Power and Spirituality
Is the Bible spiritual? It’s the world’s most popular sacred text with over four billion adherents. Silly question, right?
We think of power-seeking and spirit-seeking as opposite paths. Spirituality is a kind of truth-seeking. It’s about self-discovery, asking such questions as: What do I believe in? How can I be true to myself? Contemporary spirituality is apolitical and egalitarian, acknowledging that Christians, Hindus, and secular humanists may follow equally valid paths. Moral superiority is absent. It is not a zero-sum game, whereas power often is. Power does pursue some truths “knowledge is power, after all”—but that knowledge is a means to materialistic ends.
Does spirituality require some power? Surely power is very spiritual to a slave. Power- and spirit-seeking converge as autonomy drops below a certain threshold. It’s hard to argue that spirituality is apolitical for those who struggle to survive.
An Ancient Ethnicity
The backdrop of the Bible is a daily struggle to survive. The characters battle each other and nature: captivity by Egyptians and Babylonians, plagues, famine. The life expectancy was around thirty years. In that setting, a covenant with a superior being matters because it increases power, providing liberation from pharaohs and plagues. This relationship with God lacks spirituality in a modern sense. It is patriarchal, religiously intolerant, and spiritual only in the way autonomy is. The story of Exodus is not about the Israelites discovering how slavery is wrong; rather, it describes a superior being helping them transition from being the enslaved to the enslavers.
The biblical stories are overwhelmingly concerned with a pre-scientific survival of the fittest, and the process of ethnicity creation as a survival strategy. As many critics have said, the moral sensibility differs little from authority worship. As many interpretations of Genesis have noted, its purpose is to explain the origin of life’s unrelenting hardship. Historically, relationships with superior beings began as philosophies of suffering. They explain the causes of misfortune beyond our control and how to find hope within that relationship (usually involving sacrifice). The concept of “superior” has no place in a spirituality based on personal integrity. The loss of relevance of a superior being is predictable from basic psychological theory, such as Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.
Maslow’s hierarchy provides insight into the evolution of spirituality since biblical times. A superior being can assist (or thwart) the fulfillment of basic needs, and that fulfillment has spiritual value, but authority plays no part in the pursuit of truth.
Many passages show the biblical codes defining a culture rather than describing a morality. Exodus 20:14 prohibits coveting the property of neighbors: “you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or male or female slave” (often translated as “servant” or “bondservant” but clearly referring to ownership). In other passages, the deity closely resembles the god of war, Ares, offering military success in exchange for worship and sacrifice. In Exodus 23:27–28, he promises to annihilate other ethnic groups in the region: “I will send forth My terror before you, and I will throw into panic all the people among whom you come, and I will make all your enemies turn tail before you. I will send a plague ahead of you, and it shall drive out before you the Hivites, the Canaanites, and the Hittites.”
C. S. Lewis popularized the idea that we need God to have morality. The belief found in the text is that we need God to have power. In a sense, the Bible is right. We still thank God when we receive some sort of power, such as winning the lottery or a battle. When we are the recipient of morality, we thank a human being.
None of this comes as a surprise. A culture of love and equity needs a certain kind of history; in psychological terms, expecting it in a pre-scientific era is not “developmentally appropriate.” Any relationship—certainly with an authority—will change as power changes. Spirituality should predictably evolve as autonomy improves and with education.
“We promote interpretations that reflect traditional Qur’anic principles
of inclusiveness, mercy, compassion, and fairness … . We are committed to reproductive justice and empowering women to make healthy decisions regarding their bodies, sexuality, and reproduction.”
— Muslims for Progressive Values
A sacred text is like an ink blot: the “promoted interpretations” reveal more about the interpreters than the image.
Identity and Change
If modern spirituality is characterized by self-discovery and empathy, and the Bible contains little of that, then can modern religiosity be biblical? Does tolerant Christianity have biblical roots? At some point, an evolving identity ceases to be the same thing in a different stage of development and becomes something new. There’s a paradigm shift. Is a pluralistic Christianity of transgender ministers a more developed version of what’s described in the Bible or actually something new going under the old name?
It’s nearly impossible to find humanist, tolerant values in the biblical text and trivial to find condoned oppression and materialism. A good explanation of people with tolerant, truth-seeking values identifying as Christian, Jew, or Muslim is that they want to maintain a connection with family or ethnic tradition. It’s the community, historical and present, not the moral code that needs preservation.
A specific, concrete example of oppression is Numbers 31, which describes the Israelites carrying out misogyny, genocide, and slavery. Here, the Israelite army has slaughtered the Midianite men and returned with the women and children as captives. The prophet Moses is outraged by such mercy: “Now, therefore, slay every male among the children, and slay also every woman who has known a man carnally; but spare every young woman who has not had carnal relations with a man.”
God directs that the maidens be distributed with the rest of the livestock: “You shall withhold one in every fifty human beings as well as cattle, asses, and sheep—all the animals—and give them to the Levites, who attend to the duties of the LORD’s Tabernacle.”
