Earlier this year, Bart Ehrman (trying to remain relevant) offered an op-ed contrasting the religion of Good Friday against the religion of Easter Sunday. Issuing the stale differentiation between Jesus of History vs Christ of Faith, Ehrman defends a particular form of Christianity. Good Friday (the true Jesus faith) is a story of a charismatic leader from the lower-classes, preaching a message of liberation, whom the religious leaders and imperial authorities mercilessly persecuted. This faith is inspiring in today's world because we still face injustice, inequalities, and cynical politicians in church&state. This reality is set at odds against the fantasists, who revel in a sovereign God crushing his enemies. The resurrection is a surprise, not an expectation. It is not a moment of glory or victory, but a gold-star for a life serving in the soup kitchen. He weakly glues the two together at the end, but the emphasis is clear: Good Friday is the "real" faith of Jesus, against the Apocalypticists who project into the faith in Jesus.
Ehrman's limp justification for the status-quo (giving CNN a nice Easter piece to mock the Evangelical right, who "cling to their guns and Bibles" as Obama said) raises a far more important question. Where does the accent fall? The death or the resurrection? The answer is easy enough, namely that historic Christianity prioritized the Resurrection whereas liberal Christianity prioritizes the Death. However, this opens up the possibility to give a more insightful criticism of the modern zeitgeist. It is precisely one hundred years since J. Gresham Machen published Christianity and Liberalism and that antagonism has not ceased. In fact, the two have widened increasingly, with the latter mostly burst from its host body, like the Xenomorph emerging from an unwitting host. It is worth assessing Good Friday Liberalism as showing the perverse kind of Christianity (perhaps post- or even hyper-Christianity) that is our civilizational default.
To recapitulate a larger history (in the shadow of which we still dwell), the early twentieth century saw an explosion of religious tension that scholars have called the Fundamentalist-Modernist controversy. America's Evangelical quasi-establishment hit a cross-roads with the proliferation of new scholarship. Darwin had posited a theory of animal origins that required millennia of animal death and chaos. Higher critics issued a stream of challenges against the reliability of the texts of the Bible and the early history of the church. Growing democratic sentiment scorned moral rigidity and a Heavenly potentate. Chemical and mechanical studies had demonstrated the closedness and machine-like regularity of the Natural Order. All of these forced Christians into a difficult choice. Does one accept these scientific "facts" and adjust, or does one stand up for old time religion? A millennia of chaotic evolution made Genesis a fairy-tale. Psychological theories and popular affect veered away from doctrines of penal substitutionary atonement. The machine of nature did not allow mythological irregularities like virgin births or resurrections of the dead, which smacked more of Greek legend than Hebrew earthy moralism. As the names suggest, Modernists accepted the challenge of synthesis, while Fundamentalists published an irenic core of doctrines which were non-negotiable. The battle saw many denominations ruptured (such as Machen's northern Presbyterians, leading off an exile flock into the new Orthodox Presbyterian Church), or capitulate to one side or another. The Modernists won the vast majority of established and influential churches, leaving a rump behind. The South, which was still recovering from the War, was able to maintain a variety of Fundamentalist or adjacent churches, linked to populism and rising revival movements. Fundamentalists lay politically dormant for fifty years, until Billy Graham offered a compromise to reenter cultural struggle.
Thus, the Modernist Mainline retained most of the influential cachet for directing a Judeo-Christian, faith in faith, American world-power. Obama claimed to read Niebuhr, and even Trump was under the wing of Norman Peale. Mainliners could divide between pro-business and socialist philosophies, but these together dictated the religious culture of American politics. Eisenhower and Reagan were irreligious, while Nixon and the Bushes were nominally within the Mainline (Quaker, Episcopalian, and United Methodist respectively). Carter, the first and only genuine Evangelical, did everything to blunt its effect, relegating it to "personal beliefs" as he continued the modified liberalism of the 70s. All of this to say, even ostensible conservatives had nothing religiously distinct from their liberal democratic opponents. Roman Catholicism in the United States, by and large, has become indistinguishable in practice from the Mainline.
What is this faith? The accent falls most clearly on the Humanity and Suffering of Jesus. Even though one can see triumphalism in the earlier Social Gospel movement (Modernist to the bone), it was a triumphalism of picking up where Jesus left off. Christ had died, but his "resurrection" (more often metaphorical than metaphysical) was the living spirit of good deeds. The power of the story was in its motivation, whether it was to boot-strap to ameliorative success or join a (peaceful!) revolution to materialize the gospel in the welfare state. The fringe of the latter sometimes appeared as philo-Soviet or Maoist, but these were often hived off into academic eccentricities, as the liberal default marched through the institutions. Nevertheless, the arc of the universe bent towards Progress. The global order that the United States would lead (or force) was to realize universal prosperity, a stake-holders market-based socialism where the little guy would get a seat at the table. America was the spear of Eduard Bernstein's revisionism, which married well with Christianity. While Americans were often averse to these visions in their own land, they were exported abroad through Social Democratic or Christian Democratic parliamentary parties. The Global United Nations was this clique's means to impose the Wilsonian idea abroad. And such was married to the supposed faith of Jesus.
