Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

A discussion with a family member brought me to musing on the “I am the good shepherd” analogy. And you can bet that, having grown up in a conservative evangelical church, I’ve heard it all before – what a shepherd did (and does) to protect the sheep and lead them in safety and good supply. But what I realised I’ve never heard is the other side of the analogy. If Jesus is the shepherd, then christians are the sheep, right? Now start thinking about the characteristics of sheep:
1) They do everything as a group
2) They’re pretty defenceless
3) They don’t think for themselves, they just do what the sheep in front does.

So the extension of a shepherd analogy is neither complimentary nor a portrayal of intelligence. Perhaps that’s why conservative christians hate people questioning their beliefs… because it’s a signal of a sheep who doesn’t obey the unspoken rules.

Of course, encouraging sheep-like behaviour suits the church down to the ground – and when I say the church, I mean the organisation. Obedient, unquestioning followers make for order and safety of those higher up the hierarchy. But – as with many of the church’s policies – it also makes for a member-mass that’s ripe for abuse.

I blogged at Christmas-time about the difficulty of church-festival times of year for clergy abuse victims, and back then I said that Christmas was the worst, because it’s so all-pervasive.  But Easter has its own reasons for being considered the worst – primarily the intensity of feeling associated with it, and also the fact that it is (at least on Good Friday) a festival of grief as well as joy.  And the combination of intensity, grief and church is exactly what makes it a trigger time for abuse victims, because that’s the combination they faced daily throughout their abuse.

But for me there’s an added element – my first marriage ended dramatically and painfully on Good Friday (2001).  And what compounds the pain of that memory is that Good Friday is, year by year, a movable feast.  Which means that some years the anniversary of date and festival closely coincide, but other years there can be two weeks or more between the two, making the painful memories a long-drawn-out process indeed.  But what got me musing (and blogging) is something I’ve often said to others: if you want the religious parallels of that experience, it’s that I was so exhausted by the event that I lay down on Good Friday, and didn’t rise from my bed till Easter Sunday.  On the other hand, if you want the superstitious parallels, it’s that it happened on Friday 13th in the 13th year of our marriage!

So I was musing on the irony of being able to offer such alternative interpretations (christian or superstitious) of that event, and the pain of swinging between the two – particularly of being drawn to think church thoughts at a time which is painfully inclined to that anyway – and realised that this is the struggle I carry with me all the time.  Having grown up in a very conservative christian-oriented world/life, my interpretation of nearly everything was cast within that framework, and it’s often a struggle to find an alternative.  Yet Easter itself (not to mention every other church festival) is simply a christian overlay forced onto a much older “pagan” festival.

[There's an interesting aside here, that pagan means "of the country", and first came into use as a derogatory term when christianity became the state religion under the Emperor Constantine.  As the newly authorised religion pervaded the educated cities, "pagan" rites and beliefs referred to those of the uneducated rural dwellers, and only over time did it come to mean specifically non (or anti)-christian.]

But back to the point: the Easter festival is overlaid on a very old (more than 1500 years before Christ) fertility festival dedicated to Ishtar (Assyrian) or Astarte (Babylonian), goddess of fertility.  And the eggs, Easter bunny, hot cross buns, and even the practice of Lent, are borrowed from this much earlier tradition.  And an echo of that earlier “pagan” festival can be found in the Easter date controversies of the 3rd and 4th centuries – some christians still followed the Jewish calendar, celebrating Easter according to the date set for Passover, and some celebrated it on the immediately following Sunday, to commemorate the day of Jesus’ resurrection.  But dissatisfaction arose because in some years the Jewish date for Passover fell before the spring equinox!!  Now if religious/cultural events are all that’s important in setting the date, then the equinox has no relevance at all.  It’s precisely because the old fertility festival still carried some echoes in their thinking that the equinox was important.

I have no quibble with that; religions seeking to convert whole communities have always adopted prior-practised festivals and overlaid them with a new meaning – as, indeed, christians did with the Passover. But when the religion then promotes their own interpretation of the festival as the only right one, and denigrates other parts of it, which they borrowed in the first place, as unacceptable, they really mess with our heads

The church I grew up in went through a phase of seeking to separate themselves from the pagan associations of Easter (which name is derived from Eostre, an Anglo-Saxon fertility goddess, unlike most European languages where the word for Easter is derived from the Latin pasch, in turn derived from Pesach, the Jewish word for Passover) by calling it “The Festival of the Resurrection” instead of Easter.  And, of course, rejecting the Easter bunny and Easter eggs (but not chocolate!).  But what I think would be better is to see these traditions blended rather than separated – and not only to blend them, but celebrate the blending.  In a larger sense, to blend religious practices rather than emphasise the separatenesses.

