The Mysteria, part one
This essay also available as a downloadable PDF
“..if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief, you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble…”
Flannery O’Connor
“All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development - in which they were transferred from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent god became the omnipotent lawgiver - but also because of their systematic structure…”
Carl Schmitt
I guess I was 16 when the teacher of my Advanced Placement American Government class told me to make sure I came to school the next day, otherwise she’d be very, very frustrated.
There was a class trip planned for the day, one of many trips designed to give us students exposure to political actors and institutions. My teacher was young, and quite politically liberal, but I didn’t realize how liberal she was until she’d iterated her demand that I not embarrass her by skipping school.
I skipped a lot of school, actually, so her demand wasn’t without merit. In fact, by the end of high school I’d missed 190 days, which is more than one school year. I was working most evenings to support my sisters and my mother, and was often very tired the next morning. Despite being absent so much, I managed to get very good grades, to ace every exam and get A’s on all my essays. Doing so well was one of the reasons the teachers tolerated my absences, though I think they all also knew my home situation was really bad and that helped their tolerance, too.
Still, I “absolutely” had to show up that next day, because the class was going to a luncheon where one of us (me) would get a recognition award from a very prominent Christian political figure, Phyllis Schlafly.
At least half my American readers are too young to know who Phyllis Schlafly was, I imagine, though her influence on what the United States looks like now influences everyone there. She was a very conservative Christian, an anti-feminist activist, and is widely considered to be the primary reason for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment to the US Constitution.
And yes, I got an award from her in 1993.
I was a Christian throughout my adolescence, and a rather devout one. The tales of my life from that time could certainly fill an entire cringe-worthy book, and one day I’ll finally write that memoir. I already have a title for it, taken from the terrorist threat my mother announced over the loudspeakers of a supermarket before she was arrested and committed to psychiatric care: “Accept Jesus, I Have A Bomb.” (1)
I was pretty active in our local mega-church during those years, and that church was very politically connected. Charles Colson, the convicted aide to President Richard Nixon, spoke regularly there. Colonel Oliver North, the primary agent of the Iran-Contra Scandal during the Reagan years, received a ten-minute standing ovation after one of his special appearances. Republican leaders and financiers regularly attended, and other Christian luminaries such as Dr. James Dobson would sometimes sit quietly in the congregation.
The specific branch of Christianity of that church was Southern Baptist. They’re the largest protestant group in the United States, with quite a bit of institutional and organizational presence. Their beliefs are a bit of a mix between fundamentalism (literal interpretations of the Bible, though they didn’t make too much of a deal about the six “24-hour day” creation story), Arminianism, and some Calvinism, with a particular evangelical (missionary and active conversion) focus. In the beginning, Baptists tended to be quite democratic and were the first of the Christians in the United States (along with the Quakers) to accept black pastors and to argue that white and black people were equal in the view of their God. However, as you might imagine, the Southern Baptist Convention was founded over an argument about slavery, not specifically about whether or not slaves should be freed but rather whether or not slave-owners should be allowed to hold missionary positions. Northern Baptists said no, Southern Baptists said yes, and in 1845 (16 years before the Civil War) they split.
Baptists differ from other Christians in some significant ways. First of all, they focus primarily on biblical authority and local church autonomy, which puts them in opposition to Catholics, Anglicans, Orthodox, and other Christians with ecclesiastical hierarchy. Also, as their name implies, the way they view baptism is a core feature of their beliefs: only people who can consciously choose to be baptized can be (so no children), and baptism can only occur when the person has “accepted salvation” from Jesus.
Unfortunately, these democratic and almost anti-authoritarian spiritual features, which were products of early enlightenment beliefs about the equality of man and individual liberty, are not very evident in their social and political impact. Baptists, and especially Southern Baptists, tend to now be aggressively conservative(2), often actively campaigning against economic and social equality and holding to a very US-centric view of Christ’s “inevitable and imminent” return. This made them natural allies with Republican politics and especially with President Ronald Reagan, whose “shining city on a hill” idea of America’s exceptional and divine role still infects both conservative and progressive politics alike.
