Clare’s blog, aka rantspace

Personal qualities:
1. Pre-eminent in courage, strength and skill
2. Loyal to an ideal.
3. Gentle and kind.
4. Much greater courage, resolution, strength of character and generosity than ordinary humans.
5. Comparatively short adult life.
6. Does battle against evil.
7. Dies as a sacrifice in order to win the battle.
8. Ventures into a different world, at great personal peril.
9. Performs some great feat and/or acquires immortality as a result of being in that world.
10. Returns triumphant to his own world, and brings back something that enhances human life.
11. Demonstrates that human life can be richer, more intense and fuller than we think.
12. Ends up being considered divine.

How many of you said Jesus? You’re wrong! Or at least, only partly right. That’s the summary of qualities of the quintessential hero of myth and legend I found in a book about the symbolism of the Arthurian legends. Jesus isn’t really so unique after all, is he?

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 don’t know how many times some well-meaning christian has said something to me along the lines of “but God has used your experience of abuse to bring good out of evil”.  And the “good” has usually been identified as one of the following: 1) it made you stronger, 2) your website is a great good, 3) your action has changed the way the church deals with abuse allegations… or something like that.

But what those things really mean, albeit often unconsciously for those who say them, is an attempt to make some kind of sense of what happened to me.  And many christians feel the need to make sense of abuse because there’s no other way of accounting for such evil being done while god is in control of the world.  But the cold harsh reality is that abuse doesn’t make sense.  And attempts to rationalise it as somehow part of god’s unfathomable plan simply don’t make sense either.  If god was really so great, and so much out for our good, then s/he could bring good without such evil being necessary first. Far better to see and acknowledge abuse as it is – an act of wanton aggression (once or many times) perpetrated on a defenceless victim.

In my opinion, seeking to make sense of it actually violates the enormity of the abomination it is.

There are many military/war metaphors in christianity, and I want to take issue with them on a number of counts.  Firstly, though, let me list some:

In the bible-
1) the “armour of god” passage in Ephesians 6:10-17.
2) the “fight the good fight” reference in 1 Tim 6:12.
3) “put on the armour of light”, Rom 13:12.
4) “with weapons of righteousness in the right hand and in the left” 2 Cor 6:7  (Note: Normally, one would have an offensive weapon in the right hand and a defensive protection in the left, but not in this metaphor!)
5) “like a good soldier of Jesus Christ” 2 Tim 2:3-4  (Note: v.3 includes the quoted text, v.4 defines the good soldier as obedient to his commanding officer)
6) “the weapons we fight with…have divine power… We demolish…we take captive…and we will be ready to punish” 2 Cor 10:4-6

In songs and hymns-
1) I’m in the Lord’s Army (Sunday School chorus for children)
2) Onward Christian Soldiers
3) We are Marching in the Light of God (originally an African anti-apartheid protest song, but adapted as a militant expression of christian witness)
4) Fight the Good Fight

And why is this army/soldier metaphor so disturbing?  Because it encourages the kind of thinking that facilitates abuse and abusive structures.  Successful soldiers possess the following qualities:
1) obedience to their superior officers (and that’s not primarily to the general commanding the army, it’s to their immediately superior rankings)
2) unquestioning allegiance to the cause being fought for
3) a willingness – one might even say an agreed contract – to sacrifice themselves without question on the orders of their commander
4) a vision of themselves as the solution to the dissension and salvation of those on the right side
5) the ability to dehumanise (one might even say demonise, but certainly to depersonalise) the enemy in order to justify one’s own aggressive behaviour and one’s side’s policies
6) the mass-thinking and loss of individualism that comes from army discipline and structures

(Here’s something worth noting – christians define disciples as “followers”, a legitimate definition according to modern usage, but the etymology makes it clear that the word really means “those who accept being disciplined”)

And all the “good soldier qualities” listed above are also the qualities that comprise the setting for spiritual abuse, and foster the possibility of other forms of abuse, including sexual abuse.  That’s why militant christianity is really an oxymoron, and metaphors of battle and war have no place in a religion supposedly based on love.

This is a very important distinction, and one that’s too seldom made in general conversation about the church, as well as in my blog.  So I’m making it now, by way of clarifying what I suspect may be misunderstood by some that read here.

There are two basic divisions, theologically speaking, within the christian church.  One is liberal, the other is fundamental; that is, there are liberal beliefs and there are fundamentalist beliefs.

