Recently I informed a man that Christianity is not part of our ancestral heritage. "How is it not?" he asked. "What, do you think that the Bible took place in Europe? Jesus was an Englishman?" He was informed enough to say no; but he thought that our European ancestors had no religion before the introduction of Christianity.
There has never been a culture without religion. That includes the pre-Christian cultures of Europe.
Why have so many people in Europe and America been Christian for centuries, if Christianity was not the religion of our ancestors? There is a popular myth that non-Judeo-Christian peoples had no belief in an afterlife, and that they did not really believe in their gods. This ties in with the Christian notion that all men, deep down, have the truth of monotheism imprinted in their souls. Those who deny the existence of a single omnipotent God are either being rebellious, or their spiritual sight is darkened by sin.
All of these ideas contribute to the myth of the miraculous conversion of millions of Europeans who eagerly accepted Christianity. The truth is far different. Although there were some genuine conversions, Christianity chiefly spread through Europe in three ways:
1) Political expediency
2) Belief in the magical power of the new Christian God
3) Force
Clovis, the Merovingian king of the Franks, converted after a battle victory against the Alemanni. Having prayed both to his native Frankish Gods and to Christ, he saw his victory as proof of the Christian God's strength in battle. He accepted baptism, earning the support of the mighty Gaulish bishops who encouraged him to believe in Christianity's martial efficacy. Despite this, the native heathenry of the Franks was still practiced at court, sometimes openly, and Clovis did not pursue the matter with much vigor.
The Anglo-Saxons "converted" haphazardly. A petty king converted here, lapsed there, or like the East Anglian king Raedwald, simply worshiped the new God along with the Gods of his ancestors. Aethelberht, despite having been married to a Frankish Christian for twenty years, did not convert until missionaries arrived from Rome. Although he permitted missionary activity and pressured other kings to convert, he lacked the same concern for the conversion of his own household, and his own son remained pagan.
According to the Venerable Bede, king Edwin of Northumbria decided that his realm should embrace Christianity after the following exchange:
"...holding a council with the wise men, [Edwin] asked of every one in particular what he thought of the new doctrine and the new worship that was preached.
To which the chief of his priests, Coifi, immediately answered: "O king, consider what this is which is now preached to us; for verily I declare to you that the religion which we have hitherto professed has, as far as I can learn, no virtue in it. For none of your people has applied himself more diligently to the worship of our gods than I; and yet there are many who receive greater favors from you, and are more preferred than I, and who are more prosperous in all their undertakings. Now if the gods were good for anything, they would rather forward me who has been more careful to serve them. It follows, therefore, that if upon examination you find those new doctrines which are now preached to us better and more efficacious, we should immediately receive them without any delay' "
Another of the king's chief men, approving of Coifi's words and exhortations, presently added: " The present life man, O king, seems to me, in comparison with that time which is unknown to us, like to the swift flight of a sparow through the room wherein you sit at supper in winter amid your officers and ministers, with a good fire in the midst whilst the storms of rain and snow prevail abroad; the sparrow, I say, flying in at one door and immediately another, whilst he is within is safe from the wintry but after a short space of fair weather he immediately vanishes out of your sight into the dark winter from which he has emerged. So this life of man appears for a short space but of what went before or what is to follow we are ignorant. If, therefore, this new doctrine contains something more certain, it seems justly to deserve to be followed.'
This entire account is pure propaganda. We see a heathen priest eager to embrace the new faith as a means of worldly self-advancement, the one thing with which Christianity is not concerned.
Then we have a speech which conveys willingness to embrace Christianity if it teaches "something more certain" concerning the post-mortem fate of the soul.
The heathen Anglo Saxons already believed in an afterlife. By what possible logic, then, do the utterances of some stranger wandering into the kingdom carry the weight of "something more certain?"
Are we to suppose that the English just swallowed it wholesale when they were told that they must believe in the God worshiped by a people they had never set eyes on and whose tongue they did not understand? Did they mindlessly embrace the idea that the Gods of their forebears were at best a fiction, whom they must stop worshiping? That they must stop venerating their ancestors and the spirits of trees and wells?
Indeed! No sooner had the bishop Mellitus departed London for an archbishopric, the people there went back to the pagan faith of their forefathers, and London stayed heathen for years. After an outbreak of plague in the 660s, the East Saxons decided that they, too, were better off with the old Gods. As soon as the Danelaw was established, the heathenry of the Danes so reminded their new English neighbors of their own ancestral heathenry, that--surprise!--they once again forsook the foreign Christian God in favor of their own Gods.
I'm not one to insist that there are patterns where none exist, but considering that in the eleventh century it was found necessary to enact more laws against heathen practices, and that the clergy has continued to rail against paganism from that day to this--well, might I just tentatively suggest that our ancestors had more than just a casual belief in their Gods?
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