So you don’t think our culture is Christian?

Whenever I describe our culture as Christian, some people demur.

Don’t I know how low church attendance is? I do. And even many of those who occasionally go to church, don’t really believe in God? Yes, unfortunately. Have I seen many people crossing themselves lately? I haven’t, outside my church. Do I realise that we live in a secular society, and have done for at least a century, in reality much longer? I do realise.

So in what way is our culture Christian? In most ways that matter, is the answer to that.

Culture is like climate: one has to assess it over millennia to arrive at reliable conclusions about its essence. Taking a shorter look is guaranteed to distort the picture.

Some people display such myopia out of ignorance, others fake it for nefarious purposes. In either case, no true picture emerges.

I have answered yes to all the hypothetical questions posed above by my imaginary interlocutor. He is British or otherwise Western, meaning different from the people among whom I grew up.

In that place, Moscow, USSR, it wouldn’t have occurred to anyone to ask such questions. That would have been like asking if I realised the sky was blue, the grass was green, and the flag was red. Some things went without saying.

Faith in God wasn’t exactly criminalised, but as near as damn. Membership in Protestant sects, such as Baptism or Pentecostalism, was in fact an imprisonable offence. But more traditional confessions could be practised – provided one had no expectation of a successful career or social acceptance.

Even genius wasn’t seen as a valid excuse. Thus Maria Yudina, one of the few pianists meriting that term, saw her career dwindle away to nothing for openly professing her Christian faith – this though even Stalin admired her playing.

Children were exposed to rabid atheist propaganda before they could even walk. Kindergarten teachers would demand the tots in their care repeat things like ‘there is no God’ in chorus; pictures of apes slowly evolving into proletarians were everywhere.

As children got older, their indoctrination became more complex, but its essence never changed. They were exposed to atheist propaganda every day of their lives, they were drowned in it, they inhaled it, drank it, ate it. It was everywhere, all the time. There was no God other than Marx, and Darwin was his prophet.

At the university, I had to take a compulsory course in Scientific Atheism – after the courses in Dialectical Materialism, Historical Materialism, Scientific Communism and Marxist Aesthetics.

By then I had learned not to rebel too openly against that blithering idiocy. But as a child I’d sometimes ask provocative questions, which my parents and teachers answered with panache and in elevated tones. I recall one conversation with my thoroughly atheistic father, which I don’t think was unique to us.

“Is there a God, Papa?” “Do. Not. Be. Stupid. Of course there bloody well isn’t.” But I wouldn’t let him get off scot-free.

“If there is no God, then who created man?” “Man originated from the ape. It’s called evolution, and there was this Englishman, Darwin by name, who proved it conclusively in his book The Origin of Species. You’ll read it when you grow up.” “And where did the ape come from?” “What?” “The ape, the one man originated from. Where did that come from?” “From another ape, you know, a lower order of ape.” “And where did that one come from?”

I’d thus lead Papa all the way down to the amoeba and make him resort to the rhetorical fallacy of telling me I’d find out all those things for myself when I grew up. He was right, I have, but not quite in the way he meant it.

This is a typical example of the kind of religious education Soviet children got. Yet another example shows how poorly it worked.

A couple I knew emigrated from Moscow at roughly the same time I did. Once they landed in New York, some charity put them up in a flat in a low-rent borough. Their son was seven at the time, and the matter of his schooling loomed large.

The couple took the boy to a local state school but were appalled by its demographics. Most children there looked as if they had taken an early start in a promising criminal career, and my friends felt not only their son’s education but even his life would be in jeopardy.

Since private education was out of the question, their thoughts turned to the yeshiva, the rabbinical Jewish school that didn’t charge fees but provided decent education and a more acceptable demography.

My friends were secular Jews, the only type I knew in Moscow, but decided to feign religiosity in this good cause. Little Misha had to go through an admission interview, and my friends spent several days coaching him how to answer the predictable awkward questions.

The first such question was asked straight away: “Do you believe in God?” Thanks to the extensive coaching sessions, Misha knew exactly how to answer: “Of course, I do.”

“Excellent,” smiled his examiners. “So how do you see God?” That was a question that even some theologians struggle with, but Misha had been trained to evade it. “I can’t really say. It’s a mystery, and I can’t answer your question in any detail.”

“Try anyway,” insisted his inquisitors. “Just say the first thing that comes to mind.”

“Fine, if you insist,” agreed Misha, who felt he had to extemporise. “There was this man, Jesus Christ. He was killed, then came back to life, went to heaven and became God.”

A long pause followed, with the examiners exchanging glances and then rolling their eyes. Nevertheless they decided to make allowances for the boy’s unfortunate upbringing and admitted him anyway.

Knowing his parents as I do, I assure you that words like God, Christ or Jesus never crossed their lips, other than as parts of casual cursing. And, since the family wasn’t especially literary, I’m sure Misha had never read, say, Dostoyevsky, and I don’t think he has since then either.

He couldn’t have got that snippet out of ambient air – it was thick with atheist harangues. And yet even in that ideologically, institutionally godless country, a child growing up in a secular – militantly atheistic, to be more exact – Jewish family somehow caught a whiff of Christian aroma wafting around.

Don’t ask me about the mechanisms of cultural transmission involved – I wouldn’t be able to answer. Yet clearly some mechanisms must have been activated, those designed, built and tuned over centuries.     

This reminds me of another story, one involving Sen. Strom Thurmond, who once said back in the ‘50s that Eisenhower was a communist (a popular theme in some circles at the time). “No, Ike is an anti-communist,” objected his colleague. “I don’t care what kind of communist he is,” replied the indomitable legislator.

By the same token, a man whose understanding of life revolves around his Christianity has much in common with someone who relies on anti-Christianity to that end. Both use Christianity as their frame of reference, and in that sense negation becomes affirmation.

I am beginning to wax Hegelian, which is God’s way of telling me I must put a full stop there. So I shall, but not before repeating that our culture is Christian whether we like it or not. And if some of us don’t like it, then they’d be well-advised to identify a viable alternative.

After a few futile attempts, they are bound to realise that here in the West our choice isn’t between a Christian culture and some other. It’s between a Christian culture and none.