>Is Christianity reactionary? (This isn't necessarily a rhetorical
>question.)
Not if you're a pervert atheist:
[...]
BS (Doug Henwood): You've also left some of your readers scratching their heads over the positive things you've been writing about Christianity lately. What is it in Christianity you find worthy?
Zizek: I'm tempted to say, "The Leninist part." I am a fighting atheist. My leanings are almost Maoist ones. Churches should be turned into grain silos or palaces of culture. What Christianity did, in a religiously mystified version, is give us the idea of rebirth. Against the pagan notion of destiny, Christianity offered the possibility of a radical opening, that we can find a zero point and clear the table. It introduced a new kind of ethics: not that each of us should do our duty according to our place in society a good King should be a good King, a good servant a good servant but instead that irrespective of who I am, I have direct access to universality. This is explosive. What interests me is only this dimension. Of course it was later taken over by secular philosophers and progressive thinkers. I am not in any way defending the Church as an institution, not even in a minimal way.
For an example, let's take Judith Butler, and her thesis that our sexual identity isn't part of our nature but is socially constructed. Such a statement, such a feminist position, could only occur against a background of a Christian space.
[...]
I am a Fighting Atheist: Interview with Slavoj Zizek
Interview by Doug Henwood, Intro by Charlie Bertsch
Issue #59, February 2002
http://bad.eserver.org/issues/2002/59/zizek.html