Religion

After generations of treating the universe as mere matter to be bent to our will, it seemed inevitable that the future of humanity would be to merge with machines. Billionaires and tech utopians now predict a near future in which the human mind itself might be “downloaded” or transferred into a digital realm, allowing us to overcome death itself by slipping the bonds of our physical existence altogether. Modern-day prophets like Yuval Noah Harari proclaim that we have embarked on a second industrial revolution, though the product this time will not be machines or vehicles or powerful new weapons but human beings themselves. There’s a certain logic to this way of thinking.

What people tend to forget about Jesus Christ is that he killed children. As a five-year-old, Jesus was toddling through a village when a small boy ran past, knocking his shoulder. Taking it like any five-year-old would, Jesus shouted after him "you shall not go further on your way," at which point the boy fell down dead. Later, when the boy’s parents admonished Joseph and Mary for failing to raise their son properly, Jesus blinded them. Something to bear in mind next time you ask yourself: "What would Jesus do?" If this story is unfamiliar, that is because it doesn’t appear in any of the Bible’s traditional Gospels.

In 1831, while the slave rebel leader Nat Turner sat in jail awaiting trial in Southampton County, Virginia, he was visited by a local lawyer named Thomas Gray. Turner spoke at length to Gray, who subsequently published his record of their conversations. At one point Turner said he had been visited many years before by the spirit. “What do you mean by the spirit?” Gray asked. “The Spirit that spoke to the prophets in former days,” Turner replied. Gray was unmoved by Turner’s claims of divine inspiration and concluded that he was a “gloomy fanatic” moved to mass murder by religious delusions.

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, the immaculately Brylcreemed megastar of the golden age of Catholic television and radio evangelism in the United States, famously hated hearing the confessions of nuns. Doing so, Sheen is reported to have said, was “like being stoned to death with popcorn.” Despite this, Sheen — at one point broadcasting to over 30 million Americans — found himself hearing a lot of nuns’ confessions in his later career. He was reduced to this, alongside what was rather euphemistically referred to as his “international cassette tape ministry,” having fallen foul of the archbishop of New York, the doughty Cardinal Spellman.

In the summer of 1955, an unusual meeting took place. Billy Graham visited the writer and academic C.S. Lewis in Lewis’s rooms at Magdalene College, Cambridge. It was unusual because leading British academics typically avoided Southern Baptist revivalists. But rather than encountering a fussy, prim don, Graham found a kind, intelligent scholar who was very happy to spend the afternoon with him. Later, Graham admitted he was intimidated by Lewis, but the English professor quickly dispelled any anxiety, probably by offering Graham a cup of tea. Graham’s impact on American religious culture, for good or ill, is unquestioned, but it is difficult to imagine what that same culture would look like without the works of C.S. Lewis.