Guest Post: The “Persecution Complex”

[I’m having a lazy day. Enjoy this post by the always fantastic P. Sufenas Virius Lupus! – Star]

I’ve recently read, and commented on, a piece written by my Patheos.com Pagan Portal colleague K. C. Hulsman called “Christ is NOT the Reason for the Season.” While I would dispute a few of her details, on the whole it’s a good article, and apart from those details, it’s entirely factual to state that late December (the old date of Winter Solstice, in fact) being chosen as an arbitrary date for the otherwise unknown and uncertain birth of Jesus, and the appropriation of many non-Christian associations of the way the holiday is celebrated by Christians over the centuries, is something which Christians who insist that there is a factual element to their observances don’t realize, and can’t seem to get through their heads. Of course, there are exceptions to this statement amongst some Christians, but we don’t hear about them very much, with the pseudo-news forces of Fox and the like both complaining about those who say “Happy Holidays” rather than expressing a greeting specific to their preferred holiday, while also saying that those businesses that do wish people their preferred holiday greeting are “just doing it for the money.” But, I leave that set of problems aside for the moment.

In reading and responding to the comments on K.C.’s piece, I’ve realized something. The in-built “persecution complex” that Christians have, and still resort to, whenever anyone raises an alternative religious viewpoint to their own is something that our spiritual ancestors—the Greek, Roman, and other Pagans and polytheists of Europe and the ancient Mediterranean world—inadvertently created. But perhaps I’d better back up a bit first.

The early Christians were a minority within a minority—a radical, reforming Jewish sect that was a small part of the overall Jewish population. With people like Saul of Tarsus, they began spreading their teachings to a wider group of people, the Gentiles—which is to say, “the Nations,” meaning anyone who wasn’t Jewish. When the Gentiles started taking to these teachings, they ran into difficulty with the civil authorities of the time. Despite Jesus’ teaching about “Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s,” and the Imperial Cultus being a functioning reality during his lifetime, this teaching was interpreted in various other ways that did not include actually respecting Roman civil custom.

Of course, it is somewhat problematic to talk about “Roman civil custom” outside of “Roman religious practice,” because there was little difference or distinction between them. In our post-“separation of church and state” era, we think of the Senate of a country as a law-making body, not as a religious authority, which is what it was in ancient Rome. Taxes were levied, roads were built, wars were declared, and many other functions of what we would consider civil society, were all carried out by the Senate in the name of various different deities who oversaw these functions. The Senate was, in essence, a kind of priestly body that took care of these matters of public welfare on behalf of the people and in the service of the gods.

So, when some Christians refused to do their civil duty to the Roman Emperor, and honor the Numen Augusti by a token sacrifice for the Emperor’s health (which the Jewish authorities during Jesus’ lifetime had agreed to do, while they still had a temple in Jerusalem!), the Romans had a serious problem with that, not because of what it meant about the Christian’s belief, but because refusing to act “in good faith” in that manner suggested that the Christians were political revolutionaries dangerous to society. When Rome burned during the principate of Nero, Christians were blamed for the fire; and, while that blame-placing may not be true, it probably is true that many Christians stood by and did nothing, rather than helping out with the fire brigades that tried to fight the fire—why would they work to preserve anything of “this world” when their founding figure/deity promised that the world would be ending and they’d be in paradise soon enough? It probably didn’t endear any Romans to the Christians to see them standing in otherworldly indifference to the destruction around them in favor of a concept of “salvation” that was not this-worldly, as that concept had been in the majority of Greek and Roman society.

To this day, Christians “believe” that their early spiritual ancestors were persecuted for their “beliefs,” not for their actions and their lack of practice and participation in the things of the state. The Romans and Greeks didn’t care what the Christians’ beliefs were, they just wanted them to participate in a token fashion in their rituals of state. Even the Christian writings on the early martyrs have the Roman and Greek civil authorities pleading with the Christians to “just do this,” and giving them repeated chances to mend their unpatriotic ways, but the Christians continually refused because of their beliefs. No incident from history more sharply draws the distinction between religions of creed like Christianity and religions of practice like most forms of polytheism than this. And, the Christians were willing to die in various ways for what, ultimately, amounts to the equivalent of not standing with one’s hand over one’s heart during the Pledge of Allegiance. (Ironic, isn’t it, how many Christians in the U.S. are insistent that everyone do that now, even when some of their number, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, do not believe in doing so?)

