshot) it enjoys the lion's share of the American churchgoing population. After Independence, we were still a backwater, blessed by the Atlantic that kept the Great Powers mostly away, and in our early history we were markedly non-cosmopolitan. Our future dominance wasn't hinted at until the 1870s when industrial expansion really got going, and during that time, Britain still remained A-1 by a longshot (at that point they were like Rome under Trajan). It wasn't until Europe was in shambles after the world wars that the USA became A-1. So basically, the presence of Christian fundamentalism has never been contingent on our standing in the world. It is true that since the Reagan years, a segment of the fundies has gotten all hopped up about our being a city on a hill, which is reminiscent of Puritan rhetoric from the 17th century. But they'll just change the story again should we find ourselves having to share the stage with China, India, the EU, Russia, and whoever else. That's one thing about American fundamentalism: it is entirely adaptable to changing alignments and circumstances. It has proven to be highly resilient, unlike the old Protestantism of New England and Northern Europe.

 

I also don't think it's contingent on the structure of the domestic or global economy, as far as the American case goes. America was a land of small farmers up until the late 19th century, and these were probably the largest and most electorally dominant bloc up until after the Civil War. And while evangelism/fundamentalism seems to be the uniquely American religion (just like jazz is the uniquely American art form), it is not the religion of the elite. Lutheranism got serious traction when the German princes and knights converted. It may well have been extinguished were it not for that. Luther split the Continent in half, which led to the Thirty Year War, which pound for pound made WWII look like the Franco-Prussian War if we're talking about the proportion of the population that perished. In America, while fundamentalism is the #1 religious strain and has been since the 1970s/1980s, it is not the religion of the elite.

 

I would characterize the American elites as nominally Protestant (with some Catholics and Jews thrown in), who maintain a basic bourgeois propriety for the sake of appearances. Which is similar to most respectable, affluent, educated Americans from east of the Mississippi River.

 

Jimmy Carter was an evangelical, but he was also a progressive, and by 1980 the fundies that had voted for him wanted him gone. Ronald Reagan was not an evangelical at all; while he pandered to them, he also knew they were trouble. He kept Jerry Falwell as a close confidante largely to keep his shoe firmly on Fallwell's nut sac, which frustrated Pat Robertson enough to run for President in '88. George Bush was certainly no evangelical, neither was Clinton, and neither of the two went out of their way to engage with the Religious Right. It's debatable as to whether the W. really truly was a fundie, though we do know the W. Bush Administration manipulated the fundies in ways that far surpassed what Reagan ever did. I would say that W. threw the fundies more bones than Reagan did, as Reagan only ever gave them lip service. Probably the one tangible thing Reagan ever really did for them was to ignore the AIDS crisis so that fags would die, but since he was a cultural reactionary of the Nixonian "Silent Majority" mold he probably would have done that anyways. Whereas W. Bush attempted to do real damage to the church-state wall of separation.

 

At the level of contemporary elite politics, the fundies have only ever been pawns of the GOP. Prior to Carter, they were politically negligible, if we're talking the post-war years. Prior to the war, they tended to be more active in busybody causes like Prohibition, or justifying slavery back in Antebellum times (something the Southern Baptists devoted considerable energy to). The Protestantism of the urban North, which had first split with its Southern counterpart over the slavery thing, was more politically/socially influential during industrial times, up until the Red Scare of the 1920s and the backlash that ended the Progressive Era.

 

I would say that the American elites' religion tends towards a respectable, and largely nominal mainline Protestantism, with some Catholicism and Judaism thrown in. Of course, you do have a few token whack-job fundie Senators and Governors, like Santorum, Palin, Jindal, etc., as well as some Mormons (now there's a uniquely American religion) like Orrin Hatch thrown in. And W. Bush did populate much of his Administration with fundies, though like with Reagan they were fairly well contained and mainly served ornamental purposes. Well, in the end, I'd say it was the elites who had their dicks up the fundies' asses, rather than the other way around. Thankfully, Obama largely ignores them.

