Is Christianity a Cult?

In the last week or so, I have been doing some pretty gruelling reading, and not just reading but-- rather more gruellingly-- listening and watching. I became interested-- perhaps morbidly fascinated-- by the story of the People's Temple, the cult who committed mass suicide in 1978, under the influence of their charismatic leader Jim Jones. Nearly a thousand people died, in a purpose-built settlement in Guyana called Jonestown.

One of the most compelling aspects of the Jonestown case is how well it is documented. There is a website, maintained by a university, where transcripts and audio recordings from the cult's archive can be found. And the cult kept very full archives indeed, right up to the end.

I am not including a link to this site, as I would urge readers not to visit it. It's not that it is salacious in itself-- it is perfectly sober and factual, and rather intended to counteract sensationalism than to foster it.

But I actually regret reading and hearing some of the material I encountered on it, which has cast rather a chilling shadow over me in the last week or so.

And it has made me face the question: is all faith a bad idea? Should we run a mile from anybody who claims to possess authoritative knowledge from on high, as the Magisterium of the Catholic Church claims to do? I was not asking myself this question in any rhetorical spirit. I was very shaken by what I learned of Jonestown and what happened there.

It's not that Jonestown was a specifically Christian or even religious tragedy. The Reverend Jim Jones began as a Christian preacher in the mid-fifties, and his group (the People's Temple) were affiliated to a major Protestant denomination, the Disciples of Christ. (It wasn't just this organization that lent legitimacy to the cult. Harvey Milk, the gay activist who has been exalted as a hero figure in recent years, defended Jim Jones in a letter to President Carter. The columnist Herb Caen also wrote sympathetically of the People's Temple.) However, Jones pretty much stopped even pretending to be a Christian towards the end of his life, and the Peoples Temple had embraced Marxist-Leninist principles by the time they moved to Jonestown.

But I think Christians have to honestly face the fact that many of the characteristics of cults seem to be applicable to Christianity.

First off, cults tend to cut their adherents off from friends and families and other ties. Which may put one in mind of Luke 14:26: "If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple."

Secondly, cults tend to demand complete commitments of time and money from their adherents. This may not seem very relevant to Christianity today, but it certainly seems to apply to the primitive Christianity as pictured in the book of Acts. In this regard, I have always found the story of Ananias and Saphira rather troubling:

But a certain man named Ananias, with Saphira his wife, sold a piece of land, And by fraud kept back part of the price of the land, his wife being privy thereunto: and bringing a certain part of it, laid it at the feet of the apostles.

But Peter said: Ananias, why hath Satan tempted thy heart, that thou shouldst lie to the Holy Ghost and by fraud keep part of the price of the land?

Whilst it remained, did it not remain to thee? And after it was sold, was it not in thy power? Why hast thou conceived this thing in thy heart? Thou hast not lied to men, but to God.

And Ananias, hearing these words, fell down and gave up the ghost. And there came great fear upon all that heard it.

But even today, the claims of Christianity are absolute. "For me to live is Christ", said St. Paul. "He must increase, and I must decrease", said St. John the Baptist. "Whoever loses his life for my sake will find it", said our Lord.

Third, cult leaders tend to make grandiose predictions which, when they do not come to pass, are explained away by their followers. Take, for instance, Charles Taze Russell, the founder of the Jehovah's Witness, who claimed that the world would end in 1914. The Jehovah's Witnesses get around this by explaining that the end of the world began in 1914. And there are many other examples from other cults.

This must remind us of what C.S. Lewis described as the most embarrassing verse of the Bible-- Matthew 24:34, in which Christ seems to claim that "this generation" will not pass until he has returned. (This is a complicated topic, and not one I intend to return to in this post-- there are plenty of other Catholic and Christian sites where this apparent problem is discussed, and resolved to my satisfaction-- I am merely mentioning it as part of a prima facie case that Christianity has cult-like characteristics.)

Aside from all that, there is the general fact that Christ repeatedly enjoins us to "doubt no more, but believe". He chides his disciples for their lack of faith. Doesn't this seem just like a cult leader? Shouldn't belief be a rational response to sufficient evidence, not a virtue in itself? In everyday life, aren't we put on guard by someone who keeps repeating "Trust me"?

