An "Essential" Christian Doesn't Exist
An Academic Essay on the Problem of Essential Christianity
Introduction
The idea of “religion” is a thoroughly modern concept.[1] Scholars from various fields ranging from anthropology to sociology to psychology have sought to offer a coherent definition to describe the practices and beliefs of various groups of people as if these were all one cohesive thing: a so-called religion. Religion has been defined by a variety of people in a variety of ways, but generally refers to the practices and beliefs that relate to a group of peoples understanding of the supernatural, their purpose in the world, and their ultimate destiny. But even this definition falls short. Because there are many “religions” that reject a belief in the supernatural, some that would say there is no objective purpose to life, and many that believe there is any destiny beyond our current existence, yet still retain the label of “religion”.
In the nineteenth century, the category of “world religions” emerged[2] to group together hundreds of thousands of communities of people and their beliefs and practices into broad categories now known as “world religions”, suggesting a unified, global system of belief and practice. Most of the thinkers who created and endorsed this framework came from a European Christian perspective which saw “Christianity” as the true religion, and all the other major religions as false competitors with the “Christian religion”[3]. But whenever one does a cursory study of any of the “world religions”, one will quickly find that there is rarely a unifying and universal collection of common beliefs and practices among any of the “major religions” like Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Christianity.
In this paper, I will argue that a unified religion called “Christianity” has never existed- like most other world religions- and that the essentialist frame for studying religion in general and Christianity in particular is problematic, unhelpful, and ultimately inaccurate. I will then argue that the “world religion” frame should be done away with for Christianity, and the language should be replaced with an alternative label that accurately holds the broad diversity of background, belief, and practice within what have generally been called “Christian” communities. My goal is to help move the conversation about religion away from the concept of religion to allow for diverse and different “religious” practices to find a voice and flourish in our increasingly pluralistic world.
An Essentialist Approach to the Study of Religion
An essentialist approach to the study of Religion posits that “a “religion” exists independently of the actual human beings. That is, religion is seen as an objective entity.”[4] In other words, essentialists believe that there are series of common characteristics that make up what has been called “religion”, and that all such religions share those same traits in common. An essentialist approach may be a helpful tool in many fields of study, but when it comes to the idea of “religion”, it falls dreadfully short.
It seems impossible to define what the “essentials” are that make up a “religion”, versus what may simply be considered cultural expression, for instance. At the same time, our critique of essentialism must also guard against reinforcing the idea that “religion never existed before Westerners came and “invented” it."[5] Certainly there existed ways of talking about what has been called “religion” in various cultures and traditions long before Europeans developed the concept of religion. For example, the idea of “dīn” in Islam, a word which means “law”, “judgement”, and “custom” is one way that Muslim scholars have long thought about their own “religion”[6]. Similarly, terms such as “dharma”, “tao”, and “daēnā” are all similar concepts that describe the same reality that the word “religion” is seeking to, long before the concept of religion developed.
An essentialist approach to religion, then, never offers “neutral or objective delineations”[7], but instead offers definitions of religion that are often politically motivated, drawing lines between what constitutes a “religion”, and thus is valid, and that which does not and is then marginalized. In the modern United States, for instance, the definition of religion matters greatly because the U.S. Government offers tax benefits to religious organizations and religious leaders, governed by their own definition of religion which is summed up in the words of Chief Justice Hughes as “belief in a relation to God involving duties superior to those arising from any human relation.”[8] These ambiguous words seek to get to the essence of what a religion is, but excludes many major religions that do not believe in a God and those with a humanistic foundation. Instead, this definition of religion is rooted in a Western, Christian framework and is intended to favor and privilege Christianity and religions like it, while making it difficult for indigenous religions and non-theistic religions to gain recognition by the U.S. Government. This is just one practical example of why an essentialist approach to religion is problematic- while there must be some way to talk about that which we call “religion”, providing a rigid essentialist definition is sure to exclude many people and practices and perpetuate (most often) Christian hegemony.
