Capitalism in Christianity Part 1: Christianity Isn't the Work of Jesus
Folks, what we have here today is a mess. What started as an attempt to deep dive into megachurches and their hypocrisy in aligning with Capitalism became a deconstruction of my understanding of the Christian religion as a whole. And since I have two hours to hold you hostage, you get to listen to the stuff that I yelled at my roommate and boyfriend about for four days. Welcome, everyone, to Things That Keep Me Up At Night presents: Capitalism and Christianity and How They’re Basically The Same. Part One.
So I’m oversimplifying for comedic effect, obviously, but I do want to put a short disclaimer at the beginning of this. If you’re listening and know yourself to be uncomfortable with dissections and criticisms of religion, I’d recommend ducking out now. Of course, I always hope folks will stick around and keep an open mind to learning and adapting their relationship to faith, but I also know that faith is incredibly personal and can be inherently tied to identity. Even with the best intentions, it can be difficult to separate criticisms of the origins of religion from personal attacks, so I’m asking you guys to evaluate honestly if this kind of content is for you and listen with your own mental health and stress level in mind.
So, I’m running under the assumption that you’re not all familiar with Christianity, I’m going to give a brief overview of how it’s practiced these days. Fun fact to start us off: Christianity is the most widely practiced religion in the world, and it has over 2 billion followers today. A third of humans on the planet are Christians or identify as such. That’s an absurdly high number.
It’s monotheistic across the board, meaning Christians believe in one true God who created the universe, Heaven, and Hell. Christians also often typically believe in the Holy Trinity or an offshoot thereof, which consists of the Father (God), the Son (Jesus), and the Holy Spirit (or Ghost, depending on the sect of Christianity)
The holy scripture of Christianity is the Bible, and the Christian belief system is based around belief in the truth of the text, most importantly what it says about the life, death, resurrection, and ascendance of Jesus. In a nutshell, most Christians believe that Jesus was born of the Virgin Mary via the Holy Spirit, and that he was sent to Earth by God to be the world’s messiah and be crucified as a sacrifice to offer forgiveness for the sins of humanity. A really common image people use is that Jesus was the bridge between God and humanity, who had gone so far astray that they needed divine intervention.
Most Christians also believe in some form of the Second Coming of Christ, which is generally seen as either the portent of the Rapture. Some also believe in the existence of the AntiChrist, which is mentioned five times in the New Testament solely in the 1st and 2nd books of John and refers to a man who will lead the opposition to Jesus before the Second Coming. Opinions vary on that.
Also, for folks who aren’t familiar with the Bible in general, there are two sections - the Old Testament and the New Testament. The Old Testament contains the same “books” or chapters of the Jewish Tanakh in a different order, plus a few other books that were rejected for the Tanakh called apocrypha. The Tanakh orders the books in sections that make sense, “Law” or the Torah, “Prophets,” and “Writings,” whereas the Old Testament in the Christian Bible mixes them up.
The New Testament includes the Gospels, translated to “Good News,” which chronicle the stories of four of the apostles, or followers, of Jesus, Mark, Luke, Matthew, and John. Though the four books are ascribed to these four, the texts themselves were written anonymously anywhere from 35-80 years after the death of Jesus, so scholars generally believe they were not written by the apostles themselves.
The books that follow are generally epistles, or letters that were collected and transcribed as religious teachings. The whole thing ends with the book of Revelation, which prophesizes an imminent battle between God and Satan, the end of the world, the Rapture, and goes into what Hell is like. It’s a party.
The particulars and intensities of these beliefs vary from denomination to denomination - for instance, Catholics and Protestants have been fundamentally at odds with one another since the latter’s foundation, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints practices a version of Christianity with an entirely different holy text and belief system altogether. Some of the most common you may have heard of include Lutheran, Presbyterian, Methodist, Anglican, Episcopalian, Baptist, the list goes on. In fact, it goes on for longer than I could possibly read, because there are over 200 denominations of Christianity in the United States alone, and over 40,000 known in the world.
