I am fully aware of the hubris of the Christian Right. I experience constantly in my line of work and truth be known, probably spent a good portion of my journey guilty of it. It’s a hubris that assumes everyone is in the same place, that one can speak in absolutes, and that one has full permission to act upon these absolutes with little regard for others around. It’s what I call, “In Your Face” Christianity.
I’m not a fan. At this stage of my life, I’ve had to mop up enough messes left behind from this kind of hubris. It damages free-thinking people. It closes doors to people who would be otherwise open and receptive to the gospel. When binding up the wounds inflicted on a person from a presumptive, and ideologically violent Christian, then it can take years to repair the burned bridge. These sorts of people don’t do the gospel any favors and they make my job infinitely more difficult.
At the same time this problem is happening on the Right, we have a much different issue on the left. I’m going to call it, “The Kowtow Christ” for lack of a better term. The Kowtow Christ assumes a subservient role, not just where one is needed as in the example of Jesus washing feet, but also in places where lying prostrate before inferior and even harmful ideologies can do an equal amount of damage.
To get to where I’m coming from (and I recognize you may very well not want to), we have to move beyond the hot-button topics of today. For many, acknowledgement of a KowTow Christ only comes when certain religious taboos appear in culture – such as homosexuality or abortion. It doesn’t take long for the hubris to kick in on these topics and sensitive clergy find themselves once again attempting to mop up the blood from hacking and slashing of a fully armed Christian assault on yet another human life.
It’s a bit broader and more ideological than that. It’s liberalism of a much higher order. The kind of intellectual kowtowing that seeks to place the most delicate human ideas in the lap of naturalism and empiricism… the kind of Christ that cuddles up in the lap of academic elitism like a docile kitten, coddling an indifferent and self-serving owner in hopes of getting a friendly pat on the head.
A few things are play here I believe. The first is the absolute inability of Christian people to engage in honest ideological debate. I’ve watched the great atheists of our day debate Christian apologists. You can see the debates on YouTube if you’re ever bored. Be prepared to see Christianity absolutely dismantled as our inferiority complex is articulated in no uncertain terms by those seeking to explain our belief structure using the terms and definitions set forward by our ideological opponents.
Such inferiority causes a mad rush to bad science, horrible presumptions, and even more disgusting conclusions – such as belief that the fossil record has been fabricated, or that the geological strata can unequivocally demonstrate a world-wide flood. That’s not kowtowing, that is a brazen defiance of honest debate and communication. If it doesn’t change, it will be difficult for any rational person to accept any idea we cast forward at all.
Kowtowing happens when our inferiority complex takes us in the other direction; when we nuzzle up against the rationalist in hopes of a quick pat on the head. It occurs when we’ve inherently accepted the rules of debate without questioning those rules in the first place. It happens because we too have bought the idea that faith in a higher idea is of lesser value than the demonstrable, repeatable, and verifiable day to day reality in which we all live and thrive.
The confusion exists because we have (rather foolishly) equated two wholly different concepts: cause and value. Our Christ kowtows when we allow questions of cause to usurp questions of value and utility. Interestingly enough, we as a species will only allow this kind of kowtowing in certain arenas, religion being one of them.
For example, a firefighter could easily kowtow before the absolutely rational and empirical reality that human flesh can be consumed by fire. In truth, a degree of kowtowing must take place in a firefighter’s life if he or she wants to survive a fire via equipment and training. Nevertheless, there comes a time when the kowtowing stops. The firefighter must behave in a manner than counters the empirical reality of flesh and fire. The firefighter no longer cuddles in the lap of luxury like a docile kitten with the goal of never being burned. No, the firefighter makes an appeal to an idea and takes a measured response, at least usually. The measuring of this response considers cause and effect, i.e. fire = potential injury or death, but then moves from cause to value, i.e. fighting fire = potentially saving life. The leap from cause to value can happen under the watch of skillful planners who are on the site empirically monitoring the scope of the fire—and often does.
But the leap from cause to value can also happen in an instant of courage, in which cause is trumped by value with little to no mental exercise or reasoning at all. Men and women who make these kinds of leaps are most often regarded as heroes, even when their attempts fail and they lose their lives. Hence, the firefighter who escapes the prison of radical empiricism and behaves with a higher ordering for his or her actions is perceived quite differently than the religious person who may choose to do the same.
Recently inducted to sainthood is one man who against the common sense cause and effect relationship offered up by empiricism, rationalism, and naturalism, chose to live in a leper colony and distribute Christ’s compassion to others. Father Damien contracted leprosy and died.
Besides perhaps a few cynics, no one that I am aware of is calling for Father Damien’s legacy to kowtow itself before science and reason, but even the cynics who on the one hand might be willing to applaud Father Damien’s actions, will still call to the carpet the idea that a person might be willing to forgo the realities around them for the sake of living Christ.
“Keep your service to mankind, but lay your Jesus at my feet.” That’s the call of the modern day atheist who is quite busy erecting exchangeable ideologies for us to kowtow beneath. These ideologies are dressed in a much different set of clothes – covered in words like memetics and anti-clericalism. It’s the age-old battle presented in the third chapter of Genesis, the desire to make man his own God. The belief that we can see better than God, respond more fully than God, and behave more ethically than God.
Fascinating is this phenomenon considering that in our story, God became a person to show us the true meaning of personhood as he kowtowed to us in love and service, and for his compassion and kindness we dealt precipitously with his flesh in murderous contempt. The crucifixion story is one of hubris (both religious and other) taken to its ultimate, barbarous and bloody fruition. It’s not a story sent to cuddle in the lap of human reason and luxury any more than it is a story to wield against our fellow men with insecurity, fear, and mental ineptitude.
Christ is not a cause that can be successfully demonstrated using manmade litmus tests, but a value which must usher in a position of humility in the face of both the known and unknown. This kitten has claws and history has demonstrated time and time again that some will chose the route of fanaticism and misery and dispense it on their brothers and sisters without a second thought.
Even so, in knee-jerk fashion, others will kowtow and cuddle before ideologies scribed by human hands, exchanging God for genetics and the supernatural for the natural. Such a kowtowed Christ is equally harmful and as we enter a new age of hubris for our species – both on the Right and on the Left.
We must find a middle way.
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