Let’s talk about…Constantine

You know, I have a family member who has aggressively rejected Christmas, and other celebrations, for perhaps 20 years, where previously they happily celebrated with the rest of us, all the while still holding to the Christian faith. So this person does not celebrate Christmas, or Easter, or even birthdays, “because they are not scriptural”.  You know, I believe that an argument could be made for rejecting Christmas or even birthdays. However, Easter which commemorates the death and resurrection of Christ is not a tenuously made up festival, like Christmas could be argued to be, but is something real and utterly fundamental to the Christian faith, even if the timing does coincide with existing pagan spring holidays. Additionally birthdays celebrate someone’s age in an easy convenient way, tied to the predictable and consistent rotation of the earth around they sun, so they are not an arbitrary concept either, but rather something that can be recognised without any religious elements at all, across different faiths. So I am not going to give up celebrating either Easter or Birthdays although Easter could probably do with a more overtly Christian name. Additionally, I personally think that Christian Easter should be tied to the Jewish festival of Passover/Pesach as it was during Passover that Jesus was crucified, and in Christian thinking His crucifixion draws heavily on Passover symbolism. For instance He is called “our Passover Lamb” in 1 Corinthians 5v6-8.

I find though, that I am increasingly agreeing with my family member about Christmas. This past Christmas it struck me more than ever as a made-up festival which in itself would not be so bad, except that it is so blatantly superimposed over an existing pagan festival. I still think that the birth of Christ is worthy to be celebrated, and I will always think so. However, many of the cultural aspects that seem to be inherently associated with Christmas have no real connection to Jesus or His birth, and derive unapologetically from the underlying pagan festivities.  These include:

– All the glitter and sparkle. The tinsel. The lights. I guess an argument could be made that the lights represent the stars, or the bright star which guided the wise men/magi. Or even more that Jesus is the light of the world. However, I believe that the true “origination” origin (!) of the lights and all the sparkle of Christmas is the fact that the winter solstice which Christmas is placed just after, was traditionally celebrated with fires.

– The fact that Christmas is set in Winter, and not just in winter,  but actually just a few days after the winter solstice. What does that have to do with Jesus or His birth? Absolutely nothing. In essence, this is a winter solstice festival which is exactly why all the lights etc of the point above make sense, this is why it originally made sense to have a fire festival in the first place, to light up the darkest time of year. This also means that the timing of the year makes “Christmas” most relevant as a festival for the Northern Hemisphere where the winter solstice coincides with December rather than the Southern Hemisphere. Even though the whole world celebrates Christmas at pretty much the same time, its placement in the calendar means that it is truly most relevant for Europeans or other people who live in the Northern Hemisphere.

– Santa, his reindeer, elves etc. Yes, Saint Nicholas of Myra may have been a real person. However in our times the concept of Santa has far overshadowed the historical person. Santa is revered not as a real person who lived and died many centuries ago, but as someone who continues to be alive today, flying all over the sky to reach everyone. In candour, the fact that he is depicted as “flying” subtly demonstrates that we are in essence talking about a spirit, that is, a spiritual entity who inhabits the spiritual realm of angels and demons and fairies and witchcraft with all these other entities who are also commonly depicted as “flying”, eg witches flying on their broomsticks; the flying indicates that they travel between the physical realm and the spiritual or “shadow” realm. (When people die, they are often depicted with wings to indicate that they have now become spirits and have now gone to the other realm. Off the top of my head the original story of St Nick had absolutely nothing to do with flying, although it did have supernatural miraculous elements.) It is as if the concept of St Nick has been superimposed on existing European legends of winter spirits.  This is probably how “Krampus”, a winter demon somehow finds its way into the European celebration of Christmas. Furthermore, the historical St Nicholas originated from the part of the world that is now called Turkey, but in modern popular understanding of “Santa Claus” he lives in Lapland and is depicted by default as being “White”, rather than Turkish or Eastern.

– Christmas trees, wreaths etc – utterly pagan. I vaguely remember a passage back in A level days when studying Latin when in the Aeneid Dido (?) said “bring all the greenery” into..erm somewhere (her palace?) – the point is that leaves and leaf garlands were brought into the home as decoration for the pagan celebrations. This might make sense especially during winter when many trees lose their green leaves. So bringing evergreen leaves into the home when all other leaves are dead might be a promise about the new life that is about to bloom again in the Spring. So it might make sense in Europe and in winter but it just does not make sense to commemorate the birth of Christ who was born at an indeterminate time of year in the partly Mediterranean, partly arid climate of Israel.