This faith is the faith of the Fallen. Obviously there's the earlier liberal equivocation between dead American soldiers and the dead Christ ("just as he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free") which has a much earlier origin. But the most obvious form is the Religion of Civil Rights. Martin Luther King Jr. was not simply an organizer connected to the highest level of politics (being a good friend of Nelson Rockefeller's), he was an avatar of Jesus Christ. Despite his embrace of modernism (and rejecting doctrines of bodily resurrection and divinity of Christ), he is a saint to all. He died and thus his spirit permeated. His life of service was rewarded with the victory of the movement. Black Lives Matters has continued this cult, adding many names to the diptych of fallen martyrs. Civil Rights then expanded to every Federally recognized minority. Red Power movements formed, creating their own theological reappropriation of Christianity (accusing the White Man of believing in Col. Custer, who died for their sins). Women's Rights blossomed with its own pantheon of worthy confessors, who suffered for the faith by reporting rape and abuse. Gay Rights could claim ephebophile Harvey Milk the Steadfast or the slain Matthew Shepard as persecuted holy ones. Mainliners have even constructed Byzantine-style icons to commemorate some of the above.
My point here is not to simply skewer images of left-wing political culture, but to describe the contours of a system. Conservatives often follow the same trend, being a decade or so late and usually with less enthusiasm. What all of the above has in common is a valorization of suffering. The Victim is the central focus of a religion that ends with the hero deceased upon the torture-instrument of the Empire, spiritualized into a fetish for the faithful. Therefore, in a way, the grass-roots rabble depend upon the Empire to renew their faith again and again. What good would Jesus be if he was not crucified? The utopia would be upon us, but it never seems to be able to arrive. Pontius Pilate, Herod, and Caiaphas may lament their mistakes and take Mary Magadelene's sensitivity training, but the process can never end. Hence it's no surprise the average Modernist scholar can only read any claim of Christ's parousia as failed. If Jesus really rose from the dead, then why is he not back yet? Obviously, this misunderstands the person of Jesus, often claimed as a brown homeless-immigrant socialist. The self-professed Christian or Evangelical is stupid because they worship Christ yet do not hold his faith. If they really followed Jesus, they'd stop going to church and serve the poor. The words of Christ repackaged to fit the modern ethos of social justice and progressive change.
The point should be very clear to many Evangelicals who believe we live in a "secular world": No! Eric Adams, mayor of New York City, has spoken in almost Gelasian terms about the partnership of church and state (without interference). It is liberal Democrat Raphael Warnock, pastor of MLK's old church, who was nominated and elected senator. Joe Biden's exhausted Catholic gestures reflect a wide segment of the "Irish Catholic" type in American culture. Kneeling at BLM gatherings are ritual expressions of much wider kind of faith. The lack of church affiliation among Nones does not mean a loss of religiosity, only a change. It is precisely in the name of Jesus (among other masters and heroes) that one does not go to church, and instead volunteers or protests. This can transmute onto the right in a similar valorization of the Victim and a spirituality of oppression, but such is often unthought adoption of predominant piety.
The alternative is to self-consciously place the accent upon the Resurrection and court mockery. The Christian faith is the faith of victory. Christ was bodily resurrected from the dead unto eternal life, without a hint of allegory. Many fail to understand Eusebius of Caesarea's theology because his history of martyrdom and suffering was couched in the confidence of conquest. He was not Constantine's bootlick or court-historian, but a bishop who saw the hand of God in the overthrow of persecutors. Christians afraid of victory not only sneer at the earliest Christians who suffered much, but even the New Testament itself. Jesus withered the fig tree as a sign of Judgement. Herod Antipas' persecution and blaspheming was met with swift death. St Paul drove out sorcerers, incestuous adulterers, Judaizers, and all varieties of false teachers from the bounds of congregations. It is not Christianity that fears winning, but the Liberal skin-suit that has replaced it in the West. Again, it is not that Christianity ignores the suffering of Christ, anymore than Liberalism rejects the resurrection, it is in their relative place. The resurrection of Christ relegates the Passion to a moment in the saga of Redemption. The Lord leapt over death for the joy set before him. It is not a state he eternally dwells within, but a momentary slumber out of which he harrowed hell. Every Sunday is a replication of Easter, proclaiming the Good News and receiving the spoils from the Victor.
The Resurrection is the key to the true faith, apart from all false religions that mimic aspects of it. If Christ did not bodily raise from the dead, faith is in vain. To be saved is to believe in your heart, and confess with your mouth, that Christ the Lord was risen from the dead. If he sits upon the cosmic throne, ushering in the Age to Come that dwells within our very midst, then everything about this world is different. The Arc of the Universe does not bend towards justice, but tetelestai, It Is Finished.
