One of the fascinating developments of the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries has been the proliferation of causes to which people have become attached, often fanatically; people, moreover, stretching from idealistic student protesters to elderly retired “cause-seekers” chaining themselves to military establishment railings. And as a long-term resident in that home of lost causes – Oxford – I know quite a few belonging to both groups.
Yet why are we, as a species, especially in the well-fed and leisured West, so compelled to be saving something or other? Of course, for centuries (and that still applies for vast numbers of people today, especially in the British Isles and the USA) what they were out to save were human souls for Christ. And curiously enough, I think Christianity became the original engine for this saving passion. Ever since the Great Commission in the Gospels, when Jesus sent out his disciples to preach the Good News of salvation to the nations, and the middle-class Hellenized rabbi St Paul took his life in his hands and began his great missionary journeys, the Christian-influenced world has been occupied in saving human souls. Saving them, one must hasten to add, for what is seen as the soul’s own benefit.
Irrespective of how one might view missionary activity, it must be emphasized that, far from taking something from a person, it sees itself as bestowing a priceless treasure upon those who will accept it. And no, it is not just about native people wearing Western clothes and singing “Jesus wants me for a sunbeam”, so that the wicked West can exploit their natural resources, as secular theory intones. It is about giving them a new dimension of being, joy, and salvation. With the translation of the Bible into the indigenous African languages, moreover, African and other peoples came to realize that, in Christ, their cultures possessed a dignity and a value that emphasized the universality of human worth. And no matter how much a sceptic may be dubious or overtly disapproving of such activities, what cannot be denied is that the motive behind Christian mission was, and remains, incredibly altruistic.
Before Christianity, however, saving total strangers and aliens did not seem to figure in the ancient world. The Jewish leaders in the Old Testament, while zealous about bringing Hebrew backsliders back into the Temple fold, were generally not motivated – with the exception of certain prophets, such as Jonah with his mission to Nineveh – to take the worship of Jehovah to the Egyptians, Babylonians, or Greeks. And nor did these peoples in their turn go out of their way to take the cults of Ra, Marduk, or Zeus to foreigners, for gods, on the whole, were seen as local and nationalistic, though having parallels or cognates in deities possessing similar characteristics in other faiths, as shown by writers such as Cicero in his De Natura Deorum (“On the Nature of the Gods”). As far as material or spiritual benefits were concerned, gods were perceived to be interested purely in their own people, and only had anything to do with foreigners when subject groups were forced to bow down to the victor’s gods in an act of submission.
Indeed, the only pre-Christian philosophical religion that I can think of which did evangelize in any way beyond its original group culture was, perhaps, Buddhism, after the sixth century BC, when its monks and missionaries moved out of India into Nepal, Tibet, China, and on to Japan. Buddhism’s vision, however, while sharing certain ideas on peace and charity, was fundamentally different from Christianity’s in its concepts of the nature of human personhood, the soul, and the afterlife. Buddhism, moreover, never really had a philosophy of the continuing physical and mathematical rationality of an external natural world, as did the Greeks, Romans, and Jews, and no real concern with the relationship between science and the divine.
So “saving” people, especially distant strangers and those quite outside one’s own sphere of natural family or group-culture concern, for reasons of pure altruism, is very much a legacy of the Christian heritage. And it is testimony to the sheer power and cultural pervasiveness of Christianity that even people who vociferously reject it, and may have received an entirely secular upbringing, still feel driven, from the noblest of motives, to “save” something. The profusion of secular charities mentioned above is a case in point. Then there are those millions of people in the West out to save the environment, the rain forest, the whales, the polar bears, or the “planet”; protesters, probably “un-churched”, devoting themselves to “saving” us from bankers, the oil and atomic energy corporations, or “fat cats” in general; and those who pursue Rousseau-inspired ideals of living simple lives in the countryside (complete, of course, with mobile phones, designer tents, and antibiotics) as a perceived way of reducing their “carbon footprint” and “saving” everyone from global warming and extinction. And, of course, this deep “saving” instinct also finds secular manifestation in many who proclaim themselves to be Christians.
This is indeed a staggering testimony to the power of Christianity, even in the most consciously secular environments. For what, one might argue, secularists with a passion for saving are doing is trying to turn themselves into saviours. So no matter where you stand on the idealism spectrum, it should be remembered that saviourship in all its forms is rooted in the teachings of Jesus Christ, and to deny this is to risk spinning yet another secular myth.