My struggle, though – returning to my starting point – is to find a way to blend interpretations as well as practices.  And part of the struggle is that it’s hard to blend interpretations without being swept back into a conservative christian mindset (which is, perhaps, the reason why religions tend to insist on single-minded adherence). It’s hard to embrace parts of the beliefs/words/practices without taking along with them all the baggage that one grew up with as an intrinsic part of them.  And therein lies the basic trigger dilemma of a clergy abuse victim – that one can’t just dabble one’s toes in the edge of church waters, without also having to fight an internal battle against the parts of doctrine one no longer assents to.  So one gets forced into being “in” or “out” by one’s own limitations, as much as by the expectations or definitions of others.

But where I’d like to sit is somewhere where superstition and religion are equally valid.  Where miracles and magic are seen as the same.  And where love and truth and justice are recognised as just as good (ie. life-giving, or what christians would call godly) whether one finds them in Jesus or in any other person, and that selfishness and lies and injustice are just as evil (ie. life-destroying, or what christians would call sinful) whether one finds them in the worst criminal or in the church.

Barack Obama, as a left-of-centre president, was always going to get panned by the Vatican, but it’s happened in a far more laughable way than I could have imagined possible!  AAP reports that Obama has been criticised by the Vatican for overturning a ban on state funding for overseas abortion clinics (see here).  But it was the form of the criticism that had me astounded – though I should be used to the breathtaking superciliousness of the church by now.  The Vatican official ascribed to Obama “the arrogance of someone who believes they are right”, and further added that “What is important is to know how to listen… without locking oneself into ideological visions”.

If there’s one group of people who are arrogant enough to believe they’re right (and threaten those who think differently with eternal damnation!), and who are locked into an ideological vision to the extent of being unable to listen, it’s the conservative church!

This is still a very nebulous concept – as opposed to a fully formulated thought that I’m so indignant about that I have to blog But hopefully it will become more concrete as I type, or as people respond to it.

It seems to me that a great deal of the church insistence on correct doctrine (which – in conservative denominations – pushes against such things as the acceptance of gay clergy and the ordination of women) is caused by needing to feel that they can define who is a member, or is entitled to be one, and who isn’t. The benefit of this, for them, is that drawing such a hard line makes it easy to enforce the rules: you break them, you’re out. Or at least you get punished till you realise how bad you are. And the difficulty for denominations who don’t draw such a strong line, but allow their members freedom of conscience (no, the Catholic Church doesn’t really, whatever individual priests or bishops might tell you), is that they risk the edges of their organisation becoming so blurred that they cease to be a definite organisation.

And while I think that flexibility in religious belief and doctrine is desirable, I see that the end result might well be to cause that denomination to fall into the dust. This would then leave the conservative denominations self-righteously triumphant, claiming that “things that are not of god will fail” (Acts 5:38-39). So what is the answer to the fact that liberalism – by definition – doesn’t aggressively compel membership, yet is crucial to providing a balance to conservatism?

Not a title that narrows it down very much, really, when we’re talking about the church! But in this case, it’s about the arrogance of conservative members of the worldwide Anglican communion (about 1000 in total, a quarter of whom are bishops), who are at present in a meeting in Jerusalem which will probably see them deciding to boycott the next Lambeth Conference. There’s a nice article in The Age which more than adequately demonstrates their arrogance. Here are some excerpts, along with explanations of the arrogance for those who aren’t attuned to seeing it:

1) Peter Jensen asserts that the conference members are “the true keepers of the authority of the Bible.”
Arrogance: To suggest that just because they think (oops, sorry – know) their interpretation of the bible is right, that they are somehow “the true keepers” of its authority! Surely it’s God who is the keeper of scriptural authority??

2) Jensen also says “the Christian church has a constitution which is the Bible…it’s as if you’re a member of a [club] and you decide to break the rules…That’s understandable to the man on the street, surely.”
Arrogance no.1: Jensen and his conservative cohorts, again, are asserting that the rules they decide are the right ones actually are.
Arrogance no.2: [Unspoken translation] “Even the idiots who are just ordinary people can understand this when I’ve explained it so clearly, can’t they?”

