Watts' Perception of Christianity

Continuing to process some material from Alan Watts’ autobiography, I now will outline some of his perceptions of Christianity, mainly formed from his early youth within Anglican Christianity. This comes from two chapters, “Tantum Religio” and “I Go To Buddha for Refuge”.

These points which I refer to in this post are not so much a philosophical or theological critique of Christianity, but they are more so practical, biographical, and aesthetical anecdotes which relate how he views the Christianity he was brought up in. Imagine them scattered throughout a biography, because that is precisely what they are.

I would like to get this out of the way before going into some more central philosophical and theological issues that are raised.

Christianity as The World’s Most Talkative Religion

Here Watts’ sees most of Christianity’s observances as nothing beyond chatter, telling “God what he ought and ought not to do, and inform him of things which he is already well aware, such as that they are miserable sinners, and proceed to admonish one another to feel guilt and regret about abominable behavior which they have not the least intention of changing” (p48-49).

He then proceds to claim that if God is the Christian God, “he would be beside himself with boredom listening to their whinings and flatteries, their redundant requests and admonitions, not to mention the asinine poems set to indifferent tunes which are solemnly addressed to him as hymns” (p49).

Haunted By Hymns

In the previous quote, you will notice the negative reference to the hymns. This theme comes up again a few pages later. He says that he was “haunted by hymns” (p52), and perhaps in a tounge-in-cheek way said “I have thought of composing a book entitled Hymns Haunting and Horrible, bound in dark blue cloth..containing versical and musical parodies of these preposterously infantile ecclesiastical dities…They are wretched bombastic, moralistic, and maudlin nursery rhymes”  (p52).

Church Buildings

Watts also had some strong words regarding church architecture. He refered to Presbyterians, Baptists, and Methodists having a “strange genius for worshipping God in buildings that looked like obscene mixtures of churches and factories–all entirely devoid of color” (p54).

Empty Sermons

Watts saw the sermons he heard as convenying “nothing beyond the emotional energy of their funny voices” (p55).

A Lack of Gaity

Watts complains about a lack of gaity in Christianity, and also in the Christian view of God. He says (p60):

“A particular lightness, joyousness, and exuberance of mind and attitude? The opposite…of that high seriousness which has so afflicted us all..and which I am simply incapable of understanding. A priest once quoted to me the Roman saying that a religion is dead when the priests laugh at each other across the altar…I always laugh at the altar…because real religion is the transformation of anxiety into laughter…

But this gaiete d’espirit was entirely lacking in the religious atmosphere of my childhood, although I found it later in the Christianity of [Chesterton, Belloc, Temple, Dix, and Graham]…Throughout my schooling the religious indoctrination was grim and maudlin…As I attained puberty I had to escape it, and therefore took refuge in Buddhism”

He brings up this theme again in a bit more of an autobiographical and word-picture fashion in the next chapter when he says (p73-74):

“As I have said, I simply couldn’t get along with the Christian God. He was a bombastic bore, and not at all the sort of fellow you would want to entertain for dinner, because you would be sitting on the edge of your chair listening to his subtle attempts to undermine your existence and to probe the unauthentic nature of your life. He was like the school chaplain who took you aside for a VERY SERIOUS TALK. He had no gaiete d’espirit, no charm, no lilt, no laughter, no sensual delight in the world of nature which he had supposedly created.

Fighting Over Definitions and Words

Watts also launches an attack on Christianity’s insistance on paying close attention to and fighting over the definition of theological terms. He said :

“I kept wondering and wondering what was the hang-up of the British and Europeans in general, about being definite and precise regarding hte nature of either the deity or the nondeity. They had fought battles over the problem of whether God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, was homoousios or homoiousios…They slaughtered women and children and laid fields waste in verbal quarrels about transubstantiationism…As an unabashed pantheist I am naturally a full-blooded transubstantiationist, knowing full well that the ground wheat of bread and the crushed grapes of wine are the body and blood of Christ, the Anointed One…But I’m not going to go to war about it, nor sizzle…those who don’t agree with me…

I regard my more remote European forefathers who engaged in these quarrels as utterly insane. They were hopelessly confused and hypnotized by their languages, by the crude linear symbolisms wherewith they sought to make “sense” of the world…

Notions of God, of the ultimate reality or the ground of being, must be necessarily vague…Verbal definitions of God in the form of creeds, dogmas, and doctrines are far more dangerous idols than statues made of wood, stone, or gold, because they have the deceptive appearance of  being more “spiritual,” and because a creedally formulated God has been reduced to words, and is no longer experienced immediately” (p74-76).

To be fair, Watts also applies this critique consistently to Bertrand Russell also and says (p76):

“such an articulate, amusing, and reasonable atheist as Bertrand Russell was also hypnotized with words–with endless talk about talk, with making, as the French say, precises about this and that–all of which is an intellectual game of chess having little to do with the realities of nature”

So here you have six critiques, based upon experience, which Watts brings forward against Christianity. For now I will leave them unanswered, perhaps touching on them a bit as I delve further in future posts and comment on his worldview.