The chapter illustrates the Covenant’s nature as a strategy to gain power over others; accordingly, the moral codes of the ethnic group did not apply to outsiders. Leviticus may command us to love our neighbors including expatriates, but it definitely does not prohibit war, colonization, or hegemony.
The need, then, is for a separation of worldview and ethnicity. It’s found in Judaism to some degree in the well-established term secular Jew. Secular Christian is a rarer concept. As a general rule, those who identify as Christian insist the Bible reflects their worldview, an impossibility when their worldview is feminist and pluralistic. Such interpretations entail projecting contemporary values onto the Bible at the expense of accountability to the text.
An example of that projection is the interpretation of 1 Kings as a cautionary tale about greed. That popular interpretation is consistent with the values of affluent societies but not the text. Rather, material gain is the main reward for obeying the biblical god. King Solomon asks God for the wisdom to rule well, and God replies: “And I also grant you what you did not ask for—both riches and glory all your life—the like of which no king has ever had. And I will further grant you long life, if you will walk in My ways and observe My laws and commandments.”
And:
I will establish your throne of kingship over Israel forever, as I promised your father David, saying, “Your line on the throne of Israel shall never end.”
[But] if you and your descendants turn away from Me and do not keep the commandments [and] the laws which I have set before you, and go and serve other gods and worship them, then I will sweep Israel off the land which I gave them;
It’s a transaction: God gets obedience and rejection of competing gods, and Solomon gets “riches and glory” for himself and his heirs. The values are the various forms of power that figure throughout the Bible and reach their pinnacle in 1 Kings. Knowledge is not part of the deal nor could it be.
Subsequent events hint at the divergence of spirit-seeking and power-seeking. As wise Solomon achieves peak autonomy, he becomes pluralistic. It’s that religious tolerance, not greed, that God names as his sin:
Solomon followed Ashtoreth the goddess of the Phoenicians, and Milcom the abomination of the Ammonites.
Solomon did what was displeasing to the LORD and did not remain loyal to the LORD like his father David.
…
The LORD was angry with Solomon, because his heart turned away from the LORD, the God of Israel, who had appeared to him twice
and had commanded him about this matter, not to follow other gods; he did not obey what the LORD had commanded.
And the LORD said to Solomon, “Because you are guilty of this—you have not kept My covenant and the laws which I enjoined upon you—I will tear the kingdom away from you.”
The punishment is not for hoarding wealth—God valued and promised riches—but for allowing religious diversity after the wealth became gratuitous. (The goddess Ashtoreth is more commonly known as Ishtar or Inanna).
The story also suffers from the usual free-will problems. God guaranteed that Solomon would rule well—“I grant you a wise and discerning mind; there has never been anyone like you before, nor will anyone like you arise again”—and then punished him for ruling poorly. Rather than teaching Sunday school children that the tale of Solomon exemplifies the perils of greed, a true scholar would ask the children why such a wise king defied authority and allowed religious freedom.
And now, an exercise for the reader. A sacred text, and an interpretation:
And to the woman [God] said,
“I will greatly expand
Your hard labor—and your pregnancies;
In hardship shall you bear children.
Yet your urge shall be for your husband,
And he shall rule over you.”
—Genesis 3:16
[Genesis 3:16] describes how sin corrupts the dynamic of communion between the sexes into a dynamic of domination. This awful truth echoes throughout human history and into our own time. There are still forces in society that are actively eroding the dignity of women. As long as we live in a world twisted by sin, we will have to resist the dynamic of domination.
—Cultivating Catholic Feminism (emphasis in original)1
Does the textual evidence support the interpretation?
King Solomon and his love, Song of Solomon.
A Divergence
The Bible depicts ethnicity creation as a survival strategy. Group cohesion provides power. Ethnicity creation entails worldview creation, leading to dissonance as moral and scientific progress imply new worldviews, even as honoring family and tradition require preserving the ethnicity. If the ethnicity cannot exist without a worldview, then open-minded members must either abandon the group or abandon the sacred text by interpreting it to support new values regardless of what it actually says.
That pressure to fit any worldview into a biblical framework leads to a range of interpretation that defies definition. The thematic range of the books further facilitates rationalizing virtually any interpretation. Is morality hellfire or love? As a book such as 2001’s Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation edited by Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson makes clear, even movements within an institution can align more with secular humanism than orthodoxy.
Humanism is a democratic and ethical life stance, which affirms that human beings have the right and responsibility to give meaning and shape to their own lives. It stands for the building of a more humane society through an ethic based on human and other natural values in the spirit of reason and free inquiry through human capabilities.
—Humanists International2
The writers of these essays have created complex, intentional identities that push the boundaries of convention and open the way for change. The lives reflected in these pages are studies in courage, innovation, and deep commitments to the values these rabbis see at the core of Judaism: honesty, family, rigorous intellectual and spiritual inquiry.
—Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation3
Due to our aforesaid commitment to sacred continuity, however, we cannot accept either the ordination of women or the recognition of women as members of the Orthodox rabbinate, regardless of the title. The RCA views this event as a violation of our mesorah (tradition).
—The Rabbinical Council of America (RCA)4
Two of the worldviews and two of the ethnicities align but not the same two.
How has secular Judaism become so much more established than secular Christianity or secular Islam? Judaism has never possessed the wealth or sovereignty of the others. The Church has enormous resources and incentive to oppose Christianity without the Church. Judaism’s lack of proselytizing and colonization have also kept it more closely bound to its ethnicities. Stripping religiosity from the Ashkenazi and Sephardi leaves more commonality than stripping it from Polish and Filipino Catholics.
The resistance to separating worldview and ethnicity leads to some biblical interpretations that are more humanist than religious.
Connection and Change
In the beginning, power and spirituality are one path. Ethnicity and worldview creation increase the power of group members, giving the more unified tribe an advantage in cultural and military competitions (and it’s plausible that monotheism is more unifying than polytheism). As material and intellectual progress pass certain thresholds, meeting fundamental needs no longer suffices to meet spiritual needs. Truth starts to compete with power as a reason to hold this or that belief. Truth-seeking erodes group identity and feeds individuality, and spirituality develops beyond praying for luck in fertility and war.
Truth-seeking is so incompatible with power-seeking that a spirituality that shifts from one to the other should be considered a new paradigm. The shaming and other fear-based tactics of Leviticus are effective at creating union but incompatible with a rational morality. Justifying oppression and war requires a moral code that does not apply to outsiders, whereas truth-seeking values universal principles.
When a sacred text defines an identity with two parts, what happens when one part ceases to exist? A biblical identity normally consists of a worldview and a community. When a group member abandons the worldview of the sacred text but strives to keep the connection to family and tradition, what happens to their identity?
One option is to acknowledge the separation of cultural and spiritual identities, such as a secular Jew who is free to hold any worldview. In the less ethnic religions, public abandonment of belief risks the loss of power by shunning.
“I miss the music,” she says. MacBain sang in church choirs and worship bands most of her life, and even though she no longer believes the words, she still catches herself singing praise songs.
She says she also misses the relationships—she’ll often pick up the phone to call someone, then realize she can’t. And she misses the ritual and regularity of church life.
—”From Minister To Atheist: A Story Of Losing Faith”5
The Clergy Project was founded precisely so that atheist former clergy could join voices in the wilderness.
Apostasy and banishment make for good human interest stories, but statistical reports capture the broader movements. Take Christmas, for instance. Americans have become less inclined to see it as a purely religious holiday but not less inclined to celebrate it.6 They are not even less inclined to celebrate it by going to church, something akin to secular Jews lighting the menorah. Also in slow decline is the percentage of Christians who regard the Christmas biblical narrative as historical fact. Christmas may represent an early-stage secular Christianity.
For those without a secular version of their identity, renunciation is risky. A safer option is to “promote interpretations” of the sacred text as supporting the replacement worldview, essentially treating the sacred text as a Rorschach test (which would seem to make it less sacred). That allows virtually any worldview to operate within the religious identity, a kind of marketing to self and tribe designed to limit cognitive dissonance and shunning.
One could avoid the existential crisis altogether by living without identity, but that would be at the expense of full community participation. Maximum solidarity requires group identity. On the other hand, full community immersion comes at the expense of individuality, so having no identity likely facilitates being true to oneself.
Notes
1. “Why Catholic Feminism?” Cultivating Catholic Feminism. Available online at https://www.cultivatingcatholicfeminism.com/pages/why.
2. American Humanist Association, “Definition of Humanism.” Available online at https://americanhumanist.org/what-is-humanism/definition-of-humanism/.
3]. Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson (eds.), Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001.
4. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “Rabbinical Council of America Officially Bans Ordination and Hiring of Women Rabbis,” November 1, 2015. Available online at https://www.jta.org/2015/11/01/united-states/rabbinical-council-of-america-officially-bans-ordination-and-hiring-of-women-rabbis.
5. NPA, “From Minister To Atheist: A Story Of Losing Faith,” April 30, 2012. Available online at https://www.npr.org/2012/04/30/151681248/from-minister-to-atheist-a-story-of-losing-faith.
6. Pew Research Center, “Americans Say Religious Aspects of Christmas Are Declining in Public Life,” December 12, 2017. Available online at https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/12/12/americans-say-religious-aspects-of-christmas-are-declining-in-public-life/.
Power and Spirituality Is the Bible spiritual? It’s the world’s most popular sacred text with over four billion adherents. Silly question, right? We think of power-seeking and spirit-seeking as opposite paths. Spirituality is a kind of truth-seeking. It’s about self-discovery, asking such questions as: What do I believe in? How can I be true to …