"The Failure of Christianity"

Emma Goldman

First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth
journal.

Conceptions and words that have long ago lost their
original meaning continue through centuries to
dominate mankind. Especially is this true if these
conceptions have become a common-place, if they have
been instilled in our beings from our infancy as great
and irrefutable verities. The average mind is easily
content with inherited and acquired things, or with
the dicta of parents and teachers, because it is much
easier to imitate than to create. Our age has given birth to two intellectual giants,
who have undertaken to transvalue the dead social and
moral values of the past, especially those contained
in Christianity. Friedrich Nietzsche and Max Stirner
have hurled blow upon blow against the portals of
Christianity, because they saw in it a pernicious
slave morality, the denial of life, the destroyer of
all the elements that make for strength and character.
True, Nietzsche has opposed the slave-morality idea
inherent in Christianity in behalf of a master
morality for the privileged few. But I venture to
suggest that his master idea had nothing to do with
the vulgarity of station, caste, or wealth. Rather did
it mean the masterful in human possibilities, the
masterful in man that would help him to overcome old
traditions and worn-out values, so that he may learn
to become the creator of new and beautiful things.

Both Nietzsche and Stirner saw in Christianity the
leveler of the human race, the breaker of man's will
to dare and to do. They saw in every movement built on
Christian morality and ethics attempts not at the
emancipation from slavery, but for the perpetuation
thereof. Hence they opposed these movements with might
and main.

Whether I do or do not entirely agree with these
iconoclasts, I believe, with them, that Christianity
is most admirably adapted to the training of slaves,
to the perpetuation of a slave society; in short, to
the very conditions confronting us to-day. Indeed,
never could society have degenerated to its present
appalling stage, if not for the assistance of
Christianity. The rulers of the earth have realized
long ago what potent poison inheres in the Christian
religion. That is the reason they foster it; that is
why they leave nothing undone to instill it into the
blood of the people. They know only too well that the
subtleness of the Christian teachings is a more
powerful protection against rebellion and discontent
than the club or the gun.

No doubt I will be told that, though religion is a
poison and institutionalized Christianity the greatest
enemy of progress and freedom, there is some good in
Christianity "itself." What about the teachings of
Christ and -- early Christianity, I may be asked; do
they not stand for the spirit of humanity, for right
and justice?

It is precisely this oft-repeated contention that
induced me to choose this subject, to enable me to
demonstrate that the abuses of Christianity, like the
abuses of government, are conditioned in the thing
itself, and are not to be charged to the
representatives of the creed. Christ and his teachings
are the embodiment of submission, of inertia, of the
denial of life; hence responsible for the things done
in their name.

I am not interested in the theological Christ.
Brilliant minds like Bauer, Strauss, Renan, Thomas
Paine, and others refuted that myth long ago. I am
even ready to admit that the theological Christ is not
half so dangerous as the ethical and social Christ. In
proportion as science takes the place of blind faith,
theology loses its hold. But the ethical and poetical
Christ-myth has so thoroughly saturated our lives that
even some of the most advanced minds find it difficult
to emancipate themselves from its yoke. They have rid
themselves of the letter, but have retained the
spirit; yet it is the spirit which is back of all the
crimes and horrors committed by orthodox Christianity.
The Fathers of the Church can well afford to preach
the gospel of Christ. It contains nothing dangerous to
the regime of authority and wealth; it stands for
self-denial and self-abnegation, for penance and
regret, and is absolutely inert in the face of every
[in]dignity, every outrage imposed upon mankind.

Here I must revert to the counterfeiters of ideas and
words. So many otherwise earnest haters of slavery and
injustice confuse, in a most distressing manner, the
teachings of Christ with the great struggles for
social and economic emancipation. The two are
irrevocably and forever opposed to each other. The one
necessitates courage, daring, defiance, and strength.
The other preaches the gospel of non-resistance, of
slavish acquiescence in the will of others; it is the
complete disregard of character and self- reliance,
and therefore destructive of liberty and well-being.

Whoever sincerely aims at a radical change in society,
whoever strives to free humanity from the scourge of
dependence and misery, must turn his back on
Christianity, on the old as well as the present form
of the same.

Everywhere and always, since its very inception,
Christianity has turned the earth into a vale of
tears; always it has made of life a weak, diseased
thing, always it has instilled fear in man, turning
him into a dual being, whose life energies are spent
in the struggle between body and soul. In decrying the
body as something evil, the flesh as the tempter to
everything that is sinful, man has mutilated his being
in the vain attempt to keep his soul pure, while his
body rotted away from the injuries and tortures
inflicted upon it.

