Josh Hawley's Romance with Religion

A Grand Inquisitor Wannabe?

Wooden church, St. Mary's, Ga. Walker Evans/FSA, 1936.

I named my last car Pelagia. It was an inside joke. Pelagius was a fellow who lived a long time ago and didn't believe in original sin. This got him into some trouble with the thought police. 

I don't think about Pelagius every day, but it seems that Senator Josh Hawley may. I gather he doesn't like him (see this story in the Times). Apparently Hawley thinks that Americans derive their well-known tendency to think for themselves from Pelagius. It's true that, in addition to his ideas about original sin, Pelagius believed that free will involved making up your own mind. Hawley doesn't like that at all. 

Theologically, it strikes me that Hawley would have been quite at home in seventeenth-century Puritan Massachusetts. There the leaders told you what to think, and if you didn't like it you could go and found Rhode Island. 

(This is actually a more gentle treatment of heretics than was traditional. In 1600, the Italian heretic Giordano Bruno was burned at the stake in Rome.) 

I had thought, or at least hoped, that we had gotten away from some of the more extreme manifestations of religious fanaticism. Over the years I've made a sort of hobby out of poking around in the underside of church history, with an emphasis on the Crusades and the Inquisition. I've even written about it a bit. 

I won't hide my basic conclusion from you. Religious fanaticism is not, in my opinion, a good thing.

I could talk about the taking of Ma'arra on December 11, 1098, during the First Crusade. The Crusaders, who became pretty good at committing atrocities during the course of the Crusade, actually cooked and ate some of their defeated enemy. This is called cannibalism in polite society, or perhaps not mentioned at all. (See Abortion and the Bible.)

So many stories. One more. There was a village called Montaillou in the south of France, up in the foothills of the Pyrenees. It was crawling with heretics. The Inquisition had been trying to get them into the straight and narrow for many years. It didn't work. The villagers liked their heresy. (They believed in the independent existence of evil. This is known as the Manichean heresy.)

One day in 1308 the Inquisition, obviously fed up, had the adult and adolescent villagers rounded up and marched off to an infamous church prison in Carcassonne. 

Left behind were the children. They were alone, except for the animals.

I have a picture in my mind. A few small children, standing on a hill, a light breeze fluttering their hair on a cool, sunny day. They're watching their parents, far below them, walking away to jail.

If you can do this to children, you can do anything. (For more, see Where Have All the Grownups Gone?)

If I were Senator Hawley, I would rethink my commitment to religious fanaticism. It seems awfully hard to square with his oath to the Constitution. In the end, I think it's an either-or proposition. 

You're playing with dynamite, Josh. Stop.

Pelagius.

I found this picture of Pelagius through Wikimedia Commons. It's from a book called the Nuremberg Chronicle. This is a pretty special book. It was printed in 1493, which makes it an incunabulum - a book printed before 1500. There aren't a whole lot of them. Since Pelagius died more than 1,000 years before the book was published, I doubt that he actually looked much like this picture; in particular I think his clothes probably look a lot like what people in Nuremberg were wearing in 1493. 

See also Submerged Narratives, The Problem with Dystopia, Bannon and Co. Aren't Very Good at Being Evil.