Make Christianity Strange Again

Many American Christians are bracing for doomsday. They fear that rising rates of religious disaffiliation will lead to the decline of Christianity in America. Some demographers predict that if current trends hold, Episcopalians will cease to exist by 2040, with the other mainline denominations – the mainline that once served as the moral heart of the American populace – rounding out the endangered species list. Terms like “the great dechurching” and “the negative world” are regularly bandied about as Christianity no longer holds the same central status it once did. Some of these concerned Christians are looking for lifeboats, gravitating to suggestions such as the “Benedict Option,” where a faithful few exit mainstream society to set up their own parallel communities before the flood comes.

The Benedict Option takes its name from Benedict of Nursia, a sixth-century monk who left the crumbling Roman Empire to found the monastic community we now call the Benedictine Order. There is certainly much to be learned from that era. But we can go further back, and learn from Christians who lived before Benedict, and before Constantine’s fateful vision of a cross ablaze in the sky. There was a time when Christianity flourished even though emperors regularly cracked down on the “strange religion” that spread like a great conflagration across the Roman Empire. This is the Christianity that Nijay K. Gupta, a professor of New Testament studies at Northern Seminary, applies his anthropological eye to in his new book, Strange Religion: How the First Christians Were Weird, Dangerous, and Compelling.

Unlike us, the first Christians did not have deep wells of tradition to draw from. Our Christian history and heritage permeate every aspect of our world. We talk candidly of food smelling heavenly, discuss the demons we face, and throw around expressions like “falling from grace,” “forbidden fruit,” and “ashes to ashes” without even thinking of their original theological meanings. Much of our morality – the fundamental question of what it even means to be a good person – can be traced back to the teachings of the Son of Man.

The earliest Christians did not even have the name “Christian.” Instead, they called themselves “believers.” We think of belief today as something one can gain or lose – but for the Romans, it was literally unthinkable to not believe that the pagan gods existed. So when Christian “believers” began to proselytize about a new belief system that neither allowed the existence of the Roman pantheon of gods nor was tied to an ethnic group, like Judaism, it was the Christians who were the strange ones. Gupta writes, “Perhaps the most unusual of all was the emphasis Christians placed on belief itself…. Roman religion was a matter of practice; it was a ‘hands’ religion, not a ‘heart’ religion.” In contrast, Christians were “believing things that were invisible and sometimes intangible … and believing things that ran against the grain of society.” Gupta calls this “believing the unbelievable.” The Romans viewed Christians as atheists for not making sacrifices to the Roman gods. Christians were a “cult without smoke and blood.”

The first Christians did not have to retreat from the pagan world around them but rather embraced their outsider status, for they knew that they had the way, the truth, and the life – and that was all they needed.

Such beliefs proved dangerous to the Roman order, which viewed Christianity as a foreign mystery cult that subverted basic values. Gupta’s book provides an image of the early Alexamenos graffito, which shows a slave worshiping Jesus on the cross. Jesus is shown with a donkey head instead of a human one. Such a drawing was meant to mock Alexamenos for worshipping a so-called messiah who was nailed to an instrument meant to torture and execute slaves and others that were considered the lowest of the low. Gupta writes, “It is clear enough that that someone thought that venerating Jesus was like worshiping a donkey – silly and pathetic. In this satirical image, Christian devotion is represented as strange, ludicrous, perhaps even abhorrent. Christians believed things about this man, Jesus, that seemed more than sensational – unfathomable.” While we cannot know what Alexamenos thought when he saw the graffiti, I can imagine him rejoicing in experiencing persecution – a persecution that did not come close to the persecution of the one who had died for his sins.

For the Romans, who worshiped statues of gods depicted at their physical peak, the idea of a crucified messiah was a blatant insult. Thus, Christians “committed many abominations, not least venerating a criminal … they honored a crucified, small-town Jewish deviant.” Crucifixion was used to shame those who proved a threat to the Roman order – leading Paul to declare to the Church in Corinth that “the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God” (1 Cor. 1:18). The cross is so ubiquitous a cultural motif today that it is hard to imagine a time when its veneration was deeply subversive.

While bending the rules of space and time is associated with superheroes and mad scientists today, that is exactly what the early Christians did. Romans believed that gods resided in statues, and thus required one to be near a statue to worship whatever god was embodied by that statue, but Christians declared that God lived in their hearts. While “people like Egyptians, Syrians, and Jews were ‘mappable,’ groups to whom religion could be tied,” Christians were “a slippery group with no mother, no father, no beginning, and no ‘where.’” And while Romans conceived of the universe as a series of eternal cycles that they marked with various festivals, with no end point, Christians viewed time as an arrow ending with Christ’s second coming. So “Roman writers held out hope for the future of Rome, but they never came close to the kind of certainty that Christians had.” While Romans and Jews both had priests who served as intermediaries between humans and the divine, Christians had no need for them. After all, any believer could simply pray directly to God – the God who resided in the heart of all believers. While Romans sought to placate the gods with displays of submission, Christians were encouraged to be like God, imitating him in all his ways.

Without the need for a temple, Christians took to worshiping in believers’ homes, where they called each other brothers and sisters and greeted each other with kisses, leading detractors to claim that Christians were practicing incest. Gupta writes, “You can see how rumors might spread, and people would naturally ask questions. But this tells us a lot about how Christians thought of each other – namely, as family.” Indeed, Jesus knew such a radical redefinition of kinship would raise eyebrows. As he warned his disciples, “one’s foes will be members of one’s own household” (Matt. 10:36). While the Romans were slaughtering animals for sacrifice, Christians were sharing food in love feasts. The communal nature of the early Christians is of great interest to thinkers today theorizing about how to form communities oriented toward a common good.

Not only does Gupta compare and contrast the Romans and early Christians, he also brings readers to the present with examples plucked out of his own surroundings. As a resident of Portland, Oregon, Gupta is certainly no stranger to weirdness. Portland bills itself as a strange place, with “Keep Portland Weird” serving as a popular slogan and bumper sticker, yet “by and large Portlanders don’t like religion, especially organized religion, and especially Christianity…. To put it another way, the people who live around me see American Christianity as the opposite of weird. It’s normal, so normal it’s sickening.”

Still, in places like Portland, where Christianity is seen as “normal” to “weird” people, it is not hard to envision a return to form, where today’s believers reclaim the “strange” label of the believers of antiquity. The first Christians did not have to retreat from the pagan world around them but rather embraced their outsider status, for they knew that they had the way, the truth, and the life – and that was all they needed. “Keep Christianity Weird” stickers, anybody?