Does Christianity exist?

The political season is upon us, and though politics can’t be the entirety of one’s current interests, it can certainly inspire ratiocination. And that dangerous pastime can take one in all sorts of directions.

When I was reading up on J.D. Vance the other day, I noticed that he had been raised an evangelical Christian but converted to Catholicism at an emblematic age of 33.

For me, that’s a sign that he had outgrown his insalubrious background and achieved intellectual and cultural maturity. As a man now in full command of his faculties, he must have realised that Catholicism is the only Western confession that’s the true heir to the early Church.

St John Henry Newman reached the same conclusion and made the same journey, although his starting point was High Anglicanism, the most Catholic of the Protestant denominations. “To be deep in history is to cease to be a Protestant,” he wrote.

People who are deep in history tend to be highly educated, and Anglophones boasting such credentials, especially if they also happen to be writers, tend to turn to Catholicism tropistically.

The list of such converts is long: Dryden, Chesterton, Greene, Waugh, Kirk, Muggeridge, Spark, Clair Booth Luce, Fr. Richard Neuhaus and so on. At the same time, I can’t think offhand of a single writer or thinker who made the journey in the opposite direction.

One is tempted to define a Catholic as a thinking Christian, but that would be unfair to many serious Protestant thinkers. On the other hand, defining a Christian strikes me as easy, but even such a seemingly simple task defeated one writer I’ve mentioned, Malcolm Muggeridge.

In his moving book Jesus Rediscovered, he described Leo Tolstoy as “not only one of the greatest writers of all time, but also one of the greatest Christians of all time”. That one sentence inspired me to write my own book, God and Man According to Tolstoy, arguing that Tolstoy wasn’t a Christian at all (nor much of a thinker), never mind one of the greatest ever.

Tolstoy rejected Christian doctrine wholesale, starting with the divinity of Christ and Virgin Birth. Mary simply got pregnant by someone the usual way, and Joseph kindly agreed to marry her and accept her illegitimate child as his own.

Tolstoy rudely mocked every sacrament and described the Holy Trinity as incomprehensible and nonsensical. Jesus, whom Muggeridge rediscovered, was to Tolstoy simply a good man, and he regarded worshipping him as blasphemous. Nonetheless, he considered himself not only a Christian, but the only true one left in the world.

In that spirit, Tolstoy set out to write what he called “the gospel of Christ the Materialist”. He merged the four gospels together, excised all the miracles and everything supernatural, and gave a general impression that God was just like Tolstoy, if a bit older.

A similar project had been undertaken a century before Tolstoy by Thomas Jefferson. He too practised a selective approach to Christianity: some of it was acceptable to him, some wasn’t. So he clipped the acceptable passages out of the Bible and pasted them into a notebook, thus creating his own Scripture. One can argue that possibly all Protestants go through the same exercise in their minds, if not literally.

St Augustine warned against such voluntaristic arrogance half a millennium earlier: “If you believe what you like in the gospel and reject what you do not like, it is not the gospel you believe in but yourself.”

In other words, the Scripture must be accepted in its entirety. But does the Scripture include the entirety of Christianity? Evangelical Protestants, from Zwingli to Vance in his youth, believe so. Sola scriptura is one of the founding tenets of Protestantism.

But which scriptura? St John, who first quotes Jesus as saying “I and the Father are one”, but then quotes “My Father is greater than I”? St Luke’s Annunciation to Mary or St Matthew’s Annunciation to Joseph? St Mark who wrote about James and John approaching Jesus with a request or St Matthew who states it was their mother who was the supplicant? Mark and Luke who talk about demons being cast out of a man, or Matthew who says there were two men? St Luke who has shepherds visiting the manger at the Nativity or St Matthew who says it was the kings who followed that star?

The four gospels are four polyphonic themes, similar but not identical, that are then woven into a glorious whole with the rest of the New Testament. But who can be that weaver? Just about anybody, if we agree with Tolstoy, Jefferson, Martin ‘Every Man Is His Own Priest’ Luther, and all evangelical Protestants.

In the end, we’ll end up with many different Christianities, and true enough: in addition to the main Protestant denominations, there exist, at the latest count, 35,496 independent or non-denominational churches, all of them Protestant.

At some point, one becomes justified to ask the question in the title above. Does Christianity even exist as a single religion? Not according to Hilaire Belloc, who wrote in his book The Great Heresies that:

“There is no such thing as a religion called ‘Christianity’ – there never has been such a religion. There is and always has been the Church, and various heresies proceeding from a rejection of some of the Church’s doctrines by men who still desire to retain the rest of her teaching and morals.”

That’s a cogent, if somewhat radical, expression of the Catholic view and a profound rejection of Protestantism as one of the eponymous great heresies. By equating Christianity with Church doctrine, Belloc was arguing that only the Church preserves the Revelation in its entirety, without fracturing it into pieces appealing to various sects.

J.D. Vance talks about a mystical experience that drew him to Catholicism, which makes him one of many communicants who were thus inspired to travel to Rome, whither, as we know, all roads lead. But it’s possible to pave one such road with nothing but rational thought.

Other Western confessions simply don’t make sense, historical, philosophical, cultural or any other. I’d add social and political to this list, for the seditious Reformation was really the anteroom of agnosticism, which the subsequent Enlightenment converted into mass atheism.

That was an attempt to harness man’s sinful nature and lead mankind to virtue by DIY means, secular and political. The attempt failed, which John Adams either diagnosed or prophesied as early as in 1798:

“We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net.”

Amen.