A Safe Schools discussion must start with the past.

I’m going to wade, a little, into the Safe Schools debate that in my last post I dipped my toe into. For those who don’t know the Safe Schools Coalition initiative, it can be divided into two things; a series of lesson plans and resources for high school teachers to discuss lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex student issues, and recommended high school policies to support those students (found amongst the resources).  To shrink the language of “lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and intersex” I will be referring to this grouping as same-sex attracted and gender-diverse.

Although in my younger years some attempt was made to put all the letters of LGBTI under the reclaimed word “Queer” that never took off. For one thing the word Queer became attached to the image of a white wealthy gay male, an inevitability of any singular identity perhaps in a world of ads chasing pink dollars. Many Lesbians insisted on their own particular identity, rather than existing as Queer’s “other”. Queer politics also had agendas that were broader than the LGBTI movement – sex-positivity for example – and whereas Queer tended to embrace Drag, some feminists saw this type of performance as offensive as “black-face”.  Still Queer has an edgeyness that LGBTI lacks. Queer is a little more punk and post-normal. For this reason the term still finds favour today.

This old debate about the universality of Queer is an obscure element of history. If you lived through it and participated in it, it’s easy to imagine that everyone knows why Queer is not generally considered an acceptable umbrella term and why some people, despite this, still use it. I’m not showing off here. I never learnt this stuff. I was just involved in it. Ask me who won any of the Grand Finals through the 80’s and 90’s and I will have to guess because I wasn’t paying attention to that history.

This idea of niche and personal histories is crucial to understanding the debates and discussions around the Safe Schools initiative. Consider the example of the Tasty Raid in Melbourne in 1994. The proportion of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults in Australia who know of this event will be huge. In fact it will be much higher than people who know about why we do or don’t use the term Queer, a largely academic debate. The Tasty raid and the subsequent suing of the Victorian Police was a big deal, but the people who remember it don’t all remember it because they are better historians. Many just remember it because it was about their lives. They either were caught up in it or they learnt about at the time through their networks.

A more chilling example of separate history was reported in an article titled ‘Sydney’s Shame’  (http://www.smh.com.au/nsw/sydney-shame ). This story reported on systematic gay bashings leading to deliberate murders around Sydney beats, and a culture of police reluctance to investigate. We’re talking here about people found dead at the bottom of cliffs with clear evidence of being assaulted first and the death being ruled as an accident. We’re talking about “fag-bashing” viewed as an ordinary activity to do with your mates. Again this is not necessarily something same-sex attracted and gender diverse people study in specialist classes. It is simply what some have lived through and many more have been aware of as they walk home. Even when these things are reported in mainstream media they become part of the consciousness of some readers and not so much of others.

Incidentally this is what women’s experience of the epidemic of violence against women is like. They hold their keys differently. Take out their phone. Stay close to the lights and avoid the alleys. Notice who is walking behind them. Of course therefore they remember more than men the history of this violence, including incidents of violence, poor political or police responses and community reactions. They will appreciate how every single Mardi Gras through the 80’s and 90’s came with a warning to keep yourself safe as you left venues because the gay bashers always stepped up their activities around that time. They will understand how that warning is a part of some peoples history of events. By the way, maybe they still give out that warning, but living in Bendigo with my family I don’t follow Mardi Gras news much anymore; again separate histories.

The relevance of all this to how Safe Schools is being discussed, is simple. Virtually every argument in support of the Safe Schools program refers to the history of same-sex attracted or gender diverse people, often incorporating the personal history of the author. The Safe Schools programs are seen as correcting for the systematic oppression that has been the life of same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. My last blog did something similar – it drew upon my past. The past is very much present when supporters speak of the Safe Schools program. For them an ugly homophobic past is sitting square in the middle of the discussion.

Meanwhile the criticisms of the Safe Schools program are massively ahistorical. They may criticize the program based on its merits, or they may criticize what they have heard is the program based on the merits of that, but they are definitely not evaluating the program in a historical context. How was school for these critics when they were young? Irrelevant. How were workplaces or the media or the law as these critics were emerging into adulthood? They were fine, why would that matter?

