Our theory of myth and ritual was put to work in the Seminar on Christian Origins (a seminar of the Society of Biblical Literature, 1994–2003) by means of the categories of “mythmaking” and “social formation.” It was in this collaborative project with New Testament scholars that the ethnographic theory of myth proved helpful as a way to investigate the significance of the social reasons for the making of the Christian myth during the first three centuries. The seminar worked with the social histories of the many fractured nations of the Hellenistic era, including the Judaic peoples, the Semitic Levant, the Greek remnants of the former Alexandrian conquests, the Greek “schools,” the Roman Expansions, and the “associations” of the “Jesus schools” from Syria to Macedonia. The seminar found that the myths created by the Jesus schools about Jesus their founder/teacher, though extravagant in terms of the political importance and divinity implicitly attributed to him as a wisdom teacher of the times, were nevertheless understandable attempts to draw upon the venerable traditions of both Judaic and Greek myth and thought, in order to claim for their schools and associations a place in the large and fragmented Greco-Roman world. The Jesus associations were caught in the middle between Judaic sensibilities and the larger Greco-Roman world, and imagined Jesus as the teacher about a “Kingdom of God,” that is, a society that would work better than the erstwhile kingdoms of the recent kings and currently fragmented societies. That, of course, is mythic thinking. But since there was not yet a common movement of the Jesus people as a social formation to mythologize, and since these groups generated many ideas about the popular philosophies of the time, the seminar was not able to determine all of the factors from the writings and histories of the first three centuries that may have been involved in what modern scholars have imagined as the “origins” of “Christianity.”
Nevertheless, the theory of myth and social formation derived from ethnographies was enough to tackle the many moments of the early history and analyze the process by which the Gospel stories came into being and how the early Jesus people must have understood them. The question of interest to the seminar was why the stories in the gospels were told in the first place. Eventually the categories of “mythmaking” and “social formation” slipped into place as a way to do the research required. If the social and intellectual reasons for the making of some of the Jesus myths could be discerned, seminar participants thought that it might be possible to understand the reasons for their continued attraction and retelling down through Western history. There are now two volumes of seminar papers available: Redescribing Christian Origins and Redescribing Paul and the Corinthians, both edited by Ron Cameron and Merrill P. Miller (Society of Biblical Literature). A third and final volume about the Gospel of Mark is forthcoming. The seminar began with a recognition that the familiar model of Christianity’s myth and ritual was not yet in place during the first three centuries. The eventual form of the Christian myth as a credo had not been composed, and the Protestant reading of the Bible as epic history was not yet imagined. There was, for instance, no overall Christian church or “community” until the fourth century, and that formation was mainly Constantine’s idea. Yet the many links between the various Jesus myths and the social formations of the Jesus schools allowed the seminar to reconstruct this early history to make some sense of the Jesus people before the time of Constantine and so theorize Constantine’s reasons for wanting them to constitute the religion of the Roman Empire.
During the late first and early second centuries, the various Jesus schools and groups of intellectuals exploring the ideas of Jesus as a founder figure found themselves forming networks of recognition as if engaged in similar pursuits. The closest analogy to these schools that were interested in the teachings of Jesus was the Greco-Hellenistic philosophical associations. The interests around which these Jesus schools formed were those of diaspora people seeking ethnic-cultural comradeship. In the case of the Jesus groups it must have been a place to talk about the times and explore the teachings as a workable form of collective identity. We might call them discussion groups or schools of thought needing to find or make their place within the larger unsettled world of the times. The unsettledness included what to do about the institutions of Greek culture that Alexander had tarnished by using them for his imperial designs; what to do about the hoary traditions of Near Eastern cultures that had been brought to an end by Alexander; what to think about Alexander’s successors (diadochoi) in the Levant; and what to do and think about the Romans and their steady advance toward the eastern Mediterranean. Now that the lands of Judea, Samaria, Israel, and the Galilee had come under Roman control, the problem apparently was how to think about one’s “national” identity when the superstructures (temple and priesthood) and homeland had been dismantled. How to think about a “Jewish” identity without a temple, priesthood, or king must have been one of the social issues for discussion. And in the case of the Jesus schools, the question of their identity in terms of relations to traditional cultures and extractions must have presented a most invigorating problem.
