Crimes in the name of a god

In "Travels in Siberia", Ian Frazier describes finding Old Believers in a remote part of Russia. These are people who broke off from what they considered to be a corruption of the Orthodox Church more than 400 years ago. The major distinction visible to outsiders is that the Old Believers make the sign of the cross with just two fingers while the "new" practice added the thumb to touch the other two fingers.

Ian found that the anger and hatred that had begun all those centuries ago had been carefully preserved, lovingly handed down from parent to child. The Old Believers still know who is their enemy, even if their enemies have long forgotten them.

Of course there was much more to it than just fingers and thumbs. There always is: what may look to outsiders to be simply a ridiculous argument about very minor things actually almost always really involves power and money, lust, politics and pride. The fingers and anything else just helps you know where to direct your anger. The reason for that anger is surely found elsewhere.

Heretics and schisms, antipopes and Saints

The Catholic Church is full of similar splits. The Orthodox Church that the Old Believers left (or that left them, from their point of view) split off from the rest many centuries before - barely after Christianity had begun.

The history of the arguing that caused these splits and rejoining and more splits again is complex and torturous and would be highly amusing if it really were only about fingers or what day of the week to worship.

This creed's heretic might be the founder of another creed or might have earlier been highly respected and praised in the same group that now reviles him. A false Pope who was deposed and replaced might still be made into a Saint by another Pope. The twists and turns are truly fascinating.

The Catholics are hardly alone, however. Roger Williams was convicted by Massachusetts of sedition and religious heresy in October of 1635. Rather than face banishment, he high-tailed it into the woods and thereafter had a lot to do with settling Rhode Island. That the Indian population living there no doubt had settled it quite satisfactorily centuries earlier is a different story, of course.

Power and money

The "dangerous opinions" (that's how the General Court of Massachusetts phrased it) of Roger Williams included the idea of separation of Church and State. He felt that people should be free to practice whatever religious beliefs they might hold and that the State shouldn't enforce its particular beliefs on others. The Puritans, having left England for exactly those reasons, were remarkably unsympathetic.

They surely didn't care for his negative thoughts about the virtues of stealing land from Indians by fiat, either. Dangerous opinions, indeed.

But dangerous to what? Dangerous to established power, of course. Roger Williams leanings toward anabaptism may have caused some self-righteous harrumphing at some dinner tables, but the true problem was the threat to established power. Landowners, church collection plates, political influence over minds wielded from the pulpit - those are the things that always matter.

The history of religion is always interwoven with power. Kings became Popes, kings rebelled against popes, wealthy families provided bishops and priests. Those same families may have had other financial arrangements where the Church sheltered their wealth from taxation by the State - while taxing itself, of course. Schisms over doctrine almost always have a deeper and darker origin.

A rich subject area

I think it might be fun to look more closely at some of the religious power struggles. There are amusing flip-flops and impassioned arguments, but the root cause isn't always easy to determine. Making it even more difficult is that the victors in these squabbles have often felt no distaste at all for rewriting history to support their goals and that fired up true believers may have joined the fray with great enthusiasm while never understanding what was really happening behind the public face of moral outrage.

Perhaps I'll look into some of those another day.