“Roughly speaking we may say that the worship of Sex and Life characterised the Pagan races of Europe and Asia Minor anterior to Christianity, while the worship of Death and the Unseen has characterised Christianity.” Edward Carpenter.
The Gods were always present in the pagan past, not hidden away in an invisible heaven in the sky. They were present in nature, in bodies, in sex… present in temples and sacred groves, in sculptures and paintings. There was no separation between people and the gods. Tacitus recorded that the Germanic peoples “consecrate woods and groves and they apply the name of gods to that mysterious presence which they see only with the eye of devotion.”
The adoption of an instrument of torture, on which hangs a dying god, as the symbol of the Christian religion was a strange idea to many, and for centuries many resisted the symbol, even though dying and resurrecting deities were nothing new – the Jesus story echoes those of Adonis, Dionysus, Attis… The cross became the prime symbol in the 4th century after the conversion of Emperor Constantine and the rise to power of the Church. Medieval heretical groups had several issues with the dogma and dominance of the Roman Catholic Church, which included their rejection of the symbol of a tortured messiah as the holy symbol of the faith.
From the start of the union of Church and State in the 4th century, Christianity spread its influence, extended its power, through use of the sword. Over many centuries, people in many lands – from Europe to the Americas and beyond – were ‘encouraged’ to adopt the new faith and put to death if they refused. I could give many examples (and may come back to add some) but for now I wish to focus on one particularly deadly focus of Christianity – the fascination of the religion with what we now call gay sexuality or queer gender expression. One of the first actions against pagan practices after Constantine’s conversion was when he sent an army to wipe out a goddess temple (in the area we know as Syria), described at the time by Eusebius as a place, “where men unworthy of the name forgot the dignity of their sex and propitiated the demon by the their effeminate conduct.” The Emperor ordered the army sent in, “that this building with its contents should be utterly destroyed.” Eusebius recorded that:
“inasmuch as the Egyptians, especially those of Alexandria, had been accustomed to honour their river through a priesthood composed of effeminate men, a further law was passed commanding the extermination of the whole class as vicious, that no one might thenceforward be found tainted with the like impurity.”
The persecution stepped up under Constantine’s successors. Roman senator Firmicus Maternus wrote a polemic called ‘The Error of the Pagan Religions’ in 346 which firmly associated pagan cults with sexual immorality and especially homosexuality.
Later in the century, as pagan practices were gradually eradicated, the emperors started turning their attention on non-religious manifestations of gay sexuality, issuing laws that threatened the effeminate males working in brothels, then eventually laws that punished both the penetrator as well as the penetrated in male on male sex, calling for men who have sex with men to be killed in the “avenging flames in the sight of the people,” and associating such sexual activity firmly with the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and natural disasters of all kinds: In 538 CE, a law issued under Justinian in the eastern empire warned that gay acts “incur the just anger of God, and bring about the destruction of cities along with their inhabitants… crimes of this description cause famine, earthquake and pestilence.”
In medieval Europe Justinian’s law codes became the basis for legal jurisdiction. The sin of gay sex became a crime punished by the state (this was, as under Henry VIII, a result of the political state taking for itself responsibility to punish things that had previously been under the church’s jurisdiction). Homosexuality was seen as heresy because it was regarded as being against god’s laws, and the Inquisition was given powers to hunt down and punish homosexuals.
One of the biggest shocks for European explorers arriving in the New World across the Atlantic was the prevalence, and acceptance of, same sex relationships and gender-bending shamans, whom they labelled ‘berdache’ – a Persian word for a gay bottom. One famously awful story is that of Vasco Núñez de Balboa, en route to discover the Pacific Ocean in 1513, who fed forty ‘‘sodomites’’ to his dogs. Peter Martyr recorded the spectacle in Decades (1516):
‘‘[Balboa] founde the house of this kynge infected with most abhominable and unnaturall lechery. For he found the kynges brother and many other younge men in womens apparell, smooth & effeminately decked, which by the report of such as dwelte abowte hym, he abused with preposterous venus. Of these abowte the number of fortie, he commanded bee gyven for a pray to his dogges’’ (quoted in Goldberg, ‘Sodomy in the New World’)
Malidoma Some, a wisdom teacher from the Dagara people of West Africa, understood that the queerness we now label ‘sexual’ was previously considered more a ‘spiritual’ quality in traditional cultures in Africa as in the Americas. He said in a 1993 interview:
““Why is it that, everywhere else in the world, gay people are a blessing, and in the modern world they are a curse? It is self-evident. The modern world was built by Christianity. They have taken the gods out of the earth and sent them to heaven, wherever that is. And everyone who aspires to the gods must then negotiate with Christianity, so that the real priests and priestesses [gatekeepers] are out of a job. This is the worst thing that can happen to a culture that calls itself modern.” https://rainbowmessenger.blog/2023/05/17/gay-love-could-save-humanity/
In his 2022 book, Cult of the Dead: A Brief History of Christianity, Kyle Smith puts the case for “how Christianity became (and how it still remains) a cult of the dead.” He highlights the emphasis on martyrdom in the religion: “Smith accepts the conventional contemporary view that the evangelist Luke created the image of the martyr in his portrayal of Jesus’ death based on the Greco-Roman model of “Noble Death,” and then, in his depiction of Stephen’s death by stoning, set in motion a tradition (a “genre”) that persisted for centuries. Smith quotes approvingly Candida Moss’s “inescapable but repugnant conclusion” that “dying for Christ may be a central, rather than peripheral, part of the Christian experience.” (from review by Luke Timothy Johnson) Is Christianity a Cult of the Dead? | Commonweal Magazine
Many Christians, even to this day, believe their faith is the only true path, their version of God the only real deity, and are prepared to enforce that view with laws and violence (the anti-gay laws in many African countries are a clear example). Holy Wars have long been part of the Christian story- such as the medieval Crusades to the Holy Land, in which historians estimate 1 to 3 million people were killed. The early modern witch trials in Europe are believed to have led to up to 60,000 (mainly women) being executed. Nor are Christians beyond murdering each other over questions of belief. The competition between Catholicism and Protestantism from the 16th century was accompanied by executions of fellow Christians because they believed the ‘wrong’ things, plus holy wars between Christian nations. This conflict still echoed well into the late 20th century in Northern Ireland. The attitudes of so-called ‘Christian Nationalists’ today threaten to continue the conflict and destruction through the 21st century.
Christianity worships an unseen God and his crucified human avatar. True spirituality reveals that God is the divine spark of consciousness that resides within us and all things, and that his ‘son’ was sent to reveal that there is a second birth – to the spirit, to our divinity – available, in fact coming, to us all.
Christianity has been used as justification to wipe out entire populations, to suppress traditional faiths and to punish and murder queer people. This has been going on for centuries.
Christianity is a death cult.
rainbow messenger 