Religious Weakness
Religions provide important things, in theory. The most important, the most serviceable for practitioners the world over, is a way of thinking about life and death so that what we experience now, being alive, is not thought to be the end of all that we will experience. An afterlife is such a powerful idea, such a necessary idea in the face of certain oblivion, that it began with the earliest of man and has persisted until now, despite all evidence to the contrary. Of course it is beyond tempting to think that this, here and now, will not be it for us, that there will be something to follow. That this is only the first stage in a conscious eternity.
The other valuable and important thing provided by religion, on the surface, is a prescription for a way in which we ought to live. How we should spend this time existing that we have been allotted. Let us consider Christianity, a religion with a strong hold across the globe (thanks to imperial wars, missionary murders, and third-world subjugation). In this religious tradition, the ideal is Jesus Christ, a mythic entity laid as a mask upon a historical figure; elevated as a shepherd of the poor; a teacher who walked the earth among the most vulnerable; a man (naturally) who eschewed temporal possessions in light of the promise of eternal salvation. Any follower of Christ, any self-identifying Christian, ought to in fact live in this same model. That is to say that any Christian who espouses Christianity should not live in a home that is much too large for what they need. They should not have material possessions beyond what they can carry while administering aid to the poor across the world. They should not have access to ample stores of food while there are masses starving. They should in fact be living among those masses and helping them to secure their own food stores. Or, more to the point, declaring all food stores to be the communal property of any human being who needs to eat, which is to say every single human being. Above all, they certainly should not have reserves of money which they can use to buy items and lavish vacations and plastic surgery and precious stones and divorce settlements.
It seems logical that these people would avoid telling other people how to live if they are themselves not modeling their lives after Christ. As long as they are in search of that ideal and not yet reaching it, their lives should be essentially monastic, spent in service and daily prayer, a constant act of ministering to those less fortunate. Standing up to call everyone else un-Christian should be far from their to-do list. Right?
Of course anyone who has Christian friends or has ever met a Christian knows that this is not the case. It is exceedingly difficult to find anyone who actually lives in the model of Christ. Christians, like everyone else, like stuff. They like things and wealth and living well and being happy. They don’t want to think about the fact that their prosperity in life has nothing to do with their ability and everything to do with winning a genetic and geographic lottery; they want to think even less about the fact that their prosperity comes at the expense of the losers of that same lottery. “The meek shall inherit the earth” is something that rich people say, because it makes them feel better about trampling the meek in the here and now. It’s okay because, after all, the meek and the poor will be the ones who first get to heaven. How convenient for rich people to actually build a religious tradition on the backs of the poor, telling those same poor people that their poverty on Earth doesn’t equate to any poverty of spirit, and not to worry about it anyway because they will be taken care of in an afterlife which is definitely going to happen. Starving children, widespread yet preventable disease, extreme poverty that leads to mental illness and depression across the developing world — these aren’t things that can be remedied, and, Gosh aren’t we doing what we can by being Christian and living “good” lives anyway?
We know that in the modern world, we have the means and intelligence to work together as a group (humanity) to eradicate poverty and hunger. From this view, religion is an utter failure. With so many people around the world espousing religious conviction, all of these religious people should have long-ago banded together to do exactly what their religion asks of them: help those less fortunate and build a better world. The tools are at our fingertips. The fact that this has not happened, that the opposite has occurred and inequality has only risen steadily, would seem to be a massive failing on the part of every single self-identified religious person on earth. If you are Christian, and you live possessing a single dollar beyond your material needs while another human being suffers, by the definition of your own religion you are an immoral person living in a state of failure. This might seem a difficult truth for religious people to face.
For those of us who are not religious, it is a bit simpler to see what is going on. These people are not failures. They are not exhibiting religious weakness. They are merely ardent practitioners of a different faith: capitalism. They may have good intentions, they may want to believe the moral lessons of scriptures that they have professed to have read. They may want to listen to their parents as they extoll the virtues of selflessness and charity. But daily life, in its material excess, tells them otherwise, and over the course of that life they first ingest and then embody capitalist principles which in no way support those religious ideals.
The nun who spends her life in service is not lauded in the way a venture capitalist is; worse, she is largely ignored and then ultimately complicit in heavy scandals such as the financial transactions used to cover-up church sexual abuses, which themselves are the result of an extremely damaging patriarchal system designed over millennia to exert control and extract revenue in the form of tithes, thus building an institution of immense material wealth (the Catholic Church). The evangelical preacher who runs a television channel and speaks to followers, who themselves arrive to churches in chariots of earth-destroying excess, is not expected to live among the poor but is rather admired for his success. We do not expect a billionaire to give away their money to the poor and live only off of what they need; we applaud their mansions, hope one day to have their toys, marvel at the opulence of their most mundane activities. We can look at all of these examples and find it tempting to call these people out for their lack of religious rigor. We can look at the millions of adherents they represent, and point out their own shortcomings. But this type of finger-pointing is not necessary. Religion doesn’t actually exist to create this type of value system. It exists to protect a system of wealth-generation that benefits those at the top. The shroud around it, that of true ethics, is little more than a security blanket for the well-off. It’s not a grand experiment experiencing a grand failure. It’s not moral ineptitude. It’s not religious weakness. It’s capitalism.
