The Congitive Dissonance of the Pseudo-Christian

This incident, from one of Tolstoy's late non-fiction works, occurred in Tsarist Russia more than a century ago, but it perfectly reflects the pseudo-Christian psychology of many Evangelical Republicans.


One day, as I was passing through Borovitzki gate, I saw a crippled old beggar with his head bound up in a ragged cloth and sitting in a corner. I had just taken out my purse to bestow a trifle upon him, when a bold, ruddy-faced young grenadier in a government fur coat came running down the Kremlin slope. On seeing the soldier, the beggar sprang up with a look of terror and ran limping down toward the Alexander Garden. The grenadier pursued him, but, not succeeding in overtaking him, stopped short and began to abuse the poor fellow for having dared to sit down near the entrance-gate in defiance of orders.

I waited until the grenadier came up to where I stood, and then asked if he could read.

‘Yes; what of that?’ was the answer.

‘Have you ever read the gospel?’

‘I have.’

‘Do you know these words: “He who feeds the hungry …”?’ I repeated the text to him.

He listened attentively. Two passers-by stopped. It was evidently disagreeable to the grenadier that, while conscientiously discharging his duty by driving people away from the entrance-gate, as he was ordered to do, he unexpectedly found himself in the wrong. He looked puzzled, and seemed to be searching for some excuse.

Suddenly his dark eyes brightened up with a look of intelligence, and, moving away as if about to return to his post, he asked, ‘Have you read the military code?’

I told him that I had not.

‘Well, then, do not talk of what you do not understand,’ he said, with a triumphant shake of his head; and muffling himself up in his overcoat, he went back to his post.

He was the only man I have met in all my life who strictly, logically, solved the problem of our social institutions, which had stood before me, and still stands before each who calls himself a Christian. 

- Leo Tolstoy, from What I Believe (chapter 2)