– The drunkenness, the carousing, the general excess which is associated with Christmas. This has nothing to do with Christian moderation, but everything to do with pagan hedonism.

And there are probably other aspects of Christmas which I will think about later which so clearly have nothing to do with the birth of Christ or no significance to His birth. All of these things contribute to a growing sense of being unimpressed when Christians insist that “Jesus is the reason for the season.” Seriously?  He quite clearly is not. He definitely deserves His own season but all the same He is definitely not the reason for this season. This season existed as its own thing, and even if Christians have tried to claim it for Jesus, the underlying spirits or spiritual forces driving the agricultural festival of Saturnalia and the festival of the Winter solstice are still very much there.  Whether Christians like it or not, or admit it or not there is a lot of darkness in these festivals which have been repurposed as  the festival of light celebrating the light that came into the world.

So anyway, a few days before Christmas I was spending time with this anti-Christmas family member and we got to discussing Christmas, and I said that I was growing in agreement with them and increasingly seeing that all of this was fake.

Anyway, to finally get to the point! Our discussions led us to wondering when Christmas originated as Christmas, and thanks once again to Google we found out that Christmas has actually been celebrated on the 25th December for far longer than I could have imagined – since the 4th Century!

The Roman Emperor Constantine may have been mentioned, which then led me to start thinking of him, and in short the following occurred to me: Constantine is usually credited by Christians with the supposed “Christianisation” of the Roman Empire. But for the long time I have not looked favourably on this supposed fact. All my reservations about him crystallised as we were doing our Christmas research to strike me that actually, Constantine and/or his successors did not “Christianise” the Roman Empire so much as paganise Christianity, and turn it into a religion. There is after all a specific subset of Christianity called Roman Catholicism.

You know, excluding Catholicism, even within supposed evangelical Christianity which supposedly flows directly from the Bible, there are at least two distinct faiths.
I have previously made a point that I am a Biblist, in that I aspire to live as a Biblical Christian, with that level of all-consuming commitment. Other Christians who do not demonstrate this same time commitment are churchists, or that is the name I have given them. However, I am not even speaking about that just now. It finally occurred to me that even within the broader umbrella of Evangelical Christianity there is another faith altogether, distinct from mine where the difference is not about level of commitment. This other faith claims to believe the Bible and be derived from it, but it truly does not.  Rather, it finally occurred to me that this pseudofaith ultimately derives from the changes introduced by Constantine.

I am probably going to have to do more research about this, but for the moment I am going to post a few generalisations etc.

Something that Christians will often say is that prior to Jesus, the Children of Israel were expecting a king to come to establish a kingdom with earthly and political power to deliver them from their enemies. And yet in some ways Jesus would have disappointed these hopes because He did not come to wield earthly power.

And yet the changes that started with Constantine in essence did exactly this: build a system of earthly political power around the church, perhaps by integrating it with the Roman Empire.
The Christian faith ceased to be something that people practised personally, at risk of death, but became a public observation. Because of this, in short, sincerity was lost. There is a kind of sincerity that will be had when people are at risk of losing their lives as with the first Christians. But then when Christianity became the mandated religion, it literally took over from the existing worship of the Roman pantheon of gods, so it simply stepped into the gap left by the existing state religion, and became a religion in its own right, with rituals, sacraments etc.
This then opened the door to it becoming a tool for status. As I say these are generalisations because I cannot pinpoint specific facts. However I can state that where it became socially recognised and acceptable, where people stopped living in fear for their lives, and where, perhaps, it started making money, it inevitably became a tool for status instead.  This contradicts the New Testament itself which strictly teaches against vying for status. It is deeply ironic that people dressed in lavish garments often stand in front of others to preach the importance of humility. Because of the possibility of gaining status and or making money, it is entirely plausible that many people would be attracted to this thing and what it offers without having any real understanding of God or any true love for His word. I believe that this is what we still see today in terms of insincere pastors who clearly do not truly understand the message of the Bible or believe it or live it. In short, there is a huge incentive to claim that you believe in God whether you truly do or not. Add to that the fact that many of these Christians conveniently believe that the time of miracles was in the past, that then means that we cannot even use miracles or the presence of the supernatural to ratify someone’s claim to spiritual leadership. That then means that any Thomasina, Rachel or Harriet can then set up a church, and claim to be called by God, and there is no way of ratifying it beforehand with things like miracles.
It honestly would not surprise me if the concept of tithing 10% of your pretax income to the church goes back if not to Constantine, or his successors as Roman Emperors, then perhaps the early Roman Catholic church.

