Free Across the Pond by Terry Eagleton Page A

Perhaps they regarded him as a dreadful embarrassment, hardly an unusual attitude among family members. Having a family himself would simply have interfered with his mission. It had nothing to do with hostility to sex. His commitment was to humanity as a whole, not to his uncles and aunts. A prospective disciple who asks to say goodbye to his family before joining Jesus’s movement receives the rough edge of his tongue. Another who asks to be allowed to bury his father before joining up is abruptly advised to let the dead bury their dead. The phrase would no doubt have horrified the Jews around Jesus, who regarded burying the dead as a sacred duty. It might well have sounded to them like a moral obscenity.
    Jesus has come, he declares, to tear family members one from the other and set them at each other’s throats. A follower of his, he insists, must hate his parents. Some of his disciples today might find this the least arduous of his commandments. If they had been around at the time, advertisers and politicians would have fallen over themselves to shut him up. As it is, the Roman state did it for them, probably at the bidding of a badly rattled colonial ruling elite. Jesus’s attitude to the family is good neither for business nor political stability. The American cult of the family is part of the country’s religious legacy. Domestic bliss is a key feature of puritan ideology. It is not at all central to the New Testament.
    It is also strange to find American Christians so grimly preoccupied with sex, since there is almost nothing on the subject in the New Testament. One of Jesus’s most loyal comrades seems to have been a prostitute, and he himself shows tenderness to a woman from Samaria with a disreputable sexual history. Since Samarians counted as fairly low-life figures among the Jews, the fact that he has dealings with her at all is pretty remarkable. He does not rebuke the woman for her exotic sexual career, but offers her the waters of eternal life, which she gratefully accepts. In general, the New Testament is fairly relaxed about sexuality. This is one of the many ways in which its adherents have betrayed it.
    The Unromantic Irish
    One can contrast American cosiness about the family with certain traditional domestic attitudes in Ireland. In the nineteenth century, there was little romantic or sentimental about Irish domestic arrangements. American families are important among other things because they provide an emotional refuge from a harsh public world. The more cutthroat and anonymous social life becomes, the more one may expect a cult of domestic affections. In traditional Ireland, by contrast, the domestic unit was locked directly into the socio-economic world. This was known as the family farm. Relationships between family members were governed among other things by economic necessity. Marriage was more a matter of dowries and matchmakers than candle-lit dinners or erotic love. Many of the Irish were lucky to get a dinner at all, candle-lit or otherwise. Fine feelings were for those who could afford them. Sexual reproduction was geared to producing children who would work on the land, as well as provide for their parents in their old age. Celibacy might be enforced on those children who did not inherit the farm. Otherwise they might be compelled to emigrate, or become priests or nuns. Dividing a small farm between too many family members raised the spectre of hardship and even famine.
    Visitors to Ireland should remember that though we are all Irish in the eyes of God, the Almighty designed the Irish nation with a specific purpose in mind, namely, as a place for other people to feel romantic about. The Irish are adept at exploiting this role, though they do not feel in the least romantic about themselves and would not be caught dead wearing an Aran sweater or drinking Irish coffee. In fact, the country was recently thrown into blind panic by a malicious rumour that Irish pubs might actually be coming to