Occasionally the past is brought into the conversation from some Safe Schools critics, but it is a fantasy past. It is in fact such a fantastic past as to make their criticisms even more ahistorical for mentioning it. In these pasts everyone is neighbourly and chaste, homosexuality is barely mentioned which one supposes means that same-sex attracted people barely existed, and children respect their parents because God is in the schools where He (sic) belongs. You don’t find this sort of fantasy past promoted by serious critics of the program, but it is there amongst the petition signers and the online angry. In this past there are no gay bashings or homophobia at all. This is why I consider it to be even more a denial of history than simply not mentioning history at all.

The tendency of the more serious Safe Schools critics is to blunt any historical special interest case by generalizing the focus from homophobic bullying to all bullying.  In this way they mirror other ahistorical criticisms of other historical movements. On Q&A recently the head of the Australian Christian Lobby, Lyle Shelton responded to comments that same-sex attracted and gender-diverse kids are being bullied, with comments that all bullying is wrong for whatever reason. This is a copy of the white response to the hashtag Black Lives Matter with All Lives Matter.  While technically true there is no knowledge of history in either response. It is as if presented with the Sydney’s Shame article the ACL would say “Well, all police corruption is wrong and nobody is condoning any violence here.”

This lack of recognizing their particular history frustrates same-sex attracted and gender diverse adults. Weren’t they just sharing their painful pasts moments ago? Were the ACL and their followers listening? This only gets worse when organisations like the ACL claim to be bullied, harassed and silenced today. It was not long ago that being gay was compared to smoking by the then public face and continuing chair of the board of the ACL. The concern the ACL have always shown has been very much like a concern about the uptake of smoking, to thwart any improvement in gay lives lest it encourage more people to take up being gay. Many consider them a source of homophobia.

But it’s not even a question of whether the ACL and its current head Lyle Shelton directly spread homophobia or not. The reality is that all the time Shelton was growing up and when he was a newspaper journalist and editor, when he was a city councilor and a state candidate and when he moved to the ACL, same-sex attracted and gender diverse people have been being bullied, bashed and murdered, fired from their jobs, kicked out of their homes and turned away from services. Not a single element of this history was ever confronted by Shelton as a journalist, editor, politician or lobbyist. Shelton either never knew about this history or never cared. Most likely it simply passed him by like AFL did me. He didn’t have to decide not to take an interest in it – he simply wasn’t involved in it.

Does it seem unfair to you to judge him for this? Does it seem irrelevant to his evaluation of the Safe Schools program? Maybe so in both cases but this is what I suspect is a part of the feeling of the supporters of Safe Schools. For them Safe Schools exists within a history that entitles the voices of same-sex attracted and gender diverse people to speak and disqualifies the speech of people like Lyle Shelton and the ACL. This is a shared feeling, by the way, from supporters of the program who are as heterosexual and cis-gendered as Lyle Shelton. It’s not a Queer thing to privilege Queer voices in this discussion – it’s a historically aware thing. Many even feel it is a human thing – to allow themselves to be silenced by the testimony of the survivors of violence.

Having spoken of the frustration of the Safe School supporters, let’s consider the frustration of its critics. In their minds they are making what they feel are rational arguments. Some of their arguments are not rational at all and some of them are wildly misinformed but some of them raise legitimate areas for improvement. If the filter of personal history is driving how Safe Schools supporters feel about the program and its critics, then they can be easily hostile to any criticism being made, almost regardless of the program’s content.

The Safe Schools program has been developed with the input of numerous same-sex attracted and gender -diverse young people. It has been implemented successfully at a range of schools including a Catholic school, a tiny country school and many large state schools. This all speaks to how useful and positive a program it is, but it’s still just a program. There are bound to be ways it can improve and mistakes that have been made. It seems to me that by being engaged in historical battles Safe Schools supporters are in danger of viewing all criticisms of the initiative as attacks on LGBTI people.  That's not a healthy relationship to any program.

