The Trouble with Fundamentalist Religion? God is a Rorschach…

 Religion, Psychoanalysis, Psychology, God, Government, Church and State

I was raised in the Episcopal Church.  For those unfamiliar with it, it is a protestant denomination – the American arm of the Church of England.  The protest that was mounted was by Henry VIII who wanted to divorce his wife against the wishes of the Pope, so the church broke from the Catholic umbrella, but largely kept to the form of the church, and the church services feels familiar to Roman Catholics who attent them (and vice versa).

As part of the service, congregants recite the Nicene Creed – a statement of beliefs that all are publicly acknowledging and sharing by reciting them together.  My mother, a strong Episcopalian, went to an Episcopal conference a long time ago – long enough that the speaker was using an overhead projector instead of power point slides.

An overhead projector is basically a powerful light that shines up through a flat glass panel  and then the light hits a mirror and is directed onto a screen.  When you put a plastic sheet on the glass, anything written on that sheet shows up on the screen against a white background.

In the workshop, the leader passed out plastic sheets with the Nicene Creed written on it and he gave everyone in the group black markers.  He then instructed people to cover up with the marker parts of the Crede that they did not, in fact, believe in.  He then laid the marked-up creeds on top of each other on top of the glass.  Anything that was crossed out – anything that anyone in the relatively small group disagreed with – was “redacted”: there was a black mark where the words had been.

This is the Nicene Crede as written in the Episcopal Prayer book:

We believe in one God,
    the Father, the Almighty,
    maker of heaven and earth,
    of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
    the only Son of God,
    eternally begotten of the Father,
    God from God, Light from Light,
    true God from true God,
    begotten, not made,
    of one Being with the Father.
    Through him all things were made.
    For us and for our salvation
        he came down from heaven:
    by the power of the Holy Spirit
        he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
        and was made man.
    For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
        he suffered death and was buried.
        On the third day he rose again
            in accordance with the Scriptures;
        he ascended into heaven
            and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
   He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
        and his kingdom will have no end.
​
We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life, 
    who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
    With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
    He has spoken through the Prophets.
    We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
    We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
    We look for the resurrection of the dead,
        and the life of the world to come. Amen.

As my mother reported it, when the sheets were laid on top of each other, the only unredacted words were: We believe in God.  The rest was uncomfortable enough for at least one member of the group that everything else had been redacted.  And there is, to my eye, some pretty uncontroversial stuff here…

The point is that religious beliefs are varied, even when we get within one community.  It is also the case that the one thing they believe in; God, is hardly a univariate and consensual entity.  I think if we asked those at the conference to describe the God they believe in, we would find a great deal of variance.

On Rosh Hashanah of this year, I went to the morning service at Beth Adam, the humanistic Jewish synagogue that my wife belongs to.  There was a remarkable sermon (accessible at about 1 hour and five minutes on the link – though you might want to listen earlier to the reading and translation of the text).  The traditional reading, which the Rabbi commented on in her sermon, is the binding of Isaac.  The story in the Bible (Torah) where God instructs Abraham to sacrifice his son on an altar.

In the sermon, Rabbi Werber took the position that this Abraham, the one who travels a long distance with his son preparing to sacrifice him, this Abraham whose arm is stopped by the word of God in the very act of murdering his son at God’s command, is a fundamentalist.  By fundamentalist she means, someone who takes the word of God as permission to abandon their personal moral authority.  She cannot imagine, nor can I, a father of any sort, much less the father of a religion, murdering his son for any reason.

She went on to state that members of fundamentalist religions routinely outsource their personal moral authority to the word of God, using specific injunctions to justify heinous, immoral behavior.  As an example, she cited individuals opposed to abortion bombing abortion clinics – and killing people in the process of doing that.

For her purposes (she was trying to get a group that considered themselves secular humanists to reconsider themselves as a religious organization), she clarified that the fundamentalists in this country – and indeed throughout the world – have taken the position that if a religion is not fundamentalist, then it is not a religion.

In opposition to the fundamentalists, she defines a religion as a shared set of beliefs that include a moral code that is based in Justice.​  If we were to stretch that definition, science could be considered a religion.  Certainly psychoanalysis could be considered a religion (and it has been criticized by many for being a religion rather than a science.  How convenient, then, to clarify that all of science, based on a (largely) shared belief in how we come to know what is true, and the resulting culture necessary to support those beliefs, might be considered a religion as a membership in a greater order rather than one that is at variance with it).

Rabbi Werber proposed that the Abraham we should take as our model is not the Abraham who bound Isaac, but the one earlier in the Torah who took God to task when he threatened to destroy all of Sodom and Gomorrah.  That Abraham argued that God had no right to destroy the righteous along with the wicked.  “Far be it from you to do such a thing,” he says.  “Shall not the judge of all the earth deal justly?”

