Читать книгу The Needletoe Letters - Robert M. Price - Страница 6

My dear Wiltwing,

So your boy’s new brethren have broken the news: rejoice in his salvation as he may, there comes a time to pay the piper. He must reckon with his duty to “witness” to his faith, or, in other words, to go out recruiting. One must confess that this device is not of our design. It was the mortals themselves who came up with it, gluttons for self-imposed punishment as they are, only a few centuries ago. As you know, or I hope you do, back in the fourteenth century the Black Plague was raging across Europe, decimating the population. That was a fat time for us! Not to be sadistic, of course. It was not the poor things’ pain that nourished us but rather the desperate devotions it caused them to send our way. That is what we thrive upon. It was a fateful day when it first occurred to one of the devout, as yet uninfected with the wretched blight, to assume, and to summon others to assume, the very posture of their Redeemer. Apparently his own scourging and crucifixion were deemed inadequate to the job, so these Flagellants, I believe they call them, went from town to town, hoisting crosses, asking others to nail them up, and at all events, flogging their flesh to sanctified ribbons, all in an attempt to atone for whatever sins they fancied had called down the Plague from a vengeful Deity. Too bad the festering rats, whose mercy they ought to have been seeking, remained indifferent to the spectacle.

No, your old uncle is not drifting, despite what some say when they think I cannot hear. This history lesson has everything to do with their “personal evangelism.” For you see, it is a new version of the same thing, a new manifestation of the same pious masochism. In earlier centuries, Christian commitment demanded much, but it did not entail each and every Christian taking upon himself what was first designed as the burden only of select evangelists and apostles. At most, the Christians of old were admonished to be ready to explain their allegiance to Christ when asked by curious and exasperated outsiders who imagined they had joined some dangerous cult. But your rank and file Christian believer never imagined it was his own personal duty to fulfill the final commission of the Redeemer to his chosen apostles! Imagine a man visiting a sick friend in the hospital only to be informed it is now his turn to perform the brain surgery!

All this, I say, was by no means our invention. It was an unexpected by-product of the Protestant printing press. Once the devout got the scriptures into their feverish little hands, they read every paragraph, no matter who was addressed in it, as if it were intended just for them. They read the Great Commission of Matthew for world evangelization, and they thought they themselves were receiving marching orders!

One supposes it to have been sheer luck that none of them read Jesus’ words to Judas, “Go thou and do likewise” in the same spirit, or there should have been mass hangings for Christ.

And who could have foreseen the boon thus bequeathed! “Witnessing” became one of the most important devices to propel the believers into a fervid existence aping the stories of the Bible and pretending they themselves were part of the narrative of the Acts. Feeling themselves to be on the front lines, those who took it seriously felt they were no longer mere spectators, and the quality of their religious zeal reached a new level from which it has never since fallen.

Oh, to be sure, even this comes at a cost, because none of them can make the adjustment easily. There is no one, no matter how devoted to his faith, who easily adjusts to behavior that will cause all his acquaintances to think him a fanatic and a kook. This is why we teach their clergy to threaten them, not with going to hell (we’ve already sold them the ticket out of there and cannot renege), but with bearing the responsibility if another goes there when a word from our Christian might have rescued him. Picture the poor fool, sitting in a bus seat or on an airplane, fretting that, if he does not somehow strike up a seemingly casual conversation, and then pretend to spontaneously turn it to religion so that he may witness, he will henceforth have his seatmate’s blood on his hands for eternity! It is not far from what the believer himself would easily recognize as paranoid delusion, as if the man next to him began to confide in him concerning the dangers posed the human race by flying saucers.

But it has to be done! Of course, it is good if the person targeted does actually convert to faith, embarking on a tasty course of zeal and piety of his own! The more the better, that’s for sure! I say so as a gourmet. But there is more! It is just as good if the witnessing target turns away unpersuaded. Why? Nothing else has quite the same effect of sealing off our protégés from the secular world, that world unappetizing to our kind. The more alienated the Christian becomes from his or her friends, relatives, and acquaintances (“Uh-oh! Here he comes!”), the more firmly ensconced he or she becomes in the Christian peer-group. The dynamics are the same for any member of any group whose creed places them on stage in a drama that is larger than life (in their imaginations), whether it is a Communist or a science fiction fan.

The more seriously your man can be led to take his responsibility to “personal evangelism,” the easier it will be to do, since the stares and snickers of “sinners” will bother him less and less. This is because he recounts his evangelistic forays to his Christian compatriots, he rises higher and higher in their esteem. Like a salesman with the highest commissions. Here is something new to be good at, and a new audience to impress. He will learn to care what fellow believers think of him more than what outsiders think until he develops an implicit contempt for the latter, and the Christian begins to think of himself as a happy member of a born-again Super Race.

More next time, old man. Right now I am late for a halo polishing and wing grooming.

Your affable uncle,

Needletoe