I wasn’t really up on all the larger political forces and connections at the time I was “saved” and baptized, and anyway I wasn’t there for that stuff. I actually believed in Jesus and his sacrifice, prayed to him many times a day, and went to church enthusiastically. I’ve read the entire Bible all the way through seven times and can still, 30 years later, recite much of the Gospel of John and the first few chapters of Genesis to you. Ask me what the (Protestant) Bible has to say about any particular topic and I’ll find the chapter and verse for you quite quickly, and can easily explain the nuanced differences between each of the four gospel’s accounts of Jesus’s life. And particularly, I know exactly how the events of the end of days proceed, what happens when each trumpet is sounded and seal is opened, and what the problem with each of the churches in the last days is.
Part of the knowledge certainly came from my voracious reading appetite and very good memory, but I don’t want to underplay this point: I was a true believer. I believed it all fully, and would sometimes argue with the youth pastor and Sunday school teachers about certain scriptures I thought they were misinterpreting. One told me my intelligence was intimidating everyone and I needed to learn to be humble about what I know, but that only made me more fervent.
That fervor is what led to that award from Phyllis Schlafly. I still don’t fully understand how this happened, but the chain events also involved an old rich guy who’d been a heavy funder of Schlafly’s Eagle Forum. Also, the MTV music video awards had something to do with this, too.
I’d been at a mall with some friends after school before work, and a local reporter asked me who I thought would win that year. I told her I didn’t watch MTV because I was a Christian, and then she took my picture. The next day, my photo appeared in the newspaper alongside five other teenagers all answering the same question. The old rich guy had seen this and called me, then wrote a letter to the high school principle commending my courage and Christian faith, and then also wrote Phyllis.
Next thing I knew, I was sitting with my very non-Christian high school teacher and non-Christian classmates at an Eagle Forum luncheon. Phyllis called my name, gave me the award, and then proceeded to talk for a very long time about the immorality of popular music and Bill Clinton and how they were both trying to turn women into sluts.
My classmates were quite mean to me the rest of the school year. In retrospect, I get it.
The kind of Christianity I embraced, and yes there are many kinds, came with certain inevitable political implications. Actually, all Christianities do, and really so do all religions, because every religion is also a cosmology. How you see the world constellated, how you see the human relationship to the divine, and especially what you see as right behavior and how that behavior is determined are all core consequences of both political and religious cosmologies, and by “political” and “religious” I am mostly just repeating myself.
The German (and later Nazi) legal theorist Carl Schmitt noted that Western political concepts are really just secularized continuations of theological concepts. He wrote this as part of his critiques of liberal democracy and the modern nation-state, but this point wasn’t a criticism, rather just a statement of fact. It’s an idea that sounds quite heretical and even absurd until you slightly shift your perspective. Then, suddenly, it’s the most obvious thing in the world.
Take, for example, our idea of a president or prime minister of a nation being elected to represent the “will of the people.” Go back a few centuries and we find that kings and church leaders (popes, bishops, ministers, etc) were seen to represent the “will of God.” People and God are of course different things entirely, but the idea of authority being vested into the state or a single figure by an external source hasn’t changed. We just switched the name of that external source.
There are certain consequences to this recognition that aren’t so easily unraveled and get quite uncomfortable. To notice that the roots of our political beliefs grow in the soil of religious belief is particularly unpleasant, because what follows is that there isn’t really any other soil for them to root.
Consider anarchism, an idea that arose during the same time that Baptist Christianity arose. Both have much more in common than either would ever like to admit. Both argue for individual responsibility and individual sovereignty (Baptists call this “soul liberty” and “soul competency”) and decentralized, democratic, and autonomous decision making (a core feature of Baptist church structure). They also believe all people are inherently equal and have an inherent right to freedom of conscience.
The reason for these similarities has nothing to do with a shared belief in God, of course. Instead, it’s that anarchism was formulated as a political theory from secularized versions of these theological concepts. Both anarchism and Baptist Christianity were heavily influenced by the reformed Christian theorist/theologian Jacobus Arminius, whose ideas about salvation emphasized free will and freedom of conscience, rather than John Calvin’s ideas of predestination.