If that weren't enough, I have to admit that the psychological dynamics of cults seem all too similar to those of mainstream religious believers.

One thing that seems apparent from reading about cults is how much of their appeal comes from a sense of togetherness, of bonding, of belonging. The people in Jonestown were barely given enough to eat, lived in primitive and overcrowded conditions, and were worked to exhaustion-- and yet many of them described their community as a paradise, and were willing to die rather than see it broken up.

I can testify that this sense of bonding, of belonging, of self-transcendance, is definitely something I find in Catholicism. It is a source of great joy to me that the liturgy in which I participate, and the prayers I recite, and the Bible that I read, give me a sense of profound togetherness with Catholics all around the globe and all through the centuries. There is even a sense of self-sacrifice and self-abandonment in this; we rejoice to climb out of the ego, and assent to a creed that is not of our own making, to submit to a morality that seems so much more solid and objective than the moral fashions of the day or our own moral intuitions.

Again, cults thrive on the opposition of the world. The more relatives or friends or colleagues seek to persuade the cult member that she is being duped, the more she congratulates herself on her loyalty, and the more she takes the hostility of the wider society as a confirmation of the cult's specialness. Is this not a similar situation to that of Christians, and especially Catholics? Don't we use "the world" as a pejorative term? "Blessed are ye when they shall revile you, and persecute you, and speak all that is evil against you, untruly, for my sake: be glad and rejoice, for your reward is very great in heaven. For so they persecuted the prophets that were before you."

So, having identified all these similarities, why do I remain a Catholic?

First off, I would say that deception itself implies authenticity somewhere. You wouldn't have fake banknotes unless there were real banknotes in circulation. Jim Jones was known as "Dad" by his followers. Does this prove that fatherhood is itself a fraud? Hardly.

The mind is notoriously capable of perceiving patterns that aren't there-- for instance, seeing a face on the moon, or finding hidden messages that Paul McCartney is dead in the cover of a Beatles album. But this capacity only exists because the mind is built to perceive patterns that are actually there. The religious urge is rooted deep in the human soul. It can be abused and perverted by cults (and by ideologues). But how does this prove that the religious urge is evil in itself, or has no proper fulfilment?

Secondly, I would posit as the biggest difference between the Catholic Church and a cult that the Catholic Church is constrained by its own traditions. The Pope cannot wake up in the morning and decide that abortion is OK, or that lying is permissible in a good cause, or that plural marriage is to be instituted. The teaching of the Church has developed painstakingly over centuries, and the Church has never contradicted its own defined doctrines. Making an act of faith in the Catholic Church is not writing a blank cheque, or signing away your conscience, because you can be sure that there are some things the Church will never teach or demand-- for instance, that evil should be done in order to bring about a greater good. (This is why the concept of heresy, which is so often portrayed as being rather sinister and manipulative, is actually a very important safeguard.)

(I hope I may not be misunderstood in making this point. I am not saying that the Church's dogmas and doctrine are to be valued as a kind of protection for Church members from their own leaders, who would otherwise abuse their power. I don't actually believe they would. But I do believe that, for someone who is trying to discern a clear difference between the Catholic Church and cults, the existence of a definite body of dogma which cannot be contradicted should be reassuring.)

Third, the difference between the Church and suicidal cults could not be greater. The Church, of course, denounces suicide as a mortal sin. Not only that, but the Church has consistently insisted that martyrdom, while it is is noble and even necessary in certain circumstances, is never to be sought for its own sake. Some heretical sects, such as the Donatists of the fourth and fifth centuries, did believe that martyrdom should be actively pursued. The Cathars, everybody's favourite heretics, were also rather keen on the notion of suicide, believing as they did that all matter had been created by Satan.

I think, too, that the profundity and fertility of the Church's teaching is a clear sign that it is not, to be blunt, a scam. Listening to the tape-recorded ramblings of the Reverend Jim Jones, and trying to make sense of his faux-Marxist brand of utopianism, the contrast between such fabrications on one hand, and Christian doctrine on the other, could not be starker. How is it that the apostles, such very ordinary men, could have laid down the basic principles upon which such a magnificent (and complex) edifice of theology, dogma, canon law and doctrine could have been raised, over so many centuries? Was St. John the Evangelist simply lucky when he began his gospel, "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was God, and the Word was with God"-- anticipating such intricate metaphysical and Christological debates? Why do the Gospels and the epistles, written by so many different hands, fit together so perfectly? Why did the Popes, down through all the ages, show such a bulldog-like refusal to condone heresy or to water down orthodoxy, even when the matters at hand seemed like the merest wrangling over terms, and even when there were very good worldly reasons to compromise?

