Worship as Obedience

I am dissatisfied with my two previous posts on religion as worship, so I have decided to approach the question from a different direction.

All religions ask us to do many things, the reasons for some of which we may not understand -- even Neopaganisms! In traditional Buddhism, for example, a lot of emphasis is placed on faith that the Buddha has the true Dharma (teaching) and that it is preserved by the Sangha (monastic community), so when Buddhists are in danger of becoming discouraged by their lack of progress in meditation, they reinforce our faith through an act of will.

In Christianity and other theistic faiths, things are little different, or at least they seem so to me. In these religions, the tenets of faith are given by a divine person, and breaking the rules becomes, at least in part, an act of disobedience. A serious, faithful Christian obeys the commands of God at least partly because he or she believes obedience to be essential to the religion. After all, with full understanding there would be no faith (at least for the Christian), but where we don't understand we must have another reason to believe, and that reason is often obedience to God.

Obedience. Let that sink in. Every day, day in and day out, Christians obey commands that they may not fully understand, that they might have reasons for believing are not to be obeyed, yet they obey them anyway because that is what God commands. This goes directly against the instincts of most of us in a modern, democratic, individualist society. For us, freedom is the rule except when it impinges on the freedom of others. So what do you do? Do you (a) change your religious beliefs to suit modernity ("God doesn't really hate gays!"); (b) abandon your religious beliefs, perhaps adopting others more compatible with your individualist values; (c) change your secular values to conform to your religious values; or (d) keep both conflicting value systems, obedience in religion and individualism in daily life?

I believe most faithful, conservative Christians choose a mix of (c) and (d). It's certainly possible to live this kind of double life; it isn't rationally out of bounds; but I think humans find that kind of double standard difficult to live with. If God is real, and we are used to obeying him, then obedience takes on a positive cast in our minds. Humans think by association more than strict logic, and if you are accustomed to thinking of your relationship with God as one where you are the servant (see Paul in the New Testament) and God is the commander, then that will naturally carry over into the rest of your life.

Obedience. Obedience to God is good, so obedience becomes, by natural association, the natural and good way for society to order itself. Need I spell out the implications this has for the political order? How about the family order?

This isn't to say that all Christians are fascists or that Christian families are authoritarian. There are many reasons why this isn't the case: for one, there are other messages about kindness and mercy in Christianity (and Judaism, and Islam) that offset this tendency. For another, people do not always follow this slippery slope perfectly. There is friction along the way. But I do believe that we see this tendency among Christians and other theistic believers, and for the reason I outline above.

If Christianity were true, we would just have to live with this fact of obedience. But it isn't, and if we choose to follow a Pagan path, then we must decide how we are going to interact with the divine. Will it be one of obedience? Of service, perhaps? Of communion? Perhaps a mixture of these and more? I don't know, but I know that I no longer think much of worship, at least insofar as it leads to the kind of authoritarianism I have outlined in these posts.

"A New Age of Reformation"

I spend a lot of my day listening to podcasts of NPR programs, among them On Point with Tom Ashbrook. On Thursday the author of Christianity After Religion, Diana Butler Bass, was on the show talking about her new book. I haven't read the book, but the show was an interesting conversation on the way Americans were expressing their religiosity as Christians in recent decades, and especially over the last ten or fifteen years. To wit, they are leaving organized religion, but not necessarily religion altogether.

Give it a listen if you're interested.

Now I'm waiting for them to do a program on the growth of Paganism..

Religion as Power Worship

I spent a large part of my adult life as a Christian, where religious activity largely consists of "worship," which I have come to believe is one of the most pernicious activities ever engaged in by humankind. In this first post I will discuss the political implications of worship.

In Christianity, prayer and worship consist of debasing oneself before a superior being, of praising Him for his power and superiority, of thanking Him for His gifts and proclaiming oneself unworthy of them, and so on. This power worship is a feature of many religions, but is particularly pronounced in the Abrahamic traditions. God here is a despot; His rules are law that must be obeyed even when not fully understood; and most importantly: what He does, what He says, what he demands of you -- all must be qualified by the adjective "good."

Power worship is something that can only be done in the context of authoritarianism. If we were truly equals of God, we could have a conversation with Him. Instead, we must praise, thank, and beg from Him as we do of a monarch, since He is the one created us, could kill us at any moment, and will send many of us to hell.

Is it any coincidence that Christians, on the whole, tend toward right wing authoritarianism?

As a Christian, I could actually feel the gears clicking in my associative cortex. While raised in a democracy, I accepted that Christian cosmology was essentially authoritarian, which makes sense given the time and place in which it developed, and I tried to find some consistent way of being a modern who believed in democracy while accepting a traditional view of Christian theology, with all its implications for the natural order (including how we organize our power structures). Let me tell you, I had to ignore a lot of cognitive dissonance to make it work for myself.

