Vincent Kundukulam
‘Political religion’ has ever been an interesting topic for discussion in the intellectual circles. This is because the bond between politics and religion produces both positive and negative results in society. The political leaders like Mahatma Gandhi have used religious resources to build up unity among Indians and to win freedom from the British. But there are instances in which politicians and religious heads shoulder one another for their vested interests. In such cases, their bonding gives birth to separatism, violence, and war.
The co-habitation of religious and political agencies becomes problematic when they try to form an alternative society with an exclusive identity in a way detrimental to the life of other religions. The best examples are the nationalist parties in power in various countries where they use religious credentials for political gains and vice-versa. Christianity has subdued to such temptations during the Middle Ages. But the early Christianity does not attest such a story.
During the first five centuries, as Kathryn Tanner opines, Christians did not live in ghettos; they let themselves being influenced by those who lived around them. They did not replace the educational, economic, familial, and political organizations of the Roman Empire with their own or with supplementary bodies. Christians had special rites, but they never formed separate societies. They withdrew only from those practices which seemed to be intimately linked with pagan religious practices. They copied over good systems and practices from elsewhere, shaped them to their own needs and gave them Christian meaning. Christianity was functioning like reference point for its members providing directives of life.
In the Letter to Diognetus there is a striking testimony about the way of life of early Christians. Their insertion of the early Christians in the local culture was such that even an outsider could not distinguish them from the rest of population. They accepted the pagan names, which were even linked with the pagan gods. They did not live in separate regions, nor did they use any distinctive language. They lived with the Greeks in the barbarian cities wearing the same cloth and eating the same food. At the same time, they did not compromise their faith. For example, they adopted Roman customs in marriage without following the convention of sharing the matrimonial bed with others. They refused to exercise such customs for the fear of idolatry.
The above narrated interactive process of Christians with other religious cultures did not jeopardize their identity. This because they understood identity not in terms of isolation but as a matter of allegiance to certain standards or orientations. To them Christian-ness does not exclude or overrule all that is positive and creative in other communities. They believed they could not monopolize all the elements that make up human life. Therefore, even while they had special rituals like baptism and Eucharist, they did not refuse the non-Christian practices unless the latter contradicted the gospel. That is why we see Paul declining to forbid Christians to eat meat dedicated to idols and restrain from forcing the Gentile converts to be circumcised. Even the strong opposition among Christians to the mystery cults did not force them to abandon the water rituals in the Christian ceremonies.
However, Christians opposed all sorts of discrimination within the movement of Christ. There was no longer Jew and Greek, male and female or slave and free (Gal 3, 28; Eph. 2, 14-16) among them. The fact of having people from multiple origins, cultures and beliefs helped them to consider their life as a pilgrimage with others. They might have learned from experience that the unity of community cannot be kept by imposing unilaterally a fixed uniform code of practices but rather by prompting diverse forms of being Christian without however compromising the inner code of faith.
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