The brightest light casts the darkest shadow

Provocations from Samuel Loncar and Justin Murphy's conversation

David McKerracher of

Theory Underground

recently hosted a conversation between Samuel Loncar of the Becoming Human Project and Justin Murphy of OtherLife, an encounter which staged some of the key dilemmas one faces in attempting to take religion seriously in our contemporary context.

I was particularly provoked by the extended middle of the discussion which focused on Samuel Loncar’s contention that Christianity is anti-semitic (and that Murphy is therefore anti-semitic for holding Christian views). To this dialogue’s credit, I think the discussion of anti-semitism gets clarified in interesting ways in light of some comments near the back half of the discussion.

I do want to note at the outset that I think Murphy veers into anti-semitic territory at one point with his off the cuff theorizing that Jews perpetuate pre-Christian tribal dynamics, and thus “opt into” cycles of pagan tribal violence (ouch, no). However, the good news is that this conclusion is out of step with the dominant Christian consensus on religious toleration, and thus does not need to be accepted. It also seems to me like Murphy was thinking out loud here, so he may be corrigible on this point with further conversation.

Is Christianity anti-semitic?

Zooming out though, this claim that Christianity is anti-semitic has never made much sense to me, and it strikes me that Loncar advances it here with such vigor because it serves as his mechanism for disavowing a genuine encounter with Christianity — it provides him with his own personal escape hatch.

From what I’ve seen of Loncar and his work, he speaks at length about the importance and value of Christianity for understanding our contemporary spiritual situation as a species, but when he is pressed on whether he could ever believe or practice the Christian faith, he takes recourse to a string of invectives about how Christianity is anti-semitic in its very nature. Religion is all well and good for others, but he could never be a Christian. He loves Jews too much.

Despite Loncar’s torrent of words, this claim really does not hold water. Of course, don’t hear me saying that Christian haven’t oppressed Jews in the past (they absolutely have, and I’ll address this), but I’ve never seen anyone successfully trace this back to a theological claim made by Christianity.

I’m not a scholar of anti-semitism, so I’m open to listening and learning on this point, but please show me a passage in the New Testament which plainly justifies violence agains the Jewish people. How does a religion which worships a Jew and teaches radical neighbor love underwrite genocide? Even if Christians claim that the Jews are no longer “the people of God” (and the exegetical considerations here are complex), how could this doctrinal commitment provide a firm basis to actively oppress the Jewish people?

The only actual example Loncar musters to try to demonstrate Christianity’s anti-semitic beliefs is the historic teaching of the Catholic Church that Jews ought to convert to Christianity. But this is a strange argument. Presumably Christians believe that Christianity is true, so how is it unreasonable for them to call on everyone, including Jews, to convert to what they believe is the truth? If one accepted the logic of Loncar’s claim, wouldn’t one be able to accuse anyone who attempted to persuade them of another viewpoint as attempting to commit genocide against them and their group?

Instead of claiming that Christianity is anti-semitic, it seems plain from history that any appeals to Christianity to ground anti-semitic sentiments were opportunistic, cynical, reflexive, and easily disproven by even the most cursory reading of Scripture. Anti-semitism has persisted for millennia within particular cultural milieus, and those who hold anti-semitic beliefs will naturally twist their society’s dominant religious framework to justify their personal prejudices against the out-group of their choice. Anyone with a desire to do so can use any ideological frame they wish to underwrite their agenda. We all understand how this works, and we watch this dynamic play out on social media daily.

Loncar over plays his hand by bringing up the Holocaust repeatedly, worrying that allowing Christianity a voice in political decision-making in the 21st century runs the risk of giving the people who architected the Holocaust a seat at the table. But in what way are Christians responsible for the Holocaust? How does it make sense to blame Christianity for a program of social violence which was justified on the basis of an atheistic worldview and pagan vitalist commitments? In fact, it’s precisely the historically Protestant nation of the USA which welcomed fleeing Jews, ended the Holocaust, and today serves as the primary ally of the state of Israel, with evangelical Christians forming its most rabid support base.

The corruption of the best is the worst

There is an answer to this dilemma, but it’s not the one that Loncar assumes. Near the end of the discussion, we hear Justin Murphy propose a much better explanation for the data than Loncar’s theory that Christianity is anti-semitic — Christianity opened up the radical space of terror in which the Holocaust became possible because it inaugurated a new universal dimension of human freedom.

Murphy quotes Ivan Illich’s fascinating dictum that “the corruption of the best is the worst,” which he uses to explain why the appearance of the highest good of God’s salvation in Jesus Christ also heralds the arrival of a dark shadow, a terrible new possibility of false gospels and corrupted salvations which can now infiltrate our timeline. Illich claims that every good through its mere existence inexorably carries with it the possibility of profound evils born from the perversion of this good.

[For more on this, I recommend Illich’s essays “Gospel” and “Mysterium” in The Rivers North of the Future, as well as my piece Radioactive Love, which was born from my engagement with Illich’s essay.]

This is why Loncar’s myopic focus on European anti-semitism misses so much. After all, he fails to bring up the Soviet Union’s higher body count, or the Turkish genocide of the Armenians, or the Chinese genocide against the Uyghurs. The list could go on, and I don’t mention these as a cheap rhetorical trick — the data which Loncar leaves out reveals that whatever dynamic was at play in the Holocaust was not inherent to the truth of Christianity, but was rather a symptom of the massive shift in global human consciousness which emerged in the wake of Christianity’s radical ethical revolution.

Ivan Illich argues in “Gospel” that Christianity’s introduction of neighbor love which transgressed boundaries of tribe, blood, gender, and class brought into existence a new ethical possibility for human communities, but also simultaneously gave birth to the horror of attempting to mobilize this “love” at the level of political institutions and their process. Following this infinite ethical imperative to “love” all the way takes us to the brutal end of Sade’s masochistic violence — think the horrors of the Holocaust, the gulags, and the killing fields.

Murphy makes precisely this point that the encounter with the truth of Christianity now produces in many people and their societies a turning away to alternative gospels which attempt to institute heaven on earth through collective human effort. From the bloody French Revolution to the cruelty of the Shoah, the vision which underwrites these man-made horrors is a perverted gospel which promises salvation in the here and now by human hands.

Closing remarks

To close — I don’t think that Samuel Loncar advances a compelling argument that Christianity in and of itself is anti-semitic, even as I fully admit that many Christians have been anti-semitic. Rather, I think that Murphy, following Ivan Illich, provides a much better explanation for the amplifying scale of human violence of all kinds which has emerged in the wake of Christianity.

This principle that every good carries with it a correlative evil, and that the greater the good the more profound the evil will be, holds immense explanatory power when we bring it to an analysis of history— but it’s all predicated on the assumption that Christianity did actually introduce an unrivaled good into history. Whether that claims holds up under scrutiny, I leave to the reader.