No wonder the watching world shakes their head at Christians – – we can't even protect our own. We must protect women and children!
— Julie Anne (@DefendTheSheep) February 16, 2016
I’m quoting this tweet because it goes directly to my only serious disagreement with Julie Anne, The Wartburg Watch, Tom Rich, Jeri Massi, and all the others who have fought so hard to reform Christianity’s abusive behavior. I say: Christianity will not be reformed because its abuses inhere in what Christianity is, in its ontology. Christianity is innately abusive.
It’s easy enough to imagine a Christianity without a virgin birth, and it requires no imagination to conceive a Christianity without a resurrection; those can be dispensed with without much difficulty. Jesus could have been the son of god even if Mary had once ‘done it.’ Jesus could still be sitting in Heaven waiting for us without ever returning to the third rock.
But what does Christianity have on offer if we aren’t all born naturally depraved, unfit to exist, our very existence an offense against the cosmos itself — without Original Sin? Nothing — that’s what. Original Sin is Christianity’s only truly indispensable metaphysical claim; take that away, and there is nothing.
But Original Sin in innately unhealthy psychologically, a crippling sickness. To believe such a thing is to handicap oneself. Worse, it justifies abusing others with the rationalization that only when the spirit has been broken will the target be free of ‘self’ and ready to receive grace. It is an engine of abuse — and Christianity is empty without it.
So, yes — drag abusive clergy into the public square and make the bastards pay. Make them figures of odium, impoverish them, send them naked into the night; the world will be well rid of them. Just don’t deceive yourselves: The sickness is in Christian teaching itself, and it is that which must be defeated.