The New Testament is a very slim work. And yet all the fabulously intricate teaching of the Catholic Church is contained in embryo within it. Not only that, but I would argue that no doctrine has ever surpassed the Christian doctrine in terms of sublimity, depth and insight into the human condition, to the extent that-- even in our post-Christian age-- writers and philosophers and film-makers and many others find themselves drawing upon it for symbols, vocabulary and categories of thought. How credible is it that a bunch of frauds from Galilee could have inspired all this?

Another argument I would make is that it is very difficult to see the great figures of Catholic history as manipulative power-trippers in the style of Jim Jones, the Reverend Sun Yung Moon, Joseph Smith, Brigham Young, L. Ron Hubbard or all the other self-aggrandising, money-grabbing cult leaders of history. (Is Mormonism a cult? I don't think it's a cult now, but I think it was a cult in the nineteenth century.) St. Paul and St. Peter and St. Polycarp and St. Ignatius of Antioch did not decide to take their congregations with them when they went to their deaths. St. Padre Pio's gifts brought him a life of suffering, mortification and obedience, not power and riches. Saint Bernadette Soubirous lived an obscure life as a cloistered nun. What personal good, in worldly terms, did her visions do her? And the list could be multiplied indefinitely.

When we read about the manipulation and madness of religious cults-- and even not-so-religious cults like the People's Temple-- there is a temptation to recoil from all religious truth claims, to cry "a plague on all your houses", to resolve to take nothing on faith and to only trust what we can see and verify for ourselves. Such an attitude, however, is naive and in the long run impossible. Ultimately, we can't help but placing faith in something, even if it is simply the received wisdom of the society we live in. Not only that, but the great enigma of life lies before us unresolved-- we have simply shrunk back from the precipice, but the precipice is still there. The galaxies above us and the galaxies within us require an answer. Our souls cry out for an eternal home, for an ultimate commitment. Cults are successful because they offer an answer to these questions. They offer satisfaction to our deepest longings. The fact that they are shown to be false does not mean life's most profound questions are unanswerable, or that the human soul's deepest yearnings must go unsatisfied. I believe that there are answers; and I believe that they are to be found in the teaching of the Catholic Church.

Classified Ad in The Irish Catholic this week

Wanted: 4ft tall crucified form of Christ to attach to 8ft high external wooden cross, beside Our Lady's Grotto.

(I'm not making this up.)

The Necessity of Poetry

I have been thinking about poetry recently, and how important it is. I post my own poems on this blog, and I do so without any apology whatsoever. I firmly believe that poetry should be a bigger part of everyday life. I believe that more people should read poetry, recite poetry, and write poetry. I don't think it has to be good poetry.

There are some people-- especially conservatives (or cultural conservatives, anyway)-- who wring their hands at such poetic populism. I'm thinking about critics like Harold Bloom, Allan Bloom and the Irish poet and polymath Anthony Cronin. The general thrust of these objections is that only great poetry is worth bothering about, that if we bother with anything else we are sapping our critical faculties, and probably contributing to the decline of Western Civilization as well.

I don't buy that for a second. Poetry for the people does not mean that Gemma Higgins, age twelve and a half, becomes the equal of W.B. Yeats or Robert Frost, or that her Poem for Pebbles my Pet Bunny is put on a par with Ode to a Nightingale. That's a ridiculous idea.

Rather, I agree whole-heartedly with the famous aphorism of G.K. Chesterton: "If a thing is worth doing, it's worth doing badly." Nobody complains about amateurs tinkling on a piano, painting a watercolour, telling a joke, or making a casserole. Why should poetry be any different?

But I would go even further than that. I would say that the poetry of ordinary people has-- or, at least, can have-- a naive charm that is all its own, and that is even lacking from the sublimities of Tennyson and Keats and Philip Larkin.