One of the more striking mythologies about Jesus started with the thought that, like Socrates, he must have been killed by the authorities as a teacher whose ideas and students were cultivating sedition. There is no indication that such was actually the case in any of the literature of the time, and biblical scholars have found it preposterous, not finding anything about the Romans, Jews, or early Jesus followers to give such an idea credibility. There was, however, lore about the “noble death” of a teacher for political reasons that seems to have been common in the turmoil of the times. A current mythology about the Maccabean martyrs, for instance, was available to imagine the innocence of a teacher and his teachings held to be seditious and killed by authorities. The point of such a mythology at the time was to turn the tables on the authorities who had wrongly taken offense. It was this mythology that Paul found helpful for his constructions upon the Jesus schools as the “congregations” of (Jesus as) the messiah (christos). In Paul’s mind, imagining such a destiny for Jesus whom, as he said, he had not known, could nevertheless account for the rejection of the christos congregations by the Romans and others, and at the same time reveal the “truth” of their teachings about him. As an argument for the significance of Jesus as the prophet or teacher appointed by God to tell the Gentiles that they belonged to the “children of Abraham,” and so could continue the epic of Israel despite the troubling times, Paul’s christos myth was soon received by many Jesus groups as the way to think about themselves as well. In due course the term Christ came to be used as a proper name for Jesus and the term Christians for those who formed schools and congregations in his name.
Interest in grouping and talking about the social situations at large were apparently energized by the heady notions from the teachings of Jesus, who had appeared in the Galilee in the thirties, forty years before the Romans marched on Jerusalem, but during a period of general ideational distress about the temple, its priesthoods, and their clients in Judea, Samaria, and the Galilee. The teacher Jesus was remembered as a kind of popular philosopher who had encouraged an ethic of independence and talked about a kingdom of god. The kingdom apparently did not need an earthly king, temple, or land. The literature of the late first and second centuries tells us that these Jesus groups (loosely knit “schools” on the Greek model of philosophical schools) were energized by Greek and Jewish systems of philosophy and ethics, not plans for an earthly kingdom. But since the notion of a “kingdom of god” (basileia tou theou) was rooted in the political and philosophic discussions of the Hellenistic age, and since the Jesus schools were struggling to find their own place in the social and ideological systems of the times, and since some of these groups tended to form networks of mutual recognition as school traditions sometimes did, and since the leaders of some of these Jesus/Christ groups had taken it upon themselves to look after the widows, orphans, and the needy in their districts (in keeping with Hebrew traditions), the Roman emperor Constantine took note in the early fourth century and thought these so-called Christ people might be a good influence for the now troubled governance of the Roman Empire, which had lost its own rationale for universal governance. The ease with which the leaders of these Jesus groups assented to Constantine’s invitation to accept his largesse and take their place in the Roman Empire as the religious officials of privilege is absolutely astounding. There was nothing in the earlier myths or ideologies of these Jesus people that could have prepared for such a strikingly novel thought about their orientation to the Greco-Roman world. But it worked, taking on features of the ancient Near Eastern temple-state, and eventually resulting in the creation of a religion whose “social interests” could now be focused on the maintenance of the church as an institution and the empire as a kingdom of the Christian’s god. Thus there were two intermingled institutions of authority and power that appealed to a single all-powerful deity for legitimation as an empire of universal scope. That is mythmaking with banners.