Defining Essential Christianity
But even the idea of “Christian hegemony” is problematic, because of the essentialism implicit in the phrase. Increasingly, scholars are suggesting that there has never existed a singular, unified religion called “Christianity”. Instead, there have always been a wide array of communities, beliefs, and practices that fall broadly under the “Christian” genus, but when compared to one another, share very little in common. When looking at the second century, immediately following the age of Jesus and the Apostles, it becomes very clear that what constituted Christian identity was ambiguous at best. As Litwa notes, “early Christianity has been redescribed as a pluralist movement, featuring several different kinds of Christians, bound together in fairly porous groups.”[9] Biblical scholar Bart Ehrman echoes this claim, noting “Christianity during the first three centuries of the Common Era was remarkably diverse.”[10]
This view stands in stark contrast to the essentialist view of Christianity that is perpetuated by “orthodox” Christian communities, who claim that “from the earliest days of the Christian movement, Christian identity was maintained and measured—liturgically, ethically and doctrinally—by the reception and transmission of the deposit of faith.”[11] Undergirding this statement is a belief that there was some original, clearly outline system of belief and practice transmitted from Jesus and the Apostles that has been guarded and passed down accurately and without change to the modern day. Such claims can be seen in the Roman Catholic doctrine of Apostolic Succession[12] and in the modern evangelical fight for neo-orthodoxy.[13]
All these claims are rooted in what I am calling “Christian Essentialism”, the idea that there is some coherent original version of the Christian religion that all people who claim the title “Christian” are seeking to align with and practice. While this belief is widespread among mainstream Christian churches today, there is virtually no historical foundation to this belief at all. The claim, like many essentialist claims, it seems rooted instead in the desire to privilege a certain kind of Christian faith and to marginalize all others as a means of consolidating power and influence. Yet within Christianity, all the historical evidence points to the existence of not one unified religion but a multitude of “Christianties” since the earlies days of our faith- and this historical fact poses a significant challenge to the constructions of an essential Christianity.
Uncovering Christianities
It has been noted that there were at least eighty different groups that were labeled “heretical” by the proto-orthodox Christians in the first century of the Christian faith[14]- though there were likely many more. This speaks to the wide array of religious diversity that existed in second century in general, and the varieties of difference in belief and practice of the earliest followers of Jesus. For the sake of this paper, I want to explore just two versions of “Christianity” that existed in the first and second century that look dramatically different than the proto-orthodox version of the faith that eventually won the debate to be considered true “Christianity”, demonstrating the inherent flaw in an essentialist approach to Christian faith.
The first are the Nicolaitans, a group active in Asia Minor that were thought to be led by Nicolaus, an early Christian leader, perhaps trained by the Apostles.[15] Nicolaus is acknowledged as the “gnostic forefather[16]”, who believed there was a separation between Jesus and God the Father, that the “Christ” left Jesus, and that engaging in civic cultural rituals was permissible for Christians.[17] Like most early Christian groups who were declared “heretics”, we have very little information about the Nicolaitans, and even this summary of their beliefs only comes from proto-orthodox sources writing to condemn them- so the accuracy of such statements is debatable. Irenaeus describes the Nicolaitans as sexually immoral, writing that they practice “unrestrained indulgence.”[18] Despite being written about by several early proto-orthodox writers and mentioned twice in Revelation (2:6 and 2:16), we know very little about this group of early Christians because of the way that the proto-orthodox thoroughly silenced and marginalized them.