 

Are the elite using fundyism for authoritarian control? No, the elite simply pushes their buttons so that they become an effective voting bloc. Although arguably, the militarism that emerged in the wake of 9/11 kind of had a fundy tinge to it, so maybe it was pulled into the marketing effort to some degree. I don't think that fundyism is used to compel people to work hard and consume. The Almighty Dollar is enough all by itself, I reckon. I also don't think that fundyism is a very good tool of political conformity, because as the fundies become more marginalized they're going to become more and more uppity and oppositional, somewhat like the Puritans of King James' England.

 

You have a real gift VC. With your big picture grasp of a large number of subjects your future students are going to be quite privileged to have you as a prof. Hopefully you take it upon yourself to write a few books along the way so that others can enjoy your perspectives as well.

 

Thank you. That means a lot, coming from such a sharp cat as yourself.

[Vomit Comet]

VC, you make two excellent points here. I think the appeal to pagans of Christianity was the fact that the officially Christian Roman Empire kicked their asses, so if you can't beat them, join them, right?

 

I was thinking more of the time period when Nero was kicking their asses, which is yet another reason you'd think the pagans would've found the whole thing a big turn-off. And even still, in the face of official persecution, it was spreading like the plague.

 

I guess another factor is that the Romans, like the Greeks, didn't pay much heed to the afterlife. The Greeks had a vague, and kind of shitty conception of the afterlife where you just kind of wandered around like a sad ghost in the underworld. This was one reason why they tried to live life to the fullest.

 

Well, if you were poor and miserable, the idea of goin' to hebbin' probably sounded pretty damned good. I imagine the Roman sons of privilege would have been reluctant to give up blow-jobs from 12 year old boys in exchange for that crazy-ass notion.

[Vigile]

The Chinese politburo and its academic allies have actually been quite influenced by Weber's ideas, though Weber would probably not be so enthusiastic about their reception. They've been throwing around the notion of a "Confucian Ethic",

 

Taking us back to the point that Loren made about elites using religion as a means to an end. Seems like all of us just get played.

 

Reminds me of an Exiledonline book review from a while back:

 

http://exiledonline.com/book-review-outlie...not-having-any/

Ever wonder why you’re not rich and/or famous? If you’re an American, of course you have.

 

Turns out, intrinsic worth ain’t enough. High IQ, tremendous talent, moral giganticism, even staggering looks and charm won’t do it. No, there has to be a crazy concatenation of factors to better the odds. For example, a sense of middle-to-upper class entitlement helps, so it’s a bad idea to be born lower-class.

 

So what you have here is a recipe for furious shame and discontent in most of the population. Why aren’t we ascending, as promised, on our personal merits? What’s preventing our remarkability from being remarked on? And we want an answer that doesn’t involve raising ourselves by our bootstraps, because we already tried that.

[Neon Genesis]

I often wonder what pagans--who enjoyed drinking and fucking and who had a very casual, even cynical view of their gods--would have seen in early Christianity. Historians of religion claim that early Christianity appealed to two groups: the poor, and upper class women. Even in the Pauline letters, Paul gives thanks to many Roman matrons of impressive pedigree who were bankrolling the upstart sect. It was a way for them to acquire status denied them by Roman society. Who knows, maybe it would have died out were it not for their matronage?

 

Here's what Bart D Ehrman says about the pagans in page 196 of Misquoting Jesus.

