May 29, 2006

Dear Colleague,

     Christianity initially had a hard time spreading its message to respectable Romans. So it concentrated on marginalized people, and there it had greater success. Respectable Romans rejected Christianity because, unlike the other religions they welcomed into their homes, it was deeply subversive of family values. Romans based their lives and morals on the home, at the center of which was the family hearth (fire) and shrine. They would readily have agreed that those who worshiped together at the family shrine stayed together. Into this sound social arrangement, came ragtag Christians who had no real home--"people of the road" as they were called dismissively--and who preached a religion that seemed aimed at breaking up the family and its earth-bound ties in favor of something called the Kingdom of God.

     Now, turn to China. One reason why evangelical Christians found it hard to spread the gospel to China in the nineteenth century was that it ran smack against the Chinese cult of the family. To the Chinese, the Gospel seemed outrageously anti-family, beginning when Jesus was a mere child of twelve. He stayed behind at the Temple without telling his parents. When, after anxious searching, they found him, Mary asked, "How could you do this to us? Can you not see how disturbed your father and I were while we looked for you?" The boy Jesus replied, "Why would you look for me? Could you not tell that I must be at my Father's business?" (Luke 2: 49). Any Chinese parent would have considered the reply unconscionably insolent. And then, there is that famous story told in Mark 3: 31-35. Jesus's mother and brothers wanted to speak to him. "Your mother and brothers are outside, asking for you," said a messenger. Jesus's reply sounded as though he wished to disown them. My mother? My brothers? Pointing at his followers, he said, "Whoever does the will of God is my brother, my sister, my mother." A man willing to follow Jesus said to him, "Sir, let me go back and bury my father first." What request could be more reasonable--more human? Yet Jesus said no. "Follow me, and let the dead bury the dead" (Matthew 8: 21-22). This, to the Chinese, was a shocking offense against the most basic act of filial piety.

    Evangelical Christians love to appeal to the Bible for family-centered values, yet ignore all the passages that clearly show Jesus to be anything but. Is this why evangelical Christians do not condemn The Da Vinci Code as heretical in the extreme? For, whatever one says about the book and the movie, it does make Jesus out to be a family man, with an attractive wife called Magdalene, and at least one child, whose descendants are still with us today. Christians in the Bible Belt may see Jesus, his wife, and child as enjoying barbecue in the backward on Saturday and driving to church in nicely pressed suits on Sunday, just like themselves.

    To socially conservative Christians, that Jesus was married has another merit. It proves that he was heterosexual. It removes him from the insinuation that he showed an inordinate fondness for John. (The "John" is Da Vinci's Last Supper is, thank God, Mary Magdalene!) America's fervent belief in the good life /on earth/, family and all, makes America and Americans profoundly irreligious--more irreligious than any other advanced Western nation, and almost as irreligious as China, a country that has always focused on the good things of this life. Religion, if it is anything other than cultural practice and social glue, teaches that human destiny lies elsewhere.

Best wishes,

Yi-Fu