The next group I want to explore are the Ebionites, who many scholars believe best represent the actual religious practice of Jesus and his family[19]- meaning that they were thoroughly Jewish. The Ebionites appear to have believed that Jesus’ death on the cross put an end to animal sacrifices, and thus were vegetarian.[20] They also believed that Jesus was “begotten of God the father, but [was] created like of the archangels, being greater than they”[21], and denied a virgin birth.[22] For the Ebionites, Jesus was a Jewish man, who was appointed the Jewish Messiah by the Jewish God.[23]It is also believed that this group practiced willful poverty[24], giving all of their income to help the poor among them. It is also believed that James, the brother of Jesus, was the leader of the Ebionites and indeed the successor of Jesus, leading the early church until the intervention of Gentile leader’s vis a vis Paul and Peter.[25] Ebionites had a much lower Christology, a more Jewish ritual practice, and a more radical commitment to the literal interpretation of Jesus’ teachings in the Gospels than the later proto-orthodox Christians do. However, by the mid-second century, the Ebionites are declared heretics by Irenaeus in his work Against Heresies, and “Jewish-Christianity” becomes thoroughly condemned in the new Christian canon through the writings of Paul and Acts. (Galatians 2:11-4 and Acts 15)
These are just two of what were likely hundreds of variations within early Christianity- and none of this is surprising. Similar extensive variations existed in first century Judaism[26], and exist in most other religious traditions. Expressions of Christian faith differed based on geography, cultural background, religious background, socio-economic status, philosophical leanings, political views, and the person who originally taught the Christian faith to a group of people. While there were, very early on, movements to consolidate and unify Christian faith into one set of proto-orthodox beliefs and practices, such an effort proved futile until imperial power was eventually wielded to do the job by force.[27] But even then, non-orthodox beliefs and practices continued and have continued to this very day in communities around the world.
It is hard to contend that Roman Catholicism in Mexico is the same religion as Pentecostal Christianity in Uganda. Quakerism in the American Northeast is simply not the same religion as Eastern Orthodoxy. The broad diversity of what makes up “Christianity” proves that no such singular religion exists, but a broad diversity of Christianities that have no real essential core other than an affinity for the person of Jesus Christ. And when we concede that a true Christianity does exist, and we allow a singular denomination or creed to define it, we are engaging in an act of colonization and marginalization- declaring that thousands of groups of Christians are not “true” Christians and demanding that they conform or be excluded- often with a threat of eternal damnation if they refuse to join orthodoxy. Such an essentialist definition of Christianity is as dangerous as it is inaccurate, and history bears witness to the dangers of allowing a singular Christianity to dominate the discourse.
Is There Room for “Strategic Essentialism”?
If no essentialist definition of religion exists, and no such thing as “Christianity” exists, what then are we to do? How do we speak about “religion”? How do we study the cultural beliefs and practices of various groups of people around the world? Should we merely concede that these labels- “Religion” and “Christian”- as unhelpful and move on?
Indian literary critic Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak critiqued essentialism for many of the same reasons that I have laid out in this paper- it is imprecise and often a force for colonization. However, Spivak also argued that there was a way to utilize essentialism strategically “to disrupt the discourse of hegemonic forces.”[28] Spivak argued that grouping people by a common identity- gender, ethnicity, sexuality, religion- can help unite diverse peoples together for social and political action. This is the foundation of “identity politics”, the ability to bring together diverse peoples united around a common identity to push for justice for people of that identity group. There is no doubt that this sort of strategic essentialism works- every major human rights movement in the United States has employed such a strategy.
In this sense, the broad identity of “Christian” can still have a profound usefulness. For instance, in the United States today, a large majority of those who identify as Evangelical Christians have become politically aligned with Donald Trump, an authoritarian candidate for President with a long history of dangerous rhetoric and actions that threaten women, communities of color, immigrants, and the queer community in America. This group, as diverse as they are in theology and practice, use their common identity to support a presidential candidate that they believe will promote their unjust values. And they have been profoundly successful in uniting underneath the banner of “Christian” and baptizing their bigotry under this essentialist label.
However, on the American Left, there has been a great deal of hesitancy to recreate a “Christian Left” that could likewise use this “strategic essentialism” to push back against the dangerous political and social ideology of the MAGA Republican movement. Even though it remains true that there is very little that unites even liberal, progressive, or mainline Christians when it comes to “religion”, there is a great deal of potential political power to be gained if an artificial unity is created as a political strategy. Using Spivaks “strategic essentialism” to identify a single common denominator, while still maintaining our profound diversity as a progressive, may be one of the only ways to combat the toxic, right-wing Christianity that threatens the stability of American democracy.
At the same time, when we move from political activism to the broad study of religions, it seems vital to maintain the pluralisms that exist in virtually every broad religious tradition and resist the urge to paint with too broad of a brush. The labels and concepts of “Religion” and “Christianity” may be helpful, generally, in broadly describing what we are studying, they are built upon a fiction that either one of those things exists apart from humans, who are endlessly complex.
