A Case for Secular Preaching of the Christ Mythos

For better or for worse, western culture has spent the last two thousand years structuring itself around the mythos of Jesus of Nazareth, and the appropriated national mythos of Judaea. The idea of a single English-speaking adult in the world who has not heard the name of Jesus is unthinkable. But now, many who hear the name do not do so with reverence – his story and the content of the book which contains it are problematic fables, and the world is run by children who took Red Riding Hood too seriously, and built a world order in fear of wolves.

 Jesus of Nazareth does not deserve reverence, but not for the reasons that contemporary atheists- even self-conscious apostates- might say. It is not for the actions of Christians, or the world that Christianity created that Jesus is not to be revered, but rather that reason demands he be seen for what he only could have been: a mere human. Further, that his legends (and all the contents of the Old and New Testaments) do not contain factual, historical events when conveying the naturally impossible, and very often do not convey true historical events even when describing the possible.

 Thus, there was a man named Jesus, from Nazareth, who likely was executed by Pontius Pilate for claiming to be King of the Jews, but he did not turn water into wine. He did not walk on water. He did not multiply bread and fish. From this understanding, is there no further value for the stories about the character Jesus, Son of God? If a United Kingdom may never have existed, is there no merit to the Chronicles that detail its collapse? Why do we tell the story of Red Riding Hood to children who live in metros?

 Those who seek to build a new ethos of solace to the individuals left abandoned within existentialism, absurdism, nihilism, the infinite post-modern skepticism of perfect reason, must necessarily work within the existing foundation. This is because not everyone can be pulled out by the roots and survive. Even those who did can only have done so by pulling themselves out. None have ever made the leap of faith under duress- or it would have ceased to be an action of faith, which even nihilism is. Thus, the prospective preacher of the Great Nothing who abandons the rhetoric of The Christ within His own domain seeks to evangelize a native populace while refusing to learn their language.

 Setting aside some grand vision of a nihilistic evangelization, which is not the dream of the typical agnostic (or, perhaps, even the typical apostate), this same argument applies for oneself to oneself to anyone reared under western culture. Even the life-long atheist, child to atheists, who learned to read from The Lord of the Rings and failed to evade the cultural saturation of Star Wars has been primed with the archetypes and tropes of the Bible, hardly less potent when once-removed from the original inspiration. These themes, concepts of morality, roles for gender and race, duty, honor, family structure, good and evil, are themselves the English language. No propaganda machine in the world will have managed what Christianity has done to the minds of western humanity. This is a truth that must be understood, and finally embraced, if one hopes to make lasting change for the better to the denizens of this earth as it is today.

The Christ is not God because he did magic. He is God because there is something humans see within ourselves that deserves the same reverence as the beauty of nature around us, and because we are a part of the wonder of this world. A political dissenter who preached a better world and was executed by the greatest worldly power of its time had lent the colors that the Evangelists used to paint a tapestry of human nature, its longing for solace, and its place among God and the State. These legends are rife with familiar content, a common language, that post-Christian secular mystics absolutely cannot discard in the search for the New Religion, the Cult of the Dead God, the Path of Abandoned Commiserates.

There is a space for a future church, one which handles the Bible with a metered and more deserved literary respect, and uses the concepts of its stories as effective tools for us mere humans to communicate what it is like to be here, Godless and alone together, in a beautiful universe and with that beauty within us. The only barrier to accessing these tools is the dedication and time to learn to wield them, and the swallowing of a misplaced pride at having once cast them aside.