Dreaming the Future Closer

I’m going to spend a little time talking about this post by Hrafnkell.  I find the post profoundly frustrating.  He touches on real issues, but inflates them all out of proportion.  The claim that he is correcting monotheistic distortion doesn’t hold water, unless he takes as corrective the introduction of a rival ‘polytheistic’ distortion.

It’s hard to find a place to start or end, so I’ll focus on this, because there is plenty to talk about:

But the Third Reich’s genocide wasn’t a first, folks. The original genocide was that of polytheistic peoples, and it lasted, with interruptions, from the 7th century BCE to the European Enlightenment (for the repressive Theodosian Code, which remained in force even in Jefferson’s Virginia, see The Genocide of Polytheism), and even in its early days Thinkers had to beware Church authorities. Renee Descartes, himself a Christian but the Father of the Enlightenment, didn’t stay in France for a reason. What history before the Enlightenment reveals to us is a cataclysmic wave of genocide such as the world had never seen, one which has consumed “at least a million people per century” over the past two millennia (Gerd Ludemann, The Acts of the Apostles: What Really Happened in the Earliest Days of the Church 2005:383). That is more than the Nazis killed; more than the “godless” Communists killed.

I’m going to go through this sliver and unpack the errors to point out some useful truths to keep in mind.

I. “cataclysmic wave of genocide”

If you are going to toss out a statistic like that, implying that monotheism, presumably Christianity, has orchestrated the deaths of 1 million people per century, you better be explaining the methodology used to make that determination.  It is not common knowledge or accepted historical fact.

Even when dealing with contemporary (actual) genicides, it takes a lot of work to establish firm figures.  It isn’t just the numbers, either.  The claim of genocide needs to be backed up with thick historical description that connects the deaths to the actions of discrete individuals and coteries of individuals.  The time and pace of those genocides are clearly delineated to establish that agency and responsibility.

I have real doubts about a vague notion of ‘monotheism’ (or is it just Christianity? It’s not real clear here) over the course of 2000 or more years being useful in this regard.

Let’s talk about those modern genocides, shall we?  Hrafnkell implies that the ‘genocide’ of polytheists far exceeds the scope of modern genocide, but I think the facts say otherwise.  Let’s hit some of the ‘high’ points of 20th century genocide, shall we?

Nazi extermination camps (not the concentration camps, not the deaths resulting from invasion, etc.) alone killed, in three years, over two and half million people.  Granting this imaginary monotheistic genocide happened, the Nazis managed to do the work of two and a half centuries.

The most conservative estimates for the Gulag has the Soviets doing the work of yet another century’s worth of work over the course of two decades.

The Khmer Rouge, conservatively, does the work of a century or two of monotheism in half a decade.

Even if Hrafnkell’s statistics could be backed up, Christianity / monotheism comes off looking tender and sweet by comparison to these ‘godless’ movements.

II. Persecution and religious violence, polytheistic antecedents

Let me move on, though, to some other choice elements from that piece.  Hrafnkell points to another webpage called the “Genocide of Paganism” to back up his assertion.  If you follow out that link, you don’t find any evidence of genocide, only a summary of laws that persecuted Roman cults under the Roman Empire after Christianity became the official religion.

Now, it is wonderful to have that sort of material made available as a corrective to the general assumption that Rome perpetually persecuted Christians.  However, persecution and genocide are two quite different things. 

While the website lists oppressive laws, it provides us with no sense of how broadly or invasively they were applied within he empire.  It is, at best, a resource to help an interested scholar get an idea of where to begin investigating further, not proof of atrocities.

It has limits, though.  It provides few resources for appreciating the historical context of these laws.  For example, it doesn’t make clear that these laws have their foundation in pre-Christian Roman law.  Hrafnkell wants us to believe that religious violence and persecution are alien to polytheism, but this is patently false. 

Rome was never above supressing cultic activity that it thought challenged its own authority.  The pattern that Christian Rome takes in persecuting the polytheists is patterned after that established in persecutions of Christians and other rival cults (most famously the Bacchic cults in 186 BCE).

Now, you might suggest that Rome’s supression of cults was a political rather than a religious decision and so can’t really be seen as religious violence.  To some extent, I agree.  However, Roman politics was bound up with the cultic life of its members in a way that is not at all easy to separate.

Nor can we divorce pre-Christian Rome’s imperialism from their religious life.  The ancestor veneration of Rome was essential to their imperial activities.  Christianity becomes more prominent in part as an effort to reinvigorate this imperial privilege and its mode of adoption occurs along lines familiar to Romans, as ensuring and enhancing Rome’s political and military might.

III. Enlightenment?

The notion that the Enlightenment is some great moment of freedom from the nasty oppressiveness of monotheism is just absurd.  Enlightenment ‘reason’ is no less problematic than monotheism.  For example, under Enlightenment ’reason’ the transatlantic slave trade will reach its height, with the resultant millions of deaths well into the 19th century. 

Post-emancipation, you then have a virulent ’scientific’ racism that will help provide the basis for Nazism, as well as all kinds of nasty business throughout the Americas.  The Civil Rights movement, on the contrary, rises to its apex on the back of monotheistic religions like Christianity and Islam.