Whatever the reason, I have recently found myself hungering for poetry, and just as pleased to read a certain sort of mediocre poetry as I am to read more competent work. (Of course, when I come across a really good poem, I'm pleased to discover it.)

I say "a certain sort of mediocrity" because there are some sins I find unforgiveable, whether it's in a pamphlet by the Ballymacmurphy Writer's Group or in the Collected Works of W.H. Auden or Louis MacNeice. I can't forgive wilful obscurity-- "the starry dynamo in the machinery of night", that kind of thing. Enigma, ambiguity, and elusiveness are all very well, but when an ordinary person has no chance of guessing what the heck the poet is talking about, then I honk the hokum horn.

Another unforgiveable sin is a reliance on choppy, truncated little lines. I mean this kind of thing:

screaming
lost in air
with no
compass in dreams
or desire
or disdain
I rush forward
to the uncomprehending
sun, the
blank moon.

This seems like a form of conspicuous consumption to me; a flagrant waste of paper. How can you settle in to a poem like that? It has too much of the hairshirt about it for my taste.

Then there are those poems which seem to eschew any kind of commentary or reflection or explicit human emotion, that strive to be the poetic equivalent of a film camera left running. Stuff like this:

Daybreak in Cardiff.
Mist clings to the unpeopled streets.
A sun that strains to penetrate the clouds.
A seagull squeals, and circles.
A toppled bin outside the cinema etc. etc. etc.

Then there is the poetry that draws entirely on mythology or Renaissance history or literature or Peruvian village life. I just don't think poetry can really come alive unless it draws on the poet's own immediate experience-- especially his or her everyday experience, as opposed to that three month stint volunteering in Africa. I think poetry thrives on the familiar, and its best if it is a familiarity shared by poet and reader.

Last (but certainly not least), I hate and reject poetry that wallows in ennui and superciliousness. My father complains about angst in poetry. I can't really agree with him. I think angst is a perfectly good subject for a poet, and many of the best poets have almost confined themselves to angst. A.E. Housman is a good example. I find nothing at all wrong with a despairing ditty like this one:

The stars have not dealt me the worst they could do:
My pleasures are plenty, my troubles are two.
But oh, my two troubles they reave me of rest,
The brains in my head and the heart in my breast.

Angst is only really the shadow of ardour. An angst-ridden person at least yearns for joy and fulfilment and life. But what can you do with those blasé, over-educated, irony-afflicted poets and writers who are apparently too anaemic and sophisticated to get worked up about anything? It is though they are looking at human life from a great distance, through glazed eyes. Any kind of spontaneous, hearty reaction to anything has long become impossible to them. They have read too many books, had too many lovers, thought their way through too many illusions, and all is vanity and vexation of spirit to them.

As always, it's hard to think of an example when you need one. But these lines by E.E. Cummings perhaps show what I mean (though I acknowledge that Cummings is being satirical here):

"next to of course god america i
love you land of the pilgrims' and so forth oh
say can you see by the dawn's early my
country 'tis of centuries come and go
and are no more what of it we should worry
in every language even deafanddumb
thy sons acclaim your glorious name by gorry
by jingo by gee by gosh by gum

This sort of malady is not confined to prize-winning poets who appear in prestigious magazines. It is a temptation to any fairly clever and well-educated person who puts poetic pen to paper.

So, putting it all together, this is what I look for in a poem. A poem where I know what the poet is talking about, and where the lines cover a decent stretch of the page's width, and that draws on familiar subject-matter, and that is not buried under layers of irony and apathy. After that, I don't really care how bad it is-- within reason. I mean, I find myself unable to relish a verse like this, which is the kind of thing I sometimes come across when I am skimming poetry volumes:

Once a month the fair comes to town
And every girls goes in her brand new gown.
The farmers arrive to sell their crops
And the little kids suck their lollipops

If the author of this (fictional) verse were to read me his poems, I would listen respectfully and think of something nice to say about them. But I'm afraid I would be unable to enjoy them, no matter how many allowances I made. Still, even in this case, I think it is better for him to write poetry than not to write poetry.

I think every moment devoted to poetry is a little victory for the human race. Actually, it's quite a big victory. Poetry rarely finds time and space amongst the more imposing business of life: brainstorming, TV watching, gift-shop visiting, car washing, cooking, cleaning, partying, dinner partying, exercising, eating out, working, working, working, working. There is always something more pressing, something more profitable, something more practical to be doing.