Under Constantine in the fourth century the Jesus schools were transformed into a myth-ritual religion and institution somewhat on the model we now have in mind for the subsequent Christian church and religion. That model focused on a martyrological myth of Jesus as the Christ that had developed in the Pauline traditions to which a dramatic event of his crucifixion and resurrection had been attached and storied in the gospels. It was not long before a ritual of memorial turned the Gospel story of the “last supper” into an occasion for meditation and “participation.” This ritual took place in the new basilicas that Constantine built for the new religion as their “temples.” These basilicas and the rituals taking place within them were presided over by a hierarchy of priests and theologians busy with biblical texts, epic histories, and credos that positioned the church as a religious institution in the center of a universal history and cosmic world. This was a novel social construction in the interest of and to the advantage of the Roman Empire. It was not a normal outworking of the Jesus schools with their teachings of Jesus about how people could live according to God’s rules. The Roman Empire–Christ kingdom configuration compressed the erstwhile collection of private Jesus schools into a public state institution in veneration of Jesus as the martyred Christ. This produced a myth-ritual practice that collapsed the myth-history dialectic of the earlier Gospel stories and turned the Gospel events into a timeless, eternally present divine event to be “reenacted” by priests in the service of the believer and devotee. This made it possible for persons to “experience” that founding event of cosmos and history as their contemporary moment of personal religious experience. It was as if the “Christ event” itself transcended history and was available for reenactment in the present time, a most amazing combination of myth and history. None of that was available in the texts and histories of the first two centuries.
If the gospels provided the narrative logic of the Christian myth for Christendom, a mythic worldview provided the picture for seeing the placement and structure of both church and empire in the larger cosmic world. This cosmic world was the normal horizon for the religious imaginations of the peoples of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman worlds. The Christian myth added some features to this cosmic worldview that were not normal for its predecessors. There was now only one god in control of the cosmic forces (such as planets, stars, and angels), and this god was now in charge of creation and history (from the Hebrew epic) as well. The Gospel events from the Christian myth had rearranged the traditional astronomical cosmos into an arena of divine activity that focused on the deity’s plan to “send his son” to gather the Christians and rule the nations. Thus the merger of the Jesus/Christ networks with the Roman Empire by Constantine placed the Gospel events into the cosmic structure of creation and history, thus making possible the familiar worldview of Christendom. We know what the shapes and placements of the church and empire looked like from the artifacts of a somewhat later the time. Churches and cathedrals centered the towns and cities. Steeples announced the connection to the heavens. Palaces for dukes and kings called attention to the centers of civil authority. Townhouses and city squares handled the crafts, commerce, and the keeping of records. The town squares provided the places for meetings, markets, parades, and theater. The hierarchies of governance were obvious in the networks for commerce and communication. And both the dioceses and dukedoms presided over districts that had their own proper names by which the indigenous peoples kept their erstwhile tribal identities and customs alive. Everyone who lived within this world certainly knew the landmarks and had some sense of its size and shape. Were the duke to appear, the church to celebrate a holy day, or word to arrive of a visit from centers farther afield, the venues in place would easily be opened to the world events of the time and the narrative worlds of history and cosmos that belonged to the larger picture. These worlds were always available as pictures inscribed on the walls of churches and civic buildings, and they were played out in pageants of the regular rounds of landed rituals and social activities. We can call this familiarity with the mythic world a worldview. If we think of it as the picture of the world taken for granted by the people, the structural shape of mythic and social worlds did not go away in the transition from Medieval to Reformation times.
We need to pause for a moment at this point to notice that, as comprehensive as this mythic world was intended to be, it was not able to envelop or address the social interests of the peasants at work in the rural and village worlds beyond the walls of the church and palace. The popes and kings ruled as viceroys of the cosmic realm of power but had little to say to the peasants except for some instructions in piety. The myth and religion of the Constantinian Catholic Church were focused almost solely on the events that manifested the authority and power of the single monarch in heaven. As for the social interests of his two viceroys on earth, they were focused almost entirely on the church-palace arrangement itself, not on the well-being of the aristocratic estates and their peasants. When either the priest or the duke took notice of the peasants beyond the walls, it was usually a matter of concern with their forms of obeisance as loyal servants of the church and kingdom. The social interests and rituals of the local, rural, and home-place cultures were left mostly to the peasants themselves and their “pagan” traditions. These, however, were continued without interruption. Sir James George Frazer has collected an immense documentation for the European distribution of such practices (for example, the Maypole dance, Easter Fire, harvest wreaths, and the like) still being performed in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (The Golden Bough). This is a very clear description of rural folkways and “religious” beliefs and practices right under the noses of the Christian priests and nuns, but barely noticed by them.