The traditionalist Catholic or Orthodox Christian who believes that monarchy is the only God-ordained and approved form of government is crazy, but at least he or she is crazy in a consistent way. On the other hand, the orthodox Catholic, for example, tries to be faithful to two contradictory traditions: that before the Second Vatican Council, which was for the most part reactionary, and that afterward, which embraced many Enlightenment values.

Many intelligent people pull this off... but like any contradiction, it cannot be lived by the majority of people for long. Enlightenment values are so superior to, and so incompatible with, traditional Christian values that the former eventually triumph, and people in technologically advanced countries (where you don't have to pray to God for rain so your family won't die) abandon Christianity in ever greater numbers.

I think this internal contradiction is created, in large part, by the power worship inherent in Christianity, and I think power worship is so inseparable from Christianity that there truly exists a cultural war of sorts between traditional religion and modern democratic values. Thus, I no longer believe that it is reasonable or even possible to be a committed traditional Christian and a full member of democratic society (at least, not without a good dollop of self-deception). The siren's call of authoritarianism is too strong. As for liberal Christianity, that always was a stepping stone at best, and more and more people are abandoning it as its cultural value diminishes.

Religion as Life-Denying

After a bit of pondering, I have realized what it is about most religions that bothers me (such as Christianity and Buddhism, my two main interests before I wandered over to Paganism):

Most highly developed religions (i.e. those that are the introspective product of a civilization rather than organically developed practices "on the ground") claim that there is something wrong with the universe or with humankind, and that their religion has the cure for it.

Christianity has original sin. Buddhism has craving. The key to fixing your relationship with yourself, God, or the universe is the practices of the religion.

This appear to me to be a flat-out, head-in-the-clouds denial of the universe as we have it. Having a strong scientific bent, it seemed to me that the scientific evidence points to physics and evolution as explaining the world as we see it. Yes, much, probably most, of life is ultimately tragic, but in trying to find a solution to that, most religions paper over it with a promise of salvation, rather than trying to celebrate the tragedy that is the cosmos. Christianity is particularly guilty on this front because it claims that God created the world, but that should include the laws of physics, which gives us all the variety, good and bad, that we see today.

Clearly Neopaganism in many guises may fall victim to this tendency as well, especially when heavily influenced by the New Age, or by old-fashioned Christianity. It seems to me that "getting back to nature" as a Neopagan soteriology has its dangers if divorced from an earthy, evolutionary context. I also wonder about The Summerland as a copout, though I don't think it necessarily falls into this trap.

Having said that, however, Neopaganism seems much better able to integrate into its theology the death and evil that exists in the universe. They are not desirable, but they are part of the cosmos and to pretend we can make them all go away is a delusion. At least, I'd like to think that Neopaganism does a better job of this than other religions. Of course this must take into account the fact that there is no one Neopagan religion, and that each one has no dogma that its believers are required to follow.

Dinner and a Show

Apologies in advance for any offense I cause here. Let me state at the outset that I have no conscious bias against or even dislike of non-heterosexuals. I just had a friend out himself to me and nothing has changed between us. My concern is purely about the consistency of Wiccan cosmology and theology. I haven't written about this topic anywhere before and realize that I might come off as callous or worse.

The other night I went to dinner with some friends. One person at a table not far from us dropped a plate, and someone at another table began making comments, getting louder with "kids these days are worthless." A woman at the same table where the plate was dropped took umbrage, and an argument ensued. At one point I thought it might get violent. The guy who started it went into a strange tirade featuring the usual social conservative talking points about how "no one teaches kids morals these days," etc. He and his companions eventually left in a huff.

Anyway, that was the "show," since it was briefly entertaining before it got ugly.

Afterwards it took us a little while to figure out what had really happened, since dropping a plate hardly seems to be evidence of the moral decay of society. At first we thought it was a woman defending her children. We saw that she was with another woman, who had a "butch" haircut and, well... so we decided it was a same-sex couple and their kids. Eventually we realized that it was an "LGBT club" or something.

Anyway, we finally figured out that the guy who started the whole mess was a homophobe (he had a seat facing the group and had figured things out before us), and that his real beef was seeing a bunch of gay people congregating. One of my friends who had not been facing this guy had thought he was a woman with a raspy voice, and that made me ponder the idea that homophobes are often repressed homosexuals, a claim backed up by one study from 1996. That's obviously not enough evidence by itself, but it certainly explains this case. Of course who knows if it's true, but the homophobia we're sure about.

