See art 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4 Part 5
It is almost painful to see the critically-minded exploring biblical passages and, as though by design, discarding every key they come across. Time and again, you find yourself saying, ‘Not that one, don’t toss that one, you will need it, that one’s a keeper!’ Heedless, they say, ‘We are wise and learned adults, far too clever to be sold Adam and Eve (or whatever). What’s next? Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck? We will opt for a deeper meaning, never mind if if doesn’t add up to anything.’ So reliably does this happen that one almost suspects some sinister power at work manipulating the wise to destroy every useful map, that they may wander forever in the critical wilderness, with nary an oasis in sight.
Elaine Pagels writes a book (Why Religion? This one is her autobiography) in which she wrenches apart her soul, chronicling her unrelenting anguish at the deaths of both her young son and, several years later, her husband. She is an excellent researcher and author, and her documentation on her own ordeals is as expressive as anything I have read. It is enough to make one ashamed at better weathering similar trial, except . . .except for the reservation that, through her training, she systematically threw away any key that might have helped her. Untimely death, though still horrific, is infinitely more bearable to one entertaining the Bible’s resurrection hope.
You cannot throw away keys you never had, one might point out. If her education served to keep those keys shrouded, that is hardly her fault. Her only prior taste of Christianity was with the brand that spins the death of an infant as God picking flowers for his beautiful heavenly garden—who wouldn’t be repelled by that?—thereafter leaving her tastebuds for Christianity permanently seared. Consequently, though Pagel’s life work of religious legend and textual scholarship makes a fascinating read, both her education and religious experience have prejudiced her to overlook the keys. She never had them.
Though it has long been a staple of preachers, the analogy of God picking flowers is nowhere found in the Bible. However, there is an analogy parallel in all respects except the moral at the end. It is found in Nathan’s tale to David, the tale of the rich man who slaughtered and prepared for his visitors the sole lamb of a poor man, sparing his own abundant flock. That man did not receive praise from David, but rather instant wrath. “As surely as Jehovah is living, the man who did this deserves to die!” the king said. (FN) Likely, Pagels picked up on the contrast between David’s wholly understandable response and the evangelical model that holds God behaves just like that cruel man. Preachers make a horrific mess trying to extract themselves from the moral corners their doctrines unfailingly paint them into—in this case, the doctrine that the soul lives on and can never die.
One person who, unlike Pagels, did have the keys and did throw them away, all the time imagining she was taking a step forward, even when she desperately needed a certain key, is a woman praised to high heaven by an (one can only assume) atheist professor of theology at Harvard. Something is greatly off-base about the New York Times review (FN) of Amber Scorah’s book, Leaving the Witnesses, and it is not Amber. It is the reviewer, C. E. Morgan, who goes about her task with a humanist fervor that merits a review in itself. One wonders what she could possibly teach at that Divinity School or what might be the outcome for students who attend her class—students who likely went there because they wanted to learn about God. Her lavish praise of Ms. Scorah’s book: “She teaches us how integrity is determined . . . by enduring the universe as we find it—breathtaking in its ecstasies and vicious in its losses—without recourse to a God,” surely should give those students pause—are they truly in the place they thought they were? Or did they somehow get shunted off into Atheist Academy?
Ms. Scorah herself, as presented by Ms. Morgan, is more conventional. Hers is one of the oldest stories of time—of someone disillusioned with her present life, so she reaches out for another, which upon seizing, she finds exhilarating. It is a coming-of-age story. It is a staple of literature. Since she is “leaving the Witnesses”—Jehovah’s Witnesses, one must at least consider how the Witnesses themselves might have phrased her departure, perhaps similar to the words of the apostle Paul addressed to Timothy: “Demas has forsaken me because he loved the present world.”
Ms. Morgan cannot be expected to put it as did Paul, but since she teaches at the divinity school, one might at least expect her to be cognizant of that point of view. Instead, Amber’s departure is a tale of pure heroism for her—that of escape from an “extreme” religion—even worse than a “fundamentalist” religion, in her view—and it is “most valuable as an artifact of how one individual can escape mind control.”
It would appear that any denomination of Christianity that has not interpreted away into oblivion the resurrection of Christ would be fundamentalist in Ms. Morgan’s eyes. “The anti-intellectualism of these [fundamentalist] authoritarian movements, their staunch refusal to cede ground to reason and empiricism, often confounds nonbelievers,” and it seems she counts herself as Chief of the Nonbelievers—never mind what her teaching title might suggest. “How can people devote the totality of their lives to the unseen, the unevidenced?” she laments, seemingly unaware that such is the very fabric of faith, of those who interpret “evidence” differently, and who will say, akin to Jesus addressing the Pharisees, “Do not presume to say to yourselves, ‘We have evidence as our father.’ For I say to you that the devil is able to raise up evidence from these monied and agenda-driven stones.” (FN Matthew 3:9) But she will not say it. “How can faith subsume thinking?” she complains instead. Her frustration could not be more clear—‘We have fired everything we have at them and yet they keep standing!’