3) Jensen said the church would not reunite until the current divisions over human sexuality were resolved. “There is no reason why we should leave the Anglican Church because we have not shifted. It is others who have shifted.”
Arrogance no.1: Knowing that because they’ve believed it for years, they must be right. (Supporters of slavery justified that from the bible, too, until Wilberforce and others worked on persuading them to a new viewpoint, which they finally found more biblical.)
Arrogance no.2: The assertion that if unity is to be restored, it’s “those others” who will have to return to the conservatives, rather than finding ways to compromise or move forward amicably. (Even given their assumption that they’re right, it’s still not the way forward in a contentious issue to just keep telling the other party that they’re wrong and they have to change!)

This all leads to another blog entry (as yet unwritten) about the need (or not) for definition of who’s “in the club” and who isn’t, and – with regard to the church – who makes the definition and how.

This morning I woke from a nightmare about an argument with people from St David’s (the church where I was abused) about why I don’t go to church. And as I lay in bed with my nerves and pulse rate gradually steadying, I mused on what upset my equilibrium enough to cause the dream. It was this: yesterday, I had two encounters with conservative theology. Yes – that’s all it took to give me a nightmare. Therein lies the sting of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder). People say “just get over it” without any idea of the longterm effects. Here am I – 25 years past the abuse itself, 10+ years since I began to realise its impact, including 5+ years of therapy. And it still causes me nightmares – in this case just from two simple encounters, neither of which were very important in themselves.

Encounter no.1: My daughter (17yo) announced that she was going to bible study to learn a bit more about what they keep referring to at youth group meetings. Now, I have to tell you that my daughter (in her own words a few years ago) “doesn’t do religion”. And I think that learning about a book that a) is a great piece of literature, and b) is constantly referred to in our culture (though not so constantly as it used to be), is a good thing. But the church through which she’s doing this is a Baptist one, and I know their theology is generally conservative. So alarm bells rang, because I know how insider conservatives would see her action. It would be “This is great! A non-Christian, who’s been coming to youth group for ages for the fun, is now starting to be led deeper into the joys of our faith in Jesus, and coming to bible study. The Lord is really calling her.” And they would step up their efforts to save her from hell, both through prayer and subtle pressure. And because I know just how hard it is to recover from years in conservatism, I was alarmed.

Encounter no.2: A Salt Shakers newsletter comment on the recent Anti-Discrimination Tribunal decision re homosexual foster carers was forwarded to an email list I belong to. Salt Shakers claims to be “an independent, trans-denominational ministry…dedicated to helping Christians understand the times (1 Chronicles 12: 32) and equipping them to be SALT and LIGHT in the community (Matthew 5: 13-16) by upholding Biblical values and by being more aware of the ethical issues affecting today’s society.” (www.saltshakers.org.au) Even that much would tell most churchgoers that this organisation has conservative beliefs. The fact that they began of Baptist origins is no surprise, therefore. (This isn’t meant to be an anti-Baptist rant – it just so happens that both incidents have Baptist connections.) The full decision of the ADT is available here but may be summarised as – Wesley Dalmar, an agency of the Uniting Church (UCA), refused an application from a gay couple to be foster carers. The couple alleged discrimination on the grounds of homosexuality, and the ADT upheld their claim – partly on the basis that, since the UCA has internal dissension on the issue of homosexuality, it can’t be construed as doctrine, and therefore isn’t covered by church exemption from the Anti-Discrimination Act.

This is part of Salt Shakers’ comment on the matter:
“This appalling decision, made by the NSW Tribunal, is itself blatantly discriminatory. It is saying that the long held religious beliefs and traditions are less important than the lifestyle choices of two men!… It also discriminates against the best interests of children. In many ways this decision is the Christian churches [sic] own fault because it has moved away from Biblical truth. This decision shows just how far this nation has moved towards calling evil good and good evil.
Initial analysis shows that:

And what worries me about this – and conservative believers in general – is the emphasis on sameness. “Everyone must believe the same thing, otherwise we’re in danger.” “If you don’t believe what we do, then you’re wrong/unsaved/going to hell.” “The Bible says…”, with no allowance for differing interpretations of what the bible means. Such emphasis on sameness, and pressure to conform, is the opposite of freedom and the antithesis of the joyous individuality that a religion ought to promote.

And getting back to my nightmare and the PTSD it springs from – it’s very hard to say how much of the PTSD comes from the abuse, and how much comes from the traumatic treatment by church members at a time when I was seeking to break free from the domination of conservative theology. But one thing I do know – that recovering from that kind of spiritual domination is extraordinarily difficult, and frighteningly long in process. Which is why I argue that such views, in their attempts to become mainstream through influence in politics, are far more dangerous than many non-believers would credit. Because religion mixed with a dose of fanatacism ultimately leads to war.