All of these things mean that there are so many things to be gained from claiming to be a leader in church, and since there is no longer fear of being executed for your faith, almost nothing to lose. These things mean that there are huge incentives for insincere and unscrupulous people to flock into the church as a means of making money for themselves and basically monetising other people’s faith, and trying to control what other people believe.

Because the church had now become a means of exerting political power over other people, I suspect that it was at this time that the church became “White”, that is pale-skinned European people started to think of themselves as the default expression of the Christian faith. I have met people who apparently think that it is up to them to decide whether people who are dark-skinned like me can truly be Christians (“And you have not passed the test Tosin!”) What the Bible actually says is that anyone can be a Christian, faith is not in any way determined by your cultural heritage, the colour of your skin, your ethnicity. I believe that it is because of the potential for political power this that the predominantly White “Church”, consisting of people who were often in the church in the first place precisely because of the new potential of gaining status and power, regardless of what the Bible actually says, started to use faith as a tool of oppression over other ethnicities. “Because We are White, ergo we are Christians, but you are not White, ergo you cannot truly be a Christian, like us, but you must be an inferior being! Therefore as Christians, we can oppress you using the Word of God”. Wait what?! The Bible does not say anything about this whatsoever. OK I also have to admit that this might not actually be due to Constantine or the Roman emperors but rather it might be a consequence of the fact that Christianity has been concentrated in Europe for many centuries, so over time people may just have learned to think that pale-skinned Europeans were the “default” expression of Christianity, because that was always the way things were, even though there are no actual Biblical grounds for this thinking.

How about this too:  that White Christians have used Christianity to oppress Jewish people who genuinely and Biblically are the people of God. I guess the point I am trying to make is that when the faith became a tool for political power, that exerting power over other peoples became almost inevitable by associating your own ethnicity or people group with “the true faith”, and then using that to oppress other people outside of that ethnicity.

Sexism?
Many people talk about how “religion” has been used for centuries to subjugate women. And yet the point that I am trying to make is that Christianity did not start off as a religion but rather called people to radically love others around them.  Yes, the Bible does call us women to submit to our husbands, and yes, as a woman I do still chafe about this. However, the point to remember is that the people who these instructions were initially for were at risk of losing their lives. So they were generally characterised by great sincerity. So we can imagine that where the Bible calls women to submit to their husbands then the husbands would also have been doing their best to love their wives “As Christ loved the church”. They would have been doing their best to love everyone around them. I have had the personal privilege of growing up with profound spiritual sincerity. If there is a man who is doing his genuine utmost to love God and live in obedience to Him, then I know from experience that it would be a lot easier to submit to him. But when Christianity became a “religion” then it became a tool of subjugation, power and oppression. This is when people would have first been attracted into the church who would eagerly use the Bible to express their own existing misogyny and sexism.  These are the people who would emphasise endlessly that women have to submit to their husbands without then offering the corresponding love “as Christ loved the church” which the Bible also commands. These are the people who would go beyond the limits of the Bible in demanding obedience, perhaps for instance insisting that actually any woman should  should automatically submit to any man. These are the people who might try to take advantage of someone’s illiteracy or spiritual ignorance. These are the people who might even go so far as to sexually exploit women to serve their own depravity, perhaps by referring to special acts of service.  Dear reader, if any pastor tries to claim, request or demand any kind of sexual activity from you as a kind of perk of office, then such a pastor is definitely not a Christian. You need to run away from that church as fast as you can.

