A Christianity that Works

 I don't see in this world anywhere any manifestation of Christianity that works for me. I am highly aware that Luther was once in the same position, and Luther failed in many ways, his vision, his understanding were profoundly anti-Christian in many ways, though he addressed positively real failures and manifest corruptions in the actions and theology of the Roman church. Still, he was an anti-Semite, among his other faults. I won't say he could have known better--although I think he could have. I will say he should have been able to know better.

But I must also be humbled by this and all examples, from Saint Francis on down. I don't want to sit in judgment of the souls of Christian saints. I want to submit that when I don't see a Christianity that works for me, I must have my blindnesses too, blindnesses that will earn me the just and effortless condemnation of superior Christians, not to mention God, before whom we all stand condemned--condemned but also forgiven. 

I would like a Christianity that puts proper weight on the forgiveness. What I see is the thumb on the scale of condemnation, sin--how awful you are, not how much you are forgiven. And this, this serves other interests than God. This is what Nietzsche properly saw. Make a person humble by filling them with their sins and you can make them do anything you want. The function of so much of Christianity is to assure and ensure the Christian of their smallness, their abjectness in the sight of God and thereby to prevent them from exercising their freedom. It says to the enslaved, "you're free, but you can't leave the plantation or do any other work," just as was done to the freed slave after the American Civil War. 

The worst thing in the world is the tyrant who acts his freedom without a sense of having been freed: loveless, falsely entitled like the slave "masters," in the old South, like Trump, Stalin, Hitler (and almost-countless others throughout history). But to be freed and not to live one's freedom is a tragedy enacted everyday, everywhere by the sincerest believer at the mercy and direction of church and state.