The church did succeed in the invention of a most remarkable institution of religion on the model of the aristocratic temple-state and its cosmic myth of the Kingdom of God, and it cultivated this notion of divine sovereignty to structure its own institutional hierarchy as well as to preside over the actual kingdoms within its sphere of influence as their moral conscience. But it was hardly prepared for the Enlightenment or the Protestant Reformation, the demise of feudalism, and the emergence of the nation-state. All of these historical changes in social practice and formation were rooted in interests other than cultivating righteousness or indulging the church’s interest in piety.
One might think that the Protestant Reformation (sixteenth century) should have tempered the attraction of the cosmic picture for Christians, so clearly etched on the portals of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame and elsewhere, and in some respects it did. But the matters calling for reformation were hardly matters of distress about the worldview. They were matters of consternation about the Catholic confessional, ritual, and practice of selling indulgences. In view of the dawning Enlightenment and the Age of Discovery, the conflicts among the petty kings of Europe called for an awareness of the social interests of the several ethnic traditions that surfaced in Europe now that their encompassment by the Holy Roman Empire was dissolving. The emerging interest in the texts and histories of Antiquity, a result of the Renaissance, determined that the pieties of penance were no longer convincing, much less sufficient for understanding the function of the church for the believer. However, the medieval notion of kingdom was not dropped when the protest against the confessional gathered strength. It played a major role in the ideological separation of the two forms of Christendom. Martin Luther actually extracted the notion of the kingdom from Catholic Christendom and applied it to the role of the Protestant churches in their various European kingdoms by saying that the Protestant church continued to represent a “kingdom,” but that the Christian view of the church in the world was now a matter of having two kingdoms. He coined the phrase the two kingdoms (divine and secular), which turned civil society into an order that was not at all devoid of Christian interests and mores even though thoroughly “secularized.” This implicitly claimed a civic authority for the Protestant churches without calling the cosmic myth into question. The cosmic myth was simply left in place while the substitution of the biblical form of the myth for the Catholic ritual focused exegetical attention on the Bible and the early history of Christendom. Protestant scholars wanted to jump over the history of Catholicism to get at the “origin” of Christianity recorded in the New Testament. The study of the Bible would be the way Protestants understood and confirmed their “faith” as a matter of intellectual commitment to a biblical theology. This transformed the liturgy of the Mass into a “service of worship” in which the Bible and preaching were central. Per the famous aphorism from Luther, “Where the sacraments are held and the Word is preached, there is the Church.”
The Protestant translation of the biblical myth into personal and intellectual terms calling for “faith” did not erase the erstwhile Catholic cosmos of the divine. The details of the mythic worldview were transformed into the Protestant concepts of sovereignty, authority, power, glory, election, vastness, and superiority by the manipulation of the biblical references into placements in the two kingdoms. Thus the culture of Christendom was transformed into the Protestant culture of the Western traditions. The dialectic did determine an awareness of the conflict between the mystic perception of the transcendent picture and its rational interpretations for civil societies of the modern worlds. And this eventually resulted in the now familiar tussles between theology and philosophy, imagination and concept, experience and reason, feeling and abstraction—all of which have troubled the more recent investigations of the cultural traditions of the arts, literature, criticism, philosophy, psychology, and social ethics. This tussle continues to evoke a full range of sensibilities in the recognition of the “beauty” and “power” of the artist’s (author’s, architect’s, performer’s) achievement (“creativity”) in matters of form, genre, style, translation, intention, and understanding of the social world at the level of significance or meaning. However, much of that tussle is now passé, erased by the emergence of modernism and postmodernism. We will address this again in Chapter 6.
