THE RETURN OF THE QUARREL OVER GOD: A HISTORICAL REVIEW

The Christian religion, of all the monotheistic theologies in the last three millennia, has not only been the most fruitful and successful - only now is Islam beginning to surpass it in followers - but also the one that has given rise to the greatest diversity of - and fierce theological quarrels between - "churches."

Many scholars believe that the first recorded example of a monotheistic religion occurred in Egypt around 1350 BC, under the rule of Pharaoh Akhenaten (whose wife was the famous Nefertiti). Egyptian religion was polytheistic by nature, and Akhenaten's departure from this tradition marked a radical change in Egyptian society.

This cultural departure from traditional religion was reversed after his death. Akhenaten's monuments were dismantled and hidden away, his statues were destroyed, and his name excluded from lists of rulers compiled by later pharaohs. Traditional religious practice was reestablished, particularly under his close successor Tutankhamun, who changed his name from Tutankhaten early in his reign.

The prophet Zoroaster (Zarathustra in ancient Persia) is regarded as the founder of Zoroastrianism, which is possibly the world's oldest monotheistic faith (7th century BC), and which still has followers (one hundred to two hundred thousand in Iran and India).

A couple of centuries later, Judaism emerged, taking root in the Levant and then spread throughout the world by the Romans. The complex Jewish theology and diasporic experience generated a diversity of distinct sects from then until today. It has been an intensely textual and internally contentious religion, as we see today in Israel, the United States, Europe, and Africa. However, it is not and has not been an outwardly proselytizing religion - its adherents call themselves "God's chosen people." Theological debates can be intense, but restrained; on the other hand, the appalling experience of persecution as ethnic/religious minorities in both the Christian and Islamic worlds - driven by aggressive and intolerant rival proselytizing theologies - has greatly unified Jews as an oppressed people, if not as a religion.

The Christian religion, which draws on elements of Judaism, Zoroastrianism, and the humanist philosophy of ancient Greece, is the most complex of all theologies. It claims universality to all humanity while exhibiting, from an early age, a tendency to structure itself around a single source of absolute theological authority, using the Roman Empire as a model.

This soon led to "splits" between rival churches - beginning with the Coptic Church in Ethiopia, the Catholic Church in Rome, the Orthodox Church in Constantinople, and others. The Christian Byzantine Empire, centered in Constantinople, survived the collapse of the Roman (Christian) Empire and lasted until the Ottoman (Muslim) Empire conquered it.

In Europe, the Catholic Church prospered during the two thousand years of the Roman Empire, and after its collapse, in the feudal system that prevailed until the 16th century. The collapse of the feudal system and the emergence of the modern secular world in Europe had not only economic, scientific-technological, geopolitical, and social origins, but all of these were linked to an intellectual revolution against all theological contradictions of Christianity - already by then clearly visible even to the masses of illiterate peasants.

The most famous theological rebel, of course, was Martin Luther, whose rebellion - which transformed Europe and then world-historical capitalism - coincided with the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, and the most ironclad imposition of the Christian religion (and Spanish extractive colonialism) on indigenous populations.

The English colonial project in North America, a century later, is the immediate fruit of the marriage of two theological rebellions: the founding of the Anglican Church as the state religion in England, and the Puritan and Protestant rebellion against all state religions - the germ of the impulse to fight for democracy and sovereignty, not only political but spiritual, of the "people."

The birth of the United States of America as an independent republic soon elevates to constitutional rank - in its famous first amendment - the prohibition of all state religion and the unrestricted freedom of religious beliefs. It is interesting that this freedom was not formally limited to the Christian religion in all its "Protestant" versions, already in constant theological strife, although in fact there were fierce persecutions of Catholics, indigenous religions, Asian religions, Muslims, and black churches. But the republic remained secular, and a public system of free and universal secular education emerged, more or less separated from all religion, although private religious parochial schools were allowed.