So now we know what Christianity is today, but what if I told you that commonly-practiced Christianity and all its offshoots are perversions of Jesus’ actual purpose? What if the foundations of the world’s most popular religion were actually based largely on the personal biases of one man - who notably wasn’t Jesus?
Let’s get into the history. Most scholars and historians do agree that Jesus was a guy who actually existed in the world, so we have that going for us. But we don’t actually know much about him. We can agree that he was probably born between 2 BCE and 7 BCE (I used BCE here as a signifier of the cut between BC and AD, since we don’t know the actual theoretical year Christ was born). He was born out of wedlock to a young woman referred to as Mary in the Bible in the town of Bethlehem, south of Jerusalem in modern-day Palestine.
On the note of Mary and the Virgin birth - a facet of faith is believing in things for the sake of belief. But I’m here to interrogate the history, so what I know is that, outside the first two chapters of Matthew and Luke, the virgin birth plays no further part in the New Testament. The apostle Paul, who wrote the majority of the New Testament, makes no mention of it. And most scholars agree that virgin is probably a mistranslation of the Hebrew word for young woman.
Trigger warning for sexual assault mention here: I also know that, in the 2nd century, a book was written by a Greek man named Celsus that defames Jesus as an illegitimate child born of low status to Mary, a spinner, and a soldier named Panthera, who is implied to have raped her. Many non-Christian Jewish texts refer to Jesus as Jesus ben Pandera, largely as an insult.
The idea that Mary was a virgin may have been the defensive response of early Christians in the face of those insults. Rather than accept that the messiah could have been a low-born bastard, they may have created the virgin birth story to mythologize and deify the arrival of God in human form.The idea of Mary’s “spotless” womb carries a lot of unfortunate connotations about sex and femininity, but we can get into those later.
ANYWAY, we don’t know any details about Jesus’ childhood, but we know he was raised in the city of Nazareth, that his father figure and Mary’s eventual husband was a carpenter named Joseph, that his family fled to Egypt from King Herod’s persecution, and that he was raised Jewish. When Jesus was around 30, he was baptized by John the Baptist (go figure) and began his religious work. He and his 12 disciples traveled to teach large groups his relatively radical ideas for how the Jewish faith should be reformed, and the Bible refers to the performance of miracles like raising a man from the dead, feeding a crowd with a loaf of bread and two fish, etc.
His most famous teaching - and the best summary of his beliefs - was called The Sermon on the Mount, where he outlined how Judaism should be practiced. The sermon differs between the Gospels, but the general idea was:
Love God.
Love your neighbor as yourself.
Forgive others who have wronged you.
Love your enemies.
Ask God for forgiveness of your sins.
Don’t be hypocritical.
Don’t judge others.
The Kingdom of God is near. It’s not the rich and powerful—but the weak and poor—who will inherit this kingdom.
Jesus’ teachings were not supposed to be opposed to the Jewish faith. In fact, scholars generally agree that Jesus was likely not trying to start a new religion at all, but reform Judaism and turn it from the corruption and hypocrisy he was seeing for himself.
In the end, Jesus was a victim of the Romans’ persecution of Jewish people and was arrested, tortured publicly, and crucified (most likely on a simple stake, not a cross), stabbed for good measure, and entombed. The New Testament emboldens the Jewish people’s involvement in Jesus’ death, and claims that Jewish leaders conspired with Roman gentiles to turn Jesus in because they were jealous of Jesus’ successful ministry. The Bible also claims that an angry mob of Jewish folks were riled up (though no reason is given as to why) and demanded Jesus’ execution. No proof or motive is provided for why Jewish leadership or citizens would behave this way, and yet blame has increasingly fallen on the Jewish as time has passed. This may have been because Romans eventually largely turned to Christianity and followers of Judaism became the primary target of evangelism, but who’s to say? I just think that’s interesting.
Then enter the apostle Paul. What do you know about good ole Paul?