If we think of the picture of the world taken for granted by the people during the medieval period of Christendom, the structural shape of this worldview did not go away in the transition from medieval to Reformation times. What did change took place as the casting of new actors to play the traditional roles in slightly revised scripts for the production. The pope’s place was now taken by bishops in the countries that had become Protestant. These lands and peoples had become Protestant by means of a decision rendered on the part of their dukes or kings. “As the ruler [decides whether to be Protestant or Catholic], so the people” was the rubric they used. The result was a cluster of “national” Christendoms, structured and governed on the model of what we now would call a “state-church” arrangement, a monarchy with an official religion. The religion was monotheistic. The church as an institution of the monotheistic religion was integral to society and supported by the monarchy. Each was equally a part of the social structure, and each of them had the whole society in its view. Each had final authority in its separate domain, but they understood their separate roles to mesh for the common good. The pattern of this social structure has stayed in place until our time, revealing an amazing toughness as a skeletal structure even as drastic changes were being made as kingdoms became nations, nations became nation-states, and nation-states became democracies. These political changes were taken in stride as activities natural for the pursuits of the kingdoms until the American and French revolutions. It was in the American and French revolutions that radical moves were made to restructure monarchy and reject the authority of the Christian church in civic affairs.
But as William Shirer’s history of the Third Republic in France from 1871 to July 1940 makes clear (The Collapse of the Third Republic), the Revolution was not able to put either the royalists or the Catholic Church out of the older picture that still informs French mentality. And as for the American Revolution, the need to construct a new nation without a history of monarchy or a single state religion did not mean that the European heritage had been erased as the picture of what a nation-state should look like. It was still recognizable in all its structural parts as a reading of Alexis de Tocqueville makes clear (Democracy in America). Tocqueville was in America for a very brief period, 1831–32, and as a member of the French aristocracy he was interested in what “democracy” looked like in America. In France, the revolutions in the interest of democracy had been violent, and the results were still not clear either in the formation of a nation-state as a democracy or in terms of philosophical and political ideologies. But as a Frenchman, fully aware of the European histories subsequent to the Protestant Reformation and the fragmentation of Christendom that had ended feudalism and was just then creating kingdom-states and nation-states, his ability to analyze the social-political structure of America as a democracy fifty years after the American Revolution is astonishing.
So how was this nation-state formed in America if it did not have a history similar to the European nations’? The American history started with emigrants from Europe who first formed colonies, then states, and finally a federal union. As the colonies formed states, the pictures of the European nations were always in mind, of course. Many colonies took the presence of a Christian church for granted as belonging to the social formation, and in some of the colonies, notably in the northeastern areas, a particular denomination was not only accepted but also legally constituted. Nevertheless, the differences among the states in demography and religions prohibited a single denomination from becoming the state church of the federal union. As a matter of fact, the framing of the Constitution for the federal union included the Bill of Rights, in which the First Amendment clearly stated that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Throughout subsequent history this amendment has been referred to as the principle of the “separation of church and state.” This principle did not keep the many denominations of Christian churches, including the several Catholic configurations, from taking advantage of the “freedom” granted religion in the United States. Many have flourished and formed independent institutions with roots in particular locations, such as the Congregationalists in New England and the Baptists in the southern states. But none of them functioned as a legal component of the structure of a state or of the federal union. This means that Christianity as an institution of religion in America was even more fragmented than in Europe. And since the people were so thoroughly engaged in the practical matters of family, farm, and state building, very little thought was given either to cosmos or history. Christianity was reduced mainly to the level of Protestant preachments to the individual, and concerns for the ethical standards of citizenship in the secular society. There was no big picture to imagine the federal union as a nation, much less as a Christian Nation, and no myth-ritual for the Christian celebration of the social interests that soon came pouring in to occupy all of our energies.