We wondered at the time why the woman didn't pick up on the homophobia, but later we realized she did. She must have dealt with this kind of thing before, which explains her immediate and strong reaction as well.

Although homophobia is certainly rampant in conservative Christianity, I find it interesting that Gardner's Wicca also considered homosexuality a deviant form of behavior at first, in keeping with the times in which it developed. And it seems to make sense as well, since Wiccan cosmology and myth deals in polarities, in fact with the coupling of a male and a female deity. But things have changed, and now most or all Wiccans seem to accept that same-sex couples can instantiate the cosmic polarity of the God and Goddess just as well as straight couples.

Given the God-Goddess polarity, this is a little puzzling to me if we assume that there weren't political motivations to this change of heart. I mean, I wonder how Wiccans would handle this separation of the physical (male-female) from the spiritual and theological (polarities) were it not for the progressive movement pushing them to do so. Suppose the movement for greater tolerance of LGBT people had never taken off. Would Wicca have become a gay-friendly religion? I just have to doubt that. Am I wrong?

Addendum on U.S. Theocracy

As a postscript to my previous post on the possibility of the U.S. becoming anything close to a theocracy, I would like to expand on the strangely confident prediction I made that, in twenty years,

social conservatives will have even less influence than they do in the Republican party today, as this last bastion of Christendom, tottering at it already is, collapses for lack of foundations.

Non-Christians, and many liberal Christians, do a lot of hand-wringing over the influence of Christianity in modern U.S. politics. In specific, concrete instances where conservative Christians want to impose their vision of society on the populace as a whole, I agree that action must be taken. However, from my perspective, conservative Christianity has already lost and we are well on to becoming a post-Christian state, just as has happened in Europe.

If you read the news, you see conservative Christians constantly making a lot of noise on their own behalf and attempting to influence the Republican party. I, on the other hand, read conservative intellectual Christian blogs for several years and saw nothing but a kind of despair that Christendom was falling away in the U.S., in the same way that it had across the pond. The almost constant refrain was that Christians would once again become a small, perhaps even persecuted, minority, as they had been in the first few centuries AD. These people had accepted that the number of Christians in the U.S. drops every year and that there was no reason whatsoever to believe this demographic decline is about to reverse itself.

In the decades to come, some of the remaining conservative Christians will become more vocal exactly as their power continues to wane. No doubt there will be the occasional election where their influence will increase for a time, but the average extent of that influence will progressively decline, until they become largely irrelevant, either silent in a society whose values they despise, or attached to bizarre fringe groups.

Obligatory Anti-Christian Post

Note: I realize this post rambles a bit, but I want to get these thoughts down now, and perhaps I can be a little more focused later on when I bring up Christianity again.

I want to offer a brief, unbalanced critique of Christianity from a personal point of view. Some background:

I was a believing Christian off and on for over a decade, and I used to read several intellectually stimulating blogs by Christian believers of various persuasions -- mostly Catholic and Orthodox. Since I took the notion of revelation quite seriously, I attempted to steer a theologically conservative path, and I felt the history of Christianity was both important and valuable. Any revelation of God in which the truth could be distorted or lost for 1,500 years was not an option for me (goodbye Protestantism!). Liberal or progressive Christianity, in which we can change what Christians have "always believed," was certainly no option for me.

Over the years I continually ran up against two sources of cognitive dissonance that made it difficult to be a Christian, but it was the second that eventually made it easier to drop the whole thing.

(1) It's so obviously false. Duh? If you are in an echo chamber with regard to apologetics, or if you concentrate on minutiae, then this blaring fact doesn't jump out at you as a Christian. The evidence for the truth of Christianity is just so poor on every front that it really takes some mental gymnastics to remain a believer.

(2) Here's the kicker, though the issues aren't as cut-and-dry as many would have you believe. In a nutshell, there is no "faith once delivered to the saints."

If you accept that God revealed himself, as I did, then it's hard to believe that he would leave that revelation untended; rather, one thinks he would appoint teachers or some clear mechanism to ensure that his message was undistorted. The answer to this problem in the traditional Christian communions that have origins going back to the earliest centuries of Christianity (Catholic, Orthodox, Oriental Orthodox, and Nestorian) was the episcopate, i.e. college of bishops. I could never believe that Protestant solutions to the dilemma were feasible -- too much room for human error!

But once you really dig into the history of Christian doctrines, it becomes more and more difficult to maintain that there is a single Christian belief that has remained qualitatively unchanged for over two thousand years. To take an example that is almost painful to recall, since it's so obvious in retrospect, we go from an adoptionist Christology in the earliest Gospel, that of Mark, to an increasing glorification and deification in Matthew and Luke, finally to arrive at semi-Arian ideas in John. Paul's letters are a mix of adoptionism and nascent Arianism.