If this conversation about Safe Schools is to improve we are going to need people who can confront the history gap in our community. There are some examples of people who speak for conservative Christians who get the importance of history in this discussion and by that I don't mean a token nod to the problem of all bullying. Michael Jensen,  is someone I disagree with on Same-Sex marriage but he recently made a long Facebook post which indicated his understanding of LGBTI history. It has since been published by the Huffinton Post. What is important about this post was that it never tries to subsume homophobic bullying or racist bullying under the generic title of all bullying. Instead it recognized that homophobic bullying occupies a particular place in our history and delivers a particular harm that can only be imperfectly imagined by those who didn't experience it. That's humility.

John Sandeman provides another example. He is the editor of Eternity Magazine, a Christian non-denominational publication and one which has defended ACL and taken a conservative stance on LGBTI issues.  On the 25th of February this year he wrote an article for the Australian Bible Society website titled, ‘The SMH apologises to the Mardi Gras. What should Christians do?’ This was a genuine admission of the history of conservative Christians in denying basic freedoms to same-sex attracted people and in being involved in their systematic oppression.

Neither of these pieces of writing specifically mentioned the Safe Schools program although Jensen's piece comes close. Perhaps that enables their authors to be freer with their acceptance of the gains of the LGBTI movement for equality or perhaps even that it is to take their point too far. At least they start the conversation off on the right foot. We should all be able to acknowledge that Australian history is a brutally homophobic one and that this is not just more of the “general” bullying, violence or sinfulness of society. It is a specific problem with same-sex attraction and gender diversity that churches have fostered themselves.

From this point I think we should all be able to agree that some kind of program like the Safe Schools initiative is necessary and deserves the paltry eight million dollars that has gone into it. This will be a leap for some conservative Christians but I hope it is one they can make. As Stephanie Judd wrote for the ABC news site, addressing the ACL in particular:
“If you feel some Safe Schools content isn't age-appropriate, then isn't dialoguing with them for modifications to the program a better and more gracious approach than pitting yourself against them by calling for their wholesale defunding?”
Stephanie, whose byline indicates she attends an Anglican Church, goes on to say that  “In the absence of a a satisfactory alternative that addresses the problem that Safe Schools was created to fix, the ACL's statements are going to continue to be received as harsh and unconstructive.”

So long as the critics of the Safe Schools initiative come at Safe Schools with axes of outrage rather than ideas for improvement they will seem to have very little idea of lives outside their own. We can see this in their ahistorical approach to the issue. So long as they propose no alternative at all or a generalised alternative that hides the special historical case for justice of same-sex attracted and gender-diverse people, they will seem to have no idea there is even a problem to fix. On that basis they are not going to be listened to and despite what they might tell themselves it won’t be because they are being bullied now. On the other hand, a proper discussion might be had if the examples of John Sandeman and Michael Jensen, both conservatives, have a genuine influence on their peers.

Sex Mapping (Across the Universe) Part 1.

What does it mean to say that you or someone else is lesbian or gay or bisexual or heterosexual? These words are identities. You or I might identify someone with one of these labels who wouldn’t identify with such a label themselves.

This is partly because these words are part of a schema of understanding sexuality. If a person doesn’t share that schema they may not agree with your identifications even if they agree on all “the facts”. In some cultures for example men who prefer to have sex with men over women don’t consider themselves to be gay. Likewise not everyone who exclusively has sex with their "opposite" gender considers that a result of their heterosexuality.

