Dear Editor,

As the Caribbean community continues to grapple with Mother Nature on steroids as reflected in the increasing frequency of category 4 and 5 hurricanes, the sporting showpiece of the world, the Olympic Games, was impacted by a hurricane of its own. The source of the hurricane which barrelled down on the Olympics was the conservative Christian community, which took serious offence at some of the choreography in the opening ceremony.

Messianic Jewish pastor and writer Jonathan Kahn, in a riveting YouTube breakdown of the opening ceremony, zeroed in on the pagan roots of the Olympic Games. Kahn presented an argument to support the conclusion that the modern Olympic Games is reverting to its pagan roots, replete with the modern equivalent of the ancient priests of Ishtar, who were known for dressing in female attire.

Conservative Christians are still hopping mad about the choreography in the opening ceremony that replaced Jesus and his male disciples in the famous The Last Supper painting with a female Christ and a cast inclusive of transsexuals. While it is true that there are clear similarities between the offending choreography and The Last Supper, it is also equally true that The Last Supper was simply an artist’s rendition of what the actual last supper might have looked like. As such, this is hardly an issue worthy of a Christian call to arms.

In the online breakdown of the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony by Kahn, it was mentioned that the rise of Christianity in Europe coincided with the demise of the Olympic Games. According to Kahn, the Olympic Games was dedicated to Zeus and may have included some pornographic rites that would have been a scandal to the Christian community. The discontinuation of the ancient Olympic Games was a part of the Christian grand design to drive underground the old gods and old spiritual systems of pre-Christian Europe.

What is missing, however, from the critique of the Olympic Games’ opening ceremony being advanced by Kahn and conservative Christians is the extent to which paganism was also incorporated into the fledgling Christian movement in the early centuries of Church history. Pagan temples, statues, and practices were rebranded and refashioned into the super structure of Christianity. While it is instructive to learn about the nexus between paganism and the Olympic Games, it is also equally instructive to learn about the pagan survivals in Christianity.

Reverend Alexander Hislop wrote an excellent book called The Two Babylons in which he shows the many parallels between Roman Catholic Christianity and the ancient spirituality practised by the Babylonians. Hislop and others of the Protestant variety were convinced that the Catholic wing of Christianity was an amalgamation of paganism and Christianity.

Protestantism, which started out as a revolt against the Roman Catholic system of Christianity, broke away from Catholicism but, unfortunately, maintained many of the pagan practices. Chief among the extra-biblical beliefs borrowed from paganism and embraced by both wings of Christianity are Sunday sacredness, the Trinity concept, Christmas, Easter, infant baptism, the immortality of the soul, and the pagan concept of an underworld where the wicked would be roasted for all eternity.

It is very disingenuous for the Christian community to be crying out against the re-emergence of the LGBTQIA movement and labelling it as pagan when the superstructure of Christianity is riddled with relics from paganism. Maybe the time has come for Christians to follow the timeless admonition of Jesus and remove the beam from their own eyes before trying to remove the specs from the eyes of the scripters of Olympic Games’ opening ceremony and others.

Both Christianity and white supremacy have had a good run over the centuries. Christians enjoyed a virtual monopoly over the bodies and souls of Europeans and all subjugated people. European Christians were responsible for the destruction of countless people, cultures, literary works, and spiritual systems. The contemporary intolerance being exhibited by conservative Christians towards the LGBTQIA movement and the re-emerging non-Christian spiritual systems reveals clearly that many Christians have not learnt the desired lessons from the long centuries of Christian despotism.

If religious liberty is to mean anything in the modern world, then the rights of the choreographers of the opening ceremony at the Olympic Games and the rights of choreographers at other globally watched events must be guaranteed and defended. The Renaissance, the Enlightenment, and the Protestant Reformation coalesced to force Christianity to come to grips with the ‘Rights of Man’ (and woman). Regrettably, Islam has not been troubled by similar reformatory movements. To compare and contrast the responses of Christians and Moslems to criticism is, therefore, to miss the point about how Christianity has evolved positively from the bad old days of the Dark Ages.

Lenrod Nzulu Baraka

Founder of Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Teaching Center

rodneynimrod2@gmail.com