Conclusion
As I have demonstrated, “Christianity” has never existed- the belief in a distinct, unified, global “religion” is nothing more than myth that has been perpetuated to preserve the power and privilege of large, so-called “Christian” denominations and religious institutions. From the very beginning of the early Christian movement, we have evidence of certain sects seeking to demonize and distance from other sects with different beliefs and practices, identifying them as “heretics”.[29] This was long before the concept of “religion” had properly developed, and yet we can see the seeds being planted that would one day give birth to an idea of a unified, “orthodox” Christianity that would one day form the foundation of for the idea of “religion” globally. Yet scholars now acknowledge that “early Christianity did not have an ‘essence’”[30], that there was virtually nothing that unified one so-called Christian community with another besides an affiliation with Jesus of Nazareth- though even that is disputed.
Just as the early Christian communities lacked a common essence, modern Christianity does too. Under the umbrella of the word “Christian” exist communities and belief systems that share virtually nothing in common- from fundamentalist Baptist churches to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, to Progressive Christianity, to Ethiopian Orthodox Churches, to Roman Catholic Churches, to Unity Churches- and within each of these categories, there are endless variations from community to community. While it is helpful to think of this variety of religious expression within a singular genus- a multitude of communities that have a common origin and founder- it is simply not precise to say that these are all a part of the single, same “religion.”
Beyond this practical critique of the idea of the “Christian Religion”, the colonial mechanisms that lie behind both the creation of “Christianity” and the concept of “Religion” requires deconstruction and rethinking. And because essentialist notions of religion are rooted in the fiction of a “world religion” called Christianity, an important question is raised- does “religion” exist at all? Many scholars of religion have attempted to revise their definition of religion to take into consideration the essentialist fictions that undergird the definition. For instance, Schaffalitzky de Muckadell has offered a new, immensely broad definition of religion as cognitive and practical elements being joined together in a common practice.[31] The “practical elements” must be “some actions, choices, and values associated with a system of beliefs and practices if it is to be considered religion” and the “cognitive elements” may “take different forms such as a combination of belief, faith, hope, or fear.”[32] In other words, ethically or spiritually motivated actions paired with beliefs, hopes, or fears that motivate them. That, according to Schaffalitzky de Muckadell, is religion.
On one hand, such a broad definition works well- certainly all versions of Christianities can fit into this definition, as well as agnostic, humanistic, polytheistic, and nontheistic religions. On the other hand, various kinds of games, sports, and hobbies can also fit into this definition of religion. While it certainly resists the hegemonic impulse to define all religions considering the mythic “Christianity”, it’s so broad as to be almost useless. And yet, I also agree that we need some way to speak about the diversity of cultural and spiritual practices that have emerged in virtually every culture since the dawn of consciousness- which is why, as imperfect as the concept of “religion” may be, it seems destined to remain.
This doesn’t, however, remove the responsibility of scholars of religion to name the ambiguities and complexities whenever this term is used, and to be continually challenged to expand the scope of how they understand and judge what is a “religion” beyond the traditional, European Christian lens. It is also imperative that scholars of religion and Christian theologians alike trouble the fiction of “Christianity”, which has been used to prop up religious institutions that have enacted great harm to people in every corner of the world, most of the time claiming the authority and mantle of the “one true Christian Church.” No such church exists. No such church has ever existed. And the acknowledgement of the broad diversity of Christianities throughout history may give space for minority expressions of Christian faith to emerge and flourish in our modern world.
[1] Brent Nongbri, Beyond Religion: A History of a Modern Concept (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2015), 16.
[2] Ibid 124.
[3] Ibid 108.
[4] Jan Hjärpe, "Essentialism or an Anthropological Approach: The Role and Function of the Scientific Study of Religion in a Historical Perspective," Numen 62, no. 2-3 (March 2015): 309.
[5] Paul Hedges, "Colonialism, Postcolonialism, Orientalism, and Decolonization," in Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods for Studying Religiously Diverse Societies (California: University of California Press, 2021), 177.
