Decades of Christian Deconstruction: Understanding "JC Died for Your Sins"

If you grow up Christian and the religion is not a match for you, there is a good chance that you will spend decades of your life unmaking that which was constructed in you - so fibrous and complex are the thought clusters that make up the religion and so malleable was your mind when it encountered the faith. Indeed, as part of my lifelong project of Christian deconstruction, I've spent all of my cooking/cleaning/doing dishes & exercising time over the last several months listening to scholars of early Christianity and of the Hebrew Bible (the "Old Testament") as they critically analyze the formation of the religion and its founding texts. The work that is being done by scholars (both in the academy and without) in this field in recent decades is impressive and inspiring, as they take a multidisciplinary approach to the study of Christianity - relying not on theology but on the fields of history, archaeology, philosophy, philology and literary criticism to understand the religion.

As for many, the central stone forming the foundation of my Christian malaise is that seemingly eternally elusive concept of: "Christ died for your sins." Taken at face value (which is how a child or a desperate person so often takes things), how could you say no to that? It is, as they say, "the ultimate sacrifice." It is only in recent weeks that I have begun to understand the religious tradition out of which that apocryphal sacrifice arose, and it is the understanding of this background that is permitting me a dislodging of that central stone within me.

Blood sacrifice, of animals and sometimes of people, in order to appease a god or to feed a hungry god has been a religious practice of humans in Asia, Europe, Africa and the Americas going back at least 5000 years. It is a complex phenomenon, involving varied roots and motivations. In the Hebrew Bible, as in many sacred traditions, the deity is seen as a temperamental punisher, continuously exasperated with the shitty and sinful behavior of humans, and who ancient Jews felt required regular sacrifice at his central temple. More broadly, whether in the ancient Near East, India, ancient Greece or the Americas, one way to view rituals of blood sacrifice is to see them as a response to trauma. How to explain precarity, deprivation, extreme changes in weather, sieges due to warfare & natural disasters? One explanation is that they are expressions of the wrath of a god who is punishing us for our shitty and sinful behavior. Offering such a god a blood sacrifice is an attempt by humans to gain some agency in a realm within which they otherwise feel helpless.

The Second Temple in Jerusalem is destroyed in a war between the Romans in the Jews in A.D. 70. According to scholarly consensus, this precedes by a few years the writing of the first gospel, that of the anonymous "Mark." Options to animal sacrifice to Yahweh - long a complicated affair and now very difficult practice to pursue, lacking a central temple - were being considered throughout the Jewish faith. Jews of the Jesus movement, likely taking inspiration from both Hebrew Scriptures and from stories of dying and rising gods in neighboring religions, conceived of the idea of the final sacrifice: that of God's son, the sacrifice of both a human and a deity or a human deity. The sacrifice of both a God and a human at the same time is the ultimate sacrifice and one that would obviate any need for further blood sacrifice.

And so, this is where the somewhat puzzling, abstract and yet very coercive phrase, "Christ died for your sins" ultimately comes from. Understanding this background and understanding blood sacrifice as one response to the trauma of being alive as a human on Earth has demystified and defanged somewhat the grip that the iconic phrase has had up on me for lo these many decades. I believe none of it. I believe not in the wrathful Yahweh, nor in any of the stories about a guy named Jesus somehow being his son, getting sentenced to death by the Roman state and enduring this death as some kind of ultimate blood sacrifice obviating the need for any further blood sacrifice. I believe none of it. And yet. And yet, weakened though it may be, the psychological hold the story has on me remains. And that is not a good thing. It is debilitating and causes me, as it does so many, to feel inadequate and permanently stained.