The African American philosopher Cornel West has noted that
before the development of liberation theology in Latin America the German
atheistic philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche had described Christianity as a
religion of the poor.[1]
While Nietzsche did not evolve the method which Latin American liberation
theology would be famous or infamous for (depending on your perception of the
matter) he was right to read the Christian faith as a religion of the weak.
Because the Christian faith is a religion of the weak, Nietzsche saw it as
having evolved a morality that is rooted in resentment, the resentment which
the weak have for the prosperity of the strong in society.
In Nietzsche’s telling, morality was originally not
something that needed to be justified. It was simply the way of nature
manifested in society. Naturally, being strong and powerful is good because it
enables human survival. In nature, the strong are naturally those who lord it
over the weak. This is not a question of morality but just the way things are.
It does not need justification. Because some are strong, it is only natural
that they lord it over those who are weak. In this state of affairs, being
strong was the same thing as being good. Here one does not have to justify or
explain why they are strong because being strong is not a moral choice; it is
rather the way things are. This way of being is what Nietzsche called master
morality.[2]
Out of resentment for the strong, however, the weak sought
to undermine this definition of goodness by seeking moral justification for the
term and this justification was done through inversion of terms. The inversion of terms was done through the
creation of the categories of good and evil where a good person became one who
demonstrated certain moral characteristics and the evil one was the person who
did not manifest those characteristics. Goodness was redefined to include
elements of Christian morality such as mercy, humility, meekness, etc., and
these were characteristics often possessed by the weak. Here was a moral and
social coup d’etats where in order to be good the master had to embrace the
morality of the weak (what Nietzsche called slave morality). Master morality therefore became slave
morality and this slave morality Nietzsche saw as harboring the potential to
ruin the West.
While Nietzsche’s genealogy of Christian morality is quite
speculative, it touches on an important dynamic of the emergence of
Christianity and how it has come to be put at the service of the powerful in
our time. Christianity began with Jesus whom, as far as we can tell, was a
non-entity in the Israel of his time. Even though the Gospels connect him to
the priestly and royal lines of Israel, it is clear that the attempt to do so,
found in the Gospels of Matthew (chapter 1) and Luke (chapter 3), are problematic
at best. In the historical context of his time, Jesus was quite a none-entity,
neither connected to the aristocratic or scribal class in Israel. One of the
reasons why he was repeatedly seen as an impostor was due to the fact that his
connection to the various respectable groups of his time, such as the Pharisees
and the Sadducees, was at best tenuous. In other words, he was a man without
power. As a man without power, he evolved a morality for people without power –
the need to care for one another in a community of equals. As Nietzsche rightly
saw, the morality of Jesus is a morality for people who belonged to the lower
class of the society of their time. Jesus taught them that they were not to
split themselves into masters and servants – all were to be servants of all, as
the German Reformer, Martin Luther, would later opine.
But this will not be the future of Christianity. The future
of Christianity would be marked by the power of the strong against the weak,
characterized by racism, classism, sexism, and other nefarious isms.
How did we get to this point?
The history of how we got to this point is a long one and
books on the history of Christianity have charted it well.[3]
This began right after Jesus himself when some of his followers began
accommodating his teachings to their various societies – societies that were
characterized by hierarchies. Soon Christianity became the religion of empire
–the Roman Empire – and Jesus became King of the Empire. The lowly man who was
killed as a common criminal began wearing the crown, sanctioning wars and
defending societal inequalities.
When this religion came to America it became entangled with
American perception of itself as a power for good planted in the world by Jesus
himself (a city on a hill). An army of scholars and preachers arose to argue
that following Jesus is compatible with the exploitation that develops obscene
wealth for the few even as the many scrape by. Jesus’ teaching involving a
community of care and grace where people are treated with dignity was transformed
into one where a few hoard the wealth, hoping that it would trickle down to the
many.
And so a religion which Nietzsche rightly saw as the
religion of the weak, became an instrument of oppression in the hands of the
powerful. Here the morality of Jesus has been replaced by the master morality
of Nietzsche. Thus, we now live at a time when the masters have put down the
moral coup d’etats which the slaves (Jesus) began.
[1]
Cornel West, “Race and Modernity,” in The
Cornel West Reader (NY, New York: Basic Books, 1999), 62.
[2]
See Frithjof Bergmann, “Nietzsche’s Critique of Morality,” in Reading Nietzsche, Robert C. Solomon and
Kathleen M. Higgins, eds. (NY, New York: Oxford University Press,, 1988),
29-45.
[3]
See, for example Rodney Stark, The
Triumph of Christianity: How the Jesus Movement Became the World’s Largest
Religion (NY, New York: HarperCollins, 2011)
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