During the next two hundred years or so after the books of the New Testament were written, the Ante-Nicene writers of the "orthodox" Christian church as a rule subscribed to subordinationism (the idea that Christ was divine in some way but still under the Father). Arianism is a natural outgrowth of this, though the matter was in general unsettled and many councils were held debating the topic of Christ's role and nature in the Godhead. Yet the question was decided against subordinationism when it was condemned at the First Council of Nicaea, when Christ "became God."

All of what I just wrote about Christology is probably above the pay grade for quite a few readers, who will misread it and think I'm saying that the earliest Christians believed Jesus to be "just a man" until he was turned into a god by the Emperor Constantine. Not at all! There was clearly a tension and ambiguity about Christ's nature, but the general consensus was that Christ was divine in some sense, existing since the beginning of the cosmos, while still being less than (subordinate to) the Father. Then, in the "fullness of time," he became incarnate in Jesus of Nazareth. Yet all historic Christian communions and denominations that exist to the present day call this heresy!

Who was Jesus the Christ, according to Christians? Well, it depends on whether you asked a Christian in 75 AD, in 175 AD, or in 375 AD. And Arians continued to exist for several hundred years in Germanic territory (outside the Roman Empire) after their condemnation. If their Church had lasted to the present, one might point to them as the "one true faith," but they ceased to exist over 1,200 years ago, and that would mean that the True Faith has been lost since then.

Sorry, not buying it. If Christian doctrine is that changeable (and the examples could be multiplied), then there was no such thing as God's revelation to the world in Christ, because it means that God was unable to secure the and the faith church that he promised he would be with forever.

Of course, Catholics and other Christians have answers to this kind of difficulty. Some even glory in the "development of doctrine." I always found the arguments more than a little tortuous, and finally gave up on the whole business a couple years ago.

Is Modern Theocracy Possible?

Note: See my follow-up post.

The title of this post needs some explanation, since modern theocracy is not only possible but actually exists in the state of Iran. My question is more: is modern theocracy possible in first world countries?

My suspicion is that many Neopagans would answer in the affirmative; my further suspicion is that this answer would be driven almost entirely by worries about right-wing judges overturning Roe v. Wade, thus reopening more restrictive legislation on abortion than has existed the past four decades.

There can be no doubt that the pro-life movement at present consists almost entirely of Christians, often backed by explicit theological justification ("all life is sacred"). In the meantime, however, I want to note that it seems a bit silly to say that the U.S. would become a theocracy if Christians succeeded in stacking SCOTUS and overturning Roe v. Wade. At worst, it would mean that a single political issue has been won for people who base their stand on religious convictions. Now that certainly raises the specter of theocracy for some, but Iran it is not. Furthermore, abortion laws would probably remain almost entirely unchanged except for a very few states, where the state Supreme Courts there would likely overthrow or curtail excessively strict laws.

Overall, however, could the U.S. become Iran? I would submit that while there are forces in U.S. politics that would certainly like to impose Christian values more strongly on the population at large, there are such strong impediments to this, even within the GOP, that it is not really within the realm of possibility. I would go so far as to say that a country run by a GOP president and Congress over several terms would not bring us any closer to a theocracy.

Why am I so confident here? The most important reason I have is that demographically the U.S. is becoming less Christian with each passing year. In twenty years, I predict that social conservatives will have even less influence than they do in the Republican party today, as this last bastion of Christendom, tottering at it already is, collapses for lack of foundations.

Social conservatism has no real future here in the U.S. The Republican and Democratic parties will continue to converge on social issues, even abortion (though that will be very late coming), until the primary issues are the ones we are seeing this election cycle: fiscal, foreign policy, and the scope of government.

I bring up this topic because I am disturbed by the way Neopagans, like leftists in general, really fly off the handle when it comes to the influence of Christians in the political marketplace. (In fact, leftists in general seem to fly off the handle on just about everything, but that's a rant for another day.)

While I believe that social libertarianism is the correct stance to take in a modern pluralist society, we are, after all, a republic, and if 100% of Americans decided that abortion was wrong tomorrow, and SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, I don't think we would have a theocracy, any more than we had a theocracy in 1850 when the vast majority of Americans were Christian. But of course we are a democracy, we are not really a Christian state anymore, and there are such strong safeguards against a small minority imposing their will on religious issues that there really is no danger that the U.S. will become anything close to a second Iran.

I suppose my purpose here is to reassure my fellow Neopagans out there, to ask them to cool their jets a bit. You can relax! Secularism has won, even in the U.S.!