Funny enough, we actually know more about St. Paul than we do about Jesus. We know he was born Saul of Tarsus, which was what is now modern-day Turkey. Interestingly, we also know that Paul never met Jesus at all. We don’t know the exact date of his birth, but we can estimate that it was within a couple years of Jesus’ birth, and he became active in missionary work in the 40s and 50s of the 1st century after his conversion after Jesus’ death. By trade he was a tentmaker, but his involvement with the Jewish faith granted him the status of a lawkeeper or, essentially, a lawyer within the church, and he seemed to be on track to become part of the Jewish Supreme Court.
As an adult, he became a Pharisee, which was a sect of Judaism that fancied themselves a society of pious scholars. When Christian’s hear the word Pharisee, the term springs to mind images of corrupt leaders, evildoers, etc., but in reality it was just a group of Jewish folks who interpreted the Law of Judaism differently from other groups, namely the Sadducees. They practiced their religion from the same holy text as other Jewish people, but they diverged in their inclusion of the Oral Torah, the writings of Prophets, belief in resurrection of the dead or eternal life, and the idea that religious practice should be for all people in all areas of life, not just for the religious elite in temples. They also disagreed with Sadducees on the Hellenization of Judaism, and maintained that a pious life was not defined by blood sacrifices to the Jewish God, but in prayer and individual worship and following the Law. In the time of Christ, the Pharisees were the dominant idealogues within the Jewish faith, and their ideas went on to influence the practice of Rabbinic Judaism.
As a point of interest, Jesus famously criticized the Pharisees and scribes of the Judaism he knew largely because he saw them to be corrupt and hypocritical. While their belief system seemed to be more open to metaphorical interpretation of the Tanakh than the Sadducees, they were still very much more concerned with the letter of the Law within the Torah than they were with the idea of Jewish practitioners having a genuine relationship to their spiritualities. He also criticized them for continuously adding to and, in his opinion, complicating Jewish practices. Whereas Jesus seemed to preach with the idea that the written Law was created by man and was therefore fallible, the religious elite focused too much on following the precise letter of the Law, which Jesus argued was adding to the people’s burdens.
It’s also worth mentioning that he criticized them for acting the part of religious and spiritual leaders in public, behaving in public as holy men, but privately living for hedonism. And, interestingly, he disdained their practice of making so much of an effort to gain new converts that they distorted the truth of God’s intentions for mankind. In other words, he hated that the Pharisees perverted God’s truth in the name of gaining followers. Keep that in mind.
Other than that, the complaints were about general hypocrisy - you know, giving their expected 10% donation to the church while ignoring the poor, sick, and hungry. Worrying more about greed and self indulgence than justice, kindness, and mercy, etc. The usual.
So Paul - then, Saul - was a Pharisee. In fact, he himself described himself as such a zealous Pharisee that he didn’t know any other who knew and followed the letter of the Law like he did. He was, by definition, a religious fanatic, and he was best known at the time for his insatiable desire to destroy Christianity.
Now, it seems that his motivation for persecuting Christians were not strictly because he was a Pharisee - in fact, Pharisees have a weird history with Christianity, and they were generally more supportive of Jesus than Sadducees. He seemed interested in arresting and torturing Christians for other unknown reasons, which only adds to the image I get of an unstable, angry fanatic. Whatever the reasons, they were personal and only personal.
Now, the only stories about Paul’s conversion (if you can call it that, but more on that later) come from the book of Acts (written by the same author as Luke) and Paul himself, so I’m going to tell it as they both do. On the road to Damascus, Paul was suddenly overcome by a vision. In Acts, he was blinded by a brilliant white light, which they claim gave him a revelation to follow the teachings of Jesus and spread them far and wide. Paul asserts that he saw the face of God and heard Jesus’ voice instructing him to spread his messages across the world. After three years in Arabia, he returned to Jerusalem and acquainted himself with the remaining apostles, and began his missionary work where he pressed further and further west to evangelize the Christian faith.
Over the next 20 years, Paul traveled all across Europe and Asia, founding churches and converting pagans to his version of Christianity. When he couldn’t get to certain cities, he sent his own disciples and wrote them letters - the letters that would become the epistles that make up the bulk of the New Testament. His letters and teachings were generally him answering questions and elaborating on earlier statements about the faith. He declared himself able to clearly see his place in God’s plan, that he would be the one to lead the world to salvation by converting gentiles, Romans, and, eventually, Jewish people to his version of Christianity.