In the course of our brief history as a nation-state, the awareness of ourselves as similar to the European roots from which we came has not been emphasized. It has been the sense of difference that has prevailed. Differences have been noticed at various times mostly to mark features of our country that could be celebrated as distinguishing characteristics. Many of these have become definitional concepts or symbols of historical moments from which we learned who we were as a people. This is not the time and place to rehearse that history except to say that some rather common memories have rather powerful images and symbols to their credit: Tea Party, Bill of Rights, Separation of Church and State, Statue of Liberty, the Flag, the Western, Homestead, Land of the Free, Freedom, Independence, Can Do, Gold Rush, and “Over There.” Along with this history some decidedly strange attitudes have settled in that make it very difficult to sort out the relations among the various Christian theologies and the social history of the United States. Our history of obsessions with being the “land of the free” (meaning the freedom of individuals to do as they please; freedom from Old World conventions and government control; freedom from taxation; and so forth), our capacity for scientific research, the creation of machines and practical inventions, and our recent sense of destiny as the ruler of the world are the more obvious indicators of our sense of being a nation. We usually think of these as features of our society as a “secular” nation, features on the state side of the church-state accord, leaving religious matters to the churches and the personal experiences of individuals. But at that level, the Protestant form of the Christian myth did survive. Protestants did not need the medieval worldview of cosmos and history to preach and experience the Christ event. The Bible was all they needed. But the Christian myth in its biblical form did ask the believer to see the breakthroughs of the divine into human history from the creation to the eschaton. And it has been this version of the big picture of Christianity that has settled into the Christian mentality of Americans.
Internalizing the ethos of a people’s myth and its narrative grammar results in a mentality. Mentality is not a common concept in the United States. The term is not often used to designate the mythic rationale of a society’s particular way of thinking. But we do use the term to notice that another person’s views on a matter reveal a mind-set different from one’s own. This is especially true in the case of encountering a person from another culture. The everyday discourse internal to a society need not be conscious of its mentality. That is because at the popular level of discourse it is not necessary to make reference to the articulated form of the myth. It is possible, however, for references to be made to the narrative symbols of a myth in clichés. In the case of an argument about social issues at large, such discourse can be seriously intended as if the mythic grammar is self-evident. But such discourse is not critical intellectually as if such a reference to attitudes and truism might be questioned and/or countered. It serves only as a knowing observation that the occasion or situation be taken seriously “in light of” the larger world of mythic truisms. Should the mentality involved be questioned by another person, there is the risk of being regarded as overly critical of the culture in place, if not hostile.
In the case of the Christian myth and its mentality as manifest in the political discourse of the parties and administrations from Reagan to the second Bush, the social-cultural situation was much more complex than those political thinkers imagined. It was not merely that the Christian religion no longer had a worldview capable of keeping kings and kingdoms in their places. It was that the social logic of the erstwhile Christian myth had nothing to say to the contemporary world of social interests that had emerged since the Enlightenment and Industrial Revolution. Yet the Christian myth was somehow still in mind for these conservatives as a cultural mentality. This meant that their call to “return” to the Christian Nation we were imagined once to have been was an appeal to a history, myth, and its worldview that are now passé. They were apparently not aware of this history and the significance of its demise for the many movements, industries, nation-states, and ideologies that now filled the social and intellectual vacuums created by its absence.
The theory we are exploring can handle such a blind spot by making a distinction between the myth and its mentality. Myth is articulated, rehearsed, and ritualized (in the Christian religion), thus manifest. Mentalities are sensibilities rooted in truisms that determine the attitudes and practices of the society, thus subliminal. The problem for cultural critics attempting to analyze the conservative mind-set of the second Bush administration, and what its members meant by the term Christian Nation, is that the mythic mentality of the conservatives was not able to argue from the myth and say what they meant by Christian Nation. Mythic mentalities can remain in place for a time after the pervasive grammar of a culture has lost its myth by means of social changes. Such a mentality, robbed of the effectiveness of its mythic authority for the social institutions of influence in the society, is no longer able to envision the future constructively, debate cogently among political alternatives, or think clearly about the authority of such texts as the Bible and the Constitution or the concept of the common good for their significance in relation to the quality of life in the society. Christianity had lost its big picture of a world that worked for the authority of the church in the interest of the piety of its Christians. It had nothing to say to a world that is embroiled in competing pursuits and violence. It has nothing to offer to a conglomerate of discordant social projects and institutions that are not working together in the interest of a common good society.
