Since this is a general pattern, and the passion story can curdle to hatred in many contexts, quite a lot of different people can get hated. But there’s been one ancient continuing target all the while. From the very beginning, the hate-inducing potential of the story was entangled in Christianity’s relationship with its Jewish older sibling. In medieval Europe, Jesus’s status as God incarnate was so entrenched in culture, he was so blazingly haloed and angel-attended in all the iconography, that it was virtually impossible for many people to imagine that he had ever been mistakeable for an ordinary man: so those who sent him to his death could not have been mistaken, or ordinarily culpable for an ordinary piece of realpolitik. They must have done so because of what he was, because they were the conscious enemies of God. Because in their pride and their alarming otherness and their sinister separateness they were deliberately siding against the good. Meanwhile, Jesus’s own Jewishness, and his mother’s, and his friends’, disappeared from sight. Who gets hated? Those hook-nosed Yids sneering at Our Lord in the painting; those other Yids who live three streets away, in the ghetto. Good Friday should be the day of all days in the Christian year when we are ashamed of even our tiniest and most necessary cruelties – seeing before us the image of their consequences. But instead, grotesquely, it was often the day for pogroms; a day of heightened emotions which could be resolved, for Christian mobs pouring out of churches, into a search for Jews to kill. Then Easter was celebrated with smoke and screams, and Christ re-crucified. The final catastrophe of European Jewry, in the twentieth century, wasn’t just powered by religious anti-Semitism, but it played its part. This is the greatest shame of Christian history; the most disgusting misapplication possible of the story of compassion unto death. My own church, and most of the other mainstream branches of the universal ecclesia too, now insists that on Good Friday we all of us in the building shout out ‘Crucify him! Crucify him!’, to remind us whodunnit, and that it wasn’t Them. Unless the memory of the Holocaust fades in a way I don’t anticipate, the specific danger of Christian anti-Semitism is much reduced. But there remains, always, the general danger of pity turning to an anger sure it’s on good’s side: for it’s righteous anger, in this world, with guilt pushed out of sight, that gets the crucifixions done.
There is another, more inward sense in which the story can be used as suffering’s licence. We’re supposed as Christians to go out and love recklessly, as God does. We’re supposed to try and imitate Jesus in this, and to be prepared to follow love wherever it goes, knowing that there are no guarantees it’ll be safe, or that the world will treat such vulnerability kindly. ‘Take up your cross and follow me,’ says Jesus in St Mark’s Gospel, meaning: risk everything, even death. Take love’s consequences. Don’t be careful. He didn’t mean: what I’m about to do needs doing again and again, by you. Once was enough for ever, and only God could do it anyway. He also didn’t mean: go out, my dears, and hurt yourselves. But it is possible to read it that way, as a suggestion that we should embrace suffering by being enthusiastic about it, and there is a strand of self-directed violence in Christian history as a result, often committed by people who have a troubled or frightened relationship with their bodies anyway, and who are looking for a sanction to act on it. The lives of the saints contain cases that look suspiciously like anorexia, like self-mutilation, like terrified rejection of the bodily experiences of adulthood operating under cover of holiness. Christianity isn’t a religion of self-harm, but self-harm can find a home in it, especially during one of the church’s periodic panics about sexuality, when it can look as if the church is only willing to tolerate bodies on the most limited terms, and someone who doesn’t like bodies at all can seem to be a spiritual virtuoso. This is not usually the same impulse, by the way, as the one that leads people to fast in Lent, or to become monks or nuns: there, what is being sacrificed is something the person enjoys, but which they are willing to give up in order to simplify their life, and to concentrate it around something they want and need (and enjoy) more. Monasteries, I’m glad to say, are full of hedonists. If this seems self-contradictory to you, then I would suggest you need to broaden your knowledge of human satisfactions.