The schema that underpins homosexual, bisexual and heterosexual identifications has four key elements:

• Sexual attraction is a distinct and special type of attraction (we can talk about sexual attraction as separate from just the pursuit of status or pleasure or as distinct from our need for other types of love).
• Sexual attraction experienced in one instance is not a completely unique phenomenon. It will have something to do with the sexual attraction experienced in another instance. (Hence you can draw a pattern of attraction over a period of your life. You can meaningfully talk about commonalities between the people you find attractive.).
• The most meaningful pattern of sexual attraction regards the gender of your object of attraction. (It’s more important for identification if all your desired lovers are men or women than that they are all short or into Dr.Who. Strangely, its even more important for identity if you’re attracted to both men and women than if you are just attracted to fans of Dr.Who )
• Sexual attraction is relatively innate and fixed.

I’m not saying these four elements are the reason for our use of lesbian, gay, bi and heterosexual as identifications (hereafter called gender-based sexualities). These four elements are merely requirements after the fact.

That’s a bold claim I’m making. I’m saying that our gender based sexualities don’t spring from the universal reality of the above four elements. Instead the reality of the above four elements is imposed on us in order for gender based sexualities to work.

I base that belief on the following points;

• Gender based sexual identities are relatively recent ideas. They emerged during the western scientific enlightenment as pathologies (both heterosexual and homosexual were first use to identify disorders) and became popularized through the rise of medicine and psychology in the 18^th century. Their original purpose was not sociological but diagnostic. The rise of that diagnostic (and curative) aim directly coincides with the falling away of religion as a means of controlling gender relations through sexuality. I believe gender based sexual identities are where we turned to in order to continue that particular job in an increasingly secular world.
• Opposition to homosexual practice has historically been bound up with concern over gender relations. Firstly gay male practice is most strongly reviled on the basis that it treats higher status men as like-women in sex at least. This is as old as Leviticus in the Bible. In modern homophobia where heterosexual sex is itself sometimes understood via violent porn images, homosexuality is seen as men inviting rape by being willing to “take it like a woman”. In both cases the motivation for homophobia is maintaining the normal gender hierarchy and punishing the symbolic subjugation of men.
• Gay male relationships also contradict certain politically and economically prescribed male to male interactions. Men have historically been expected to co-operate or compete with each other without particularity, i.e. as a team with a common cause rather than independent horizontal allegiances. It is important for the military, police, and business as traditionally male dominated spheres that men don’t fall in love with a fellow soldier for example (or worse an enemy!). Such attachments can challenge vertical chains of authority. ( This wasn’t a problem when sex and romantic love were not joined at the hip but became one as we culturally connected the two.
• Lastly women’s gay relationships are opposed on the basis that they allow women to replace their emotional dependence on men. This is evident in the problematising of women’s “special” friendships as proto-lesbian whether at a young age or older age in early psychological literature. (Female Homosexuality: A Psychodynamic Study of Lesbianism, Frank Caprio, M.D., 1954 ) There may be no sex but the emotional allegiance to other women is opposed just as vehemently. The “problem” of lesbianism has consistently been framed as a fear of men and male authority. The “cure” is to switch that fear for a love for the same.
• The function of gender based sexualities has been to contain homosexual behaviour by attributing it to a personality type (originally a disorder) which is then inescapably inclined to continue that behaviour. When the behaviour is criminal that’s a powerful disincentive to dally in it.  This containment has reduced people’s reporting of same-sex attraction and may have reduced same-sex sexual behaviour. I believe that was their purpose.

From this I conclude that gender based sexualities began as a continuing means of restraining behaviour that didn’t support how gender was needed to organize society. Put simply our sexual identifications are hangovers from the needs of patriarchy.

However did you feel while reading the above points that they are somewhat out-dated? I agree. In what gets called late-stage capitalist, symbolic capitalist, post-modern or consumer culture the above points are not as relevant as they were under early capitalism. For one thing we aren’t being organized by society into mom and pop nuclear families. As consumers and as self-employed contractors instead of the nostalgic “working family” we are encouraged to be both absolute individuals and yet interchangeable with each other. Gender as a broad category to belong to is arguably less important in our economy.