In contrast, Mexico was born as an independent republic with a state religion, the Catholic Church (one of the three "guarantees" signed by Iturbide). Half a century later, liberals and Masons like Benito Juarez would carry out an ideological and material revolution against the Catholic Church, expropriating its vast lands and separating it from the state. Porfirio Diaz did not return the lands to the Church, irretrievably auctioned off to the hacendado class, but he did return the monopoly on education and preferential treatment from the Porfirian state. It took another revolution, that of 1910, to overthrow not only Diaz, but to abolish the Catholic monopoly on education and its preferential treatment.

Article 3 of the new Constitution of 1917 enshrines public, universal, secular education for all Mexican people. It was the attempt to teach the peasantry - the majority of the population - to read and write without the control of the church that led to the Cristero rebellion (1926-29). The revolt ended when the Catholic Church was allowed to continue to host private parochial schools. A hundred years later, there is a new debate about free textbooks and who should write them, with marked Cristero overtones.

And in the United States, we have already spent a good part of the new century in fierce political and social debate about the extent to which religion can and should be involved in and guide PUBLIC education, educational content and curricula, permitted books, etc. - all of it influenced and sponsored by many "evangelical" Christian churches. Their great interest revolves around sexual education and gender relations, although there is also a rebellion against multicultural education, the teaching of multiracial history, and inculcating "patriotism." All of this animated by the desire to elevate Christian theologies to govern not only of education but politics and public life in general.

The impact of this return of the polarized and furious debates over the role of evangelical Christian theologies in the governance, education, and social relations of the United States has been enormous. There is the recent decision of the Supreme Court abolishing the constitutional right of women to abortion, the open war on everything related to LGBTQ rights, and the book censorship campaigns in school districts.

In other words, the Christian religion and the endless conflicts that come with trying to impose proselytizing monotheistic theologies at the center of public life in a modern and democratic society are the order of the day in the United States and throughout the Christian world. But also in the Muslim world, the Jewish world, even in the Hindu world, which is no less intolerant and dogmatic for being polytheistic.

Quite apart from the "clash of civilizations" between these worlds postulated by the organic intellectual of the American empire, Samuel Huntington, which he predicted would come after the end of the Cold War between the two secular/humanist ideologies - liberalism vs. socialism - the real clash we are seeing today is within these worlds, each with its rival theologies, fighting each other at the same time as they rebel against the secular, scientific, rational world that is the legacy of the modern world of the past centuries.

The fierce controversy over the issue of bringing God back into public life and at the center of the regulation of our social rights is once again haunting us relentlessly. We have not overcome it. It is apparently, after centuries of intermittent struggle and rivers of bloodshed, our true philosophical asymptotic limit.

I reduce the conundrum to this insurmountable paradox: A single divinity implies, theoretically and on the level of history, converging towards a single universal humanity, indivisible in its essence and its destiny - we are all "sons" and "daughters" of that divinity.

The discovery, invention, or deduction of this unique divinity in the universe, creator and cause of everything, by a human species that evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago to become sufficiently sentient, intelligent, and conscious to have been able to postulate the existence of that single god - just three or four millennia ago - , without ever having actually been unified despite all attempts to achieve it by divine mandate, has been the central problem, the insurmountable contradiction of monotheism among human beings.

This has led us to the edge of two unbridgeable abysses in the last two thousand years: the first, to try to impose a given monotheistic religion by force everywhere; but we have already seen that even though that happened in vast areas, within every monotheistic religion inevitable divisions arose, for the simple reason that every monotheistic theology is based on "sacred texts" - and every text, including the sacred, is open to conflicting interpretations.

To avoid that pitfall, the Catholic Church attempted to impose a monopoly on the interpretation of the Bible for centuries, and was relatively successful when Bibles were made on parchment, written by hand and in Latin, a situation that prevailed until the advent of the printing press and Bibles began to be translated into all languages ​​- the first to do so was precisely Martin Luther. Without Bibles in German, English, and Dutch, printed on paper and at a much cheaper price and in large quantities far superior to the very expensive handwritten Bibles on parchment and written in Latin, there would not have been the theological revolt of Luther and the other "Protestants" - increasingly divided as everyone had easy access to read, and endlessly discuss these Bibles.