Corrupting God’s solidarity with human suffering into pretext, alibi, camouflage: that’s our greatest failing. Then next in the roll-call of Christianity’s most destructive failures comes our persistent desire to give grace a downgrade. We’re supposed to see God’s willingness to mend, to forgive, to absorb and remove guilt, as oceanic; a sea of love without limit, beating ceaselessly on the shores of our tiny island of caution and justice, always inviting us to look beyond, to begin again, to dare a larger and wilder and freer life. But it is possible to shrink it instead into something like a Get Out of Jail Free card, to be played by God only very occasionally in a game otherwise dominated by the same old rewards and punishments, human justice writ large all over the cosmos. Having begun with a powerful instruction to look beyond law, which human beings need, to see what else there is that we need too, Christianity has constantly tried to build new systems of law which can hold this thing we’re told God wants us to notice. To hold it, to restrain it, to domesticate it, to bind it with rules, like Gulliver tied down by the ropes of the Lilliputians. Of course: because something kinder than fairness is, by definition, unfair, and once you take grace seriously it immediately threatens to produce scandalous unfairness in human terms. Jesus offered the very gentle, easy-way-in story of labourers who all get paid the same no matter when they turn up for work, but there are far harder, far more revolting consequences to grace. It is not for us to know who does and does not manage to accept forgiveness, but if the love really never stops, if God really does long for every lost soul, then in principle God regards as forgivable a whole load of stuff we really don’t want forgiven, thank you. People who use airliners to murder thousands of office workers, people who strut about Norwegian summer camps stealing the lives of teenagers with careful shots to the head, people who drive over their gay neighbour in their pick-up truck and then reverse and do it again, people who torture children for sexual pleasure: God is apparently ready to rush right in there and give them all a hug, the bastard. We don’t want that. We want justice, dammit, if not in this world then in the next. We want God’s extra-niceness confined to deserving cases such as, for example, us, and a reliable process of judgement put in place which will ensure that the child-murderers are ripped apart with red-hot tongs.
So for most of its history, with varying degrees of certainty about whether the church really does have a bureaucratic grip on what happens after we’re dead, Christianity has been in the hell business. You die; grace makes a momentary special-guest appearance for the defence courtesy of Jesus or, if he happens to be occupying the judge’s seat just then, his mum; everyone admires God’s classy but basically non-functional wish to be nice; and then you get exactly what you deserve. Hell, by contrast with God’s niceness, is highly functional. It does lots and lots of work in human cultures. It operates as a deterrent, scaring the shit out of people who are contemplating doing bad things (and a lot of other people too, but hey, you can’t have everything). It operates as a form of social control, since the misdemeanours that get you sent there somehow very often include cheeking your betters, asking awkward questions, embarrassing the powerful and engaging in unsightly degrees of class mobility. As if to make up for that, it also and simultaneously operates as a last-ditch form of social justice, promising that the malefactors of great wealth the law couldn’t touch on earth will finally get theirs when they come before God’s tribunal, where the clear-up rate for crimes is one hundred per cent. And, most weirdly, it operates on the side as a kind of theodicy, a peculiarly twisted attempt to solve the problem of pain. Imaginatively speaking, hell deals with suffering by doubling up on it, by coming up with something worse, alongside which anthrax and toothache and Colonel Gaddafi don’t look so bad. Hell drowns out this-worldly suffering in horror. Alongside the world, it lays in imagination t
his other domain which is all horror, all the time, without our world’s mixture of qualities, and without the finiteness which ensures that, in life, even the worst things end. The idea being that here suffering is finally put on a proper basis, with proper moral causation in place. In hell, rocks never fall randomly out of an empty sky and break your skull. In hell, it only happens if you deserve it. In hell, the bad things only happen to guaranteed bad people.