So, ultimately, it was Paul’s belief system that informed his initial spin on what Jesus taught and, by consequence, what modern Christianity became. While Jesus did speak on things that you shouldn’t do (one of my least favorite being divorce, unless one spouse commits adultery, but I have my interpretations on what that could have meant in context), the colloquial definition of sin was cherry picked and occasionally entirely fabricated by Paul. Not only that, but the entire core belief system about Jesus’ relationship to God was made up entirely by Paul.
As a rule, Jesus referred to himself not as the Son of God, but the Son of Man. It was Paul who interpreted and twisted it to mean that he was God in flesh form, not Jesus himself. It wasn’t enough for Paul to spread the story of a young Jewish radical arguing with Pharisees about particulars of the Law, so instead he claimed that Jesus had been sent to Earth as God incarnate to forgive in whole the original sin committed by the first humans in Eden.
It’s interesting and, in my opinion, important to note that the Gospels (the books Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John) differ pretty substantially both in detail and content, though they all tell the same story. What Christian leaders of both then and now would have us believe is that these Gospels were written by the men featured in the books’ titles: Matthew, a direct disciple of Jesus who was previously a tax collector; Mark, the secretary of Jesus’ disciple Peter; Luke, the travelling companion of Paul; and John, known as Jesus’ “Beloved disciple.”
Already, it’s interesting that only two of the Gospels were allegedly written by (or from the perspective of) actual disciples of Jesus: Matthew and John. But even those two books, which were apparently written by eyewitnesses, vary wildly from one another. Matthew never once describes Jesus as being the son of (or even related to) God, whereas John writes that Jesus is first and foremost God himself. In Matthew, Jesus teaches exclusively about the kingdom of God and not about himself, certainly not about his own divinity. In Paul, Jesus only teaches about his own divinity. In Matthew, Jesus outright refuses to perform miracles to prove his divinity or proximity to God, but in Paul that’s pretty much the only reason he performs miracles.
One reason for the differences in all four Gospels may very well be the length of time that passed before they were written. The earliest book in the Gospels was Mark, written between 30 and 40 years after Jesus’ death. Matthew and Luke were likely written between 50 and 60 years after his death, and John was the furthest removed of them all despite being attributed to an actual disciple, written about 60-80 years after Jesus’ death. With the variations, writing styles, obvious edits, the fact that all were written anonymously, and time gaps between the event and the books, scholars and historians generally agree that the names attributed to the Gospels were not the authors, and the Gospels were almost certainly not written by eyewitnesses.
So going back to what I was saying about Paul - we base our knowledge on the differences between Jesus’ messages and Paul’s on four books which were written decades after the life and death of Christ by people who weren’t there and likely got their information thirdhand, at best by the aging disciples and at worst from even less reliable sources. There’s also the possibility that these four Gospels were influenced by Paul’s own teachings, as they started and finished before the Gospels were even written, but it’s more likely that Paul was aware of the oral history of Jesus that predated and originates the stories in the Gospels, and that he was inspired by that rather than the other way around.
So, I’m comfortable with taking some of the more consistent Gospel messages at face value for the purposes of this deep dive, so for this I’m going to refer to the teachings outlined consistently (and occasionally with similar wording) in Matthew, Mark, and Luke. John’s gospel is so entirely different and often counter to the others that I don’t feel comfortable including it in the initial, historical teachings of Jesus.
ANYWAY those three books don’t really emphasize Jesus’ divinity. They do all mention the resurrection and Jesus’ instructions to stay in Jerusalem and continue working on the church’s message, but I’m willing to bet that 3-6 decades of oral history probably skewed the reality of what happened after Jesus died. It was Paul who spread the idea that Jesus was sent to wash away our sins, that he would return again to usher in a new eternal kingdom, and that the relationship between God and man was not intimate and familial but rather a strict dichotomy of sin and salvation.
