I hit the jackpot today. Feeling stuck about what to write next I read a few online mentions of “Christian Nationalism” and invective directed against presumed Republican candidate Donald J. Trump for the US Presidency, and my mind recognized an overlap. In an instant I realized that there actually is something out there which could be called Christian Derangement Syndrome.
I also decided that CDS, as I will now call it, falls within the scope of my longest series which relates the dramas of today with those of the French Revolution. Back then, the revolutionaries had their own version of CDS. More about that later.
But first, terms must be defined. What, in fact, is a Christ? Sure, everyone assumes that it has something to do with Christianity, but there are plenty of folks in our Global Village who do not know what a Christ actually is.
Going back to its Ancient Greek roots, the word Christ comes from the word χριστός (christos) meaning anointed. In the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, that word was used to translate מָשִׁיחַ (Mashiach) or Messiah.
The Encyclopedia Britannia does not hesitate to tell us that anointment, an “almost universal practice in the history of all religions,” represents healing, consecration, and ordination.
Britannia? The Encyclopedia of the British? My ever-agile monkey brain starts asking whether there is any Christian Derangement Syndrome in Great Britain these days. An interesting question, but I will leave it for another occasion.
Given that Jesus of Nazareth was, according to Christians, the Anointed, perhaps the earliest historical example of Christian Derangement Syndrome was the reaction to Jesus by the Pharisees. What, actually was a Pharisee?
A quick glance at Wikipedia makes it clear that the Pharisees were the Jewish Establishment at the time of Jesus before and after the Crucifixion. There was competition for such a role, and not just from the followers of Jesus. There were Jews, for example, called Sadducees who were under the influence of Greeks who followed Alexander the Great centuries earlier.
In the Christian Bible (Matthew 21:12) Jesus overturns the tables of the money-changers, an act which certainly did not endear him to the Pharisee Establishment. Money-changers? Indeed. Pilgrims from many nations needed local currency to participate in the Establishment culture of the time. Of course the Pharisees, who were very influential over the less powerful Jews of the time, considered Jesus of Nazareth to be a threat. He had to be taken care of. That was the job of the local government, which was Roman back then, hence, the responsibility of Pontius Pilate. If you want to know the details of what happened before this year’s Easter Bunny comes hop-hop-hopping into the news, you can find a lot about it online, so I need not send you links about crucifixion or resurrection.
Instead, I will return to my earlier mention of the French Revolution and that event’s particular version of Christian Derangement Syndrome.
As I have written earlier in this series, when the people of Paris stormed the Bastille on July 14, 1789, society was officially divided into two ruling class factions, the Clergy and the Aristocracy, and the third and largest “estate,” Those Who Work, the “everybody else” category, known today to orthodox Marxists as the Proletariat, and to orthodox American “Democrats” as the Deplorables. But now, let’s turn our focus to the First Estate, the Clergy.
In 1789, the Clergy consisted of the local version of the Roman Catholic Church. Yes, there were Protestants, Jews, and Muslims, but they didn’t count for much. The Revolutionaries who purported to represent the Third Estate had a problem. One attempt to solve it was a law passed in July, 1790 establishing a “Civil Constitution of the Clergy” which ended any separation of church and state which might have previously existed. Clergymen then were required to sign a loyalty oath to the revolutionary government, and the Clergy was split.
CDS had begun in Revolutionary France and it was a big deal.
The programme of dechristianization waged against Catholicism, and eventually against all forms of Christianity, included:
destruction of statues, plates and other iconography from places of worship
destruction of crosses, bells and other external signs of worship
the institution of revolutionary and civic cults, including the Cult of Reason and subsequently the Cult of the Supreme Being (spring 1794)
the enactment of a law on 21 October 1793 making all nonjuring priests and all persons who harbored them liable to death on sight.
Destruction of statues? Can you, in the farthest stretch of your dystopian sci-fi imagination, conceive of such a thing?
Anyhow, you are probably wondering if any non-cooperating (nonjuring) priests got killed in the process.
You bet they did.
In a place called Rochefort, 827 priests and other religious prisoners were held in the hulks of old ships, of whom 542 died before the rest were freed. On October 1, 1995, Pope John Paul II finally beatified 64 of them as martyrs.
So that was the Eighteenth Century version of CDS. But what about the Twenty-First Century?
Well, what is this form of nationalism which is being called Christian nationalism?
Let’s go right to the horse’s mouth, the horse being David French of the New York Times. In this article (paywall alert?), Mr. French tells us,
The sociologists Samuel Perry and Andrew Whitehead define Christian nationalism as a “cultural framework that blurs distinctions between Christian identity and American identity, viewing the two as closely related and seeking to enhance and preserve their union.”
Mr. French hastens to assure us that an American who just considers himself a Christian isn’t necessarily a target of contemporary Christian Derangement Syndrome. It’s only those distinction blurrers who are.
Are there any Christians reading this? Any distinction blurrers reading this? Well, I hope so. That’s why I wrote it.
😬
Many of the nonjuring priests were still imprisoned when the prison riots were incited, leading to many of them being murdered in their cells.