The larger matter of the Protestant Reformation had even greater consequences on political thinking. While I’ve written much disparaging the Reformation shift and especially its purity drive (the iconoclasms and purges) and its role in the formation of Capitalism, there’s one core aspect of the Reformation that inadvertently was more pagan and naturalistic than earlier Christianities.
That’s the idea of the “priesthood of the believer,” derived specifically from Martin Luther.
Orthodox Christianities (Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxies, and Anglicanism) all hold that there are certain religious rites and duties that can only be performed by ordained priests. They all vary on what those rites and duties are, but the core idea is that priesthood conveys a special relationship to God that the ordinary believer cannot or does not have. One result of this is the idea of the Church as the intercessor or intermediary between humans and God: while individuals can pray and be in relation with God, only ordained priests can absolve sin, consecrate the Eucharist, and perform other crucial rites.
The idea of that “ministerial” priesthood is an amalgamation of Hebrew and Roman religious ideas of the priesthood. Jewish priests (Levites) were selected through bloodline and had to be descendants of Aaron; no others could become priests. Priests in Hebrew religion were the only ones who could perform the necessary rites of atonement (blood sacrifices) for the forgiveness of sins, and thus were an indispensable hierarchy that interceded between humans and YHVH.
In Roman religion, priests could be of any class and any bloodline, but only ordained priests could perform certain rites in the temples. However, those rites weren’t for absolution of sins. Rather, they were primarily for practical matters like divination and requests for healing or blessings. Also, the priests performed rituals for the gods themselves, decorating shrines and temples on certain days, turning statues in specific directions, and performing specific rites that the god requested.
Christian priesthood continued most of the Hebraic forms of priesthood, but opened it out of the restrictive bloodline requirement and used some of the more egalitarian Roman model. This meant still that only ordained priests could perform crucial intercession (absolution, the sacraments, etc), but you didn’t need to be born into a family of priests. In fact, you couldn’t be born into a priesthood, because priests were not allowed to marry.
You can still see some continuations of the pagan priestly idea in Catholic and Anglican/Episcopal churches in the changing of altar adornments, the maintenance of a Paschal candle, the performance of masses without attendees, and the keeping of the sacrament or “host” in a pyx or tabernacle. All these are much older pagan, rather than Hebraic, priestly functions.
The break the Reformation (and specifically Martin Luther) made in the idea of a Christian priesthood was actually a full rejection of its Hebrew and much of its Roman and pagan roots. You no longer needed a priest for the absolution of sins, nor did you actually need any priestly intercession at all. Instead, anyone could relate to God fully and directly on their own, and also had the inherent ability to do so. Anyone could now be their own “priest,” which also meant that anyone could know God’s will and work on behalf of his will.
Of course, this meant anyone leading a church couldn’t be truthfully called a priest. Instead, they became “ministers,” a word most Europeans are much more likely to associate with a government position than with a religious role. That’s because ministers (from Latin, the opposite of magisters) were seen more like managers of God’s will among groups of believers, the same way that a minister is a manager of the government’s will in a certain area (minister of health, minister of finance, etc.).
Again, we see how obvious Carl Schmitt’s observation really is here, yet there is a more subtle point easily missed about the Reformation’s break. The idea that we can have direct relationship to the divine didn’t start with Luther at all, and is rather a very widespread religious framework. The point of household shrines in Hindu, Shinto, Buddhist, Taoist, Ìṣẹ̀ṣẹ (Yoruba religion), in older pagan religions, and in syncretic Christianities (Santeria) is that individuals can have direct and everyday relationships to gods. All Luther did was challenge a thousand year long attempted monopoly on the divine, and his was not the first (scores of heretics had tried before) but really only the final attempt.
The problem for Europe and now the rest of the world was that the Reformation kept going, challenging not just the Hebraic idea of a priestly monopoly but also the idea of priests at all. Again, in the Hebraic model, the priests exist for humans; in non-monotheist religions, priests also exist for the gods. A Shinto priest keeps a shrine because the kamineed him to, just as a keeper of a shrine to a god or to the Orishas does so because those gods and the Orishas require it.
