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Nearing Christmas, I often wonder how Christianity has become so institutionalized that its founder, Jesus of Nazareth, is almost an afterthought while his popularizer, the Pope, is busier than ever. The originator (Jesus) and the popularizer (Pope) represent the same ideas of Christianity; but, more often than not, the institutionalized version is so compromised by the reality in which it must exist that the original form is hardly detectable in the popularized version.
Jesus, the original-revolutionary founder speaks his ideas and leaves the stage, but the later popularizers, like popes, must spread the ideas in a way acceptable to multitudes. The problem is that we cannot traverse from the original revolution to later popularization without compromise and corruption, often to a point unrecognizable by the founder.
Jesus was simple and his disciples were honest; but the pope’s institution today is highly personalized and politicized with factions within fighting for their own interests and powers. Jesus lived among his people and talked to them; our popes — in an institution surrounded by thick walls and armed guards, immersed in archaic titles and protocols, live like feudal kings. Human history is replete with examples of the founders’ purity severely tainted, even forgotten, by the process of institutionalization and the power-play of its keepers.
Take the example of the Declaration of Independence compromised into the Constitution of the United States. The Founders composed the Declaration purely as their ideals — such as in “all men are created equal” — conceived from their simple hearts. By the time the declared ideals were codified as the Constitution a decade later, the original ideals were pretty much muted into the demands of practicality as the Constitution had to be approved by practical men. Thomas Jefferson and his fellow writers could only declare their intentions of the heart. (Jefferson’s first draft even had a sweeping denunciation of slavery, which his colleagues vetoed as too radical). But the Constitution was a blueprint with which they had to actually build a real society in a real world.
The distance between Declaration and Constitution is about as wide as that between the founding generation and today’s largely corrupt compromisers and politicians, for whom every ideal is a deal first. New York City’s Jeffersonian mayor Zohran Mamdani must fight the housing oligarchs to lower their rents without quoting Jefferson’s declaration of equality, America’s first principle, now drowned in the sea of capitalism.
It’s inevitable that the road from revolutionaries to popularizers is paved with corruption. As Jesus would not recognize the Catholic Church today as the House of their Fathers, our Founders would not accept our contemporary generations as the rightful inheritors of their American ideals. Jefferson worried about George Washington going soft on the revolution’s radical republicanism; Hitler was unhappy that his victorious Nazi colleagues were forgetting about their radical national-socialist (Nazi) goals; Mao wanted to revive the sagging communists’ revolutionary spirit by turning the Red Guards loose on Chinese society. In every new revolutionary movement — Christianity, liberalism, national-socialism, communism — the original ideas are soon watered down, even abandoned, by their institutional administrators and citizens.
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The founders of any movements — spiritual, political, philosophical — uncompromising and pure at heart — need popularizers to bridge the distance between the epiphany of the movements and their repeats by habit. But as the time-space distance widens between the two — Jesus from Christianity, Jefferson from America — the original purity cannot escape the ensuing compromise and corruption. So Jesus sees his “churches” everywhere but the spirit that fills them is far removed (institutionalized) from his original commandment. In American politics today, it’s doubtful that Thomas Jefferson and his cohort would find any kinship with our democracy practiced in their name.
Some more contrasts are instructional: Henry David Thoreau, the purest and most demanding soul in New England, thought his fellow transcendentalist and popular speaker Ralph Waldo Emerson had become corrupted in popularity; disappointed with Emerson, Thoreau quit the group.
John Brown, the abolitionist, could not persuade Frederick Douglas, who was a popular celebrity-speaker in Boston, to join him in the armory attack; the attack failed and Brown was soon hanged; Frederick Douglas lived comfortably for three more decades while John Brown’s death inspired the Civil War.
Malcolm X was the uncompromising radical who would accept only pure-hearted whites as true brothers; but Martin Luther King Jr., the popular preacher, compromised with white society to be more acceptable; and today, white America shuns Malcolm X’s pure heart, MLK is showered with honors and celebrations, and quoting something from “Dr. King” is fashionable among liberals.
Popes, the vicars of Christ, could not even theatrically imitate Jesus; nor could modern American politicians or their voters imagine the Founders’ perfect union; nor could Emerson live like Thoreau; nor could Douglas die a martyr’s death like Brown; nor could MLK be true like Malcolm X. Beholden to their social institutions and realities, not to the original callings of the heart, popularizers can only pretend, not replicate, what they enact. To paraphrase Lord Acton: Popularity corrupts and institutionalized popularity corrupts more absolutely. Unsurprisingly, just now, Santa Claus and Christmas trees have overtaken Christ himself in importance.
How do we escape from this corruption trap? We must all become revolutionaries, 1776 style, and overthrow our present yoke: Rejecting “paganized-commercialized” Christmas is a start. We must save Christmas — and our own souls in the process — from the unremitting carnival straight from Sodom and Gomorrah that it has become.
Jesus would be the first to appreciate a simple but solemn prayer from our heart instead of extravagant gifts and loud parties concocted by our own money-changers in their den of thieves.
Jon Huer, retired professor and columnist for the Recorder, lives in Greenfield and writes for posterity.
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