The Antichristian Phenomenon

My anthropology teacher gave me a very interesting angle to look at Christianity today. First of all, let me outline what my new course is about, and I will roughly translate the title of the course into English: “Worldviews, power and support”. From the title alone, I think it is pretty evident what this course is about, it will mostly deal with political and economical anthropology and how one can study these two things in a society as an anthropologist.

Then, let me outline a quote from Max Weber, a famous German who formed one of the first and well-known definitions of power:

“[P]ower is the possibility for one or for many to realize their own will in communial action, even against the resistance of others.”

Christianity then, is a huge institution both politically, economically and socially, so it is very much possible to look into the system of Christianity and come up with a conclusion about what is power, how it is used and who is using it. My teacher further eplains that the use of power is often internalized by those who who do not actually benefit from the actual practices of the one in power and he gave an example when he was doing field research in an African country whose name is probably not Zimbabwe but very close to it. His field was mostly compromized by studying an African tribe called Alyamba, but for some reason he also visited other parts of the country and thus also a school where he witnessed quite a cruel treatment of the children, not too different to how we treated our own children in school just fifty or so years ago (and in Sweden the corporal punishment of children was not banned from the Swedish national law book until as late as the 1970s, where it says that corporal punishment was allowed during certain circumstances).

He went on to explain that upon his arrival, he saw all the children of that school kneeing with bare knees (in this country all children were wearing typical uniforms, so skirs for girls and shorts for boys) on the rough pebble that constituted a majority of the campus (I understood it as some sort of pebble, I may be wrong, but it doesn’t matter much here in the terms of serving as an analogy). He was lucky being able to ask one boy what was going on and the boy replied with something such as: “We are being punished for our own sake.”  This rings a bell in me, and I think many of you understand why. It sounded an awful lot like Christianity, being punished for your own sake.  This boy further explained that this punishment happened every day so all the students would shape up and not behave as badly as they would without it, and in a very twisted way, he somehow had managed to see it as positive thing, hence it has become internalized.

My teacher then went on explaining that this is common when power is used or abused; internalizing the structure helps to maintain the current system and is often justified in this sort of manner, it is actually for our own sake we are being punished, even though from the outsider’s point of view, it is quite rediculous. A poor boy being forced to knee on sharp pebbles for gods know how long under the steaking African sun is not a very nice treatment of kids no matter how you see it and certainly does not serve any actual meaning to the boy in question. We can factually prove that this sort of treatment will not improve this boy’s or any other boys’ or girls’ behavior, and there is most likely nothing wrong with it in the first place.

It is further explained that a truly good leader will be able to mask these sort of things justifying it with reasons given above; no matter how rediculous it may seem (the Genocide, the Dark Ages anyone?). Now, what really made me start to think is to whom and why are Christians maintaining this sort of power system? Why do Christians keep insisting that they are sinners and therefore must pray or do whatever pointless ritual to cleanse themselves when God obviously is not nearby and can keep an eye on them, enforcing their behavior is so need be?

I don’t quite feel expressing that Christianity is a meme, a scheme (not to be confused with meme) or even an expression of a bunch of symbols can properly explain this. This is obviously overcourse to me right now, I simply lack the current knowledge of this sort of field to properly even theorize of what could be a cause or a reason.

Max Weber also outlines a few defintions of different types of authority, I am sure they can be meaningful in this sort of discourse but my teacher has yet to explain to us what they all mean so I will leave it for now. Maybe someone else has any ideas?

Yes, I do understand that Christians may be considered disillusional and therefore no more explanation is needed, hence, their leader (God, any priest or other religious leader?) exists but only in their minds, their punishment is primarily delivered all by themselves, but this doesn’t hold up as an explanation from an anthropological point of view. So while I definitely consider it an unserious option as an answer it’s not really what I am looking for here.

It’s interesting and I wish I could dig in it further. Maybe I can do a more proper analysis after the end of this course.

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 31st, 2009 at 1:24 am and is filed under Culture, SocioPolitical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.