But I think poetry is necessary because it reminds us we are alive. It reminds us that we are humans, that we are spectators of and participants in the primal wonder of existence. There is nothing wrong with being a consumer, or a commuter, or a voter, or a citizen, or a viewer. But we desperately need to be reminded that we are more, infinitely more, than the aggregate of those roles we play.

The wonderful thing about poetry is that its subject matter is everything. It has no agenda, no terms of reference, no brief. The Trojan War can share equal billing with the day, aged four years old, when the poet watched the dust motes dancing in her uncle's loft. Doubts and hesitations and confusions are as welcome as convictions, passions and insights. The King James Bible and a sun holiday brochure can both be source texts. Writing and reading poetry should be like that moment when we finally get out of the airplane seat and gratefully revel in the rediscovered gift of space; space to stretch in, space to move through, space to think in. Except the space we are stretching our limbs in, when it comes to poetry, is all time and space and possibility and imagination.

There is a moment from Star Trek: the Next Generation (yes, I'm a Trekkie) which always sticks in my mind. It is a scene in which Geordi La Forge and Data (the android who wants to be more human) are discussing a poem that Data has written about his pet cat. (One of the things I love about the series is all the laudable, self-improving extra-curricular activities that the crew take part in, such as amateur dramatics and trombone recitals and, indeed, poetry readings. In the supposedly more adult and sophisticated Deep Space Nine, the characters tend to prefer holographic sex as a recreation. You decide which is better.) The fact that a scene like that could occur in a science fiction show struck me as almost a little miracle, and also, a delight.

I remember, too, the time I came across a book in school in which teenagers picked their favourite poems and wrote commentaries upon them. I was amazed. Here were kids talking about their own personal reactions to poems, and they were printed in a book. It just didn't fit into my perceptions of what the world treated as important. One of the kids (a girl!) said that she wrote out her favourite poem on fancy paper, drew a decorative border on it, and put it on her wall. I was flabbergasted.

I think poetry is important because I am a humanist. (Incidentally, how on earth did the word "humanist" come to be equated with "atheist"? I don't see how you can be a humanist without believing in God. I don't know how you can believe that every human being is of infinite value if you believe that man is a cosmic freak, and ultimately no more than the sum of his parts; if you believe that mankind was not intended, but simply a by-product of mindless physical processes.)

I think poetry is important because it reminds us that we have souls.

As a Christian, I think poetry is important because it has God's approval; he gave us the Psalms, along with the other poetic works of the Bible.

I wish poetry was more of a part of everyday life. I wish business meetings opened with a short poem. I wish there were poems at hen parties and bachelor parties (though there may be, for all I know). I wish party political broadcasts included heartfelt sonnets. I wish supermarkets were opened with a ceremonial poem, to be inscribed on a brass plaque at the main entrance. I wish there was poetry (as opposed to jingles) in advertisements. And I'm grateful for the everyday situations where you do find poetry, such as greeting cards and in memoriam ads and school exercises.

I think poetry is important because poetry is so easy to sneer at, so frequently sneered at. All the best things in life are easily sneered at; youthful idealism, starry-eyed romance, eccentricity, wholesomeness, sentimentality. The words "I'd like to read a poem that I wrote" is generally accepted as a signal to duck for cover. I submit that this is a mistake. I think that, if we can find time for car shows and reality TV and murder mysteries, we might spare thirty seconds to listen respectfuly to a fellow human being opening the landscape of their soul to us.

Sigh

Earlier this month, The Irish Times printed a letter from me which began:

Sir, – It is frustrating to see how the abortion debate is continually sidetracked by irrelevant questions, question-begging, and obfuscatory rhetoric. The rhetoric of “a woman’s right to choose” and “a woman’s control of her own body” obviously begs the question of whether there is a second person’s body and freedom at stake.

Today, there is a letter from a Peter Dunne of Clontarf that begins:

Sir, – Maolsheachlann O Ceallaigh’s assertion (May 3rd) that the abortion debate in Ireland has been “side-tracked by irrelevant questions” such as “a woman’s right to choose” raises an interesting point.

