Now, as to how Christianity might be evil – certainly, Christians have committed great evils in the past, specifically in the Middle Ages, with all that witch-hunting and so forth. And those who are familiar with my other posts on this board will know that I am no friend of Islam, but the Crusades were definitely chock-full of evil acts by Christians against a largely innocent Muslim world (ah, how times have changed!).
Citing the historical evidence of Christian evil only demonstrates that Christianity is a religion that has been capable of evil in the past, says nothing about its present role.
And talking about the theological underpinnings of Christianity and whether they create a propensity for good or evil is generally fruitless, as that stuff has been going on for centuries and will just wind up with the equivalent of another debate over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin and/or who did best on the Diet of Wurms.
The thing to do would be to ask are there any Christian groups or subgroups that are up to stuff that could generally be described as “evil” right now, in the present day, and of course the answer is “Yes, yes there are.”
We could start with the Christian Identity crew, the religous arm of the Aryan Nation. Right-wing bigots, racists and hatemongers to the bone. Of course, they’re a tiny subgroup of Christianity and it would be wrong to condemn Christianity in general as evil because of them, but it’s fair to say that some elements of Christianity are evil, since the Christian Identity crew call themselves Christians and they are by any reasonable standard, evil.
But there are two much larger groups of Christians that are open to charges of being evil: Catholics and Christian fundamentalists.
Catholics are evil becauseB they have an attitude about birth control that’s sexist to the bone, and because they are sexist to the bone. Their stand on abortion rights is only part of the equation – reasonable people can disagree reasonably on abortion. It’s their stand on birth control that’s fucking evil. It could reasonably be argued that they just want lots of poor women to get knocked up so they’ll produce more orphans to be worked as virtual slaves like the slave orphanages they had going in Ireland and Australia in the 70s.
And that business about preist/pedophiles – sure, every religion has had its problems with pedophiles – they’re attracted to roles where they associate freely with other people’s kids in a position of trust – but no other religion’s leadership chose to conceal their pedophiles from the law, and actually shuffled them from parish to parish where they could continue preying on children.
That was evil. That was fuckin’ evil.
But that’s not all. Catholic leaders have historically been big fans of censorship, a fandom that continues right up to the present day. The Catholics were the guiding force that led to the creation of the Hayes Office censorship board in the 1930s that kept American films and television so dull for 40 years, and they’ve backed every major censorship move since. They’re not satisfied to have the pulpit, they want to control every aspect of what people can see and hear. Just because they haven’t been too successful lately doesn’t mean their goals have changed. And with the current political climate moving in favor of censorship, they may yet see success. They’re fuckin’ evil and anti-American for that reason.
Christian fundamentalists are also big fans of censorship, though their fandom doesn’t have the historic traditions and organizational resources of Catholic censorship groups. Nevertheless, people like Wildmon and Falwell are politically powerful and have a well-organized base of people who support censorship. The could really fuck America up if given a chance, and the Republicans seem inclined to do so.
But of course the fundies are also sexist pigs, specifically the one who took over the Southern Baptist Convention, which shortly afterward adopted a rule stating that it was a wife’s position to be subordinate to her husband. Now I’m all for this sort of thing so long as it’s all fun and games, but having it established as a religious tenet to be obeyed in real life is just bullshit. And fuckin’ evil besides. That’s why Southern Baptists who had an ounce of decency in them – like former President Jimmy Carter – parted company with the Convention soon afterward.
Christian fundies are also really weak on the separation of church and state, in the sense that they think the church really oughtta run the state. They’re always trying to use the power of the state to force kids to acknowledge their vision of God, whether or not they’re fundamentalist or even Christian kids (atheist kids, you get the impression they think they should be taken from their parents) because they don’t have one iota of respect for the beliefs of others. They wanna make kids acknowledge God by forcing them to recite the current tainted version of the Pledge of Allegiance in school, and by making them listen to long, boring school prayers every day in school.
Combine this readiness to use the power of the state to enforce religious values and this pro-censorship bias, and you have a real formula for the Christian equivalent of mullahs running things.
Fucking evil? Fucking A!
Having said all this, I must acknowledge that both Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity, like most churches, do a lot of good things in the way of charitable acts and helping people when they really need it. What separate Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity from most other U.S. churches is that they have all this evil stuff going on, too. If I could switch out Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity for one or two of the milder, more help-the-needy churches, say Methodism or Lutheran churches, I’d do it in a heartbeat.
And of course, Catholicism and fundamentalist Christianity at their worst don’t hold a candle to fundamentalist Islam at its worst, for sheer evilitude.
The best and most probable outcome will be that we will all outgrow our need for Great Sky Fairies in a few decades, and all the preachers will all have to either turn to good works as being good for their own sake, or selling some other brand of snake oil for personal aggrandizement.
Happy Easter, ya’ll!
I don’t think what consenting adults do in bed is a political matter. I could not care less who my neighbor sleeps with.