‘I believe... 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 instil 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’ - Emma Goldman
Emma Goldman, an Eastern European migrant to the USA and fierce critic of patriarchy and the state offers Christian anarchists an important pause for thought in her challenge to their religion.
Although for centuries Christians have worked hand-in-hand with oppressors - this often brushed off as “Christianity after it became the official religion of the roman empire” (Constantinian Christianity), and so nothing to do with us. Arguments about the metaphysical beliefs of Christians - in God, or in miracles for instance - seem to miss the point of what Christianity is really about. So we stay comfortably distant from the usual Atheism vs Christianity debates.
Yet the arguments against Christianity expressed by Emma Goldman in her essay ‘The Failure of Christianity’ take their ammunition neither from the actions of the modern church, nor from the niceties of Christian theology. Rather, she critiques the very teachings of Jesus himself, believing that just as oppressive governments cannot be reformed into benefactors of the people, oppressive religion cannot be reformed into something free and life-giving. Her criticisms are shocking, and we need to attend to them - stopping every now and again to question our beliefs and the way we live them is crucial to direct our future actions.
Emma Goldman spent her life organising, speaking and writing for the poor and the oppressed, and against power and militarism. She was sent to jail multiple times; first for ‘inciting a riot’ - by publicly telling unemployed workers “Ask for work. If they do not give you work, ask for bread. If they do not give you work or bread, take bread” - later for distributing birth control literature and finally for persuading people to resist the draft during the first world war, before she was deported from the US. She is widely considered to be one of the founders of anarcha-feminism, and in her writings both her love of individual freedom and her anger at economic injustice and violent authority are evident throughout.This is the basis of her dislike of Jesus’ teachings - she argues that they lead to the acceptance of injustice and to the denial of the good and the beautiful in people.
Jesus’ blessing of the meek, and his command to ‘resist not the evildoer’, she claims, have been part of the reason that people have accepted slavery and terrible conditions - because they believed that meekness was a virtue, and that they must not resist or stand up for themselves. God would give them rest and reward in heaven anyway. Jesus’ blessing of the poor in spirit is taken to be praising of weakness, of un-creativity. How can this possibly create justice and equality, she asks? Isn't poverty the very thing we are trying to end? "What is [the sermon on the mount] but a eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of things?"
She believed Jesus promise of reward in heaven for the poor, such as in the parable of the rich man and Lazarus, make the poor accept oppression, and may even make the oppressors worse too. She also criticised apparent concessions in Jesus' teaching. For instance, although he said ‘Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be filled’, how could this ever happen when ‘the poor shall always be with you’? The worst of these is ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's, and unto God what is God's’ - she says "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".
It is tempting to simply argue with her interpretation of scripture - of course, one can say, 'resist not the evildoer' should be translated as 'do not resist the evildoer with violence'. One can say ‘once you give God what’s God’s, there is not much left for Caesar’. However, it is impossible to deny that, for centuries, Emma Goldman's understanding is what Christ's teachings have meant to the poor and the oppressed, and what has been preached to them. Even among 'radical' Christians, there is a tendency to romanticise poverty. If we dwell too much on meekness, then I believe that we will change nothing, and only serve to propagate the things we are fighting against.
The way Jesus' teachings are understood by most people will not be determined by scholars, or by what we say between ourselves in reading groups and discussions, but by how we interpret them with our lives. If the Church, which is the body of Christ, stands meek and bumbling against evil, compromising with state power at every turn, then that is what the world will think Jesus was about. If however, like Shadrach, Meshach and Abed-nego[1], the Church refuses to back down against oppressors and injustice, if it refuses to bow before the idol of political conformity, then perhaps the world will see a Jesus they haven't seen before.
Emma Goldman's criticism, should be seen as a call to Christian radicals to love more fiercely, to stand firm in their convictions, and not compromise with the powers that be. To name and fight the capitalism, sexism and militarism that we see in our world, and even in our churches, with all the force we can muster.
[1] Three people in the Hebrew Scriptures who were thrown into a furnace for refusing to bow to the king of Babylon
[note - this article was originally published in 'A Pinch of Salt', a zine looking at the connections between Christianity and Anarchism]