My own spiritual ancestor, Divus Hadrianus, better known to history as the Roman Emperor Hadrian, had a remarkably tolerant attitude to Christians in those early centuries of the movement. He enacted a law which stated that no one could denounce someone as a Christian just for being a Christian, but instead that the Christian concerned had to be committing some illegal and punishable offense; and if they were committing such an offense, they should be punished for it, not for being a Christian. This legal action of his was so appreciated by the Christians that they preserved it in their own historical records and chronicles. Where Christianity was concerned, Hadrian’s approach was a forerunner to “don’t ask, don’t tell,” in many respects (in the memorable formulation of Steven Saylor’s novel Empire)!

However, Hadrian was far from perfect, and likewise neither were many of his spiritual descendants. The holy city of Antinoöpolis, founded on the spot where the god Antinous died and was deified, had Christians living in it before the time of Constantine, and many were executed when they ran afoul of the authorities. I take this fact rather personally, and while I am not myself responsible for those deaths or those actions, I feel it should be my responsibility to make sure such atrocities never happen again. This is one of the motivations for the ritual we’ve held in the Ekklesía Antínoou on a few occasions already, and which I hope we’ll hold on more occasions in the future, known as the Communalia. In this, we make a public acknowledgment of the difficulties of the past between different religions and cultures, and vow to not repeat such atrocities in the future, and in fact to be allies to one another in the event that our communities come under threat for whatever reason. I’d like for Jews, Christians, and Muslims to take part in this ritual with us at some point in the future—but, every time I’ve invited them to do so, they have not even given a polite refusal, but instead have entirely ignored my request. So much for “loving thy neighbor,” or much less “loving thy enemy,” I suppose, at least on the part of the religious people who have that teaching in their sacred scriptures…

All of the Christian scriptures were written during the period of persecution before Constantine, and even though their final redaction was not compiled until this period “officially” ended with the principate of Constantine, up until then the religion had largely been an ascetic one with little investment in “this world,” since Jesus had said that the end of the world would arrive in the lifetime of those hearing him. The scriptures of the religion—particularly the Gospel of Mark—were a guidebook in preparation for martyrdom: death at the hands of the Romans had been Jesus’ fate, and it would be a glorious, blessed, and fitting result for anyone who wished to be his follower as well. (And Saul of Tarsus’ writings on being “baptized into Jesus’ death” and so forth didn’t help the situation at all!) When, rather suddenly, the Christians found themselves in the position of power, they quickly forgot many of the teachings on meekness and non-violence of their ostensible founding figure, and instead carried out a persecution of non-Christian culture and religion that left almost nothing standing, quite literally (with the exception of some of the nicer buildings that could be re-used as churches—including the Pantheon built by the Emperor Hadrian to honor all the gods). They could not even extend the level of tolerance to people who weren’t of their religion that Hadrian had extended to them, and for which they praised and admired him.

And, because the Christian scriptures haven’t changed, and their overall message hasn’t changed, since those times, Christian ideals and teachings still prepare everyone for potential martyrdom, and put Christians in a constant position of feeling persecuted in the world, even when all that is occurring is the speaking of an alternative viewpoint to their own—whether those alternate ideas are spiritual or secular. And, for this, our spiritual ancestors as Pagans and polytheists bear some responsibility.

For my part, I’d like to offer the following to any Christians who might be reading this: I’m very sorry that the basic misunderstanding between your ancestors’ beliefs and my ancestors’ practices lead to you becoming what you have since then. It was wrong for my spiritual ancestors to persecute your spiritual ancestors in the way that they did. I also think it would be wrong to say “But it was all for the good, because look how things ended up”; no, “how things ended up” has been even worse than the initial situation. So, for the part that my spiritual ancestors played in the creation of your current state of feeling like a persecuted minority—even despite the fact that there are more of you alive now than there were of all my spiritual ancestors combined in the four centuries between when your religion emerged and when it came into absolute political power—I am truly and deeply sorry.

You pride yourselves on being a holy people, and you are called by your scriptures to “be perfect, as God is perfect” (Matt. 3:48); I therefore also call upon you to remember the teaching of your tradition (1 John 4:18) “There is no fear in love. But perfect love drives out fear, because fear has to do with punishment. The one who fears is not made perfect in love.” It’s time, therefore, to stop living in fear, and to follow the teachings of your religion, your founding apostles, and your god Jesus when all of these spoke of love.

You cannot rightly claim to be in the position of a persecuted minority any longer; you have, more often than not, been the persecutors for the last 1650 years or so. For those of us who are not of your belief system, we have no interest in “dying for” our religion, because we value life and wish to have it in abundance, here, in this very good and beautiful, though flawed, world. For us, martyrdom is not a virtue nor an ideal. For us, who are now in the position that your spiritual ancestors were when your religion emerged, would you act in ways towards us that you still execrate the Romans for nearly two millennia later? “The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone,” indeed…