This is one of those notions I stumble on from time to time while daydreaming or free associating. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about religion of late—as how could many people not be, what with the state of the world (he says with tongue in his other cheek, being both ironic and absurd)?—and trying to come up with some theory of it that might bleed off the poisons that seem to bubble up from it from time to time.
Someone said something to me that triggered this idea and it’s probably not original. But we were discussing Roman Catholicism and the observation was made that in its long history it has absorbed more than it has suppressed.
“Of course it has,” I responded. “That’s how it began, after all, as a congeries of pagan beliefs subsumed beneath an orthodox umbrella. It is the perfect example of an assembled religion.”
Regardless where the initial push came from, whatever its core ideology, the fact is that Roman Catholicism came to fruition as a political entity and it was a model of almost democratic universalism. The holidays (holy days) are mostly borrowings from other disciplines, retrofitted to make people comfortable with the new paradigm. Its rituals and mysteries are all adaptations of older religious ideas and practices, including a marvelous transplantation from Egyptian mythology of the entire Jesus myth (Horus—almost all of it is duplicated, including certain names, such as Lazarus, and the whole virgin birth motif, which itself is nothing particularly new). The architects of Roman Catholicism, let us assume to be more gracious than not, recognized a core set of beliefs that did not of themselves require the trappings of a religion or its concomitant institutions, but also saw that most people would prefer (or require) all that such physical and cultural manifestations afford. Romans above all understood in their bones the function of public architecture and ceremony. They seemed instinctively attuned to the idea that to get people to behave a certain way they should live within the physical representations of the philosophies behind such behavior. Romans were Romans as much because of their cities and roads as because of any political philosophy. The two supported each other. The church borrowed that big time.
But as an assembled religion, it had a problem, which was the necessity to obscure all the past manifestations, cut the ties to all the pagan practices they’d taken over, and embark on a long-term campaign to evoke cultural amnesia in order to represent themselves as The Truth. The problem with this is two-fold: there are always going to be those who know the facts (because you can’t destroy all the evidence, if nothing else) and you have to be very careful about how you present and protect your core ideas, lest people start interpreting them any old way they please.
Along comes the Protestant Reformation, which was at base a movement to return to the Church to its original principles and free it from the “corruptions” that had crept in over the centuries.
The reformers, smart as they may have been, labored under a handicap, namely the overwhelming success the Roman Catholic Church had enjoyed in obliterating and subsuming all those borrowed elements. The reformers at base believed many if not most of the trappings, which were largely secondary to the core principles, which amount to a set of principles quite separate from the “miracle faith” cult it had become.
So when the Protestant movement began, they took as their goal the idea that the adaptations were the principle elements of their faith, and tried to return themselves to that basis as if it had had no predecessors. The Catholic Church itself couldn’t just come out and say “Hey, you don’t understand, the whole idea is to adapt and absorb, not build a wall around a few iconic aspects and throw out everything that looks a little different.”
Roman Catholicism had largely succeeded by being adaptable to local beliefs. Look at the bizarre nature of Latin American Catholicism as ample proof of this. Even to this day, the Catholic Church “compromises” its apparent principles to bring others into the fold—look at the recent attempt to retroactively reabsorb Anglicans.
Protestantism began as a take-no-prisoners response to what some people saw as corruption—the willingness to concede and adapt. But it assumed that the Church had been based on something originally “pure” and uncorrupted, a set of ideas that stood apart from everything else. (To a degree, this was true, but not what the Protestants thought identified it as a priori “Christian” orthodoxy.) They rejected the malleability of Catholicism, drew a line in the philosophical sand, and argued that the essential element of Christianity was the death and resurrection of a prophet they believed had no antecedents. What that prophet said and what Christianity embodied as a set of principles for living took second place to the mysteries, and they shut their eyes to the possibility of truth in various guises.
Which is why Protestants burned more witches and killed more Jews than did Catholics, why Protestant treatment of natives wherever encountered has been harsher and in many instances more fatal than Catholic treatment of the same or similar groups, and why fundamentalism is far more a Protestant problem than it is Catholic.
We arrive at the 21st Century and see many Protestant denominations “maturing” to the point where they recognize that Fortress Christianity is counterproductive and ultimately a wrong-headed approach—but we also see splinter groups from these major denominations more and more that cling ever more fiercely to the notion that the edifice is the message and the heathens must be stamped out, producing virulent strains of anti-rational lunacy. (Certainly there are Catholic fundamentalists, but they seem to be a disfocussed, almost inarticulate collection of mystic loonies instead of militant dogmatists.)
The very adaptability that made Roman Catholicism so successful for so long is based on the fact that they started off as a Rube Goldberg assemblage of beliefs and practices that recognized an idea that truth is a thread running through many fabrics, whereas Protestantism had its birth in the idea that there was only one true suit.
Hence we find that the Catholic Church, for all its other irrationalities, is able to embrace Darwinism, Galileo, and admit it was wrong about the Jews, while the staunchest Creationists and, often, bigots come out of the Protestant movement. White Supremacist groups are protestant. The sputtering fear and hatred of Difference is protestant. The clinging to Milleniallism and hopes for Armageddon are protestant aesthetics.
Now, I see no way to address this problem unless Roman Catholicism is willing to come clean. When a pope (not this one!) comes out and says “Hey, people, you’re missing the point, and it’s our fault that you do” then we might start to see something ameliorative from within the whole Christian community. But they can’t really do that. After all this time, the “point” of Catholicism is its continual attempt to absorb.
Which is better than some Protestant notions of slash and burn.