The Christian religion and morality extols the glory
of the Hereafter, and therefore remains indifferent to
the horrors of the earth. Indeed, the idea of
self-denial and of all that makes for pain and sorrow
is its test of human worth, its passport to the entry
into heaven.

The poor are to own heaven, and the rich will go to
hell. That may account for the desperate efforts of
the rich to make hay while the sun shines, to get as
much out of the earth as they can: to wallow in wealth
and superfluity, to tighten their iron hold on the
blessed slaves, to rob them of their birthright, to
degrade and outrage them every minute of the day. Who
can blame the rich if they revenge themselves on the
poor, for now is their time, and the merciful
Christian God alone knows how ably and completely the
rich are doing it.

And the poor? They cling to the promise of the
Christian heaven, as the home for old age, the
sanitarium for crippled bodies and weak minds. They
endure and submit, they suffer and wait, until every
bit of self-respect has been knocked out of them,
until their bodies become emaciated and withered, and
their spirit broken from the wait, the weary endless
wait for the Christian heaven.

Christ made his appearance as the leader of the
people, the redeemer of the Jews from Roman dominion;
but the moment he began his work, he proved that he
had no interest in the earth, in the pressing
immediate needs of the poor and the disinherited of
his time. what he preached was a sentimental
mysticism, obscure and confused ideas lacking
originality and vigor.

When the Jews, according to the gospels, withdrew from
Jesus, when they turned him over to the cross, they
may have been bitterly disappointed in him who
promised them so much and gave them so little. He
promised joy and bliss in another world, while the
people were starving, suffering, and enduring before
his very eyes.

It may also be that the sympathy of the Romans,
especially of Pilate, was given Christ because they
regarded him as perfectly harmless to their power and
sway. The philosopher Pilate may have considered
Christ's "eternal truths" as pretty anaemic and
lifeless, compared with the array of strength and
force they attempted to combat. The Romans, strong and
unflinching as they were, must have laughed in their
sleeves over the man who talked repentance and
patience, instead of calling to arms against the
despoilers and oppressors of his people.

The public career of Christ begins with the edict,
"Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand."

Why repent, why regret, in the face of something that
was supposed to bring deliverance? Had not the people
suffered and endured enough; had they not earned their
right to deliverance by their suffering? Take the
Sermon on the Mount, for instance. What is it but a
eulogy on submission to fate, to the inevitability of
things?

"Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the
Kingdom of Heaven."

Heaven must be an awfully dull place if the poor in
spirit live there. How can anything creative, anything
vital, useful and beautiful come from the poor in
spirit? The idea conveyed in the Sermon on the Mount
is the greatest indictment against the teachings of
Christ, because it sees in the poverty of mind and
body a virtue, and because it seeks to maintain this
virtue by reward and punishment. Every intelligent
being realizes that our worst curse is the poverty of
the spirit; that it is productive of all evil and
misery, of all the injustice and crimes in the world.
Every one knows that nothing good ever came or can
come of the poor in spirit; surely never liberty,
justice, or equality.

"Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the
earth."

What a preposterous notion! What incentive to slavery,
inactivity, and parasitism! Besides, it is not true
that the meek can inherit anything. Just because
humanity has been meek, the earth has been stolen from
it.

Meekness has been the whip, which capitalism and
governments have used to force man into dependency,
into his slave position. The most faithful servants of
the State, of wealth, of special privilege, could not
preach a more convenient gospel than did Christ, the
"redeemer" of the people.

"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be filled."

But did not Christ exclude the possibility of
righteousness when he said, "The poor ye have always
with you"? But, then, Christ was great on dicta, no
matter if they were utterly opposed to each other.
This is nowhere demonstrated so strikingly as in his
command, "Render to Caesar the things that are
Caesar's, and to God the things that are God's."

The interpreters claim that Christ had to make these
concessions to the powers of his time. If that be
true, this single compromise was sufficient to prove,
down to this very day, a most ruthless weapon in the
hands of the oppressor, a fearful lash and relentless
tax-gatherer, to the impoverishment, the enslavement,
and degradation of the very people for whom Christ is
supposed to have died. And when we are assured that
"Blessed are they that hunger and thirst for
righteousness, for they shall be filled," are we told
the how? How? Christ never takes the trouble to
explain that. Righteousness does not come from the
stars, nor because Christ willed it so. Righteousness
grows out of liberty, of social and economic
opportunity and equality. But how can the meek, the
poor in spirit, ever establish such a state of
affairs?