Our earliest records indicate that Christians were sometimes violently opposed by pagan mobs and/or authorities. The apostle Paul, for example, in a listing of the various sufferings for the sake of Christ, recounts that on three occasions he was "beaten with rods" (1 Cor 11:25), a form of punishment used by Roman municipal authorities against criminals judged to be socially dangerous. And as we have seen, Paul writes in his first surviving letter that the Gentile-Christian congregation in Thessalonica had "suffered from your own compatriots what they [the church in Judea] did from the Jews (1 Thes 2:14). In the the latter case, it appears that the persecution was not "official" but the result of some kind of mob violence. In fact, most of the pagan opposition to Christianity during the church's first two centuries happened on the grassroots level rather than as a result of an organized, official Roman persecution. Contrary to what many people appear to think, there was nothing "illegal" about Christianity, per se, in those early years. Christianity itself was not outlawed, and Christians for the most part did not go into hiding. The idea that they had to stay in Roman catacombs in order to avoid persecution, and greeted one another through secret signs such as the symbol of their fish, is nothing but the stuff of legend. It was not illegal to follow Jesus, it was not illegal to worship the Jewish God, it was not illegal to call Jesus God, it was not illegal (in most places) to hold separate meetings of fellowship and worship, it was not illegal to convince others of one's faith in Christ as the Son of God

[Loren]

VC, you make two excellent points here. I think the appeal to pagans of Christianity was the fact that the officially Christian Roman Empire kicked their asses, so if you can't beat them, join them, right?

 

I was thinking more of the time period when Nero was kicking their asses, which is yet another reason you'd think the pagans would've found the whole thing a big turn-off. And even still, in the face of official persecution, it was spreading like the plague.

I see this dynamic as an ongoing human psychological factor which some times rises spontaneously from a grass roots level, and is some times played and manipulated by power brokers. I've noticed a definite propensity for people to see some small (or relatively small) group being targeted or apparently targeted by "Big Gummint" and reacting to the scene with an attitude something like, "Hmmmm... Why is Big Brother going after those guys? Maybe they're doing something right." The old, "enemy of my enemy is my friend" thing.

 

I guess another factor is that the Romans, like the Greeks, didn't pay much heed to the afterlife. The Greeks had a vague, and kind of shitty conception of the afterlife where you just kind of wandered around like a sad ghost in the underworld. This was one reason why they tried to live life to the fullest. Well, if you were poor and miserable, the idea of goin' to hebbin' probably sounded pretty damned good.

And the shapers of Christian theology were certainly not slow to pick up on that opportunity. The clear cynicism of the development of Christian theology as social engineering was one of the nails in the coffin of faith in that cult for me.

I imagine the Roman sons of privilege would have been reluctant to give up blow-jobs from 12 year old boys in exchange for that crazy-ass notion.

Again, what I said above about the church shapers not being slow to learn from the lessons of others.

 

"Hey, we're not like those poverty-stricken, ascetic early Christians! You want gold? We've got gold! You want power? We've got power and are getting more all the time. You want fancy robes? We've got fancy robes! You want boys? We've got boys! We just have a 'Don't ask, don't tell and above all, don't rat out your fellow clergy,' policy. And when you die, you'll go to !!HEAVEN!!, where you'll have joy forever and not be held to account for what a rotten shit you've been, as is, of course, only right for aristocracy. What's that, you say? You're not aristocracy? Well, you are, now! Buddy, it's your lucky day!"

 

 

Thank you guys for all you've written in this thread! This has been fascinating to read. What a great thread! I totally agree with Vigile, VC. You do have a real gift. Clearly, you could write some wonderfully readable books.

 

And Vigile's no damn slouch, himself!

[Vomit Comet]

Me and my girlfriend were touring the catacombs in Rome. There was this marble statue of an early female Saint, a pagan who had been converted by one of the earliest Popes. The statute depicted her corpse, with a bag over her head and her throat slit.

 

My girlfriend and I looked at each other. "How could that have been worth it?" we asked one another. As a fundie I would have been walking through those catacombs with a giant boner, and I probably would have creamed my shorts when I came across that martyr's monument. And then I would have spent the rest of the week trying to tell myself that if the New World Order officially kicked off worldwide Christian persecution, that I would have as much balls as these early Roman Christians did. But as a fundie-turned-agnostic I was just kind of beside myself....