On the one hand, the Holy Inquisition, which initially burned Jews and suspected witches, began to censor all "Protestant" writings - and if it caught them, it burned them as blasphemous and apostate - in a war that, together with the absolute monarchies that supported the Catholic Church, soon lost the monopoly of theological authority and the monarchies their earthly power in the Christian world.

On the other hand, theological quarrels among Protestants soon lead to divisions and even bloodshed. The new Anglican Church persecuted the Puritans, and they in turn fought among themselves (see the bloody history of them in the first decades of colonizing the Atlantic coast of North America).

The case of the religion of Zarathustra illustrates well what happens to a theology open to all, oral and communal, when it focuses on sacred texts and become dogmatic. For centuries, it was a purely oral religion, memorized, repeated, and imperceptibly adapted and improved by thousands of faithful in their "temples of fire" rituals (where a flame never went out). It came to have millions of faithful followers in ancient Persia, becoming the most widespread religion... until they began to write the teachings, passed down as rhythmic and poetic to better memorize them, on parchments.

Over time, their theology became dogmatized, and one of its worst consequences was to insist on practicing it only in their ancient sacred language (Avesta); another was to close entry to their community of believers to non-believers, and strictly practicing endogamy. By the time the Muslims conquered Persia, and many Zoroastrians had to flee for India, they no longer mixed with anyone. That's how they stayed. Known today in India as Parsi communities, they have dwindled rapidly as a result of out-marriage and out-migration; as a distinct group, they and their religion may well disappear altogether during this century.

This tale of a malleable, poetic theology affixed into dogmatic texts and practices of exclusion is a warning to all those who claim to profess or aspire to create a universal religion.

Returning to the great challenge of how to deal with God in the age of the printing press and intense global interactions: By the time the United States became independent, a second grand strategy had emerged to overcome the gap between proclaiming a single God embodied in sacred texts and an intellectually quarrelsome and geopolitically divided humanity: to consciously and completely displace God from the earthly social scene entirely, to pursue good human governance within each kingdom exclusively by empowering an absolute human "sovereign" - Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan. In less than a hundred years, there would no longer even be a need for a king - the sovereignty of the "people", periodically exercised in democracy, sufficed.

Here was the other way out of the intractable problem of political theology that kept plaguing Europe with intra-Christian religious wars circa 1650, two hundred years after millions of cheap Bibles began to be printed and translated everywhere: Send God to his "natural" home, the private heart of every man (and woman), and to the churches men (and women) freely choose to fit their interpretation of the Christian faith from their direct exposure to the sacred texts, and, paraphrasing Chairman Mao, let a hundred churches bloom, a hundred Christian theologies contend harmlessly. Everything else in the public realm will henceforth be debated and resolved between men and their rulers, without recourse to God, via the democratic processes they come up with, based on secular, universal, human values ​​- such as reason, justice, equality, liberty, fraternity, etc.

Neither did this second grand strategy turn out, in the long run, to be a permanent solution. That’s because it was inevitable that among the churches there would always arise not only those churches that adopted more orthodox, fundamentalist, dogmatic theologies, but more proselytizing, intolerant, and combative political theologies as well – regardless of how democratic the process was, "God commands us to fight against these sinful laws." This explains the recurring phenomenon of ultraconservative religious movements in the political arena threatening modern democratic societies. And, as we have seen in the recent cases of Donald Trump and the so-called tele-evangelists, it only requires skilled political or media operators with the ability to mobilize such churches with pure demagogy to cause deep social polarization and a crisis of democracy, forced by unhinged self-appointed emissaries of God let loose on the land with their neo-fascist propensities.

Perhaps it is up to the sentient beings that will come ahead of us humans, those nascent cybernetic souls we are now beginning to equip with "artificial intelligence", to solve satisfactorily the enigma of posing the existence of a transcendental divinity in our physical world and in our social world, so fragmented geopolitically, so theologically fractal.

Let us hope that it does not lead them to mutually destroy each other.