[Dialogue] Spong part 2

[KroegerD@aol.com]

November 17, 2004


Election 2004 Part 2 - An Analysis of the Evangelical Vote in the Campaign of 2004 


Last week I began an analysis of the rise in religious and evangelical fervor that was so powerfully displayed in the presidential election in November. For many it was a frightening and incomprehensible spectacle. I suggested in that column that historically, the primary function of religion was to bring security to a radically insecure human life. I sought to demonstrate that religion finds its origin in the compelling need of self-conscious creatures to cope with the angst of existence. Self-conscious beings know themselves to be separate from nature and vulnerable to nature's forces. Human beings live in time that enables us to recall a past we did not inhabit, and to anticipate a future that does not include us. We live with the awareness of our mortality. Religion's first agenda, therefore, is to bank the fears associated with being alone and mortal in a vast and frightening world. It accomplished this task by postulating a supernatural spirit or spirits, who had the ability to take care of us in ways that we did not feel competent to handle for ourselves. Our ability to manipulate this deity by our behavior and worship were also powerful parts of the "religion equation." We were taught that, if we behave according to the revealed will of the deity, God would reward us with divine protection. It is a very favorable quid pro quo. This behavior control became a part of all religious systems. If we pleased the deity by worshipping properly, including praising God with extravagant words of flattery while making our requests known, that God will answer our prayers. This is where the almost hysterical human compulsion to adhere to set forms of worship emerges in religion, and explains why religious liturgies are so filled with excessive titles for God: "Almighty," "Most Merciful," "Ever Loving," "Eternal" and many other accolades fill our prayers. We also tell God in liturgy what we hope God is: "You are more ready to hear than we to pray," and "Your nature is to be merciful and long-suffering." Because human beings use flattery to manipulate human power figures, we assumed it would work with God.

This sets the stage for understanding why it is that if someone challenges our god-perception or violates the deity's perceived standard of conduct, such behavior causes us to fear that divine wrath will descend on the whole clan, creating a powerful control system. Why else would human beings resist so vehemently new insights that challenge both traditional authority and established behavior patterns; while guarding against any deviation from the 'true faith.' This fear alone makes sense out of the irrational religious behavior that has marked religion through the ages, such as burning heretics at the stake or making claims that we possess the absolute truth of God. The powerful corollary to that claim is that to disagree with us is to disagree with God! Ideas of papal infallibility or scriptural inerrancy are both patently absurd by every rational standard, but they continue to be part of the security systems of competing religious traditions because they appeal to human inability to cope with uncertainty or relativity. The hold of this security system on the human psyche is easy to demonstrate, so is the trauma experienced when these sources of security began to waver.

When the medieval synthesis, challenged by new learning, began to break apart, anxiety rose in exact correlation. It took a while for these challenges to get to ordinary citizens since the authorities did not want the average person to look into the mechanisms of control. That is still present in religious circles today. Commonplace ideas discussed at religious academies seldom get to lay people; for religion to be effective it must have all the answers, in order to hold rampant anxiety in check. "Why is it," a poster I saw asked, "that churches claiming to have all the answers don't allow any questions?" I know, for example, of no recognized biblical theologian in the world today who believes that the virgin birth is about biology or the resurrection is about a resuscitation of a deceased body, yet references to those realities still bring anxious howls of protest from those whose security is invested in literal certainty.

In a pre-modern world of limited opportunity and no means of mass communication, new knowledge and new insights took centuries to trickle down to the masses. The challenge to the view that the earth was the center of the universe posed by Copernicus did not create great waves of protest until Galileo a century later developed the idea further using his magnificent new telescope. Galileo then wrote about it attempting to win converts, thus drawing public attention to that which religious leaders preferred to keep a private matter. Only then did the hierarchy of the church condemn Galileo. Age and physical infirmity saved him from the stake. Bruno who stated a similar position a hundred years earlier was not so fortunate.

When the 16th century Reformation successfully resisted Catholic attempts to restore unity to Christianity, the power of the church to resist the challenge of new ideas was greatly tempered. Insecurity and uncertainty rose, but so did warfare and religious torture. When Isaac Newton, published The Principia in the 17th century, he visibly shrank the arena in which miracle and magic had once served as explanations. Yet the fact that today the Roman Church will not canonize a saint without the documentation of miracles remains a way of pretending that piety still has the power to determine supernatural events.

By the time that Charles Darwin suggested that there was a different way to look at human origins, the church's power had waned so that religious leaders challenged him only verbally. He was neither imprisoned nor muted. However, Darwin did withhold publication of his findings about evolution for years before publishing them in 1859, apprehensive of the church's power. Some of his more challenging ideas were delayed to an even later date.