The social dimensions of this are important. There is (though not without opposition) a growing culture of non-hierarchical heterosexual relationships. Men aren’t presumed to be on top of women in the bedroom. Hence gay male couples aren’t presumed to include one man acting as a symbolic victim/woman. Men also aren’t prohibited from particular emotional attachments with each other. The buddy film (eg. Lethal Weapon) and Snag culture put paid to that. And subsequently gay men are able to serve in many more armies than they recently were. We don’t want women making babies instead of careers necessarily so there’s no need to be (as) concerned about their emotional independence from men. Most importantly we have officially stopped using gender based sexualities as mental illness categories since the 1970’s. Gender based sexualities may have genuinely evolved into something other than control mechanisms.

Furthermore I am not convinced the right view is that gender based sexuality is entirely constructed and imposed from outside us. There are people you meet who are straight and who you think could never be anything other than straight. There are others who are not straight absolutely and deeply. Some of the horrific treatments people have endured to change their sexuality from lesbian or gay to heterosexual are heartbreaking. Sometimes people volunteer for these treatments. The ineffectiveness of their will and ultimately of torture to change themselves suggest that a gender based sexuality for them is far stronger than mere socialization would permit.

For a great many people it does seem that all the elements – the distinctiveness of sexual attraction, the meaningfulness of a gender based pattern to that attraction, and the unchangeable nature of that pattern are very powerful realities. It’s not impossible that this is a consequence of extreme socialization however that doesn’t feel right. If some people are exceptionally able to be socialized (and that’s why they have a clear gender-based sexuality) how could any of those people be lesbian or gay? There are hardly social rewards (outside of small subcultures) for those sexualities. It really seems we have a language here that despite its short history is telling some peoples deep truth in a way we haven’t expressed before.

Lastly in contradiction of their original aim gender based sexualities have been taken up as sites from which to challenge violence done to people for experiencing same-sex attraction. What previously justified electro-shock therapy, chemical castration and worse is now used to prevent those treatments. In fact without gender based sexualities it seems hard to imagine how rights for gay people could have been articulated. This has even included the reclamation of derogatory terms. The original "negative" – that sexuality is a condition beyond conscious control – has become the basis for government action to support people experiencing same-sex attraction.

“Heterosexuals” have also used the concept of their own innate sexuality as a way of articulating needs and wants. People in sexless heterosexual marriages can say how their lives are impoverished with the language gender based sexualities give them. Women’s sexual desire is certainly much more acknowledged than in the past whether as lesbian, bisexual or heterosexual. Arranged marriages are increasingly viewed as unjust for one thing. A sexuality is seen as something we are all entitled to express. Without the concept of an innate sexuality could we have empowered such choices as we have?

Sexual identification is something that goes on in our society. We cop it and we do it. Only recently it began as a tool to aid patriarchy but it has evolved even more recently into something else and it is still evolving. In my next piece on this topic I want to play around with it further and see how we can continue making something of our own out of it.

It’ll be fun.

The Good Bits

First day on the job and I could have expected this. My supervisor saw the opportunity to retell the tales every other employee knew by heart. 

“History is fascinating,” he moaned in an affected voice, “You’ll never be bored.”

“That’s what they told me before I signed up. So I became a field officer, part of a team responsible for correctly dating the invention of the wheel. I was specifically responsible for 5238 BN [i]  to 5230 in Northern Africa.

“I should have paid more attention to the unsettled personality of my predecessor. I relieved him quickly and he didn’t mind being rushed on his way. Me, I was just excited to get started.”

The old guy spun on his heel like a dancer and looked straight at me, “Nothing happened. Not a thing for eight years. I took to drawing circles in the sand to see if they got the hint. I heard some woman got the prize eventually.”

“But she was eventually stripped of it after it came out she spent three years rolling round rocks down hills. Now we’ll never know.”

He turned around and resumed walking. I kept pace.

Over his shoulder he continued, “I learnt that actually history is dull, most of it at least. For every fight over a grand ideal there are a hundred thousand spats over what’s on the v.t.[ii] That’s why we came up with The Good Bits, history without all the nothing.”