Even God, in this version of religion, should be questioned and held to the standards that God has set.  Even God, implicitly, can be unjust – can be wrong.  We cannot take even the word of God as the gospel on what should or should not be done.  We need to evaluate it against our moral code – especially if that moral code originates with God, and we should all be held accountable to it, no matter how complicated that might become.

In the United States, the constitution is our operating manual.  But it relies – heavily – on the individual moral authority of those who would operate the mechanism of government.  It allowed for punishment to those who violate the manual, but that is not really the mechanism that the framers intended to make this country great.  As I have argued elsewhere, we fought a revolution to secure self-government, not no government.  

Our current government is riddled with appointees who are a strange mixture of clearly self-interested leaders and fundamentalists – including those who appear to worship at the altar of the office of the President.  Many of these individuals within the executive branch are operating with impunity – as if they have no obligation to the other branches of government nor to the people they are governing. 

The advantage of redefining religion as a shared set of beliefs is that it opens up the body politic to a dialogue about what it is that we share as a polity – as a body political.  Certainly Justice is at the heart of it – and the Justice system – the courts and the enforcers are at the heart of that, but we also share a belief that because these arms are manned by humans, they need oversight.

As a teacher, as a psychologist, as a psychoanalyst, as a father, as a partner, even as a child I need oversight.  My motivations are complex and not always clear to me.  I know what I would have myself do – I know the kind of person I would imagine myself to be.  And I know how complicated it is to achieve some semblance of that person.  In addition to an awareness of my drivenness, I am aware of my laziness.  I am also aware that my drivenness can drive me into places that I would rather not be and create blind spots that are problematic.

I hate having someone look over my shoulder.  I am so self-critical that I assume that others with be equally critical.  This can keep me from checking as often as I should, but also from asserting my position clearly so that others can evaluate it.  It also means that I shy away from recognizing that to act in any way is to risk acting immorally from some perspective, but that should not keep me from acting, for that is also immoral.

I am aware of my tone becoming increasingly religious.  I am, apparently, working to match the Rabbi’s sermonic tone.  But I also hope to be connecting with her position that overreacting to the current moment – becoming dogmatic to fight dogmatic fundamentalism – trying to match the idealizable fundamentalist vision with an alternate ideal vision (something I think I am routinely guilty of in these posts) may create an equally inhuman picture of the complexities of governing and being governed; of being a governor and of being a citizen.  We will certainly not be perfect, but that should not stop us from striving to make the world a better place by finding principles we are willing to work from and being open minded about how we interpret them, but not so open minded, as my wife points out, that our brains fall out.

When we appeal to God, or to God's word as the definition of a religion, we are engaging in a feint, in an untruth. We are pointing to an entity that is, by definition, unknowable by most of us.  In those who do have a personal experience of God, that experience is exactly that, a personal experience that can be reported.  Moses, when he comes down from the mountain, can tell us what he saw, but he does that as a messenger.  Even Jesus, in so far as he was God incarnate, communicated with us as a human being - a person. 

We, as human beings, need to acknowledge each other's humanity and, I believe, in doing that we should recognize that another's conception of God may be valid.  That said, when I worked at an inpatient psychiatric hospital, we often referred patients to have a chat with the chaplain about whether their beliefs were, indeed, shared by others.  A religion requires community, it is not the creation of an individual.  It is when, in that community, that a member references God with certainty, especially about specific human affairs that we, as members of that community, should carefully and fully evaluate the validity of the position.  We should avoid using God as a Deus ex machina.

Addendum: I wrote this post yesterday and it feels more unfinished than most of my posts, which always feel a bit unfinished.  I don't think that I clarified that I think - I'm not sure if the Rabbi would agree - that fundamentalist religions are NOT religions.  In her definition, religions are a shared set of beliefs.  I think the Episcopalians do have a shared set of beliefs - overlapping Venn diagrams, if you will.  If we compared any two of the slides, I bet there would be more agreement than disagreement - both about what was included and what not.  

I think that what I am struggling with is that a religion must needs have disagreement.  If there isn't disagreement within a religion, that isn't a religion, it is brain washing.  It is a denial of the human qualities of the members of the religion.  I don't believe I could have faith in a God that didn't respect humanity - that is the quarrel that the other Abraham has with God about Sodom and Gomorrah.  That Abraham is having a dialogue with God, not mindlessly following him, and he will have a dialogue with the other members of his religion, and it is this that entitles him to be the father of sea of faiths.  I suppose I am proposing that dialogue is essential to the human condition - and therefore, to be considered a religion, the religion must needs recognize the condition of the members of that religion.

Of course, that both of these versions of Abraham exist, clarifies that there is a desire for the kind of faith that would erase our humanity.  As a reluctant psychoanalyst, I can resonate with that.  I wish that the human mind weren't so complicated and convoluted that we need psychoanalysis.  I also wish that faith weren't so complicated that we have to be uncertain while we hang onto it and wrestle with it, but ultimately I believe that to be the case.

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