In other words, the sacred demanded something of humans, and specific people were tasked with meeting those demands. Reading the many accounts of monastics, we can still see the older Christianities still maintain this role through monasteries and hermitages. In a recent essay, Paul Kingsnorth quotes an ascetic of Mount Athos who describes precisely this other priestly role:
‘The monk flees far from the world, not because he detests the world, but because he loves the world and in this way he is better able to help the world through his prayer, in things that don’t happen humanly but only through divine intervention. In this way God saves the world.’
In the uprisings after the Reformation, Protestants very quickly did away with the cloisters and abbeys, closing them down, often swiftly ransacking them and even in some cases raping nuns. This happened particularly in England in the decades prior to the birth of Capitalism, and this is no accident.
Though within Protestant Christianities anyone could be their own priest, there was no longer any significant sites of perpetual devotion to the divine which most priesthoods entailed. Devotion itself became a matter of discomfort, shame, and even of terror, while the sacred sites set aside (the meaning of “sacred”) for that devotion were destroyed or otherwise profaned.
While the material aspects of the priestly relationship to humans and the sacred were destroyed, the framework nevertheless continued. Again, taking Carl Schmitt’s point deadly serious, it’s not difficult to notice how the rising bourgeois class in Europe after the Reformation merely translated theological ideas about salvation and the will of God into economic and political terms. The simplest way to see this is to remember that economics comes from oikonomia, meaning “household management.” In Christian theology oikonomia came to refer to the proper management of the Church and its people—in other words society as a whole—on behalf of God and according to his goals. In the Protestant break, economics still retains the idea that there is a proper way things can be managed, but God’s plan becomes instead a “scientific” or “ideal” plan that must be divined not by priests but by technocrats.
That is, we kept the priests but changed the names. Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” of the market is of course a divine force, but it looks much less like the God of the older Christianities and much more like John Calvin’s coldly plotting predestiner. He’s both a distant but always immanent being, manifesting his will through our countless transactions and interactions, not so much guided but rather abetted by his learnèd economic, banking, finance, and trade ministers.
This is not the only continuation of the priesthood into our modern era. Dear old (and dead) Phyllis Schlafly was yet another sort of devout servant of God, the sort Flannery O’Connor was getting at in the letter fragment I quoted at the beginning of this piece:
“..if you are a Catholic and have this intensity of belief, you join the convent and are heard from no more; whereas if you are a Protestant and have it, there is no convent for you to join and you go about in the world getting into all sorts of trouble…”
Phyllis truly believed she was doing God’s will, as did that teenager to whom she gave a recognition award. But then so too do most social justice activists and tech giants. In the end there’s not much difference between the certainty of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel and the certainty of Ibram X. Kendi or Judith Butler, nor between their certainties and that of the Southern Baptist ministers who performed an exorcism on me when I was 16. (3) All of them act out a kind of God's will, because they are all attempting to make manifest a heavenly kingdom on earth. Whether that kingdom is of a "real" God or just their divine vision is less important than the real world effects of their fanatical devotion.
What’s really important here is that another unnoticed feature of priesthoods disappeared when it was decided we didn’t need priests. Sometimes the sacred says “no,” and occasionally it is a rather harsh and even violent “no.” The democratization of the divine was partially a return to the older direct relationships with the sacred, but what didn’t return with it were the augurs, the diviners, the oracles, the prophets, and the ecstatics who could warn us that what we thought was true was really a suicidal lie.
In the next installment of The Mysteria, I’ll explain more what I mean by this, and tell you more about my journey from Christianity to pagan polytheism.
Notes
She actually said, “Everybody please accept Jesus Christ as your personal Lord and Savior right now, I have a bomb and I’m going to kill you all.”
They weren’t, originally. In fact they even supported abortion for women in many cases in the early 70’s. However, a fundamentalist “resurgence” slowly overtook the moderates.
You’ll get that story in a future installment, don’t worry.
Rhyd Wildermuth
Rhyd Wildermuth is a druid, theorist, and writer living in the Ardennes. He writes at From The Forests of Arduinna and is the director of publishing for Ritona. He is the author of Being Pagan: A Guide to Re-enchant Your Life.
He is also the author of the upcoming collection The Secret of Crossings, which