trevor j major

For skeptics like Bart Ehrman, the key to undermining the Christian faith is to undermine the Christian text. After all, faith “comes from hearing, and hearing through the word of Christ.”[1] But what if we are not really hearing the word of Christ? What if we are really hearing the word of power-hungry men who conspired to give us their particular spin on the person and nature of Jesus Christ?

Peter famously confessed that Jesus was “the Christ, the Son of the living God.”[2] Christians make that same confession today. In the greater context of the New Testament, we come to understand that Christ’s sonship is tied inextricably to His deity.[3] God the Father sent His Son into the world so that we could believe what Peter and the rest of the apostles believed.[4] But what, exactly, did Peter believe?

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Church bashing, pagan priestesses, and religious pluralism – Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon (1982) has it all. Offering yet another take on the Arthurian legend, Bradley’s fantasy has been praised for its feminist narrative and honored with its own miniseries on basic cable (2001).

The strongest women of Avalon – all devotees of the mother goddess – hold the destiny of the High King in their hands while fending off the dual threats of Saxon invasion and Christian conversion. The “official” version of the new religion gaining ground in Arthur’s world is cold, misogynistic, hypocritical, and meddlesome. Not all is gloom and doom, however. Bradley, in the voice of Morgaine, offers hope by uniting the two religions under one Gnostic banner. If Morgaine has her way, the most enlightened heirs of Camelot will understand that the Christian God and the Celtic goddess are male and female aspects of a single, nameless Divine. The good old days are behind us, she laments, but the goddess survives in the guise of Mary, mother of Jesus.

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There are a lot of myths about the Middle Ages. I suppose we have the Enlightenment humanists and the Victorian romantics to blame for most of those misconceptions. But the myth-making goes on.

The current impetus, as far as I can tell, is coming from two directions. On the one side we have Postmodern relativists who are embarrassed by the success of Western civilization. Support for Israel and two Gulf Wars are seen as painful reminders, if not rehearsals, of the old Crusades in which cross-wearing brutes attacked a more tolerant and more sophisticated Middle Eastern culture. Ridley Scott develops some of these themes on the big screen in his Kingdom of Heaven (2005).

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In various Star Trek series, the “Prime Directive” ordered a strict policy of noninterference in the cultures of developing planets. For Gene Roddenberry, the show’s creator, the plot device was aimed squarely at the perceived evils of Western civilization, including traditional Christian faith. Indeed, religion always provided a convenient exception to the Prime Directive. Principal characters, especially in the original series and in The Next Generation, were frequently called upon to debunk religious belief or quash its development.[1] For someone like Roddenberry, tolerance was the first and greatest command unless, of course, an inhabitant of the galaxy happened to believe in God.

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• Plugged In, Tuned Out