The best way to define fundamentalism is to give a bit of history.  Back in about 1905 in the US, a bunch of Presbyterians got together to agree on five “fundamentals” of faith.  Those fundamentals were, and are still – the inerrancy of Scripture; the divinity of Christ; the virgin birth; the substitutionary theory of atonement (in simpler words – Jesus took the punishment for our sins); and the bodily return of Christ.  However, the term fundamentalist wasn’t really used until the 1940s, when there was a split between those who believed in asserting the fundamentals from within their existing denomination, and those who believed in separating themselves from others who didn’t firmly believe the fundamentals.  Those who remained within denominations became known as evangelicals, and the separatists as fundamentalists.

Liberals, on the other hand, are much harder to define.  The reason for this is the basic characteristic of a liberal, which is that they do not assert rules about what must be believed in order to be defined as christian.  Instead, they would probably prefer to talk about beliefs that identify a faith as christian, the most basic of which is a belief in Christ.  But not simply a belief that Jesus existed (which is fairly universally accepted, these days), but that in encountering Jesus you are encountering God.*  And let me make it quite clear, at this point, that that is not the same as believing that Jesus IS God.  But beyond that identifying belief, liberals would argue that a wide range of interpretations of the bible are possible, and that no-one has a right to label someone else a non-christian because they interpret something differently.

(Note: The fact that the word fundamentalist is now used to describe anyone asserting their belief in a fanatical way bears out the common acceptance of the distinction I am making here.  Although in a christian context, fundamentalism still also refers to belief in the fundamentals, in a wider sense fundamentalism refers to an aggressive and uncompromising approach to communicating beliefs, rather than to the particular beliefs themselves.)

These days, most major denominations comprise both fundamentalists and liberals.  The Sydney diocese of the Anglican church, for example, is fundamentalist.  Much of the rest of the Anglican church in Australia is more liberal.  The Uniting Church allows for a wide range of beliefs, so many members have liberal beliefs, but some congregations are closer to fundamentalism.  Cardinal Pell could safely be labelled a fundamentalist, judging from his public pronouncements.  Many other Catholics are not.  And this internal difference in perspective and attitude to belief is, in many cases, at the heart of intra-denominational disputes about homosexuality, the ordination of women, abortion, etc.

However, where all this related to me blogging is that I often refer to “the church” – mostly in disparaging terms   And I think it’s important to put on record that in these cases I am specifically referring to the fundamentalist end of the church spectrum.  Because to me it is not christianity, per se, that is dangerous, but the fundamentalist component of it.  And the same goes for any other religion – a faith that allows others to hold a different faith is harmless; a faith that insists that everyone should believe the same as they do, and is prepared to exert pressure (eg. claiming that if you don’t believe you’ll go to hell) or force (terrorist attacks, the Inquisition) to convince people to convert is profoundly dangerous and abusive.

Footnote:
* I am grateful to this site for this way of expressing it.

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.

Having grown up in a Christian family (one side of it, anyway) and having developed as a child a fondness for some series of books that have a quite strong Christian basis (in both the series I’m thinking of, the characters’ faith is a significant part of their lives, though in a mostly very practical way), when I re-read any of the books as an adult, I find myself approaching the depiction of the characters’ faith in a quite different way.

For instance, I no longer accept the argument from one character to another that the outcome of questioning the existence or the goodness of God is too awful to contemplate.  In one book, a character says “Don’t even begin to think that [ie. that God doesn't exist], because if it were true it would make everything we do worthless and the world pointless.”  My perspective now is that such reasoning is badly awry.  If God doesn’t exist, it may indeed make some things that we do worthless (though not all), and it may make the world pointless (but I don’t believe it must), but surely it would be better to believe the truth than to bolster ourselves into some artificial sense of purpose by holding to a false belief?

But back to my point: the book I was reading today had a character explaining to another that it’s unreasonable to question God, and say he’s cruel, when something bad happens unexpectedly.  And she gave the analogy that when a child doesn’t understand something its parent does, it doesn’t immediately turn round and say its parent is cruel – rather it remembers all the good times and trusts its parent, and says “I’ll wait, and one day I’ll understand.”  And it occurred to me that such an attitude is one of the most dangerous ways to approach our “why” questions.  Dangerous because it encourages an avoidance of the hard questions, and a consequent vulnerability to evil.

