Another Bumper-sticker, Another Study in Over-Simplification

     Cruising through Sylva the other day, a brand-new, rather large SUV sported yet another sound-bite-sized word of wisdom on its bumper:  “Religion kills.”  Perhaps because a vehicle bumper is so small, a more accurate and detailed summation of religion is not possible – something to the effect, “Religion, in most instances in human history (especially in the West), has been the catalyst for powerful philosophical endeavors; the force behind the founding of universities; the motive for orphanages and hospitals; the inspiration for some of the world’s most beautiful music, sculpture, painting and architecture; the source of innumerable movements for peace; the immensely popular means of consolation in grief and sustenance of hope; the reason for feasts and means of encounter with the Divine; etc.  Nevertheless, I, as a 21st century driver of a new SUV, feel impelled to oppose its existence, since some have killed in its name.” 

      The problem of this lack of bumper space could be remedied by a concerted, popular movement to force automobile manufacturers to design cars and trucks with a billboard-size rear bumper, then we would be able to give, in a very democratic manner, equal time to all the things that kill:  guns, knives, ropes and baseball bats; a doctor’s scalpel in an abortion clinic or an overdose of morphine; revenge, jealousy, and greed; the aching desire for more petroleum (in order to drive around new, gas-guzzling SUVs); secular ideologies such as Marxism and Nazism; nationalism and imperialism; and so forth....  But then the obvious would become too clear – that people kill (for whatever motive), and that would then not serve someone’s precious agenda. 

      If religion has some dirty laundry – and it does – what are we to say about movements in history, still to this day with their defenders and bumper stickers, that account for far, far more slaughter?  It is indeed odd to sit and listen to a college professor, who’s a Marxist, rant and rave against the “crimes” of religion, specifically and almost invariably, the Christian, Catholic religion, even as he or she clings to an ideology responsible for the most horrific mass killings in history.  Why are these easily accessible facts about the trail of blood left by Communism not taken into consideration?  Why are they, if they are acknowledged, excused and the sins of religion not?  Well, because it depends on what serves the ideology. 

      Imagine.  A few hundred of our enlightened critics of Christianity take a boat to a remote and until now undiscovered land, where the most powerful of the natives have formed an empire, and whose religion demands the ritual, annual sacrifice of thousands and thousands of the other natives – and sacrifice by the most gruesome means:  the bound victim is carried to the top of the pyramid temple, strapped to the altar, where, while still alive, his heart is cut out and held up for popular viewing and his body then rolled down the steps, at the bottom of which he is dismembered so that his arms and legs can be eaten.  What would be the reaction of our modern multiculturalists?  One hopes the same as that of the Spanish Catholics who were appalled at this custom in early modern Mexico and put an end to it with the eager help of many a Native American tribe, long preyed upon by the Aztecs.

      So, religion does kill?  No, but people do kill in the name of religion, in this case a very dark religion, what we would label demonic and what would have shocked most Old World pagans as well as yesterday and today’s Hindus, Muslims and Buddhists, all often very religious.  (But of course, most present-day opponents of religion do not have the Aztecs in mind or even jihadists; rather, when questioned about their distaste for religion, they almost always begin the usual litany about Inquisition, Crusades, and Conquistadors.)  The point is that the erasing of religion from the world will not stop the killing; the problem, so sharply illustrated by perverse religion, is deeper, much deeper, down in the recesses of the human heart, so easily turned to evil, even sometimes in the name of religion.  But it is still religion that has been the recourse of most people throughout history to try to fix this perennial problem.  If history teaches us anything, especially modern history, it is in the very attempt to rid the world of faith that the evil “blossoms” forth most forcefully.  The Twentieth Century stands out as a warning most glaring, when in the name of religion-hating ideologies, more human beings were killed violently than in all the other centuries added together. 

      Dostoyevsky was right:  the modern secular ideologies are really godless “religions,” having all the fervor of “faith” and none of real religion’s constraints:  no unchanging morality that checks the human tendency to do evil in the pursuit of some seeming good, no judgment day in eternity to uphold earthly justice, no real means of taming the human heart with charity and humility.  Ironically, the religion most hated is the very one – Christianity – that most explicitly targets with the Gospel the very source of the problem, the human heart, and offers the most sure remedy, repeated over and over by Christ our Lord, and summed up in the words so often appended to a depiction of the Sacred Heart:  “My child, give Me your heart” – an offering of oneself to the Heart that wept for our world, died to redeem it and rose again to eventually restore it.   

      But it is in the very essence of the modern ideologies to locate the “fixable problem” in our world anywhere other than in man himself, in his interior life of reason, will and emotion, in his spiritual nature.  And so we have a succession of secular attempts to perfect the world, and one after another has failed, often with terrible results.  Beginning in France with its Revolution – prepared for by a century of ideological opposition to the Church – there was to be the forced “liberation” of Europe from the “darkness” of Christianity and other impediments to “enlightenment,” a campaign that culminated in the first genocide attempt in history (with the murder of a quarter of a million Catholic men, women and children in the Vendee by the revolutionary army) and the feverish use of the guillotine and the consequent reign of chaos until France found a tyrant, Bonaparte, to restore order and spread this “good news” all over the continent. Thus a decade of a war of tremendous devastation, all the way to Russia.  Then, after a few decades, Karl Marx set to work in England on his own plan of universal “redemption,” even as the new hope (and religion) of the world appeared in the Industrial Revolution and in unbridled capitalism, promising so much to so many and failing to deliver.

      By this time, with the authority of the Church long broken, Europe’s principle of unity had fractured, and nationalism, another new religion, surfaced and set the stage for disputes that would usher in the Great War (you know, the “war to end all wars”).  During that nightmare – which the Pope valiantly tried to negotiate to a quick end but was rebuffed by nearly all national leaders, dead-set on victory at all costs – Germany, in a last-ditch effort to foil its enemies, sought to disengage Russia from the war by packaging off Lenin on a sealed train to foment revolution in what was to become known as the Soviet Union, that iron-curtain-enclosed bastion of atheism, gulags and myriads of secret police.  Meanwhile, the war left behind a ravaged Germany ready for its own tyrant, who would be Hitler, to come and restore order (and precipitate WWII and the Holocaust).  And the rest, as they say, is history, that is, secular history. 

      The secular ideologies have failed, and yet we are presented with ever-new ones, fresh fruit to pick off the forbidden tree, these days ideologies less of the political and more of the “scientific” kind.  They shall fail too, and perhaps lead to results far worse than what we have already come through.  “But Christianity has also failed,” one may suggest; “it couldn’t stand up to other, opposing worldviews.”  G.K. Chesterton answered that one back in the midst of the turmoil of the Twentieth Century:  “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting; it has been found difficult and left untried.”  Or, if tried, dropped, rebelled against.  For the human heart is a hard thing to tame, to convert, especially when it refuses to admit that it’s the source of the problem.   And secondly, the Christian faith offers no earthly utopia (literally meaning “no place”) as do the ideologies, and so, especially in a secular era, will lack appeal.  “How often,” said Aristotle, long ago in his work on politics, “the good is lost in the seeking of the perfect,” the utopia, so roundly mocked much later by St. Thomas More in his classic Utopia, and in those frighteningly familiar and prescient works of more recent times, Brave New World and 1984.

      “Religion kills,” goes the over-simplified sound bite of the American bumper sticker.  But the truth is that people will kill with or without religion.  And without the fullness of truth revealed in Christ, and the conversion it calls for, people will kill, destroy, their own humanity, even as they seek to solve the problem of life apart from the God who gave that life to us, He Who alone can heal the heart.   

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