The Political Function of State Religion, by Northrop Frye

It is in the God of official Christianity, invented as a homeopathic cure for the teachings of Jesus, that state religion has produced its masterpiece. This God is good and we are evil; yet, though he created us, he is somehow or other not responsible for our being evil, though he would consider it blasphemous either to assert that he is or to deny his omnipotence. All calamities and miseries are his will, and to that will we must be absolutely resigned even in thought and desire. The powers that be are ordained of him, and all might is divine right. The visions of artists and prophets are of little importance to him: he did not ordain those, but an invariable ritual and a set of immovable dogmas, which are more in keeping with his ideas of order. Both of these are deep mysteries, to be entrusted to a specially initiated class of servants. He keeps a grim watch over everything men do, and will finally put most of them in hell to scream eternally in torment, eternally meaning, of course, endlessly in time. A few, however, who have done as they have been told, that is, have done nothing creative, will be granted an immortality of the ‘pie in the sky when you die’ variety.

Read More

Welcome to the Church of Blake, an online community that celebrates William Blake’s vision of Christianity. It seeks to develop and explore the radical and imaginative aspect of Blake’s take on Jesus and what this means for the twenty-first century.