He veers away from the Jewish idea that we are active and lively participants in our own lives and replaces it instead with the assertion that our lives are simply a duller version of the next world, our eternal lives with God. Human intuition has historically placed more value on the real (even if it includes suffering) even if the surreal was more pleasurable, but Paul rejects that idea and claims instead that the real is inherently sinful, that paradise is the only reality we should strive for during our mortal lives.
It was Paul who cherry picked what parts of the Old Testament went into his message, and it’s not hard to see where his own biases influenced his decisions. He left out almost all the laws outlined in Leviticus, but kept in its mistranslated ideas outlawing homosexuality while simultaneously disregarding the observance of the Sabbath - which is one of the Ten Commandments. He insisted that suffering and premature death were punishments from God for immoral lives, that it was better to be entirely celibate for your whole life so you could dedicate your time to worship, that your actions could taint your faith enough to condemn you to hell, that Jesus’ return would signal a physical resurrection of the bodies of all the faithful who had died, that the universe has multiple realms including a Third Heaven where God and the angels live - all things that never appear in Jesus’ initial teachings while he was alive. It’s also important to note that Paul demanded absolute perfection from his converts and claimed that he, himself, had lived an almost perfect life. He insisted that followers of Jesus would have to keep a “sound and blameless” mind, body, and soul until the Second Coming of Jesus, and that anything less than his standard of moral perfection was unacceptable and sinful.
Now, I mentioned earlier that, up to the point of Paul’s mission, followers of Jesus’ teachings were already Jewish, and Christians were primarily just adapted Jewish people. When Paul began his missionary work, he focused on the conversion of gentiles instead, which, notably, Jesus never really spoke about (unless you interpret his directive after the resurrection to mean gentiles, which is debatable).
Paul ran into two roadblocks with this. Part one was that Jewish Christians believed that the correct way to become a follower of Christ was inherently to convert to Judaism and follow all its customs. Part two was that gentiles didn’t really wanna do all that, especially not the Sabbath observance, dietary restrictions, circumcision, etc. etc.
To resolve that problem, Paul insisted to his gentile converts that they could still be saved and not follow Jewish Law. This was sticky, especially for Jewish Christians who took issue with that line of thinking. For that side of things, Paul struck a deal with the Jewish Christians in Jerusalem. Peter would be the primary teacher for Christians in Jerusalem, and Paul would be the primary apostle to the gentiles and would not have to change his messages in exchange for financial support to the Jewish church when he returned to Jerusalem. Easy peasy.
The other half of the equation wasn’t so simple. See, he was preaching to pagans and other polytheists. Pagans, in general, were known to have pretty tolerant views on religion. They were comfortable with adding Gods from foreign cultures to their own, as long as they continued to worship their own local Gods. Paul, in stark contrast, made no such allowances for the people he tried to convert. He demanded that they give up entirely their worship of other gods - in his opinion, idols - in favor of the Jewish God.
But when these pagans did not want to follow the parts of Jewish law that would change their diets, livelihoods, or bodies, Paul insisted that they would not have to to be saved by Jesus and gain eternal life. When they had difficulty rationalizing elements of his initial message, he simply adapted the message to fit what they needed to hear. For example, they were able to accept the base story of Jesus being the Son of God sent to clear us of sin, but they balked at the idea that our bodies would be resurrected after death when Jesus returned. They knew for a fact that bodies decomposed and couldn’t rationalize how those bodies would reconstitute, so Paul twisted his own words and claimed that the resurrected body was actually a “spiritual body.” And when people were worried about the amount of time between their own deaths and Jesus’ return, he spun the story that our spiritual bodies would immediately go to be with God upon our deaths and returned to Earth after the Second Coming.
To make matters worse, if you’re wondering how he managed to make entire cities of people so compliant to his message, it’s important to remember a few things. One, Paul was a brilliant speaker and knew how to manipulate an argument - that much is evident from his writing. Two, the threat of eternal damnation is a powerful one - one that I know the terror of firsthand. And three, Paul disallowed any activities aligned with previously pagan traditions. This included feasts, parades, celebrations, theater, and athletic competitions - pretty much anything that involved leisure or fun.
