Christianity versus social Darwinism: an ideological war for the 21st century

I am an atheist. And, while remaining so, I now find myself on the side of the Christians. Our enemy is strong: it relies, perhaps without much awareness of it, on paganism, on nature itself, and on the philosophy that followed Friedrich Nietzsche. Perhaps those of us on the Christian side don't even know we are Christians. I'm not talking, of course, about religion, but about a clash between worldviews that erupted in the 20th century and is characterizing the 21st.

Let me explain.

I belong to a side that believes in human rights. That believes in the equality of all human beings. That believes in democratic systems and is convinced that every citizen has the right to express their opinion in the form of a vote, with no vote worth less than another.

All of this, viewed objectively, seems quite absurd. We know, in good conscience, that not all people are equal, nor are they all of equal worth, and that not all votes or opinions carry the same weight. But we persist because it is what we consider just.

We are talking about culturally Christian ideas, or Judeo-Christian ones if you prefer. Only Christianity, among all religions and beliefs, asserts that each human being is a child of the same god and is made "in the image and likeness" of that same god. Only Christianity proclaims the primacy of slaves, the poor, the deformed. Only Christianity stems from what Friedrich Nietzsche called, in "On the Genealogy of Morality," the "corrupting power" of "a God on the cross," "that mystery of an unimaginable, ultimate, extreme cruelty and self-crucifixion of God for the salvation of humankind."

From the humus of the Gospels and the preaching of Paul of Tarsus arises the conviction, already reflected in medieval canon law, that there is an inherent dignity in human beings. This conviction is established for the first time, as a political document, in the United States Declaration of Independence, written in 1776: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

In 1789, the French revolutionaries drafted their own Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

But these rights, or these "truths," have never been "self-evident."

The theory of evolution, proposed by Charles Darwin in his book "On the Origin of Species" (1859), maintains that nature favors the genetic transmission of the strongest and most adaptable individuals and, therefore, is not at all egalitarian. None of the pre-Christian or post-Christian religions (including Islam) believe in equality or human rights. And Nietzsche is convincing when he expresses horror at the "slave morality" imposed by Christianity. Nietzsche defends the figure of the "superhuman" or "ultrahuman," "beyond good and evil," with no morality other than its own strength.

Nazism used some (but not all) of Nietzsche's arguments. An internal SS bulletin stated: "By repeatedly insisting that God died on the cross out of compassion for the weak, the sick, and sinners, they then demanded that the genetically ill be kept alive in the name of a doctrine of piety contrary to nature and a misguided conception of humanity."

Fortunately, we haven't returned to that. But certain aspects of neoliberalism, such as "social Darwinism," certain aporophobic and xenophobic attitudes (see the rejection of poor immigrants), the growing admiration for the "strong man" and the rule of force, and certain attitudes of those who today feel they own the world (the tech magnates or Donald Trump himself), convinced they are the "Übermensch" prophesied by Nietzsche, are linked, despite certain Protestant traits (such as divine blessing in the form of wealth), to the backlash against Christian culture.

Fundamentally, this appears to be the ideological battleground for this century.