I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.
For poor on’ry people like you and like I…
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus ’twas in a cow’s stall,
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
And the promise of ages it then did recall.

– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), collected in “Songs of the Hill-Folk” (1934)

In fact, it was the Roman version of Christianity that came for to die, and it breaks my heart to say it. I have loved Christianity since I was a child! I had an experience of light when I was eight, and from that night on I refused to spend my Sunday mornings with singing and a box of crayons. After that, I wanted Reverend Turrell’s sermons, and I made sure my family never missed a Sunday. I was going to be a minister when I grew up. I majored in early Christian history in college, and it was only when I studied the First Council of Nicaea under dear Miss Corwin, a professor who looked to me back then to be old enough to have been in attendance, that I first began to question whether my beloved Christianity might actually not be the religion that Jesus began when He launched His disciples out into the world, saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:18-20).

Of course, I know much better now. From the moment the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye upon the young and lovely Way of Jesus and chose her as his own, and then he began to remove from her and destroy every version of the Lord’s Way except for the awful Jesus-died-for-our-sins idea that Constantine thought that he could use to further his absolute power and control, the fear-based Roman remnant that remained of Christianity was doomed to die at some point. The fact that you and I are here to witness its dying is a painful coincidence of history. Nothing more.  

Having lately come to see Constantine’s seizure of Jesus’s Way more from Jesus’s perspective might give us perhaps a different view of it. My Thomas tells me that at first, from the Lord’s perspective Constantine’s takeover of Jesus’s spiritual movement produced a flood of victims. Thomas took an earth-lifetime at the start of it so He could report back to Jesus about what was happening on the ground, and it was then that Thomas insists to me that he died on a cross after two days of singing. Of course, I still insist to him that his memory is faulty because you cannot sing on a cross. You can barely breathe!

My own  view of pre-Roman Christian history through the eyes of anti-Roman Miss Corwin was of a vibrant and diverse spiritual movement. And Miss Corwin was right! There were millions of burials in the catacombs in Rome, for example, in the first four centuries after the death of Jesus, and with Jesus generally pictured in the grave-art as clean-shaven and with a baby goat around His shoulders. And with not a single depiction of a cross to be found. The Way of Jesus as He Himself taught it was based entirely in love and forgiveness. In caring for the goats as well as the sheep. But Constantine could have used none of that in his plan for ancient-world domination

And history is written by its winners. I learned from other college professors that the Romans under Constantine and his successors had “organized” early Christian beliefs in a “helpful” way at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and at the six other first-millennium ecumenical councils, when in fact what they did was to destroy millions of the followers of Jesus so brutally that Jesus spent the next thousand years loving the followers of His Way and the victims of the various Inquisitions and Crusades back into spiritual health. At some point during those first few centuries of Christianity, my Thomas encountered an incarnation of me as a teenage boy when we died together in a Roman massacre of followers of The Way.
  

My Thomas and I have talked about the coming death of Christianity. He is, shall we say, frankly unsentimental about the religion that I once loved. He tells me that at first, Jesus and those around Him found it impossible to believe that this most extreme of all possible views of the crucifixion of Jesus could become the basis of a whole religion that would lay deep roots and last for so long! And Jesus was so preoccupied by love and concern for the victims who continued to pour into His afterlife rehabilitation gardens that He had little attention to spare. And so the centuries passed, until we have come now to what is apparently the natural demise of the religion that the Romans installed seventeen centuries ago in place of The Way of Jesus. 

So I have been writing along here, and come to the place in this post that seemed to require bullet points and something about how Covid hastened the decline of Christianity in recent years. But then those bullets would of course include a lot more than Covid. As I was busily assembling them, Thomas called to my mind a vision of my childhood church on the morning of my father’s funeral.

My father died more than thirty years ago. He was much older than my mother, and he was a deacon of my childhood church. His funeral service filled every pew. I had married a Catholic and converted by then, but I gave the message, wearing red because it was my father’s favorite color, and I recall that full and vibrant church on the morning of my father’s funeral. But when my mother followed him twenty years later, and of course still well before Covid, we had a graveside service. I doubt that there were more than twenty people in attendance, even though she had been a more important figure in that church than my father ever was.   

An article about “the catastrophic decline in religious faith and what to do about it” is perhaps worth reading. It ascribes the decline during those two decades largely to cultural issues, and reading it makes me think that the solutions this article prescribes would be like shoveling pebbles against the sea.

My Thomas tells us now that this recent dramatic decline in the religion that I loved is not only about the end of Christianity. He says that the era of humanmade gods is coming to an end for all the old religions. The time when having faith alone was sufficient is passing for humankind, which means that the era of all religions and religious dogmas is coming to an end. The age is dawning now when we want to know the truth, and nothing less will satisfy us! As Jesus said, “If you hold to My teaching, you are really My disciples; then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

Which was an odd way for Jesus to phrase it, when you pause and think about it. But Thomas says now that The Way of Jesus which has been delayed for seventeen hundred years is actually meant to be freedom from all religions. Religious dogmas and beliefs are a poor substitute for knowing the truth about reality. Mere faith and beliefs are very thin gruel! If faith alone is to be the standard, then you might be talked into believing anything, even if it turns out to be nonsense. But the Way of Jesus was never intended to be a religion in the first place! It was Constantine and the Romans who added the dogmas and made it into a religion. The Way of Jesus is meant to be a way of thinking and living so as to more rapidly transform yourself, and then to transform the whole material world and to bring God’s kingdom on earth. As above, so below. Jesus told us all of this perfectly clearly in the Gospels. And He intends now to reiterate it in His website.

So the human need for any religions at all is ending, as we come to understand the truth about our own eternal selves. The religions were about the gods that we invented to comfort ourselves when we were powerless against the great unknown. Those old religions had fear-based dogmas, which was what made them good instruments for mass control. And the dogmas that we made up were often crazy dogmas. Take, for example, the whimsical notion that God created one man and one woman in the Garden of Eden, and then arbitrarily God told them not to eat the fruit of one particular tree. So then of course they ate that fruit anyway, and thereby they estranged all of humankind from a whimsically angry God. Until in the fullness of time, in order to reconcile humankind again to Himself, that God sent His Only Begotten Son to die as the perfect sacrifice to Himself, so now God can forgive all the rest of us for Adam’s having eaten that apple. And if there is any loving parent to whom any of that makes any sense, then I cannot imagine that parent!

These were all human ideas, of course. Every religious dogma is a human idea. None of them has anything to do with God.

And there is indeed an all-powerful God. But the genuine God at the highest aspect of consciousness will not be framed or defined by any human-made religious dogma. The genuine God will not submit to any human-made religion at all, and nor will God submit to any human idea of how God must be worshiped. God needs no human sacrifice! God will not submit to a human name, nor dwell in any human building. God said to the ancient Hebrews, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). God speaks to and dwells in each of us. It is God in Whom we live and move and have our being. But if any human being ever claims to speak for God, then know that you are hearing wind.

And something has just occurred to me. I have just now said to Thomas, “But, wait a minute. Are you saying that two thousand years ago, Jesus brought us His Way to replace all religions? He intended to replace all religions, even back then?” Thomas didn’t say anything. Then he smiled.

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
A star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
Or all of God’s angels in heav’n for to sing,
He surely could have it, ’cause he was the King.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.
For poor on’ry people like you and like I…
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), collected in “Songs of the Hill-Folk” (1934)