The Roman Catholics were the first to respond to all of these destabilizing ideas. To shore up their fading power, they built in the 19th century their 'Maginot Line' of the pope's infallibility. It took the more fragmented Protestants until the early 20th century to fortify their flagging defenses. Their leaders issued a series of pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals," which enjoyed massive circulation. These pamphlets gave birth to the word "fundamentalist" and laid out the Protestant claim for the inerrancy of scripture. They also sought to establish the core doctrines of evangelical religion such as the virgin birth of Jesus, his physical resurrection and the necessity of blood sacrifice for atonement, which they asserted, was achieved in the story of the cross. None of these positions is today intellectually defensible, but these pamphlets served to bring a fleeting security back to the fragile believers. The Scopes trial was their major victory.

While still trying to react to scientific learning, the world of biblical scholarship launched in Germany in the early years of the 19th century, began its relentless assault on the underpinnings of the literal details of the Judeo-Christian faith story. The church responded to this new tension by beginning its inevitable split between security-seeking fundamentalists and the 'modernists' who tried to embrace new realities.

Next instantaneous communications began to shrink the size of our world and relativized all faith convictions as every religion became aware of other traditions. Anxiety continued to grow. Conservative churches began to retreat more and more into pre-modern enclaves. The more open mainline churches began a rapid decline as its members, unable any longer to believe the old stories, simply dropped out, taking up citizenship in the 'secular city.'

The first line of defense employed by the rising secular consensus was to replace traditional symbols with their secular counterparts. When the certainty of life after death declined in the Western world it was replaced with a passion to build the Kingdom of God on earth. That idea inspired the various movements in liberal politics that appeared in the 20th century calling themselves things like: Christian Socialism, Communism, The New Deal, The Fair Deal, and The Great Society. The energy of prayer once the primary weapon used to fight illness was replaced by medical breakthroughs that secularized health issues. The secular passion, however, to build a better world and to cure disease was not successful. Poverty, ignorance and racism continued to flourish in the Great Society and things like the HIV virus and mutant forms of ever-evolving viruses refused to yield to modern advances. As optimism died, human beings increasingly turned either to fundamentalist religion or to secular materialism in the constant search for meaning. Evangelical religion grew by focusing negatively on the things that threatened its personal security. As a result, evangelical concern was not directed to the preaching of the gospel, the care of the poor or the feeding of the hungry, but on abortion and gay rights.

Abortion was understood as the last stage in the woman's battle to have control over her own body. No one fought any longer over the morality of birth control. The secular world embraced abortion; the religious world recoiled before it calling it murder. In a similar manner Gay Rights were viewed as a direct challenge to the authority of scripture. 'We cannot embrace what God abhors,' they said. Homosexuality, however, was what they abhorred, not what God abhorred. They seemed to think that Jesus' invitation read, "Come unto me some of ye, not all of ye." So as uncertainty rose, the passions flowed, motivating the voters to turn out in droves. Congregations became centers of political activism. To put the genie of fear back into the bottle of certain religion was the driving new agenda.

Next week I will return to this subject and trace the rising insecurity especially among this South's rural white population for that is where the heart of the evangelical vote is located.

-- John Shelby Spong


Question and Answer
With John Shelby Spong

Lee from Elko, Nevada, asks: 

What part did the oral tradition play in the development of the New Testament? 

Dear Lee, 

The oral tradition is the only way that the stories of Jesus could have lived between his death in 30 C.E. (approximately) and the writing of the Gospels between 70 C.E. and 100 C.E. This means that everything we know about Jesus lived for 40 to 70 years in oral transmission before it was written down. The real questions are where was this tradition preserved, by whom and in what context? 

When I wrote "Liberating the Gospels: Reading the Bible with Jewish Eyes," I defended the thesis that it was in the synagogue that the oral tradition was born and in the synagogue that it thrived. Most of the gospel stories existed first as sermons, preached about Jesus against the background of the synagogue readings of the Torah and the prophets In this process, Jesus in the oral tradition came to be understood as the fulfillment of both the expectations of the Torah and the hopes of the prophets.

I also argued in that book that stories of Jesus appropriate to the great feasts and fasts of the Jewish year were developed in the oral tradition that enabled the gospels to suggest that not only was the crucifixion of Jesus to be interpreted against the Passover, but also that every other major Jewish holy day was in time given Christian content by the oral tradition during the synagogue phase of Christian history.

In my life, this point of view has opened the gospels to a freshness that treating them as literal history could never create. Try it; I believe you will like it.

-- John Shelby Spong


-- 
Dick Kroeger