And since the ex-pagans also did not convert to Judaism, they were left in a spiritual limbo with no real identity. This put Paul in a powerful authority role over his converts. He emphasized that suffering and patience were rewarded by God, and that, in return, they would have rewarding spiritual experiences. He promised they would experience self-healing, prophesying, and speaking in tongues - and the socially isolated converts were only too eager to have those experiences to replace their previous activities. It’s no wonder Paul documents people having intense religious experiences, convulsing, speaking “other languages” that were most likely gibberish, etc. They were emotionally and socially starved and perfectly primed to psychosomatically believe they were having those experiences for the sake of social gain.
In another interesting move, Paul demanded that his followers obey any and all authority figures. In Romans 13:2–7, he claims that “whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment,” a sentiment that Jesus almost certainly would have disagreed with, based on our understanding of his relationship to religious leaders in his day. He doubles down on that in his letter to Galatians, where he goes so far as to say that the truth he preaches is the only truth, and that the Galatians should not believe the words of any other prophet on the subject. He even said that if he were to come and preach any other truth, that they shouldn’t believe HIM.
That first verse was used for centuries to justify systems like the Divine Right of Kings and the idea that true devout believers should accept any authority over them, even if the authority is unjust. And even on its face, those directives sound like they come straight out of a cult leader’s mouth. Any leader of anything that paints his own words as supreme truth is manipulating you and working against your best interest, and even Jesus would have considered that kind of arrogance repulsive. We can assume, based on the Gospels, that Jesus’ message focused on the criticism of dogma and strove to make the Jewish people’s relationship with God one of rest and genuine love and reciprocity. He reviled the idea of the Old Testament God, which had been immortalized as a vengeful, sadistic God who took pleasure in the punishment of mankind and didn’t allow for mercy.
Paul, on the other hand, reinserted the vengeful God into Jesus’ teachings, injecting his own religious bias and zealotry into his interpretations.
There’s an amazing book called The Kingdom by Emanuel Carrere (who also wrote The Adversary, which was the basis for my Jean-Claude Romand episode) that delves into the known history of both Paul and Luke and speculates on the mindsets of both while the author interrogates his own 3-year stint as a zealous Christian. In it, there’s a section where Carrere references the letter to Galatians that I mentioned before and breaks down what he believes Paul’s motive to be in writing that portion of the letter. He’s reminded of Stalinist show-trials, where Trotskyists and others who opposed the Communist party were forced, under threat of execution, to not only renounce their long-held beliefs but condemn their past selves as unrecognizable monsters. He draws a comparison between the duality of those testimonies and Paul’s violent and radical conversion from one side of religious zealotry to the other. And because Paul had already once had his convictions so thoroughly change, “he must have dreaded, more or less consciously, that it could happen to him again.”
I think that’s a really apt read on the situation, and it explains a lot about his own behavior. These are the actions of a man desperate enough to hold to his beliefs that he changes them on a dime without even realizing it. When his viewpoints are challenged such that they risk alienating converts, he alters his message to be more palatable. He was so convinced that he would shepherd the world into Christianity that he demolished any integrity his movement had, keeping himself and others within the confines of strict rules such that he would never have the opportunity to question his faith again.
Sources:
https://www.britannica.com/biography/Saint-Paul-the-Apostle
https://evidenceforchristianity.org/what-are-your-thoughts-on-those-who-say-that-john-the-elder-wrote-some-of-the-books-attributed-to-the-apostle-john/
https://hermeneutics.stackexchange.com/questions/4360/where-does-the-tanakh-differ-from-the-christian-old-testament
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/dec/24/story-virgin-birth-christianity-mary-sex-femininity
https://www.ccel.org/ccel/renan/saintpaul.txt
MisGod'ed: A Roadmap of Guidance and Misguidance in the Abrahamic Religions
https://www.history.com/topics/religion/history-of-christianity
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/07/10/the-radical-origins-of-christianity
https://www.ancient.eu/Paul_the_Apostle/
https://www.britannica.com/topic/Pauline-letters