He came to a door with an actual physical data entry device. Flipping through several keycards on a long chain he found the right one and swiped it in the dusty old reader. He didn’t have to explain The Good Bits to me. The Good Bits was just “everything worth knowing” as the slogan went.

“Your job was once to guard The Good Bits. Those were exciting days. All sorts of hackers and wackers would try and get into its files. It was usually people who wanted to insert histories that they thought were important. Sometimes it was people who thought we got something wrong. It was amazing. You’d go to bed and by morning everything worth knowing would be completely different. Monkeys on the moon. No monkeys on Mars. It was hilarious.”

His voice dropped low theatrically, “And dangerous. Not everyone restricted themselves to cyber attacks. Things got physical. There were bombs.”

In a lighter tone he said “So we instituted The Good Bits version two. Your job is a lot different. You just police glitches in the system now. Meanwhile in order to access The Good Bits people have to log on. When they log on we match The Good Bits to their particular affiliations and inclinations. Everyone sees the history the want to see. There are no conflicts.”

“You see it was never about the truth so much. It was much more about the kids. People just didn’t want kids learning things they didn’t think was good for them. The truce is that everybody gets to decide what’s best for their own kids but leaves the other kids alone. So far it’s holding.”

The way he put it I felt very important. I had thought of it as a nothing job, just a way to pay for my body transplant, but now it felt like I was preventing World War two or something. The title wasn’t bad either.

I wired myself in for my first day as Head Librarian.

---

[i] In an attempt to make history more accessible for young people the notation BN for “Before the Net” was adopted in, about 60 BN. Younger readers may only be familiar with the BV, BG or BO notations introduced for similar reasons more recently.

[ii] V.T. or Virtual television was an anachronism even in my own time. We just called it V.

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The folly of appraising Christianity.

We can't even know if egg on pizza is a good thing.

Although I thought I was being very clear in my last post (and the first of a series) “Why are Christians such a bloodthirsty lot?” It seems I wasn’t clear enough. Or perhaps there is just no walking through a food fight and keeping my shirt clean. So in response to a few conversations I’ve had since the last post I thought I’d write this quick note.

To be absolutely clear I think appraising Christianity as overall “good” or “bad” is stupid. I think when people say we need to be grateful for Christianity as a historical benefactor they are being stupid. I think when people say that Christianity has made the world a terrible place they are being stupid. There are several reasons why.

Firstly it’s like asking whether writing is good or bad. Yet I am in the middle of writing a series of posts. Although they haven’t been written yet, this series relies on all writing before it to get written so it is part of the current potential of writing. As does the poem you could knock out this evening. Who can say now if that will be a good or bad thing? Similarly Christianity is a living thing. You can attempt to put it in the scales and weigh it but you’ll be missing the new growth of the emerging churches and neo-calvinism for a start. We are humans and our history doesn’t fit in a Petri dish. The Petri dish fits in our history.

If you don’t care for that objection because you like, and think history is, looking at “things” (gunpowder, homosexuality, cheesemaking, ghoststories, Christianity) pinned to a board then I have others.

Christianity in the third century exploded in outrage against what had preceded it, including the persecution of Christians. In particular when Christianity destroyed the library of Alexandria it was largely an illiterate slave movement whose leaders had only just shoved the pagans out of government. For all the sorrow about what Christianity cost us in that act have we forgotten that there was little “us” between the master and the slave? I’m both a lover of knowledge and a big ass lefty. The lover of knowledge mourns the ending of Egyptian religion in the Christian era and the severing of that link to the past. The big ass lefty asks whether anyone waiting to be sacrificed to the crocodile god should have been expected to give a shit.

