It’s Sunday evening. Time to thump a few Bibles.
The difference between organised religion, on the one hand, and belief, on the other, is this: belief is predicated on the individual’s calling to serve their fellow citizens; religion is predicated on the individual’s calling to regiment and control their fellow citizens.
This may sound harsh, since many join churches, or are raised in their bosom, who avow no desire whatsoever to regiment or control others. I believe them, they speak truth—if truth it be that they speak. But the churches that they join are nevertheless organised precisely in order to regiment and control their members. These bodies are not set up as come one, come all community services, like some bring-and-buy sale. They exert duress.
In times past, when the church was more allied to the notion of the nation state (a concept which fundamentally negates the message forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us, and which is nonetheless still the case in many places), much that happened within the church served as a function, not of the church, but of the nation state.
Baptism at the age of just a few weeks functioned as a census mechanism, so that the lord of the manor knew what troops he could call on in the defence of his realm. Anabaptists, who refused to baptise their children until the youth could make a conscious decision for God, were executed for their pains. Church-led states could not countenance the prospect that a boy, particularly, might be of fighting age and still the church had not yet registered his existence. Nor that a believer might contemplate sacrificing himself for the life of another, even one who fought on the side of the state’s enemy.
In 1569, Dutchman Dirk Willemsz escaped from the prison where he was being held on charges of anabaptism, and fled across the winter ice, but, out of his religious convictions, returned to aid his drowning pursuer, who had fallen through the ice. He was re-arrested and burned at the stake, on the strength of the oath in terms of which the bailiff had, in the presence of God, sworn to uphold the law. From Martyrs’ Mirror by Thieleman J. van Braght.
Anabaptists were burned at the stake for failing to baptise their children as commanded by the church. This had less to do with presenting the child to God than with presenting him to the army. In a time when infant mortality was over 60 per cent, parents were admonished by the church that baptism had to be carried out at the earliest possible age, which got backed up with strong-arm techniques: the unbaptised dead could not be buried in consecrated ground, and no one wanted their babe in arms interred next to Mozart. The rites of passage into the life of the church served as a prelude to the rites of passage into the life of the army.
The practice of giving names to slaves upon arrival in the Caribbean stems from similar considerations. In the Old Testament, the name of God is given as I am. In fact, God’s people may not know God’s name, on the ground that knowing someone’s name gives you control over them, and no one has control over God. If you think that God is all nonsense, it is very well constructed nonsense.
Matthew 18:1-6: “[T]he disciples [came] unto Jesus, saying, Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven? And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the midst of them, and said, Verily I say unto you, Except ye be converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven. Whosoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven. And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name receiveth me. But whoso shall offend one of these little ones which believe in me, it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck, and that he were drownèd in the depth of the sea.”
Anyone who offends a child that believes in me would be better off dead: Jesus spoke in sometimes harsh words, inescapable words, which those who have come after Him sometimes feel a need to give nuance to. The passage is now commonly understood as an admonition against sexual interference or physical cruelty against children, and that satisfies the casual Bible-reader, who, of course, would never be guilty of such a heinous offence.
But a parent or priest who disciplines a child for failure to adhere to the strictures of the church likewise offends against him or her. It was precisely this passage that encouraged the Anabaptists to delay baptism until a time when a child is mature enough to make a conscious decision to avow their love of God. To this day, across all the churches and across all the globe, whilst we protect children from the acts of adults, on the grounds that infants can give no consent, we at the same time enrol them in religious belief, oblivious to their consent, avowing a love that must spontaneously spring from the individual’s own heart in order even to be worthy of the name. And then, to boot, we deny the child the right of suffrage, to decide his future. Do you believe a child of six years would vote to engage in war? Would he not rather vote to prevent them, the wars for which he is baptismally enlisted at birth? Where are those millstones?
The same chapter of Matthew, verse 20: “Where two or three are gathered together in my name, there am I in the midst of them.”
A church does not need to be organised, with west doors and altars, gold-trimmed robes and crucifixes. No monstrance is needed, nor no menorah and no minaret, no kneeling mat and no kippah. A church is defined in terms of these words of God Himself: where two are gathered in My name. That on its own is a church. A synagogue is a church. A mosque is a church. A temple is a church, for they are all places where two or more gather together in the name of the deity. Indeed, wherever you are, you are in company with God. And, since God is always with us, you are a church even when you are with no other person. What binds you to God in Heaven here on Earth also binds you to Him in Heaven above. And what you loose on Earth, you loose also in Heaven above: God will never sue you to enforce the bonds and contracts you make with Him. But your fellow humans will: they will sue you to enforce the contracts they putatively make with Him in your behalf, as were they He, and even contrary to His express word, putting you to death to prove how right they are to do so.
It’s one thing to baptise a baby in the hopes of a good life for it in the Lord’s care. It is another to cynically contrive a muster list for the state’s wars and to condemn to death those who would thwart its aims. For that is an offence against the parent and it is an offence against the child: advantage taken of his infantile inability to grant his consent.
If organised religion is the prime factor in your society’s cohesion, then how poor your society is, if it cannot coalesce otherwise. Be that as it may, whatever reasons people have for founding an organised religion is a matter for them. But know that their motives include the regimentation and control of you, their congregation, as church cynically joins with state to urge selfless devotion to the glory of one nation under God: onward, Christian soldiers.