As bad as fundamentalism is, however, it is not so bad in her eyes as an “extreme religion” like Jehovah’s Witnesses. To establish that she has done her homework, she relates that from its 1870 inception, the faith “rejected Christian doctrines it deemed extratextual [not in the Bible], including trinitarianism and hell.” You would think she would be happy about that, for it is a distinct step toward reason—Witness leader C. T. Russell was known within his lifetime as “the man who turned the hose on hell and put out the fire.” The Witness description of death, “extinction or non-being,” is exactly the rationalist view, though it will be marred in her eyes by the caveat of a future resurrection from the dead.
The notion that Christianity should return to its default state Morgan finds “dubious.” Yes, of course she would find it dubious, for it freezes religion in place. It halts evolution. It detracts from her authority at the Divinity School to proclaim a new gospel holding that dependence on God is for chumps. No, she wants religion to evolve, as does everything else in her Darwinian world. Witnesses also “actively proselytize, warning of an imminent Armageddon,” she complains, as though it is wrong to even suggest that an earth carved up into scores of eternally squabbling nations might not be exactly God’s dream come true.
In short, she has found people—ordinary people for the most part—who disagree with her, and she oozes disdain for them. Children raised in such religion “experience a totalizing indoctrination that so severely limits the formation of an adult psychology that many don’t ever achieve maturity in the way secular society conceives of it.” Necessarily, this means that she thinks adults of that faith are, for the most part, immature children. None of them will be found among her social contacts or workplace, perhaps barring a support worker or two, with whom she may occasionally exchange a brief word so long as they keep their stupid opinions to themselves.
The patronization is simply too much. Any time someone leaves one culture for another, there is some catching up to do—say, in the case of a person migrating from one country to another. Would Ms. Morgan similarly find it necessary to crow her superiority over the country and culture of emigration, say, where Hinduism is practiced, perhaps, or Spanish is spoken? She would recoil at the thought, but when it comes to religious views that stray from her worldview, it is as natural to her as breathing air. Let her “world” prove itself reasonably “free from sin” before she casts stones on those who have come to see things differently.
Amber ran out on a “loveless marriage,” Ms. Morgan states, and her implication is clear that Jehovah’s Witnesses think loveless marriages are the bee’s knees, since she presents love as the balm that finally wakes Ms. Scorah up. I will take her word for it that Scorah’s book is as she says it to be—an “earnest one, fueled by a plucky humor and a can-do spirit that endears.” And yet it does not completely satisfy the reviewer—it shows too much the “the remnants of a Christian modesty not well suited to the task of memoir.” One can all but hear her plead, ‘Modesty? What’s that?! Come on, SPILL!’ as she redefines “miracle” into “enduring the universe as we find it — breathtaking in its ecstasies and vicious in its losses — without recourse to a God.” Look, if I were a student in her divinity class, about this time I’d be asking for my money back, assuming I wasn’t too brainwashed just then to think of it. I mean, I get it that she’s not going to use her tenure to save souls, but you still wouldn’t think God would be public enemy #1 at the Divinity School.
But, her review has not yet come to the most gripping part. When it does, Morgan foresees another book. “Many readers know Scorah through her viral article in The New York Times about the death of her son on his first day of day care,” she writes. “This, one senses, is her brutal but beautiful route into a new book—a shorter, wiser one, sharp and devastating. Here she reveals a chastened existence, steeped in grief and unknowing without recourse to pacifying religious answers.” It is unbelievable! It is “wiser” to tell God to take a hike! If a religious answer comforts, throw it away! It is as though sawing off the tree limb upon which one has long perched and, as it comes crashing down to earth, whooping for joy at the liberation, like the Dr. Strangelove cowboy straddling the falling nuke!
Scorah must have anguished with the notion that her child might not have died but for the abandonment of her faith—she must have. Pagels thought it—what might she have done differently that might have averted tragedy? Job thought it, especially as his three visitors pulled out all the stops to convince him that he had caused his own downfall. Scorah, too, must have for a time grappled with the notion of ‘retributive justice,’ same as Job. There is no reason to think it is so, but she is human. She must have grappled with it.
She had the key, as Pagels did not. Swayed by the revisionists, she discarded it. She exchanged a backdrop of: “We do not want you to be ignorant about those who are sleeping in death, so that you may not sorrow as the rest do who have no hope” (FN 1 Thessalonians 4:13) for one that urges, “Stay Ignorant. Stuff happens. Get used to it.” Ms. Morgan reckons that exchange an unmitigated triumph of the human spirit! Anyone of sense would reckon it as does Paul, a “shipwreck of faith.” Keep smashing your head into the wall of critical education until you feel better. It is impossible for the biblically-literate not to think of the verse regarding those who, ‘although claiming they were wise, became foolish.’ (FN Rom 1:22)
From the upcoming: [working title]: The Book of Job: a Workman's Theodicy
to be continued here
****** The bookstore