I don't think that's really a fair paraphrase of what I wrote. And it irks me to think that, at breakfast tables and in train carriages all over the nation this morning, Irish Times readers will attach to my (very distinctive) name the impression of a purple-faced, sputtering misogynist.

Oh well.

A Poem for Michelle

When I look at your face I think
About the flickering flames
Of an open fire on a winter’s night;
Bare branches swaying in a winter’s wind
And clean crisp sheets, and the coolness of a pillow
Against my sleepy head;
All welcoming things, all loved and dreamed-of things
All beckoning and all soul-comforting things.

When I look in your eyes
I think of every colour, every element
I ever yearned to lose myself inside.
The near-unbearably gorgeous coloured wavelets
I saw on a visit to Howth, long long ago
When I was a little boy.
The beautiful aquamarine of swimming pool water
The swirling brownness of Coke, held up to the light,
The sepia fog of long-ago photographs.
None of these things look like your eyes, in truth,
And yet your eyes remind me of them all.

When I listen to your voice, I hear
The hum of voices in some busy place
The sound of life itself; I hear the sound
Of children playing in a playground, and
The whistle of a kettle on the boil.
I hear the crash of waves. I hear the crunch
Of leaves beneath my feet.

When I am close
To you and breathe your scent, joy fills my soul.

When I kiss you
And taste your lips, it tastes like home-made bread
And a cup of tea made by someone who loves you.

When I hold you
It is like lying back in a hot bath
Or wearing a warm coat on a cold day.
Your softness is like darkness to tired eyes,
Like silence to tired ears.

When I see you
It is like seeing a window’s yellow light
Cheerful against the dark of a stormy sky
And knowing that my key fits in the lock
Inside the door that opens on the hall
That leads me to that room of yellow light
And someone there will smile to see my face
And come to sit beside me.

When I see
Your face, what I am looking at is home.

Recommended Reading

Impending nuptials grow ever more impending. Here I am in a suit shop trying on suits. (What's with the crazy hair, you ask? I tend to avoid the barber's for as long as possible, although I usually don't let it go as wild as it did here. It's shorn now. I felt a little like Rod Stewart, putting on suits while my hair was so frazzled.)

I probably won't have much time to blog (yeah, I know I said that a few weeks ago), so I thought I might be excused a little self-indulgence. I'm putting up links to my personal favourite posts from this blog-- the ones I liked writing the most, and in which I discuss the subjects nearest to my heart-- so that people surfing through cyberspace and landing here will have something to keep them chewing, if they so wish, while I'm away.

Here is a popular post in which I wonder why C.S. Lewis never became a Catholic.

Here is a review of an infamous sixties documentary about Ireland called The Rocky Road to Dublin (of course, it blamed most of the country's woes on the Catholic Church).

Here is a post about television that I put some effort into.

Here is a fun poem about why I am a conservative, and how I like old stuff simply because it's old. (Well, I think it's a fun poem, anyway.)

Here is one for Christian Trekkies. I put a lot of work into it.

Here is my own favourite post that I wrote, a hymn of praise to my favourite film of all time, Groundhog Day.

Here is another post I put a lot of effort into, about my fascination with the whole idea of debate.

Here is an account of a pre-Cana course that me and Michelle did last summer.

Why I am not a feminist.

This account of a John Waters talk attracts a fair amount of traffic.

Regarding the commercialization of religious holidays.

I liked this post, even if nobody else did.

I defend clichés.

I enthuse about daily Mass.

I defend organized religion.

I discuss my own difficulties with Christian belief.

Here is my account of how I came to my Catholic faith, from the site Why I'm Catholic.

That lot may while away some idle hours at a computer. If you still have time on your hands, here are some wonderful posts by my favourite philosopher Edward Feser. Here he wonders why liberalism rules the roost in universities, and here he insists on the need for a metaphysical basis for conservatism.

If even that isn't sufficient, well, there's always Snopes.

I'll be back!

An Ordinariate in Ireland?

Here is an interesting idea....a Fr. O is seeking to stimulate discussion about an ordinariate for Irish Anglicans who wish to enter communion with the Roman Catholic Church, similar to the Walsingham Ordinariate which was established in England quite recently.

His blog can be found here. Have a look!