The big ass lefty in me asserts that it is important to look at history from the perspective of choices made by people in recognition of their equal worth. Too often we expect the same classes of society (the poor, women etc) to bear the costs of the greater good. Maybe societies’ overall stability is threatened by women wanting to explore their leadership potential. If so, tough. Calling it good or bad as if it is ever reasonable to ask women to shut up for society’s overall benefit is not something I’m prepared to do. Similarly we have to ask ourselves whether Christianity wasn’t forced to have a violent birth or none at all by the Roman Empires own abandonment of its’ pluralism (persecuting Christians and Jews from 64AD to the roughly 300AD with equal periods of tolerance). In such a situation when the oppressed of that society choose what’s advantageous for them I am reluctant to judge them for its broader cost.

That said mobs do terrible things and from mid 300AD Christianity began what can only be called a reign of terror that would have seemed without end to those who endured it. What began as a movement for the oppressed became their cruelest master. To me, even as a non-Christian the brutality of the crusades or the macabre works of the Spanish Inquisition are deeply inconsistent with the Gospel narratives. That they were able to be based on those narratives is a conundrum worth answering. We should be very interested in not repeating those theological conclusions.

Furthermore Christianity once in power proceeded to burn all its local competitors. In a matter of centuries it became punishable by death across the Holy Roman Empire to profess a belief other than orthodox Christianity. Knowledge that wasn’t Christian was largely destroyed even if it wasn’t about theology. Then slowly, painfully, in fits and starts (ask Galileo), that knowledge is either rediscovered or it reenters pockets of relative free society (like Renaissance Venice) from outside Christendom.

Christianity does end up delivering us all sorts of amazing benefits. But would the pagan world have taken so long to abolish slavery, allow women to inherit, universalize education or produce the rights of the refugee (and then ignore them)? Or would we be there and more? Or would we never get there? We can’t say.

It’s like if IBM got rid of Apple Macintosh (and Amiga and Commodore 64) in the early eighties. Then it crushed Microsoft and Sony before they got off the ground. If IBM then delivers Wifi in 2090 should we be grateful? Should we consider IBM our great benefactor? Or could we reasonably wonder if we might have got there earlier without them? Fact is we’d never know.

Sure we can play the parlour game of “what if” regarding Christianity or for that matter any other historical event. What if Paul the Apostles boat sank? What if Constantine had never converted? We can certainly look at China where Christianity was quiet for so long or India or Australia to speculate on worlds without Christianity or a different one. However let’s be honest that we are just having a lark speculating wildly. There are too many variables to make this anything like proper scholarship.

Anyone who tries to tell you they have a definitive picture of how the Western world would look without Christianity is either a liar or an idiot. It’s the question of whether assassinating Adolf Hitlers grandfather as a kid would have averted World War two, in a different form. Maybe paganism would have had its own Spanish Inquisition. Maybe a world without Christianity would still have slaves or would be colonizing the stars by now. We can’t know. Whether Christianity has been overall “good” or “bad” is therefore impossibly difficult to say.

Writing, as the example given at the start of this piece, is an apt one. Christianity is actually well understood as a language. There are concepts it says well and others it struggles to express. There are ways it inclines debates and types of answers it predisposes us to. There is also a lot of freedom within it. At its core Christianity says we have all been created by one God and belong to that God. We have earned Gods punishment by sin (maybe Adam and Eves, maybe our own). Jesus as the foretold messiah of the Jewish faith (and maybe God or God/man) somehow redeems us and calls us to live in fellowship with each other (maybe just the other redeemed or maybe all the created).

I think on this level alone it is somewhat meaningful to discuss Christianity’s “goodness” and “badness”. We can cry out in frustration that this language misses or is clumsy with meanings we cherish. Or we can thrill that it captures what matters to us neatly or give us tools of expression we need. But let’s be honest as well. Let’s try not to confuse our own lack of imagination with the actual limits of the language.

With the language of Christianity I can write anti-child labour laws. I can also write that the smell of burning witch flesh is like an incence offering to God. I can write grafitti to bring down an Empire. I can write a soppy Christianized birthday card. I can write Highway to Heaven and Touched By An Angel. I can write Pride and Prejudice and Great Expectations. I can write something different next….

…or you might. That’s history too.