"Blessed are ye when men shall revile you and
persecute you, and say all manner of evil against you
falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad:
for great is your reward in heaven."

The reward in heaven is the perpetual bait, a bait
that has caught man in an iron net, a strait-jacket
which does not let him expand or grow. All pioneers of
truth have been, and still are, reviled; they have
been, and still are, persecuted. But did they ask
humanity to pay the price? Did they seek to bribe
mankind to accept their ideas? They knew too well that
he who accepts a truth because of the bribe, will soon
barter it away to a higher bidder.

Good and bad, punishment and reward, sin and penance,
heaven and hell, as the moving spirit of the
Christ-gospel have been the stumbling-block in the
world's work. It contains everything in the way of
orders and commands, but entirely lacks the very
things we need most.

The worker who knows the cause of his misery, who
understands the make-up of our iniquitous social and
industrial system can do more for himself and his kind
than Christ and the followers of Christ have ever done
for humanity; certainly more than meek patience,
ignorance, and submission have done.

How much more ennobling, how much more beneficial is
the extreme individualism of Stirner and Nietzsche
than the sick-room atmosphere of the Christian faith.
If they repudiate altruism as an evil, it is because
of the example contained in Christianity, which set a
premium on parasitism and inertia, gave birth to all
manner of social disorders that are to be cured with
the preachment of love and sympathy.

Proud and self-reliant characters prefer hatred to
such sickening artificial love. Not because of any
reward does a free spirit take his stand for a great
truth, nor has such a one ever been deterred because
of fear of punishment.

"Think not that I come to destroy the law or the
prophets. I am not come to destroy, but to fulfill."

Precisely. Christ was a reformer, ever ready to patch
up, to fulfill, to carry on the old order of things;
never to destroy and rebuild. That may account for the
fellow- feeling all reformers have for him.

Indeed, the whole history of the State, Capitalism,
and the Church proves that they have perpetuated
themselves because of the idea "I come not to destroy
the law." This is the key to authority and oppression.
Naturally so, for did not Christ praise poverty as a
virtue; did he not propagate non-resistance to evil?
Why should not poverty and evil continue to rule the
world?

Much as I am opposed to every religion, much as I
think them an imposition upon, and crime against,
reason and progress, I yet feel that no other religion
has done so much harm or has helped so much in the
enslavement of man as the religion of Christ.

Witness Christ before his accusers. What lack of
dignity, what lack of faith in himself and in his own
ideas! So weak and helpless was this "Saviour of Men"
that he must needs the whole human family to pay for
him, unto all eternity, because he "hath died for
them." Redemption through the Cross is worse than
damnation, because of the terrible burden it imposes
upon humanity, because of the effect it has on the
human soul, fettering and paralyzing it with the
weight of the burden exacted through the death of
Christ.

Thousands of martyrs have perished, yet few, if any,
of them have proved so helpless as the great Christian
God. Thousands have gone to their death with greater
fortitude, with more courage, with deeper faith in
their ideas than the Nazarene. Nor did they expect
eternal gratitude from their fellow-men because of
what they endured for them.

Compared with Socrates and Bruno, with the great
martyrs of Russia, with the Chicago Anarchists,
Francisco Ferrer, and unnumbered others, Christ cuts a
poor figure indeed. Compared with the delicate, frail
Spiridonova who underwent the most terrible tortures,
the most horrible indignities, without losing faith in
herself or her cause, Jesus is a veritable nonentity.
They stood their ground and faced their executioners
with unffinching determination, and though they, too,
died for the people, they asked nothing in return for
their great sacrifice.

Verily, we need redemption from the slavery, the
deadening weakness, and humiliating dependency of
Christian morality.

The teachings of Christ and of his followers have
failed because they lacked the vitality to lift the
burdens from the shoulders of the race; they have
failed because the very essence of that doctrine is
contrary to the spirit of life, exposed to the
manifestations of nature, to the strength and beauty
of passion.

Never can Christianity, under whatever mask it may
appear -- be it New Liberalism, Spiritualism, Christian
Science, New Thought, or a thousand and one other
forms of hysteria and neurasthenia-bring us relief
from the terrible pressure of conditions, the weight
of poverty, the horrors of our iniquitous system.
Christianity is the conspiracy of ignorance against
reason, of darkness against light, of submission and
slavery against independence and freedom; of the
denial of strength and beauty, against the affirmation
of the joy and glory of life.

First published in April 1913, in the Mother Earth
journal.