The Cult of Christ

What do you call a new young religion?

The answer is clearly either The Real Deal or a cult.

The word cult has got a lot of negative connotations with it that Christians really don't like associated with their religion's early days but if we look at the matter objectively then cult is the only appropriate name to give the early church. If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck and quacks like a duck it is reasonable to consider the possibility that it's a duck.

Christianity did not start with the appointment of bishops and a fund to build a new building program and found a seminary. It began with a lot of (probably wide-eyed) millennial, charismatic preaching and a bizarre initiation rite (full immersion baptism) and the call for people to leave behind their families and join in a new radical movement dedicated to finding solace for souls in the last days.

That has absolutely nothing to do with the religion of being brought to the church or temple where your great-great-great grandfather worshipped to hear the same story he was told. Mormons now have that legacy of the deep past, they didn't have it in the time of Joseph Smith's initial cult. Christians had it long before. But they certainly did not have it in the time of Saint Paul. The new Christian church was not selling wholesome traditional family values, it was overturning all that tradition and babbling away nonsense words under the impression that they were being possessed by the Holy Spirit. To the impartial observer 'another stupid bleeding cult' is the only rational way to categorize that new 'church'.

Paul, as Saul, claims to have been appointed by the religious authorities of Jerusalem specifically to suppress the new cult. Nobody ever suppresses cults they think are genuinely doing the bidding of genuine gods, suppression of cults is done to protect the public from dangerous lunatics and to stop wealthy widows being stripped of their money by charlatans. This is also the reason why the Roman authorities don't like Christianity. The alternative analysis, that the Romans knew the Christians were right but wanted to suppress that truth and carry on worshipping what they now saw to be false gods is quite simply laughable. Only a person who tore out all his reason in the name of faith could possibly fall for such an idiotic suggestion. The Romans' attitude to Christians is just the same as American Christians' attitude to the Moonies and Scientologists: they believed with complete and arrogant confidence that the new cults were both wrong and dangerously subversive.

Use your common sense for a moment and look at the issue rationally. People in the time of Saint Paul had no reason to believe that they were living in Biblical Times when gods walked among men. To believe a story of their god being born as a man and coming to Jerusalem last year and being put to death unjustly surely must stretch the credibility significantly more than the story you were told. You were told that the real One True God was born as a man long ago and far away, in Biblical Times, simple times, in The Holy Land, a special place, and your ancestors have been accepting this story as true for many centuries and it is the predominant view of people around you. In fact not to subscribe to that view makes you considered to be a dangerously ungrounded amoral psychopath or directly controlled by the source of all the evil in the universe. Can you see how it is slightly easier to believe in Jesus in Kansas City in the year 2007 than in Jerusalem in the year 40? Jesus belief in Jesusland (America's 'Red States') is the default, in Jerusalem in the first century it was very definitely a fault. A Christian? Oy vey! What kind of a calling is that for a nice Jewish boy who loves his mother? Not only was Jesus belief a fault it was most definitely cult-like.

What other way is there to analyse it? Only the obvious incorrect view that this was the birth of a real church formed by genuine saints, revered ancestors and holy martyrs. You have to throw off the view that these people were special people living in a special place at a special time. These people were normal sweating farting and balding men, living in what was to them the here and now, as real as real life ever could be. Saints were not special people, they were ordinary people seriously mixed up with extraordinary beliefs which were so strong that their entire lives were given over to them. Like cultists. Exactly like cultists because that is the only sensible way to understand them. These people were steeped in the religion of their people and had respect for it but found it inadequate and they wanted something deeper and more personal, at least they did when it was shown to them. My grandmother was convinced I would end up in a cult while at university because of my 'unusual' beliefs, little did she know I had been an atheist for years and so was totally immune to the lures of such nonsense.

You really can't have it both ways, you can't have an ordinary mortal man in an ordinary place being God and taking ordinary men to follow him and then not be willing to see those ordinary men as (from the standpoint of the disinterested) figures creating and caught up in a cult. If they were special people in special times then the beauty and power of the myth evaporates and they might as well be actors on a celestial stage carrying out a virtual sacrifice of a virtual saviour in a virtual world to placate the wrath (never could figure that one out) of a virtual god. Mythical saints and martyrs will suffice but you can't have mythical bishops. At some stage something concrete has got to condense out of the cloud of the cult. If that is done so that those who sincerely believe in the message of the cult become the leaders of the mass organization the cult is set on the path to becoming a respectable religious institution. All you need add is the dust of ages and a policy of indoctrinating the young girls before they reach marriageable age and you have the foundations of a church. (You have to get the girls first, any club owner will tell you this, get the girls and the young men will follow.)

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