But of course hell’s handy little bundle of social utility – unlike the grace of God – comes at a cost. Hell makes God Himself a torturer. It produces grotesque distortions in what we’d have to mean when we talk about His ‘love’. If love can be manifested in scooping out the eyeballs of unrepentant criminals over and over again for all eternity, then (if I may refer you back to Chapter Four) it instantly fails the John Stuart Mill test of being recognisable as the phenomenon humans call by the same name. Moreover – guaranteed bad people? What has happened to the central Christian recognition that we’re all bad people, in need of mercy? Somehow, in hell, limitless compassion acquires very definite limits: limits so tightly drawn that in the end it becomes inescapably clear that the whole contrivance, besides being repellently sadistic in itself, is blatantly incompatible with the primary thing Christianity believes about God, and must in fact be another of the shadows of our failure, another vengeful projection of the HPtFtU of Christian humans, rather than part of the furniture of God’s universe.
And here I have good news for once. Hell is still popular – just look at the way the tabloids invoke it, whenever they need a way to describe evil that won’t decompose into touchy-feely social-work-speak – but not with actual Christians, any more. Crazy avant-gardists that we are, we went ahead and decided to do without it some time ago. The majority of us have not believed in it for several generations. It isn’t because we’re wimpy modernisers who can’t stomach the more scaly and brimstone-rich aspects of our inheritance. It’s because, from the beginning, hell conflicted with much more basic aspects of the religion, and our collective understanding finally caught up with the fact. Those posters you occasionally see on buses and rail platforms threatening you with unquenchable fire come from a tiny faction of headbangers. We don’t like them either. (I myself would rather have the atheist bus any day.) I promise this is really true. No more hell! It’s official! The smiliness of Christians may be creepy for other reasons, but we are not, I swear, biding our time and waiting for everyone who disagrees with us to get slung into the pit. We are not smiling because we are waiting patiently for you lot to fry. Honest. Except in miniscule enclaves, the centuries are over in which the threat of hell was wielded to ensure conformity, passivity and deference; in which it terrified and tormented the living; in which it was used to justify the cruelties of earthly law; in which it served as a narrow, frightened, legalistic refusal of the generosity we were supposed to be celebrating.
While we’re talking about law, let’s talk about power as well: the next area of disaster. Quite a lot of people imagine a version of Christian history that comes with a moment of decisive downfall where power is concerned. Usually they point to the 330s AD, when Constantine the Great made Christianity the official religion of the Roman empire. No more innocent sect; from then on, a branch of the state, wielding the weapons of the state to enforce an intolerant monopoly. Goodbye, the holy impossibilism of the preacher from Galilee; hello, bishops sending the police to heretics’ houses. I don’t buy it myself – not, at any rate, the idea that power in itself has poisoned Christianity. There is a characteristic and persistent Christian failure where power is concerned, but it’s much more specific. Power as such is not optional. Having a relationship with it of some kind, whether wielding it or being subject to it, comes as standard in human societies. For the church, relating to power one way or another is a necessary consequence of operating in the world, or rather of trying to straddle two worlds: of trying to witness to an unconditional love while also doing what is needful to go on existing in the world of conditions. It’s a paradox. In order to still be there tomorrow saying, ‘Take no thought for tomorrow’, the church has to think about tomorrow.* The very early church, and quite possibly Jesus too, expected that the problem would solve itself shortly, because the world was about to end. It didn’t, and instead it became clear that Christians were going to have to build and maintain and bargain as well as living out God’s impractical foolishness.