[6] John L. Esposito, ed., "Din," in The Oxford Dictionary of Islam (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
[7] Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell, "On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (June 2014): 504.
[8] Ben Clements, "Defining Religion in the First Amendment: A Functional Approach," Cornell Law Review 74 (1989): 532.
[9] M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE, 1st ed. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 16.
[10] Bart D. Ehrman, ed., After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 3.
[11] W. David Buschart and Kent Eilers, Theology as Retrieval: Receiving the Past, Renewing the Church (Downers Grove: IVP Academic, 2015),15.
[12] Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, "Successione Apostolica" (1973), Vatican, accessed April 28, 2024, https://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_1973_successione-apostolica_en.html.
[13] See Thomas Oden, The Rebirth of Orthodoxy: Signs of New Life in Christianity (ICCS Press, 2015).
[14] Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 101.
[15] Ibid 113.
[16] Ibid 115.
[17] Ibid 115.
[18] Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses, 1.26.3.
[19] Keith Akers, Disciples: How Jewish Christianity Shaped Jesus and Shattered the Church (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2013) 135.
[20] Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 135.
[21] Bart D. Ehrman, ed., After the New Testament: A Reader in Early Christianity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998) 136.
[22] M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE, 1st ed. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 75.
[23] Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Christianities: The Battles for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 100.
[24] Ibid 99.
[25] Keith Akers, Disciples: How Jewish Christianity Shaped Jesus and Shattered the Church (Berkeley: Apocryphile Press, 2013) 137.
[26] Matthias Henze, Mind the Gap: How the Jewish Writings between the Old and New Testament Help Us Understand Jesus (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2017), 24.
[27] Wes Howard-Brook, Empire Baptized: How the Church Embraced What Jesus Rejected (Second-Fifth Centuries) (Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 2016) 5148. (Kindle)
[28] Paul Hedges, Understanding Religion: Theories and Methods of Studying Religiously Diverse Societies (California: University of California Press, 2021), 172.
[29] M. David Litwa, Found Christianities: Remaking the World of the Second Century CE, 1st ed. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2022), 2.
[30] Ibid 7.
[31] Caroline Schaffalitzky de Muckadell, "On Essentialism and Real Definitions of Religion," Journal of the American Academy of Religion 82, no. 2 (June 2014): 510.
[32] Ibid 508.
Thanks for sharing this with me, Brandan. It's a very thoughtful piece that will help many people better understand the theologically liberal perspective. Many questions arise for me. I'm not clear why modern "concepts of religion" were so important for the purpose of this article. Seems like unnecessary anachronism. Regarding modern Christianity, as the great historian Jaroslav Pelikan points out, Nicaea 381 continues to unite all the diverse Christian groups you listed (except LDS and Unitarian of course). You're right that there are endless variations across the 2.6 billion confessional Christians globally today of course, of which the average Christian is not a Western, white, English-speaker but likely a 20-something black or brown female with a passion for Jesus, empowered by the Spirit, to love her indigenous culture well. And that kind of Christianity is spreading the fastest in the countries Western colonization never really hit, i.e. Iran and China. Many other questions abound as well. Peace to you, friend.
I wonder if essentialist Christianity stems from an hierarchical understanding of public life, one that privileges individualism, civilization and empire over community. I think about pre-contact indigenous peoples who never separated “religion” from what we’d call civic life and who never went to war over “religion.” Steven Charleston describes Native American Christian theology as community based: “Truth is played out in the democratic spiritual dialogue of the community. . . . they may be core truths of a spiritual nature, but they do not exist independent of the interpretive process that constantly flows over them, that refines, polishes, and re-presents them to succeeding generations. Each speaker of a sacred truth, like that truth itself, must stand within the active presence of the community. There are no disembodied messages from on high, only intimate messages from within.” (“Theory—Articulating a Native American Theological Theory” in Coming Full Circle: Constructing Native Christian Theology, 7.) What you call essentialist Christianity seems dualistic compared to Charleston’s triadic understanding, which emphasizes the need for an interpretant. Thanks for giving me new ways of thinking about these matters.