Psychothic Nation

Saturday, June 04, 2005

It is frightening (Or beautiful? Honestly, I don’t know.) to see the result of someone’s passions, especially if that someone has good ideas and a good amount of charisma.
Today I saw "Luther,” the history of Martin Luther (directed by Eric Till, 2003, with the participation of Joseph Fiennes and Alfred Molina, among others). Luther was a passionate man. He was driven by guilt as well as by the search for truth. A doctor of theology (I don’t want to lecture a class, but only to introduce the subject), he rescues the biblical scriptures, which contrasted sharply with the authoritarian, guilt-filled, abusive and unfounded doctrines of the Roman Catholic Church of the sixteenth century. As an evangelist Luther began to preach in a passionate way about the merciful God found in the Bible and he became popular—yes, he was a hit in Maguncia; he was a Rockstar. There are elements in the preaching of Luther that could explain his success: Luther placed God himself on the side of the blamed and abused habitants of Maguncia (blamed by the Catholic doctrine and abused by the purchase of their salvation; money that was used for the building of St. Peter’s Cathedral). Besides, Luther did something huge: he helped to build the ethos of a nation. He allowed the German people to create their own version of the manifestations of their religious beliefs. The Lutheran Church, as well as the Anglican, Calvinist, etcetera, are born from the free practice of a community that exerts sovereignty over itself. The action of Luther derived in a revolution that was like a religious update: “No more Romans, but Germans. No more Romans, but British.” It was something like the prevaling of the republic over the monarchy, an expression of the culture that escapes from heteronomy. The Bible was translated into the local language, local songs, created by them, and they were allowed free interpretation and to ask questions. God was among the people.
Jesus did something similar in relation to the Pharisees. He freed the conscience from eternal condemnation and destroyed all the rules. He killed the “religion”—in the sense of power structures—and preached salvation to all who believed in Him. That was the only requirement: to believe. Dead repetitions or dead rituals were not required—only believing in and relating with him in a spiritual way. Both characters brought freedom of conscience.
However, what we see today inside the church is, on some occasions, pitiful and unacceptable. There still exist the rules, guilt, structures of power, and the struggle to reach the top of those structures. There are doctrines and more doctrines, translations of the Bible that are too literal or too liberal. Ladies and Gentlemen, every time we attend a Church with legal personification, we are in front of the institutionalization of Christianity. Why is that a problem? Because it creates a conflict between our expectations, the discourses and the practices.
The expectations: “The church is a place of sweet communion with God and with fellow man, a place of reunion where everyone can find shelter and spiritual consolation, where the poor will be sustained and sooner than later, we will reach a spiritual utopia where God finally will reign.”
The discourse: “God is a God of love; His salvation is for everyone; there is freedom in God; and there is no larger or smaller sin, because we are all sinners and God has saved us. Let be all welcome!”
The practices: “We, the ones leading the church, are here because we are better than all of you poor souls with no consolation that cannot reach the place we are standing on, except through a process of being totally obedient to our commands. Anyone who responds any other way will be considered the enemy, and therefore must be ripped away or destroyed.”
This practice is recurrent in every social institution, not only in churches. Let us take a look at economy: Adam Smith “preached” about a free economy, where everyone would have equal access to information and equal access to the accumulation of capital to invest it and make sure that everyone had a comfortable and happy survival. Is that what happened when capitalism reached the consolidation of its practice? Clearly, no. He who holds the information holds the power, and not everyone has equal access to that information. Therefore, not everyone has the same opportunities, and it is evident that not everyone can insure a comfortable and happy survival.
What I want to stress here is the gap between the idea and the massive practice of that idea, between the statement of principles and their practice by society and the eventual institutionalization of those principles; The gap between the freedom in God preached by Jesus and Luther and the dogmatic rigidity of the Church. It seems proper to raise the question: Is the people’s religious sensibility what determines its social order in economic, moral and everyday terms or is this order what determines the way we practice our beliefs?