Christianity Went Wrong From The Start

Wednesday, 17 December 2025, 12:50 pm
Opinion: Martin LeFevre - Meditations

During another Christmas season of shop-till-you-drop schlock, of pretty lights and huge blow-up snowmen in neighbor’s yards, the brothers at New Clairvaux Abbey, who rise at 3 am for the first of their five communal prayers daily in a 12th century restored chapel, come to mind.

Before the pandemic I initiated dialogues at New Clairvaux, a 20-minute drive north of town. My intent was to have talks between the Trappist monks and interested people in the area. I didn’t find any interested people in this small city, but I was invited into the cloistered area of the monastery for talks with the brothers.

For this recovering Catholic, compelled to attend Mass six days a week as a child (five before parochial school, plus on Sunday), the six weeks of dialogue were eye-opening.

At first the monks, draped in their identical medieval robes of brown and white, looked all alike. That’s the intended effect -- to efface individualism in the eyes of the public, and enhance coherence in their community.

But after two sessions, their individual personalities began to emerge. For example, one was intellectual and erudite, another simple and quiet, while a third, who managed the vineyard, was gregarious, workmanlike, and, in a non-monastic setting, would be considered cool.

The last talk between this heterodox mystic and the most traditional of Catholic monks stands out. I began with a question. Do you feel that Jesus’ last words on the cross really were, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”

They all, including the abbot, said yes. To which I audaciously but without mischievous intent replied: Do you see what that means? It means that Jesus himself didn’t understand what went wrong.

Jesus’ male disciples, instead of acknowledging the failure of his mission to transform the human heart, inverted the cross (literally, in Peter’s case), and placed his life in the pagan context of sacrifice. “He was God made man,” the first Christians intoned, “who was meant from birth to die on the cross for our sins.”

That’s where Christianity went wrong, since if Jesus himself didn’t understand how his mission failed, how could lesser minds and spirits claim that it actually succeeded?

Unsurprisingly, the monks disagreed with such a heretical insight. But to their credit, they politely differed, and offered traditional interpretations, none of which held up to my mind. I didn’t press the issue.

I feel that Jesus’ greatness is not because he was “God becoming human” and sacrificing himself for our sins. It was in his astounding humanity, which people ever since have a hard time grasping. Though things went terribly wrong, Jesus didn’t turn his back on humanity. He also said on the cross, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do.”

What would Jesus himself say about the idea that he was “God becoming human?” I feel he would say it’s a grotesque blasphemy, intended to externalize him as a deity, and thereby remove our responsibility to transform ourselves as he insisted. Jesus incarnated Spirit, not embodied God.

It’s true that “our belief in the moral equality of all people places us downstream of the Christian tradition.” But we need to make a clear distinction between Jesus and Christianity. There is an overlap, but much less of one than Christians believe.

Indeed, Christians not only conflate Jesus with the Christian tradition, but Jesus the human being and Christ the Spirit. That’s generated enormous conflict, corruption and suffering over the centuries, including fueling innumerable wars, as well as devastating ecological destruction and grotesque economic disparity.

How did right-wing evangelicals “turn a figure of love into a figure of hate who blesses precisely the cruelties that he condemned?” Is Trumpism a Christian contradiction, or the culmination of Christianity in the west?

As another Christian commentator wrote, “The distinctive thing about this newly ascendant version of Christianity is that it meshes easily with the savage cruelty of the new political order.”

It’s essential to keep in mind that Jesus was a Jewish teacher, sage and prophet, not the initiator of the new religion of Christianity. His followers formed, organized and proselytized Christianity in the decades and centuries after they created a narrative that Jesus wouldn’t recognize for his death on the cross.

The term “Christian” wasn’t used until nearly a century after Jesus’ death. Peter, who the Catholic Church refers to as the first pope, was wracked with remorse after he denied Jesus three times (as Jesus predicted) the night of his arrest. Jesus didn’t appoint him the first pope, and his guilt is the actual cornerstone of Catholicism and Christianity.

Jesus’ disciples were flawed, ordinary men. Mary Magdalene, the only female disciple, was closest to Jesus and understood his teaching the best. She was the only one that was primus inter pares (first among equals) with Jesus.

It’s said that we can shed our Christian faith, but we retain its ethics. The dignity of the individual, human rights, and the primacy of reason enshrined by the Enlightenment are part of Christianity’s “making of the western mind.”

However Christians cannot claim that Christianity was has been the major influence of western civilization without also acknowledging that Christianity has been a major influence in the destructiveness of the west.

We need new insight into Jesus, insight that makes him understandable and accessible as an exemplary human being, not “God becoming human.” Not to revitalise Christianity, but to help in revitalising the spirit within us.

Martin LeFevre

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Martin LeFevre - Meditations

Scoop Contributor

Martin LeFevre is a contemplative and philosopher.

His sui generis “Meditations” explore spiritual, philosophical and political questions relating to the polycrisis facing humanity.

lefevremartin77@gmail