Ever wondered why the world, especially our Western world, is so aggressive, so sure of itself, and yet so utterly confused and seemingly hopeless? Well, according to the late Ivan Illich, controversial and excommunicated Catholic priest, it’s due to a corruption of Christian values.

In The Rivers North of the Future: The Testament of Ivan Illich (Anansi, 2005) CBC broadcaster and author David Cayley interviews Illich and explores his theories that centre on the idea that “the corruption of the best is the worst,” meaning Christ’s message of the primacy of Love was perverted by the Church into the historical horror show we’re all familiar with. That is, you can’t have something as Evil as the Church until you have something as Good as Jesus.

Plain examples of Church hypocrisy are The Crusades, The Inquisition and The Witch Trials, but Illich’s argument is not about that. Instead he shows how the spectacular mismanagement of the New Testament led to Western secularization, liberal individualism, and finally to post-modern disorientation.

Whatever your opinion is of religion it’s impossible to deny the historical influence of Christianity. But is it possible, as so many of us assume, that we live in a mostly secular, post-Christian society? Have we really shaken off the burdens of arbitrary Church power? Or has Christian cultural dominance merely changed form? Illich would say Yes, and we’re left living with a perverted, corrupted, and downright confused version of Christ’s intended message, informing every part of Western culture’s institutions, including law, art, literature, medicine, technology, citizenship, bureaucracy, family, friendship, even language itself.

Illich insists that in encouraging compassion for each other, as opposed to following what our society expects us to—love over law—Christ was preaching a totally new, completely revolutionary idea about the personal freedom to choose who to love. This is best understood through the parable of the Good Samaritan.

The Samaritan, a traditional enemy of Jews, helped the beaten up Jew in the ditch out of compassion for another human face, while the Jew’s own brethren, the priest and the Levite on the way to the Temple, passed him by because they had more “important,” socially-ordained business to deal with. See: love over law.

However, as Illich points out, the Church’s attempt to make into law what is fundamentally a personal relationship—love—was impossible by definition because you can’t make compassion for another human being into a rule to be obeyed. After all, it was the priest and Levite – not the Samaritan – who were “following the rules.” So, Illich says, the Samaritan is acting according to an “ought,” but not one that conforms to a social norm or rule; rather, he acts according to his own internal, moral instinct. Today we think of the “Good Samaritan” as someone who is merely a nice, helpful person. But this misses the point entirely. The Samaritan did precisely what he wasn’t supposed to do, which was help his enemy. Illich says to fully grasp this radical concept we must imagine a Palestinian today coming to the aid of a wounded Jew. Our failure to see the extreme position of the Samaritan is but one sign of our modern, moral confusion, and the persistent, pervasive, perverted Christian ethic.

By introducing this new type of personal freedom to humanity through Christ, says Illich, God also created a new type of personal betrayal, a new low for evil known as sin. Just as we think of the Good Samaritan as a “nice guy,” we think of a “sin” as “breaking a rule,” when it originally meant the opposite: to sin was to betray another human face in following a rule, like the priest and Levite who pass by the injured Jew.

The basic mistake of the Church was to institutionalize what was fundamentally, for lack of an existing word, uninstitutionalizable: love and compassion. Take the example of charity, which Illich says was—as practiced by early Christians—a personal act: “it was customary. . . to have an extra mattress, a bit of candle, and some dry bread in case the Lord Jesus should knock at the door in the form of a stranger without a roof.”

The Church, however, in its attempt to make this Christian practice into law removed the deeply personal element—the face-to-faceness of it—and turned charity into a social service provided by poorhouses and not people. Charity went from compassion for an individual human face to a distant social tool, something that could be politically organized as a means to combat poverty, or in Illich’s words: an “institutionalization of neighbourliness.” He says that by “assigning the duty to behave in this way to an institution, Christians would lose the habit of reserving a bed and having a piece of bread ready in every home, and their households would cease to be Christian homes.”

However, it’s not all bad. As my title hints, The good news is that, contrary to received wisdom, Christianity is largely responsible for what is considered tolerant and progressive in our society. I know that seems counterintuitive, if not downright sacrilegious (so to speak) to modern, liberal sensibilities. So I’ll use an extreme example to illustrate: sexual equality. One doesn’t usually think of “Christianity” and “sexual equality” without a “not” in there somewhere. But Illich shows how Church doctrine set the legal basis, at least in theory, for women and men to be treated as equals in spirit and mind. He says, “the Fourth Lateran Council [of 1215] . . . enjoins the duty of confession on women just as much as on men” which is “the first important statement of the legal equality of women with men. This equality is also reflected in the Council’s new definition of marriage as a contract which is entered freely and knowingly by a man and a woman, rather than being dictated by their families or their milieu.” After all, what else, if not Christianity, is there to account for the “permissive” modern society?

As for global Western aggression, it’s not hard to see the historical connection: missionaries and colonialists made great bedfellows, and George W Bush is, after all, Born Again. But even secular forms of imperialism, like Western economic and foreign policy, are, according to Illich, also rooted in the Church’s insistence on converting others to a superior system for their own salvation. This corrupted Christian psychology runs not only through our entire system of institutions, but through our personal lives, too, in our everyday alienation from people of other classes and cultures.

So why, then, are we all perverted Christians? We live in a society descended from Christianity and use a Christian language, and so it’s built in to our very speech. It informs almost everything around us. We’re like fish who can’t see the Christian water. That’s not to say we are automatons, rigidly determined by our environment, upbringing, or heritage. But the big paradox I’m getting at here is that without recognizing history as a dimension of our own identity, we can hardly go beyond whatever limits such a past puts on us—both socially and individually. Might we today need to reflect on our collective Christian heritage, if only to see where we’ve been, how we got here, and how to get out of it?