Is Christianity Darwinian?

Recently I did a “link post” to The shadow of Pax Romana —Unherd. It’s an interview with Tom Holland about “Roman sex lives, Christian morality, and the rise and fall of empires.” In it Holland makes an interesting statement the likes of which one doesn’t see very often:

I think that the thing that enables people in the long run to continue feeling Roman, even when the sinews of government have been cut, and the imperial hold has gone, is that they retain a shared identity as Roman which has come to be fused with Christianity. And the reason that Christianity is so successful — the reason, if you’re looking at it in Darwinian terms, why it’s adopted — is that, in this period that Pax covers, this is a world that is full of different cultural centres. You can go and pay sacrifice to someone in northern Britain, or in Syria, and these are all gods. But in the long run, the heft of these cultural centres depends on them being local. I mean, as with the temple in Jerusalem, it’s the fact that they are local that matters. Christianity changes that.

It’s not very often that “Christianity” and “Darwinian” appear together. As Holland notes, there are many who think that Christianity sapped the energy of Rome and led to its collapse. He does not. Christianity managed to fuse Roman identity into itself, something that not even the East-West split changed (the Empire itself had split long before that.) Christianity survived; Rome did not, something that left it behind China. That, in a real sense, is Darwinian.

Today we’re told that the choice is between some kind of theism and some kind of Darwinism. The wedge used to split the two is the theodicy issue. How could a good God allow so much evil in the world? Especially when it happens to me? Unfortunately, turning towards a more secular view doesn’t really solve that problem, it just deprives someone to blame. Bad things continue to happen, some of which is natural but increasingly more of which is self-inflicted, something I pointed out in Wonder Where Evil Comes From? Try the Mirror.

Today we live in a world where many think that things should always go our way and get petulant and upset when they don’t. Unfortunately a Darwinian view doesn’t really buttress this concept of life. The easiest way is to look at the title of Darwin’s best known work: The Origin of the Species. The survival and propagation of a species is the ultimate end game; the loss of individuals, except when enough of them lose at once (as was the case with the dinosaurs) is, to put it coldly, incidental. In some cases the loss of individuals can be seen as a way to advance the rest of the species. In such a system it is ultimately the aggregate advancement which counts; individual survival depends upon and in turn buttresses the survival of the group.

In many ways that was the ethic I was brought up on, something I expand on in my post If I Started the way @BartCampolo Did, I Wouldn’t Believe in God Either. To answer the question of “Why did God not prevent _______ from happening to me?” the reply was “Why should he?” If you get a whiff of Deism out of that, you should. But ultimately the answer to this question goes beyond that and gets to the solution: the offset to the indignities of this life is not found in this life but in the next, infinite one. The “slings and arrows” that the “losers” in this life have to endure are more than made up in the benefit of eternity with God.

Ultimately for all individuals the problems of this life are sorted out in the infinite one that comes after. That wasn’t immediately apparent to God’s chosen people, something that is evident with thoughtful consideration of the Old Testament. As the author of Hebrews puts it, “God, who, of old, at many times and in many ways, spoke to our ancestors, by the Prophets, has in these latter days spoken to us by the Son, whom he appointed the heir of all things, and through whom he made the universe.” (Hebrews 1:1-2 TCNT) That goes against the literalism of atheist and fundamentalist alike (and those who are some of both) but it is consistent with the concept of inspiration given to us in the Scriptures. (Their idea is more consistent with that of Islam, but that has its own difficulties.)

Our problem these days is that Christianity, in its quest to be “relevant,” has let eternity fade in the background to the benefits of the faith in this life. This is a mistake. Christianity has been criticised for being “pie in the sky,” but these days, with the oligarchs and the left hand in hand and real concerns of survival shunted aside for “faculty lounge” issues, the pie in the sky is the only pie really visible. In the hour when we need the comfort of eternity the most those who one would expect to be its most enthusiastic proponents are simply out to lunch.

Worse than this, we hear in Christian circles stuff that would make those “Darwinian” Late Roman Christians wince. It is easy for us to adopt a sub-Christian sexualised and racialised agenda in the face of what is shoved down our throat, but that’s a mistake. Those Darwinian Late Roman Christians, for all of their faults, pushed back against a patronage and sexualised culture, even to the point of keeping civil “servants” out of the priesthood (assuming they lived long enough to get there.) Evangelicals love to trash these people as having corrupted our faith, but they’re not doing much better. And as far as transcending their empire, we have so hog-tied our Christian identity to that of the empire that I can’t see how Christianity in this country will survive its demise in anything like its present form.

Earlier this year at a restaurant I ate a dish called “tacos al pastor.” So I told a Guatemalan friend who actually pastors a church that I ate his lunch. We as Christians need to wake up and stop putting in the back the issues that should be in the front. Otherwise, like some others, we, out to lunch, will find that someone else has already eaten it.