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What to Believe?

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I was raised a Christian lad, not by proselytizing parents, but by a father and mother who passively practised the religion they’d been taught by their own parents.  As an infant, I was baptized in the Church of England; as a boy, I attended Sunday School, where I learned the Anglican liturgy. In my early teens, I publicly professed my learned faith in a confirmation ceremony; as a young man, I married my bride in a Christian church.

Growing up, I was enamoured of the tales of derring-do by British adventurers who set out to dominate the world—Richard the Lionheart and the Crusader knights; Sir Francis Drake and other explorers and privateers; Sir Cecil Rhodes and the rapacious conquerors of Africa and Asia. All of them ventured forth under the cross of St. George, ostensibly to bring Christianity to the heathen masses. Or so I was taught.

I wasn’t dissuaded by the troubling outcomes that sometimes occurred to me, arising from those teachings. For example, had I died before being baptized, I was taught I would not have gone to heaven; I was told that children of other faiths, unless they converted to Christianity, would not go to heaven; I believed none of us, being sinners, would go to heaven if we did not sincerely repent and swear never to repeat our sinful actions; and it was ingrained in me that those who did not go to heaven would be damned to eternal hellfire.

It didn’t dawn on me until much later how ludicrous it was that the God of love held dominion over me through fear. Still, I’ve never had doubts about the essential teachings of Jesus, as I understand them from the several writers of the Bible who have reported them—love; forgiveness; humility and service; empathy and trust; repentance and redemption; compassion and mercy. It seems to me that if everyone, Christian or not, practiced those teachings, the issues that plague our world would disappear.

From earliest times, my favourite part of being in church was listening to and singing the glorious hymns, accompanied by the mighty strains of a pipe organ. Because of the early, emotional indoctrination I experienced through my parents, they prickle my skin to this day when I hear them rendered—to name a few: Abide With Me; Blessed Assurance; Guide Me, O Thou Great Redeemer; Jerusalem; Joyful, Joyful, We Adore Thee; Nearer My God to Thee; O God, Our Help In Ages Past; and Rock of Ages.

A good number of hymns, I discovered later, were written by British lyricists and set to the melodies of classical composers, many of them Germanic. One of those, Glorious Things of Thee Are Spoken (by John Newton, who also wrote Amazing Grace), is sung to the same Joseph Haydn melody that graces the German national anthem, Deutschlandlied (formerly Deutschland über Alles).

Given the 20th century history of conflict between those two nations, I always found it strange that they shared a love for such glorious music. Even more so, I found it preposterous that soldiers of both Christian countries were killing each other on battlefields, in direct contravention of their shared God’s commandment.

Yes, God is with us! Nein, Gott ist mit uns!

But perhaps that isn’t so strange, given the militaristic character of many of those hymns. Take these lyrics for example—

Stand up, stand up for Jesus! ye soldiers of the cross;
Lift high His royal banner, it must not suffer loss:
From vict’ry unto vict’ry, His army shall He lead,
Till every foe is vanquished, and Christ is Lord indeed.

Implicit in those words is the instruction that good Christians must overthrow those who do not believe. I found that to be in contravention of the Christly teachings mentioned earlier, which always struck me as invitational rather than compulsory. I was taught, after all, that God had gifted us with free choice.

Mind you, George Duffield, Jr., the American clergyman who wrote the lyrics in 1858 and set them to an original melody by Franz Schubert, may not have intended them to sound militant or jingoistic. But that is how they ring in my ear. And it is such sentiments that crusaders and conquerors of the past cited to justify their conquests.

If you doubt it, consider also the lyrics of such hymns as Onward, Christian Soldiers, We’ll Go Out and Take the Land, or The World Must Be Taken For Jesus.

In fact, many Christian buccaneers and swashbucklers set out to plunder the world for reasons far more crass than what they professed. Bringing Christianity to the heathen masses was, at best, a by-product of their colonialist ravages, and at worst, an excuse for them. As for those Indigenous peoples subjected to the messianic zeal of 19th century Christian missionaries, I’ve always wondered how their forced conversions could be deemed proper when similar depredations imposed on Christian victims during the 8th century Moorish invasion of Europe were considered barbaric. Did both aggressions not have the same effects on those who suffered and died? Were they not the same thing, save for the religious faith driving them?

Might makes right, some say. To the victors go the spoils. And history—the history I grew up learning—was written by those victors. The synoptic gospels have Jesus saying, “Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s…” A venerable phrase translated from the Latin has Caesar claiming, “I came, I saw, I conquered!” The emphasis, of course, is on that final word.

So now, with more yesterdays accumulated than tomorrows to anticipate, I find I am no longer the Christian lad I once was…not with how Christianity, particularly the degraded, evangelical sort, has come to be defined in this 21st century. I do believe in free choice, and I choose not to believe Jesus was all about conquest and subjugation.

Further, I do believe in the wisdom of the aforementioned teachings of Christ, although I do not need the backing of a supernatural mythology to support my belief. I regard those as universal truths shared by Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Judaism, among other religions…and indeed, by many folk who profess no religion. Those teachings promote adherence to the Golden Rule, compassion for and kindness to others, the valuing of family and community, and the pursuit of a moral life.

