Jim Meisner, Jr.’s essay on “Biblical
Sexism and Modern Rape Culture” is provocative and well worth your five
minutes to read. It prompted me to reflect on the relationship between religions
generally and the socially constructed systems of deprecation and
discrimination that have haunted human societies historically and today serve
as the crux of the culture wars.
For far too many years far too
many people within the world’s religions have conflated common social constructions
of human beings and human relationships that proclaim who can be valued in that
society and who must not be with what they purport to be revelations of the divine. In
an early Iron Age culture with its warrior sky gods rapidly displacing agrarian
female deities, it would hardly be surprising to see the tribal values of the
socially dominant – patriarchy in all its hydra heads (sexism, homophobia) and racism
– accepted as simply part of the natural order.
Correspondingly, over time, those
understandings which were produced through social construction would no doubt
be attributed to the tribal deity. Thus, sexism, homophobia and racism came to
be seen as reflecting the mind of their god.
I doubt such tribal gods ever
fully served all the people of G_d. It was undoubtedly a question of where one
fell in the cultural hierarchy. If one was male and straight in patriarchal
cultures and white in racist cultures, the tribal gods who reflected and
validated their privilege was a great deal. If you were wealthy, divine
affirmation reflected your privilege. If you lacked one or more
of those qualities, this was a lousy deal even as your socially constructed misfortune was generally interpreted
as the result of divine judgment and thus your fate.
There was a reason that Jesus of
Nazareth consistently spoke out on behalf of the anawim, the little ones, whom he declared G-d favored. In a culture which proclaimed by word and deed that G-d did not value them, statements like “Blessed are the poor...those who mourn...the meek..,” i.e., the opposite of those exercised power and enjoyed privilege in his culture, were words of resistance - if not defiance.
The holders of arbitrary,
socially constructed privilege and virulent social prejudices at some level inevitably recognize how arbitrary and thus how fragile their positions are. Most come to feel the need for legitimation
for the same. The common sources of such legitimation tend to be nature,
tradition and religion. But regardless of how legitimate these understandings
may come to be seen, at heart they always remain social constructions, subject to deconstruction by critical consideration and reconstruction in ways less exploitative and injurious to others.
To
the degree they impact the lives of targeted groups of people negatively today,
they must be seen as what they are - common social prejudices, NOT the respectable
tenets of a venerable religious tradition. Those traditions may well hold a number of tenets worthy of respect (and it is neither fair nor intellectually honest to sum up entire traditions based upon their worst features). But the conflation of common social prejudices and socially constructed privilege with the mind or will of the deity is not among them.
Insisting that the deity
demands such understandings in the face of modern scientific knowledge about
sex, gender, sexual orientations, race and the creation and distribution of
wealth no doubt requires increasing levels of denial among even minimally conscious human beings. Notions of a deity who is seen
as the source of all goodness are simply impossible to reconcile with corrosive
prejudices which causes observable harm to human beings and to the planet we share with all other living beings.
A thoughtful believer today might
begin to ask him/herself whether their construct of deity needs
reconsideration. A god who ordains male privilege within families, who excuses egregious
male abuse of women and children, who is homophobic and/or racist, or who blesses the
amassing of enormous amounts of wealth at the expense of the rest of the population
and the good Creation itself, is not a god worth worshipping by thoughtful
people regardless of the tradition in which that construct is found.
Whatever else that construct
might be, it does not point toward the Creator of the Universe, the G-d who is
Source and Ground of All Being.
As for those who continue to foster
such impoverished and ultimately pathological understandings without further
consideration, they reveal themselves as holding a vision of religion not worthy of respect even as their persons and the image of G_d they bear must always be
respected by those who would draw them into question. Clearly, many will find
it difficult to make that distinction. But it is there and it can be and must
be made.
As always, we can do better.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
hcoverston.orlando@gmail.com
If the unexamined life is not worth
living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is
not worth holding. Most things worth considering do not come in sound
bites.
For what does G-d require of you
but to do justice, and to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your G-d? (Micah
6:8, Hebrew Scriptures)
Do not be daunted by the enormity
of the world's grief. Do justly, now. Love mercy, now. Walk humbly now. You are
not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to abandon it. - Rabbi
Rami Shapiro, Wisdom of the Jewish Sages (1993)
© Harry Coverston 2018
No comments:
Post a Comment