The Needletoe Letters. Robert M. Price
them to rejoice in agape, a Greek word ostensibly denoting a special, transcendent kind of love. Humans may feel attraction to one another, romantic or erotic stimulation. That is called eros. They may be attracted to spend time together as comrades without romance, but simply as friends, and this they call philia, or brotherly love. We have taken an ancient synonym for either kind of love, the famous agape, and filled it with the denotation of a selfless dedication with no necessary emotional concomitant. We tell them that, as sinners, they were absolutely loathsome to God, a stench in his nostrils. He had no natural attraction to them, either eros or philia. But he determined to act on their behalf, sending his Son to redeem them anyway. By virtue of that redemption, he now regards them as being as loveable as his Son, even though in fact they are not. It is an act of faith (or pretense) on God’s part. Well, Wiltwing, the love they claim to feel for one another as members of their fellowship is this agape love. This is what they are proud of when one often hears them boasting how no two of them would have become friends in the first place if not for their common faith in Christ, their sharing of the Holy Spirit. It is Christ, and he only, who can bring together those who would surely otherwise ignore or even despise one another. Now they are something better, deeper, higher than mere friends. They are brothers and sisters in Christ. This is the line to pursue. Never let them suspect that what they call profound love is actually shallow—even fake. This will become clear as soon as one of them decides he no longer accepts the party line that provides their supposed solidarity: if one drops his or her faith, what reaction may he expect from his former “brothers and sisters”? You know well enough. The cold shoulder. Absent the one artificial thing they had lending them a paper unity, a unity based on common religious allegiance, not mutual affection and appreciation, the “bond of faith” dissolves like the mist it was, making it clear in retrospect that conformity had always been the price of (faked) affection.
You may think I am disparaging the illusory bonds of Christian fellowship to which believers cling. I am not! No, “the tie that binds their hearts in Christian love” is one of our most valuable resources, for it stokes those toasty feelings of solidarity against the sinful world that so nourish creatures like us. Thus it is worth every effort to keep the mortals firmly ensconced within these little bubble-worlds of faith. The pressure of faith and devotion is highest, strongest, when it must resist the crushing pressure of an imposing world (at least perceived as) hostile to it. We must encourage the believer to hold others (“sinners”) at arm’s length; otherwise our protégés might find themselves unduly influenced by outsiders, tempted to assimilate back into easy coexistence with “the world” and its values. It is not a slide into immorality that we dread. Rather, it is a lukewarm faith, a tepid zeal. Only strong feelings do us much good.
And if it is vital to keep our charge’s friendships within the circle of co-believers, it is doubly important to have him choose a mate from the same ranks. If we are not careful, our charges will find mates who do not share their faith, and then what do you think will happen? She may tolerate his faith without sharing it. They marry, and he soon feels self-conscious about engaging in religious behaviors his wife does not share. His faith becomes self-ashamed and lukewarm. No good for us. Or suppose your patient falls in love with a mate from a different faith community. Either spouse will likely switch to the other’s religion. If the conversion were a true one, full of enthusiasm, well, that’s no problem to us. Zeal is zeal. But how likely is that? You know as well as I do (and so do they, unless they are even more stupid than I blame them for), that no one who really cherishes a creed will be able to discard it like an out-of-fashion suit to replace it with a sharper-looking one. Such “faith” is so shallow as to do us no good in the first place.
Now I am far from retracting my opinion of a paragraph ago! The artificial “agape” bond between co-religionists is equally shallow, albeit in a different way. We want the believer (any of our believers, in any of our religions) to marry someone of common faith, and this for one simple reason. It is not so they may propagate their faith in the next generation. No, mere inherited faith tends to be taken for granted, too tepid a brew for our tastes. In fact, we would actually prefer the children to throw off the yoke of their parents’ faith and embrace another, since this “bold” act produces the convert’s zeal, precious to us, that is, to our stomachs.
No, the reason for marriages within the same faith is that it discourages critical thinking about that faith. If one begins to have doubts as to the faith he and his wife share in common, he cannot help but see it will threaten her as well. And then their marriage. He is just too close to her for her to disregard his changing his mind on such a fundamental question. I know what you are thinking, my boy: suppose the man dared speak his doubts aloud, and his wife fled his company. Would she not feel the resentment of the martyr? That would be good, yes, but the danger outweighs it. You see, the husband would in the same moment realize that if marriage no longer binds him to faith, nothing lesser can, and so he leaves us completely. We don’t want to risk that. Rather let him become so deeply invested in sharing a faith with his wife that it will bind them together, suppressing all doubts. You really should have learned all this from our Cupid class, but perhaps you went to the Infirmary with a migraine that day.
Your affectionate uncle,
Needletoe
IV
My dear Wiltwing,
So your boy’s new brethren have broken the news: rejoice in his salvation as he may, there comes a time to pay the piper. He must reckon with his duty to “witness” to his faith, or, in other words, to go out recruiting. One must confess that this device is not of our design. It was the mortals themselves who came up with it, gluttons for self-imposed punishment as they are, only a few centuries ago. As you know, or I hope you do, back in the fourteenth century the Black Plague was raging across Europe, decimating the population. That was a fat time for us! Not to be sadistic, of course. It was not the poor things’ pain that nourished us but rather the desperate devotions it caused them to send our way. That is what we thrive upon. It was a fateful day when it first occurred to one of the devout, as yet uninfected with the wretched blight, to assume, and to summon others to assume, the very posture of their Redeemer. Apparently his own scourging and crucifixion were deemed inadequate to the job, so these Flagellants, I believe they call them, went from town to town, hoisting crosses, asking others to nail them up, and at all events, flogging their flesh to sanctified ribbons, all in an attempt to atone for whatever sins they fancied had called down the Plague from a vengeful Deity. Too bad the festering rats, whose mercy they ought to have been seeking, remained indifferent to the spectacle.
No, your old uncle is not drifting, despite what some say when they think I cannot hear. This history lesson has everything to do with their “personal evangelism.” For you see, it is a new version of the same thing, a new manifestation of the same pious masochism. In earlier centuries, Christian commitment demanded much, but it did not entail each and every Christian taking upon himself what was first designed as the burden only of select evangelists and apostles. At most, the Christians of old were admonished to be ready to explain their allegiance to Christ when asked by curious and exasperated outsiders who imagined they had joined some dangerous cult. But your rank and file Christian believer never imagined it was his own personal duty to fulfill the final commission of the Redeemer to his chosen apostles! Imagine a man visiting a sick friend in the hospital only to be informed it is now his turn to perform the brain surgery!
All this, I say, was by no means our invention. It was an unexpected by-product of the Protestant printing press. Once the devout got the scriptures into their feverish little hands, they read every paragraph, no matter who was addressed in it, as if it were intended just for them. They read the Great Commission of Matthew for world evangelization, and they thought they themselves were receiving marching orders!
One supposes it to have been sheer luck that none of them read Jesus’ words to Judas, “Go thou and do likewise” in the same spirit, or there should have been mass hangings for Christ.
And who could have foreseen the boon thus bequeathed! “Witnessing” became one of the most important devices to propel the believers into a fervid existence aping the stories of the Bible and pretending they themselves were part of the narrative of the Acts. Feeling themselves to be on the front lines, those