One of the truly exceptional features of the big Christian picture of the world is the narrative grammar of its myth. The Bible is a double quest romance with two agents in an irresolvable tryst. The divine agent should be able to have his way, for he is the all-powerful creator of the world. But his need to be recognized, adored, and obeyed as the Father of his children and as the sole sovereign of the universe keeps running into trouble, for humans find themselves distracted by one another in their own quests for advantage and power. These human questings are regarded by the divine monarch as evidence of intransigence, and he responds with threats and promises. The threat is of punishment and final destruction. The promise is of forgiveness if his children repent, or adoption if the ungodly convert. Viewed by Protestant Christians as the divine plan for human history from beginning to end, it is the only history that counts.
There is a social logic to this narrative grammar that is troubling. The logic determines the way in which Christians learn to think about everything in their world, and to make judgments about the right way to classify and define things. It begins with a logic of the singular which says that there is only one god, one law, one credo, one system of values, and one right way to live and please the sovereign. In the Catholic tradition all of that was taken care of in the institutions and rituals of Christendom. But in Protestantism, this logic frustrates the Christian’s quest to be sure of one’s “election,” to know for sure the right way to live in the world, and what to think about political loyalties. It is also the logic behind what we can now call the Christian mentality, the cultural preference for thinking that there is only one correct definition for an object, and that the really important events and decisions are, as we say, “unique,” that is, singular and incomparable. The trouble with this logic of the singular is that it cannot handle the real world. And it is compounded by a mythic logic of the dual. The logic of the dual starts with the divine demand for obedience, which recognizes the fact that humans can disobey. The logic of the dual then continues with the distinction between the human and the divine, the cultural division of the human race into Christians and all the others, and finally with the oppositions of “right vs. wrong,” “us vs. them,” and “good vs. bad.” This has made it extremely difficult for Christians to accept and appreciate difference, to compromise with other points of view, and to negotiate with non-Christians and other cultures. Scholars have traced aspects of this cultural mind-set to the Greek philosophies of “being” (versus “becoming”), and the Aristotelian theory of language whereby a single definitional term or name for a thing must be found before “knowledge” of the thing can occur (cf. Saussure’s Course in General Linguistics). However, Heidegger’s analysis of this philosophic tradition in Sein und Zeit makes it clear that the Greek culture alone cannot account for the absolutism of the singular in the Western tradition of philosophy. It is true that the fixation on the “singular” definition of an object is a cultivation of the “mono” mind-set of the world of “being” that has been pursued by Westerner philosophers. But this Western tradition of philosophy is a combination of Greek and Christian concepts and worldviews. The Christian myth also works with a mono logic. Thus cultural critics in our time are referring to the Christian logos that has been involved in contemporary cultural manifestations. In Chapter 6 we will need to ask what these modern scholars see when referring to the Christian logos as a description of the Western cultural tradition. For now it is important to see that the Western traditions of philosophy and theology (not always seen as forms of the same pursuit) have been grounded in the Christian worldview and the social logic of its myth. This means that a Christian mentality at the core of the Western cultural tradition may be the form of Christianity that underlies the ways in which the people of the United States think about themselves and the world at large irrespective of the type of Christian denomination or theology to which one happens to belong. It is that suspicion, in any case, that I want to explore as this book unfolds.
