Nietzschean Christianity

Posted on March 20, 2011 in Hypocrites Morals & Ethics

Forms of American Christianity prove endlessly creative when it comes to combining affirmations of faith with worldly life. Consider, for example, the new fad of “pole dancing for Jesus“. The thing that makes this possible isn’t a biblical text (and never let it be [[The Letter of James]] which says that you shall be judged by your works!), but a variety of existentialism that has been attached to it.

[[Frederich Nietzsche]] wrote of two kinds of morality. One of them he called Slave morality. The statement which exemplifies this is “I did it because it was right.” The other he called the Master morality: “It was right because I did it.”

Christians who practice what [[Dietrich Bonhoeffer]] called “cheap grace” hold, in part, that all you need to do to be held as a Christian is to say that you are one or that you accepted Jesus into your life and that’s that. It doesn’t matter what you do, just that you do it. It is these so-called Christians who have so neatly combined Nietzsche with Christ (and in the end denying Christ) by introducing a new morality: “It is right because I am saved.” There’s no costly grace involved, no Christ of the Gospels who calls for more than mere declaration that the light bulb of salvation has lit up in your soul and moved you to put a bumper sticker on your car. You don’t have to help the poor through your vote or your words. You can be just as mean and obstinate as you were before because one thing has “changed”: how you describe yourself spiritually.

Is it implausible that these have set their moral compass to the Tea Party? Should it surprise us that they have gone directly against the Bible and declared that their wealth and prosperity makes them paragons of Christian virtue? Speak of community to these and they accuse you of communism. Speak of hope and they rage against you. Give them the Beatitudes to sign and they accuse you of being subversive. Respect a Muslim and they wail about your undermining religious freedom. They have abandoned Christianity for modern megachurchs that thrive on their donations and the publicity they earn through the awe of the numbers they attract rather than genuine acts of charity.

They are the eternal opposites of Christ because they read the Bible for loopholes past its jeremiads against greed and contempt for the weak. It is easier to stick a rope through the eye of a needle than for these to do real good. God calls on them to be servants, but they want to be the overlords.