Here are a couple of funny true stories that have actually happened to me:
1. One day when I was in my early twenties, a much older man was trying to chat me up. He was of brown-skinned African descent like me. In a bid to get rid of him, I said “Oh I’m sorry, I’m a Christian.” I should have known that that would not work because to be candid it never works on men of African descent, because they will simply claim to be Christians too. In my experience it has always worked on pale-skinned Caucasian people though, but never people of African descent. Well in this case, not only did this man confirm that he too was a Christian, but he told me that he was a bishop, with 400 pastors under him. I almost threw up. Bear in mind that I was in my early twenties. Let us even concede that he may not have been married. “Why are you as a supposed pastor chasing after a girl you have just literally just met, who is half your age?!”  These people claim to be pastors, but apparently they have never come across the Bible verse that says “Thou shalt not commit adultery”!  And you know that there are girls who would literally throw themselves at such a man after hearing the kind of power and prestige that he walks in?! Eww. Thankfully I managed to end the conversation there and then and never see him again.

2. This second story concerns someone that unfortunately continues to be a member of a social media group that I also am a member of. This comes after I made every effort to break off all interaction with him. He was a pastor of a tiny church that I attended. It was always going to be risky, seriously what was I thinking?! His church was so small and I was so committed, and he was approximately my age. Even if I had been married it would have been a bad idea. At this time though I was desperate regarding church, and not quite ready to give up on church altogether. Everything went fine for a year, then he apparently thought that I was sufficiently invested for him to be able to reveal his true colours, and he did some weird stuff, and let’s just say that there were definitely sexual undercurrents to what he did. At the time, it seemed to me that he considered me some kind of “perk” for all his hard work despite his already being married. I left that church so fast, I blocked him on everything. Which is why it is somewhat frustrating that he has conveniently decided to become ultra-committed to the group I also belong to…but only after I became committed to it.

Of these two stories, the first one was definitely not my fault, (except that I did have a very elaborate expensive hairstyle on at the time?!) I was literally just standing there at the bus stop and this man decided to chat me up. In the second one I had probably been careless simply by attending that church and being as committed as I was, considering how small the church was. These examples show how it can be all too easy for people to abuse their spiritual authority regarding sexuality. And this also reminds me of the need to be honest with yourself about your sexual needs before getting married, so that you can try as best as is possible to find a spouse whose sexual needs and desires correspond to your own… Then you don’t have to go around preying on young girls.Or is this just the naivety of an unmarried woman speaking?

Christmas
Yes I believe that it was probably in the days of Constantine or people closely succeeding him that people tried to reclaim the existing agricultural festival of Saturnalia and the distinct winter solstice as “Christmas”. Over the years we have come to accept all these different aspects of Christmas as inherently being part of Christmas. However if were to think critically, we would see that many of these aspects of Christmas don’t truly fit within the celebration of Christ, but we accept it all because it has all melted together into the cultural understanding of the birth of Christ.

To go back to Constantine, these are the things that I think he and his successors are responsible for. As Christians, the true Biblical faith of Christ and of the Bible is breathtakingly radical and carries some undeniable power, not just supernatural power for miracles, but power in terms of offering people the chance for a new life, the chance of forgiveness. “Religion” has co-opted that power and has twisted it to oppress people and to financially exploit them. However that religion has as little to do with the real biblical faith as the similarly fake festival of Christmas has to do with the birth of Christ.

I believe that it is because of all these things that there is such a strong and unmistakable heart of racism in many evangelical churches, and people act as if the faith of Christ itself validates their racism, even though the Bible says that God loves everyone, everyone is of equal worth, everyone is made in the image of God. It is because of these things that for instance Christian nationalists act as if the Bible is their handbook even though the way they live, their beliefs completely contradict the Bible. It is because of this that many Christians apparently despise poor people even though God shows throughout the Bible that He loves poor people. All these things are because, I believe, starting from the time of Constantine onwards, people have demonstrated how to use the Bible to legitimise attitudes which actually contradict the Bible, to use the Bible, the ultimate tool of freedom in this world as a tool of oppression and this has now been going on for centuries, which also lends credibility to the people who would think and act in these socially accepted but completely unbiblical ways.

Ah yes, also, Capitalism, by which I mean the rapacious greed for profiting from the labour and misery of others. Also Slavery, empowered by the complete dehumanisation of other ethnicities. The fact that people tried to use the Bible to justify these things in my view ultimately springs from the fact that faith had largely been severed from its “radical” roots (where radix from which we get the word radical literally means root in Latin) and it had been twisted by selfish, godless and unregenerate people seeking political power, wealth and status to serve selfish, godless and base aims.