For the past three hundred years Western “civilization” has produced projects of social interests that do not appear to have been initiated by Christian thinking or motivation. As a matter of fact, some of these projects have been attributed to what later has come to be called “humanisms,” intended to be taken as an anthropology different from the Christian’s fascination with the divine. These developments include the views of the Renaissance, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution, and more recent projects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Many of these more recent organizations of human energy found the United States to be a society that welcomed experiments not easily imagined in more traditional national structures. So it was here in the United States that certain features of the current global picture have emerged. These include “military empire,” “global corporations,” exploitations of natural resources around the world in the interest of American capitalism, worldwide networks of financial institutions for banking and investment, the International Monetary Fund, “free-trade” markets, scientific research centers into all aspects of physical realities, electronic communications, surveillance systems, agribusiness, fossil fuel energy, and the “mission” of the United States to spread “democracy” around the world. How all of these organizations of energies and institutions have occurred in the United States is the subject for the next chapter. They paint a dynamic picture so complex that it is all but incomprehensible as a single coherent society.
It was for this reason that the emergence of the term Christian Nation in the Reagan and second Bush administrations came as a surprise. They used the Christian myth to justify their political ideologies that called for Christians to take charge of executive power and privilege as those who assumed our superiority in worldwide “leadership” because we were a “Christian Nation.” Since this way of seeing and thinking about the world was taken for granted by these Christian conservatives, and produced the white papers calling for us to gear up for the American century, the surprise turned to consternation when these papers were revealed. Then the 9/11 “attack” on the Pentagon and the New York towers was interpreted as a call to arms, and the “war” against “terror” began. There did not seem to be any way to stop the furor or ask whether the administration and Pentagon understood why the “attack” had happened. I wrote the book on Myth and the Christian Nation to clarify the reasons for the unthinking involvement in world affairs that this situation revealed. Now, after seven years of wars and rumors of wars with no solutions to the social issues that underlay and still underlie the posture of the United States, I want to explore the influence of the Christian mentality that seems to be the problem.
There is a chilling picture by John Gast entitled American Progress (1872) that David A. Sánchez has reproduced in his book From Patmos to the Barrio. It is in a wonderful chapter on the symbols of “manifest destiny” during the middle of the nineteenth century. The picture shows Lady Providence as an ethereal heavenly figure spanning the space between a valley below and the clouds in the heavens above, bent forward with one foot close to the ground, and looking ahead. She is leading the way west for the settlers. In the picture of the valley below are wagons, homesteads, hunters, prospectors, roads, bridges, ships, railroads, telegraph wires, all leading west. Other authorities from the time are cited by Sánchez making the point that manifest destiny was a notion based on our sense of being an exceptional people, and that this notion was clearly understood as the result of being a chosen people. Thus Christian mentality appears to be capable of imagining more of the world as “Christian” than the medieval picture of Christendom or the mythic narrative of the Bible easily reveals. The biblical form of the myth is so anchored in the transcendent world and sweep of divine agency that its ritual recall in the church, and its entertainment for personal meditation, become imaginative experiences of that spiritual world. But the mythic image of a Christian nation, ultimately derived from the social formations of Christendom, is apparently capable of application even to the modern nation-state. It is not yet clear to me whether and how the modern Protestant church carries and projects this picture of itself as the religious center of the Christian Nation, but the recent articulations of conservatives cited by Jeff Sharlet, Erin Runions, and others tell us that the projection is seriously social and political, not merely a matter of being concerned about the morality of individuals. The leaders who have talked about a Christian Nation seem to have focused on the Bible as law and the power of God as the means to realize a promised political destiny for the nation. So that makes our questions about the persistence and reproduction of this mentality quite complicated. It appears that models of power and property (capital) are now part of the mythic entanglements.
It is this society that is now in trouble and needs to be studied in terms of the human interests it fosters, the social interests that it assumes, the unacknowledged mythic rationales it has produced, and whether it is possible still to imagine social formations in which the common good is privileged in place of wealth, power, and sovereignty. I intend in the next chapters of this book to address these issues.