this post was submitted on 13 Apr 2025
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Saying that the Catholic Church is antithetical to the “message of Christ” is like saying Tolkien is antithetical to the messages of Frodo and Bilbo Baggins. The former is the closest thing to a primary source for your understanding of the latter. Christian doctrine is full of internal contradictions no matter how “originalist” one claims to be in reference to a particular revision of a particular translation of a curated selection of secondhand accounts of an original message.
It can be positive to the extent that people choose to see in those contradictions things that inspire them to act in service of humanity, and negative to the extent that people choose to see in it things that license them to act in their own self-interest at the expense of others.
I’m not aware of any modern self-identified Christian denominations that can show evidence of having existed continuously since before the Catholic Church, which is generally accepted to have originated in the 1st century CE.
I was raised in an American evangelical Protestant tradition (you probably know the one), so I’m familiar with the argument that (for example), the English King James Bible is the one true literal word of god that predates both King James, the English language, and the Catholic Church. I’m not here to tell you what your spiritual truth is, but as a Marxist with an evidence-based perspective rooted in historical materialism, I don’t find any of the retroactive claims of modern Protestants to be the “true” or “original” form of Christianity any more or less valid than Mormons deciding in the 1830s that they’re actually the original Christians and settled North America in 600 BCE.
I’m not trying to belittle whatever specific faith you hold or tradition you practice if the material result is that you’re doing good in the world. I just wanted to share an outside perspective that, in the context of a post predominantly about the ideological origins of the more antisocial flavors of Christianity, claims from Anglophones that amount to “everyone else got it wrong, and I know what Jesus really said” sound absolutely indistinguishable from every other form of modern Protestantism.
It’s true that I was making some demographic assumptions. I was unfamiliar with the oriental orthodox tradition; it seems like they have a reasonable claim to being of a roughly similar age give or take a few years. Given how comparatively small their population is as a proportion of global Christianity, it seems unlikely that the overwhelming majority of modern Christians base their understanding of what “Jesus’ message” was on these particular traditions rather than something derived from the more widespread Catholic, Eastern Orthodox, or Protestant traditions. Obviously someone raised in a specific tradition is going to have beliefs based in a specific canon regardless of how many other Christians acknowledge the same canon, but that’s sort of my point: any Muslim would claim to have an understanding of “Jesus’ message” that differs in a pretty considerable way to most Christians’ understanding (i.e., did he claim to be god). As far as I know, Jesus is not generally accepted to have written any surviving works directly outlining a definitive version of “his message”. All of the primary sources for what constitutes “Jesus’ message” are, to the best of my knowledge, purportedly second or thirdhand accounts at best, with significant discrepancies between them. One person’s deeply held conviction of what the message really is can differ considerably from another person’s understanding of it, and there doesn’t seem to be a legitimate material bases on which to empirically declare one more or less “correct” than another.
What I’m not doing is making a positive claim that the Catholic Church is inherently good, liberatory, or compatible with a post-revolutionary socialist state. Marxism-Leninism is fundamentally materialist and consequently atheistic. Every Abrahamic tradition I’m aware of would have some irreconcilable degree of contradiction with the Marxist conception of socialism in the long-term. It’s not the primary contradiction at present, which is why I don’t have an immediate strategic interest in convincing any believers that they’re wrong if they’re acting in service of the global proletariat and managing their own ideological contradictions for the time being. What I will say is that I’ve not seen evidence that Catholicism is qualitatively more incompatible with Marxism (or the aggregate average conception of Jesus’ teachings) than every other (mostly derivative) form of Christianity I’ve ever heard of. They are all ultimately incompatible for broadly similar reasons. Contradictions are present in all actually existing people, and I’m sure you can find examples of both revolutionary and reactionary actions from people across the spectrum of self-identified Christians, Muslims, etc.