I’ve long believed that the evils of this world are caused, for the most part, by extremism—unbridled nationalism, greedy capitalism, and apocalyptic religions. How might it be if only we gave those universal truths a chance to show what they could do instead?

In closing, lest this screed be mistaken for apostasy or advocacy, let me assure you it is no more than a statement of personal belief, refined over many years of observation and experience. Despite the sage admonition not to believe everything I think, I have always felt that believing in something is important, so as not to fall for anything.

The question, of course, is knowing what to believe. And for me, seeking that knowledge will be an ongoing journey until, inevitably, the road comes to an end.

Whose Truth Will Survive?

It has been stated countless times, including here in this blog, that history is written by the victors.  Whatever any of us knows of the past has been determined by what we’ve been taught by our parents, teachers, and elders.  And they have simply passed down to us their own understandings, their own truths, based on what they, too, were taught.

In short, what we think we know to be true about our society has been filtered through many lenses—cultural, racial, gender, socio-economic, and political.

There have been attempts at presenting alternative-history scenarios, fictional representations of what might have been, ‘if only…’.  Harry Turtledove, for instance, has written books about what happened after the South won the U.S. Civil War, and after Germany won WW II.  H. G. Wells wrote about an alien invasion of the planet, The War of the Worlds, which, when adapted by Orson Welles for radio in 1938, caused near-panic among the populace.  In The Plot Against America, Philip Roth described events after Franklin D. Roosevelt was defeated in the 1940 U. S. presidential election by Nazi sympathizer Charles Lindbergh.  And Margaret Atwood devastatingly described the misogynistic society of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale, about subjugated women in a patriarchal society.

These alternative histories are fiction, of course, although all too real in their telling.  But across the millennia, there actually have been innumerable alternate realities experienced by people of the time—realities which, although true, were never recorded and passed down the generations because they were on the losing side. 

For example, I was taught, as perhaps you were, that Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492; in truth, what he did was discover it for the white, colonial, commercial powers of Europe.  The Americas had actually been discovered eons earlier, maybe 33,000 years ago, by Asian nomads who crossed what was then a land bridge where the Bering Straits exist today.  I was never taught about those people and their descendants, nor about that version of history, true though it is.

I grew up with an implicit understanding that the great figures of the past were men, not women—white-complexioned, European men who stood fast against the barbarian hordes, mostly people of different colour and religion, who were intent on assailing the established order.  It remained for the adult me to learn about such people as Gandhi, Mandela, MLK, Margaret Sanger, Eleanor Roosevelt, Tommy Douglas, Gloria Steinem, Cesar Chavez, Germaine Greer, Nadia Murad, Malala Yousafzai, Greta Thunberg, and others too numerous to list who have fought for equity for all.

Growing up in the 1950s, I was taught that communism was the great evil of our time—the relentless enemy of capitalism, the system I was taught to believe would raise us all to a marvellous standard of living.  Today, for many of us, that has proven to be true; but what of those for whom it has not?  What will be written of their history, if anything is written at all? 

I would never proclaim myself a communist—the whole ideology has become irredeemably politicized and villainized.  But I confess an affinity for a socialist-democracy, where every citizen is considered worthy of support and respect, over what has become a capitalist-democracy, where the very few prosper, a larger number just get by, and the majority contend with poverty.  For those whose motto might be I’m alright, Jack, such a status quo might be fine.  But any society, like a chain, is only as strong as its weakest link.

I wonder, too, about the history my great-grandchildren (and their children) will learn, beginning perhaps thirty years from now, about the times we are presently living in.  Will it be a history of the life I am living?  Will it be a history of the lives led by the homeless in our cities?  Will it be a history of ethnic minorities who are being subjected right now to genocidal actions by oppressors?  Will it be a history of the demise of democracy in favour of authoritarianism?  Whose truth will survive?

More existentially, I wonder about the future of the planet itself, and whether our depredations will allow it to sustain human life as we have known it over the past hundred years.  I saw two pictures recently, taken from the same location one hundred years apart, that drove home the point very viscerally. 

Just as our human species has evolved (for better or worse) over the span of our history—and continues to evolve—so too does the planet continue to change.  And not necessarily for the better.  Are such evolutionary changes inevitable, beyond our ability to control, dooming our descendants to a dismal future?  Or is it within our capabilities and purview to act now to preserve a habitable planet for them?

Most of us govern ourselves by the values and truths we have come to accept, based on our accumulated experiences, which for the most part is conducive to social order.  But danger arises when we close our minds to the values and truths espoused by others, without trying at least to understand them.  At such times, we need to de-centre from our own perceptions of things, and try to see the world as those others see it, based on their experiences.

We need not necessarily accept those alternative views, but by understanding their genesis, we can contribute to a more harmonious existence.

And then, with any luck, we can acknowledge our differences, while at the same time recognizing the perils we face collectively.  That is how we shall survive.

And that is how there will be a history to pass along to those who will come after us.  Whatever the truth will be.