* Perhaps this is the place to try and lay to rest the bizarre idea that my own church, the Church of England, is ‘rich’. Somehow, the people who say it is only ever look at the C. of E.’s assets, never its liabilities. Wealth is assets minus liabilities, and the church’s income from its investments is outweighed, and then some, by its bills for salaries and pensions. This is true even with maximum use of volunteers, and fewer and fewer paid priests, and each priest covering more and more parishes, and longer and longer gaps between priests in the parishes when they move on elsewhere. The church’s portfolio is valued in the (low) billions, but that’s because it operates on a very large scale. Disaggregate the billions, and you find that on a local level the reality everywhere is one of penny-pinching, and continuous fund-raising just to keep the roof on the thousands of ancient churches. It takes all the running we can do to stay in the same place. It’s not as if the assets could be liquidated, anyway. They aren’t being held for their cash value, and they don’t belong to us to dispose of. The purpose of the church’s money is not to make money, but to contrive for it to go on being true that the church is there whenever it is needed. Everywhere in England is in a parish. Everyone in England has a priest they can go to. In the unlikely event that a heartbroken Richard Dawkins wants help with his HPtFtU, there will be somebody tired but willing in North Oxford whose responsibility it is to offer him an inexpensive digestive biscuit and a cup of milky tea, and to listen to him for as long as it takes. Meanwhile, the personnel who do this are not exactly coining it: certainly not in comparison with the rewards available to those who write ‘brave’ anti-religious bestsellers, or to comedians being ‘iconoclastic’. A parish priest aged fifty, driving frantically between her five or six leaking churches, burying people and marrying people and sitting with the dying and serving as the messenger across all of the contemporary divides and keeping faith with both hope and despair and trying to ease where she can the weight of sorrow and cruelty, earns about £22,500 a year, about as much as a recently qualified nurse. She gets a house, which is not to be sniffed at, but it vanishes at retirement, of course. (And although there are still a few nice big houses in the country, the cash-strapped Church Commissioners have sold off almost all the pretty architecture for what it will fetch. ‘The Old Rectory’ is an address for a stockbroker.) A bishop, managing while trying to be more than a manager, and representing the faith to a world inclined to believe it’s all a cover for bigotry and kiddy-fiddling, and contriving to uphold a carved medieval mountain which is always trying to fall down, earns £39,000, slightly less than the salary of a long-serving police sergeant. The Archbishop of Canterbury – our overburdened intellectual with the beard, doomed to please nobody – earns £72,000, slightly more than the salary (before expenses) of an ordinary MP, vanishingly less than the income of any chief executive of any organisation doing anything anywhere in the private sector. Nobody in our time ever joins the church to get rich. There is ancient splendour, yes, but it’s all in trust. You might consider these figures the next time you see someone stuck on auto-sneer about the ‘wealth’ and ‘power’ of the clergy. Especially if they themselves have a job in financial services.
Given that inevitability, none of the choices available for the Christian relationship with power are uncomplicated. All of them are compromises of some description, and all of them lead to culpability of some kind. You can refuse the violence all power depends on, as some sects of Christians have always done, and be pacifists like the Quakers or the Amish, but then you end up tacitly depending, for protection and civil orde
r, on those who do get their hands dirty. You become power’s free riders, taking the benefits without paying the price. You can withdraw into a monastic pocket civilisation, where family and biology’s obligations are suspended, along with the state’s, but then somebody else, again, has to have and raise the children, and make the world safe enough for them. You can make your refusal of power violent in itself, and fight a perfectionist guerrilla war for your vision of the kingdom, but what if you win? What if your militia of Anabaptists or Fifth Monarchy Men enters the filthy city victorious, and you suddenly have to keep the power station running, and put burglars on trial? The necessities of the world keep imposing themselves.
Or you can come to terms with power in some form, allying with it or supporting it or participating in it or trying to take it over; and then the other end of the paradox, the other horn of the dilemma, begins to dig into you. For though Christianity will function, more or less, as an ideology of power, it never does so easily and conveniently, like the law-giving religions. It never does so without an awkward residue being left over. You can tell the gospel as a story about authority, if you choose to – Jesus passing on the power to speak for God to human deputies, whether St Peter and his heirs (Catholic version), pious emperors of Constantinople and Moscow (Orthodox), or evangelists leading prayer breakfasts at the White House (Protestant) – but then what do you do with the insistence that God sees the world upside down, from the vantage point of failure, from our gutters not our palaces? What do you do with His endless alarm about loss, and His indifference to possession? What do you do about Christ’s preference for having dinner with the rogues and the screw-ups and the enemies of public order? No matter how hunky-dory the authorities of some supposedly Christian set-up declare things to be, the church is always nurturing the seeds of a critique. We can’t help it. The critique is always there in the story, and as we value the story, we have to keep the critique of power available.
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