A brief look at Christianity’s oldest conspiracy theory
Sherry Shriner Claims Most Christians Are Devil-Worshipers (and She May Have a Point)
Sherry Shriner Claims Most Christians Are Devil-Worshipers (and She May Have a Point)
I’ve had the pleasure of talking to a lot of people about religion lately as I go around hawking Dragged Into the Light.
People want to hear about Orgone, and Chewy Bigfoots, and the alien agenda, but Sherry’s core belief that most of the Bible was written by the Devil himself doesn’t get much traction. I can understand why.
First, there are a lot fewer Christians than we’ve been led to believe. I was speaking with a woman just this week who told me apologetically, that she didn’t know much about the Bible. I didn’t press, but in my experience a lot of people don’t know much about the Bible.
The majority are content to assume their preachers are being honest about its contents, but there are many people who just don’t care about Christianity and want to keep clear of religious discussions.
Second, Sherry Shriner isn’t the first or the only person to claim much of the Bible is attributable to Satan. It’s one of the earliest Christian conspiracy theories, and I’d like to take you through it with a thumbnail sketch of Christianity’s darkest secret.
An inside job?
For the non-Christians and lapsed Christians, there’s a guy named Paul the Apostle at the center of the story. His real name wasn’t Paul and he wasn’t really an Apostle, but we’ll get to that. The Apostles were Jesus’ immediate followers, 12 early adopters, one of whom sold Jesus out to the Romans leading to the Christ’s arrest and execution.
Without Jesus around, the remaining 11 Apostles did what they could to spread their teacher’s word and they were getting a little heat. People were converting, slowly abandoning Judaism and other religions for this new way of thinking about God.
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This is where a guy named Saul comes into the picture. He is variously described as a Christian persecutor and a tax collector, but there are also claims he was just a businessman, which makes what follows even more impenetrable.
One day, Saul was walking along the road to Damascus and he was struck down by a blinding light. According to him, it was God and God wanted to know why Saul was persecuting his people. Saul apologized and God left him blind for a little while longer to think about what he’d done.
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When his sight returned, he took the name Paul to show he had changed his ways and set out to preach the word of the lord. I think he tacked on “The Apostle” for the street cred it would have bought him, but it is just as likely “The Apostle” was added later.
So we have this guy who never met Jesus who elevates himself very quickly to the main Christian commenter and writer. He and Peter, the guy Jesus personally put in charge while he was away, never got along and there was always a power struggle between them.
Yet, pretty much everything you know about what Christ wanted you to do comes from the mouth of Paul on the strength of his own claim that he bumped into God one day.
For my money, Paul’s biggest revolution was giving Christians permission to eat pork, though he gave excuses for not following other Jewish culinary and hygenic prohibitions.
God’s People had kind of distinguished themselves as non-pork eaters for millennia, but Paul tossed it out as an old-fashioned notion. It didn’t go over well with the traditionalists, for whom eating bacon was as despicable as having relations with someone of the same sex, but the pork chop enthusiasts won the day.
Paul constructed a new religion with new rules from whole cloth or the few things he had heard that Jesus was reported to have said. This still doesn’t sit right with a lot of hardcore Christians, many of whom consider eating pork a slippery slope to gay sex.
And I don’t necessarily fault them. Without religious surety, without practices and rules we know are unerringly good, we’re asea, forced to rely on our own intuition to know how to behave toward strangers. Once we lose divine judgment, we are responsible for our thoughts and actions. We have no one to praise or blame.
Diggin up dirt on the New Testament
Sherry Shriner was by no means the first person to wonder whether Paul the Apostle was legit. While I like to think it’s because shysters know their own, Sherry didn’t seem to see Paul the Apostle as a liar so much as an ignorant dupe, and she is not alone.
The curse of imagination is that it’s often unbidden. We make these what-if connections subconsciously, and the what-if Sherry and those that came before her made was this: What if it was Lucifer and not God who appeared to Saul on the road to Damascus?
First of all, that throws out a good chunk of the Christian New Testament. Scholars have devoted their lives to reconciling why Paul the Apostle seemed to contradict so many of the traditional Jewish laws, and tons of them have (predictably) concluded that he didn’t really, technically, if you look at it from a certain perspective.
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It takes more mental gymnastics to justify why God changed his mind so suddenly about which rules were important and which weren’t after Paul started publishing than it does to accept that he was taking dictation from Lucifer. That Paul was working for Satan without knowing it is the second most elegant explanation (the first being Paul was the original charlatan Christian preacher).
Sherry’s success in promoting this idea is born from the following 1,500 or so years of religious strife and questioning. For example, she seized on the obvious insight that if Jesus was born in Palestine he was not a six-foot-tall blonde person. It was something the dumber priests and teachers in my Catholic education explained by saying that Jesus was special.
I like Monty Python’s “Big Nose” intimation better. For Sherry, though, the big blonde Jesus was a person named Sananda.
Sananda is another pretty convoluted idea, so I’ll just sum it up at the risk of oversimplifying: The blonde, blue-eyed Jesus in the pictures was the Satanic founder of the Illuminati.
From there it plays like the end of The Usual Suspects. Everything the Old Testament and the Gospels say about Lucifer being the ultimate liar and trickster undermines everything Paul said in his commentary on it.
It answers the questions about why the New Testament “Hippie” God is so nice and willing to let bygones be bygones if people violate his laws but apologize sincerely.
More important, though, it allows true believers to turn the Bible into a Choose Your Own Adventure book.
If you are a Christian, this should be the central question in your life: Did God or the Devil accost Saul on the road to Damascus? Put another way, did a shady businessman truly and literally see the light? Or did he see a rising economic opportunity as so many have since?
This is one of the central things I like to talk about when people ask why Sherry and her followers believed such “crazy” things. Their central belief, that blonde Jesus is really the devil, isn’t only centuries-old but is just as reasonable an explanation as its opposite.
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Tony Russo is a journalist and author of “Dragged Into the Light: Truthers, Reptilians, Super Soldiers, and Death Inside an Online Cult.” Subscribe to his Bagel Manifesto here.