The Dark Side of Christian History

Rating:
Summary: Not what Christianity is all about
Review: No one will argue that many bad things have been done through the centuries in the name of Christianity. The Inquisition, the Crusades, cruel and insensitive missionary activities, etc. Even today, many Christian faiths seem not to be living up to Christ's law of love with regards to women and homosexuals. That I won't deny.

But writing a book like this -- which the author specifically says up-front is only going to present the "bad side" -- is a downright silly idea, especially for one who does not practice the faith herself. It would be like a Jew writing a book about only the "bad side" of the Islamic faith and ignoring all that is positive in it. When an author does that, you can pretty much bet that you're in for a biased read.

The scholarship is shoddy, too. To begin, Ellerbe focuses her book on what she calls "orthodox Christianity." What, exactly, is orthodox Christianity? She defines it as "traditional ideology within most denominations of Christianity." That's the weakest definition I've ever heard. What is "traditional"? What are "most denominations of Christianity"? Mormonism looks different from Catholicism which looks different from Christian Science. Again, this points to the fact that the author has no real understanding of this topic and of its complexity.

In addition, many of her claims are simply wrong. She says, for example, that Christianity believes that the world and nature are evil, and that only the spirit and heaven are good. Yes, there was a suspicion of the body and the world in early Christian history, but one of the biggest heresies the early Church had to correct was exactly that: the belief that Christ couldn't have been human because humanity was bad. That belief got slapped down pretty quickly. Sure, vestiges of that thinking may persist nowadays, but anyone with a true understanding of Catholic doctrine (with which I am most familiar) knows that they believe that God is IN the physical world, and that Christ is accessed through our senses: through the bread and wine at Church, through a sunset, even through sex. I recommend that Ellerbe read Andrew Greeley's books about the Catholic imagination; she'd get a much clearer picture.

I was disappointed that Alice Walker, whom I admire as a writer, raved about this book. And I'm disappointed that so many reviewers of this book rave about it, too. Anything that lacks balance scares me, whether it's inflexible Christianity or inflexible anti-Christianity. To correct this imbalance, let me point to Cesar Chavez, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, and former president Jimmy Carter, among many many others, who have effected good in the world because of their Christian faith. And let's not forget Christ himself, who preached the law of love and forgiveness in a world that was totally focused on persecution and revenge. Sure, lots of his followers have gotten it wrong, but let's not forget the millions who continue to get it right, day after day.

Rating:
Summary: The Dark Side of Feminist Propaganda
Review: Helen Ellerbe's _The Dark Side of Christian History_ is a typical liberal, New Age, feminist polemic. Its central thesis is that the Orthodox Church, a Middle Eastern cult led by sexually repressed white males conspired to destroy spirituality, Goddess worship and cultural diversity from the time of the Roman Empire to the "Religious Right" in America today. The book is endorsed by several heavy hitters in the feminist theological and literary scene: Alice Walker and Barbara G. Walker, the author of _The Woman's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets_, who calls Ellerbe's work "lucid, objective and accessible." The publisher is in fact "Morningstar and Lark," which is no surprise because Morning Star is a translation for Lucifer and the doomed harlot of Babylon in several editions of the Bible. The cover features a menacing design: a huge black cross superimposed on bright red flames and with "The Dark Side of Christian History" written in glowing orange letters. Ellerbe begins with what she sees as the central problem with Christianity in its orthodox form, "the belief in a singular, solely masculine, authoritarian God who demands unquestioning obedience and who mercilessly crushes dissent. Orthodox Christians believe that fear is essential to sustain what they perceive to be a divinely ordained hierarchical order in which a celestial God reigns singularly at a pinnacle, far removed from the earth and humankind." Ellerbe accredits sexual repression to Orthodox theologians such as St. Augustine and claims that earlier pagan religions gave free reign to sexuality. This is not the case, however, because many pre-Christian ideologies (like the Stoics) argued for abstinence and containment of sexual drives. Ellerbe also casts disdain upon the rather deterministic worldview of Christianity (especially St. Augustine) as a pessimistic, hierarchical system demanding obedience to unjust authority. She cites environmental destruction, torture and execution of witches and supposed heretics, missionaries destroying native religions, racism, anti-Semitism and sexism to Orthodox Christianity. She especially dislikes the Protestant Reformation because it claimed that the world was under the control of the devil, while she ignores the liberalizing Protestant tendencies that arose after the seventeenth century. Isaac Newton's philosophy of a universal mechanism constructed by God, and Darwin's theory of evolution and survival of the fittest are also to be considered suspect of Christian, patriarchal tyranny, according to Ellerbe. Newtonian cosmology and Darwinian evolutionary theory presupposed a world/universe without any divine immanence--which is the logical consequence of the belief in the Christian objective, transcendent, Father God. Ellerbe instead argues for what she believes to be a holistic pre-Christian pagan religion devoted to a monistic, feminine deity. For Ellerbe (...)there is a total rejection of the reality of life's struggles and the natural, biological differences between sexes and races which are a stamp of fallen Man. I recommend this book for anyone who wants to understand the total hate the New Age has for Christian theology and history, and for feminist rejection of the single unifying factor of Western Civilization. (...)