In 1927 British philosopher Bertrand Russell delivered a talk the text of which became a well-known pamphlet entitled, “Why I Am Not a Christian.”

As a young seminarian I took on the challenge of critiquing this work, and over the years I have revisited it in different contexts. The rather sudden darkening of the prospects for peace and justice in the world over the last eight or so years up to now presents a new environment in which to consider it again.

The current situation owes itself to a process that I would identify as covering more like sixty years since the assassination of President Kennedy in November 1963 which followed by three months the famous “I Have a Dream” speech of Dr. Martin Luther King at the Lincoln Memorial. The erosion of the nation’s values from the peak of Dr. King’s highly idealistic moral suasion, solidly grounded in universal Christian convictions then, to the “Greed is good” mantra of barely two decades later set in motion the what has brought us to today’s troubling times.

Trends and fads in a population don’t usually arise spontaneously from within it. It is usually normative that powerful and dominant social currents work to impose opinions and outlooks onto the wider public in the effort to stay in control. This relentless effort often succeeds if not always at the pace the dominant currents would wish for. 

One could say as Russell did in his condemnation of Christianity that this explains how the church evolved from the conversion of Constantine in 312 AD to become a tool for imposing an ideology exploiting fear to exercise control over subject peoples throughout subsequent history.

Processes of humankind’s overcoming such controls have taken centuries to succeed, in the modern era arising from the invention of printing press to the Renaissance in Italy, the Reformation in Germany, and the Enlightenment that spread all over Europe and led to the American revolution and the codification in law, namely in the U.S. Constitution, of protected “inalienable human rights” further advanced by the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights following the formation of the United Nations in 1947.

Sadly, this advancement has occurred in the contexts of great world wars and systematic genocides, indeed often done in the name of religion on multiple sides that could be said in general were due to efforts to prevent progress.

So it comes in the recent 60 years that we have an effort to recast Christianity as a political weapon which has been assigned the label of “Christian nationalism,” and this has been a huge factor in the current descent toward darkness.

From the standpoint of the constructive elements of Christianity, those such as found in the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of the New Testament that it shares with other great world religions, this “Christian nationalism” is pure heresy, to apply an historic term of reference.

The faith is not about adherence to or condemnation of individual practices or behaviors. It is about responding from a universal standpoint to the sufferings and travails of being human beings in this cosmos, to find purpose and meaning in alleviating these conditions, with the binding element for doing this being love.

In college, I took a year-long sequence of courses in world philosophies, in the first semester, and then religions. It led to a lot of deep anxieties about my role in life, and I found positive values in almost all the systems I was exposed to.

For the final exam, students were tasked with writing an essay on the spot on which religious or philosophical system we preferred and why. I was not raised in any faith, but sitting there, I made a choice that surprised me. I chose Christianity not as against any other belief system, but it embeds in its stories, particularly of the nativity, one overriding proclamation, from star to stable, that the universe is governed in its totality and in its particularities by that which draws us out of our selves and, with empathy, towards caring for others, love.

I wrote furiously. It has been a defining moment of my life.