How?  Because evil first has to be recognised as evil.  Then it has to be fought.  And if our response to bad or frightening events is to ascribe them unquestioningly to a good God, with some good (though not understood) purpose, then we risk failing to discern between bad things caused by (or not prevented by) God, and evil happenings which should be fought with all our ability and strength.

Take, for instance, child sexual abuse – particularly by some intimate or trusted figure.  It is all too easy for Christians to say (as many do after the event is known) that God must have allowed it for a purpose.  But such an attitude comes perilously close to accepting evil without question, and encourages a response of inactivity, albeit under the guise of “allowing God to deal with it”.  This, in turn, makes allowing God to deal with it simply a cop-out so that we don’t have to.  Those same people who say that would be quite likely to say – in other, less confronting circumstances – a) we are God’s instruments, b) God helps those who help themselves, or c) we are on this earth to fight against evil.

So it seems to me, the biggest question is not “why did X happen?”, but rather “what are we going to do about it?”  Because it is our response to bad happenings that will determine whether we protect ourselves (and others, such as children) in future, by not just accepting what comes as inevitable (“sent by God”), or whether we allow bad people who do bad things to get away with it.

That’s a pretty broad topic heading, but I want to focus on the manipulation involved in “conversions”.  Let’s look at two scenarios:
1) Newcomers attending church on Sundays, and how the congregation behaves towards them.
2) Individual church members “witnessing” to friends/acquaintances/etc.

Scenario 1
Doubtless most church members, or former church members, will recognise the “we must be more loving [or welcoming] to visitors” angst.  But my question is, what is the purpose behind this?  In Christian doctrine, love is supposedly one of the “fruits of the Spirit”, and therefore something which grows as a result of a relationship with god.  So human efforts to act more lovingly can only – in that understanding – be seen as human attempts to create something artificially that isn’t happening naturally.  Thus the reason for being more loving/welcoming to visitors is not about being more godly, but about appearing to be more godly in order to not push visitors away, and keep them coming along to church.  Why would Christians want this?  Two reasons that I’ve heard being subtly or overtly expressed: a) because we want them to feel like we’re their friends, and b) because we want them to keep hearing “the word of god”.  And it is in the combination of these that lies the manipulation.  The more frequently a person hears a code of belief, the more likely they are to espouse it.  That’s the basic principle behind brainwashing, and it’s not limited to brainwashing practices.  It’s explicit in the Catholic Church’s boast “give me a child till they’re 7, and I’ll give you the man”.  It’s the basis of parental concern over their children being taught at school by a gay teacher.  It’s a clearly understood principle in all forms of teaching.  And when you add to that the development of a social network (in creating friendships, that is), you add pressure.  It becomes a situation (unspoken, usually) of “believe along with us, or we will not be able to maintain as deep or close a friendship with you”.  That’s manipulation through subtle emotional blackmail.

Here’s the test question as to whether a parish’s niceness is manipulation or not:  If someone comes along, and enjoys the parish’s niceness to them, but is quite outspokenly a non-believer and continues to be so, will the parish treat them just as nicely, and just as welcomingly and inclusively, for the rest of their life there?

Scenario 2
Again, church members or former church members will readily recognise the approach along the lines of  “so-and-so is having a tough time right now.  That’s just when they most need god, and so this is a god-sent opportunity to witness to them”.  And yet no-one seems to question whether this is an appropriate time to attempt to convert them.  It’s common knowledge that times of crisis are not when anyone should be making life-changing decisions, yet that’s exactly the time that Christians think most opportune for conversion.  Why?  Because it is!  When someone is vulnerable – through stress, or grief, or trauma of some kind – is exactly when they’re most likely to make a decision without fully grasping the implications.  Salesmen know that, and use it to their advantage.  Christians should not!

Here’s the test question for this scenario: in doing things for the distressed person, is the Christian doing or saying anything that carries the implication of wanting the distressed person to change their beliefs?

.

And here’s a thought for two possible overall tests as to whether there’s manipulation going on: 1) is the original thing that attracts someone to whatever-it-is the thing they ultimately have to agree to in order to belong/comply?  and 2) is the initial approach one of offering something (for free, or at a bargain price) followed by having to sign up for something you’ll pay for (in money, time, or other “currency”)?

Manipulation is bad wherever you come across it.  Manipulation by supposedly loving people is worse.  And manipulation that carries a threat of eternal damnation if you don’t comply is just plain evil.