The Huffington Post reported this week that “the American Family Association, a religious right group, is urging that Tillikum (Tilly), the killer whale that killed a trainer at SeaWorld Orlando, be put down, preferably by stoning. Citing Tilly’s history of violent altercations, the group is slamming SeaWorld for not listening to Scripture in how to deal with the animal.”

Apparently, the Bible should be referred to in cases such as this:

Says the ancient civil code of Israel, “When an ox gores a man or woman to death, the ox shall be stoned, and its flesh shall not be eaten, but the owner shall not be liable.” (Exodus 21:28)

“However, the group is going further and laying the blame for the trainer’s death directly at the feet of Chuck Thompson, the curator in charge of animal behavior, because, according to Scripture,”

But, the Scripture soberly warns, if one of your animals kills a second time because you didn’t kill it after it claimed its first human victim, this time you die right along with your animal. To use the example from Exodus, if your ox kills a second time, “the ox shall be stoned, and its owner also shall be put to death.” (Exodus 21:29)

I submit to the AFA that it is now 2010, not 610 B.C.E. when the Yahwists were busy stoning everybody who disagreed with them. Can we at least pretend that 3,000 years have gone by?

I hereby name the American Family Association  nithings. Let them stand shamed and condemned before all for their vile and reprehensible behavior.

INTRODUCTION

The gay/lesbian rights movement has been called the civil rights issue of the new millennium. Conservative Christian groups oppose granting the gay-lesbian community the rights guaranteed them by the Constitution and they do so on the basis of a black and white moralistic dichotomy. Some Pagan groups do as well. I will argue here that opposition to gay and lesbian rights on a historical basis is misguided and – where not influenced by Judeo-Christian understanding of morality – is based on modern ideas of gender roles and categories. Homosexuality has not been universally seen as immoral; it has not even always been seen as homosexuality. As often happens, the truth is much more complex than the simple black and white model offered modern Western audiences.

We claim to live in an enlightened age yet we are trapped by our own understanding of gender roles and categories. We are brought up to believe that there are boys and there are girls. Boys have penises and girls have vaginas. And there is nothing in between and it is obvious how the pieces are supposed to go together. And no surprise: we are brought up to see the world in this way.

But it is not the only way; other cultures and other ages have different ideas and understandings. In the industrialized West we determine gender categories based on plumbing. We don’t base these categories on gender roles; instead, gender roles have for a long time been determined by gender categories: men fight and hunt; women engage in domestic duties.

Likewise, if a boy makes love to a boy, it is homosexuality. You thus have a category called “homosexual” – those who engage in same-sex sexual relations. Both participants are labeled as homosexuals.

But homosexuality, few people realize, is a modern concept. The pathology of the 19^th century created the category from the male/female conceptualized as abnormal.[1] Ancient ideas about sex and sexuality are far more ambiguous.[2]

To claim therefore that modern distinctions and prejudices are simply continuances of ancient Pagan feeling on the subject is to misstate the case. As Marilyn Katz puts it, “the nineteenth-century notion of sexual pathology was unknown to antiquity.” As she goes on to say, “[T]here is a radical discontinuity between the ancient and modern discourses on sexuality.”[3]

This is a point upon which modern Pagans would do well to ponder. Will we appeal to the past, or to the present, or will we find our own way? And if we appeal to the past we must have a care that we do not impose our own prejudices on our interpretation of history. As Beate Wagner-Hasel observed in 1989, the debate over the status of women in ancient Greece “is not only an attempt to reconstruct a bygone way of life, it is also a discourse over woman’s place in modern bourgeois society which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and has continued up until the present time.”[4]

Archaeologist Joan Breton-Connelly speaks of “presentist” assumptions – arguments based on or colored by “late twentieth -century political sensibilities.”[5] With regard to genders as “fixed” categories Breton-Connelly appeals to Judith Butler’s questioning of “woman” as a fixed category in her Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990) in which she “exposes the ways in which traditional feminist constructs decontextualize individuals from their historical, political, and cultural settings and identities.”[6] The same can be said of homosexuals as a fixed category.

OTHER PARADIGMS

But what if gender was based on gender roles instead of plumbing?

Take for example my own Norse ancestors. While a boy might be born with male sex organs, that simple fact did not in itself make him a man. Gender categories were not fixed and manhood was something that had to be earned – and maintained – through the activities normally associated with that gender category. This meant that while a boy and his penis could aspire to manhood, so could a woman. By laying aside one set of gender roles and embracing another, a woman could become a man. Conversely, a man could become a woman.

Critics – many of them Christian – and Western – say “you confuse gender roles with gender categories.” The answer to this claim is that such a viewpoint is ethnocentric and of little help in understanding the complex nature of gender issues both temporally and spatially.

“This is a world in which ‘masculinity’ always has a plus value, even (or perhaps especially) when it is enacted by a woman,” writes one scholar.[7] It was “a society in which being born male precisely did not confer automatic superiority, a society in which distinction had to be acquired, and constantly reacquired, by wresting it away from others.” Because women had no theoretical ceiling and men no theoretical floor, gender categories were flexible and movable.[8]

Like the Norse, the Romans and Greeks lacked a modern understanding of “homosexual” and “heterosexual.” Once again, it was not what a Roman “was” but what a Roman “did” that determined things. A Roman male was supposed to be a penetrator, the “active” partner in sexual activity. It was manly to penetrate; it was feminine to be penetrated.

The poet Horace put it thusly:

When your organ is stiff, and a servant girl

Or a young boy from the household is near at hand and you know

You can make an immediate assault, would you sooner burst with tension?

Not me. I like sex to be there and easy to get.

As one author puts it, for a free male citizen of Rome “to be sodomized was shameful, a betrayal of his masculinity. Anyone who was known to enjoy being buggered was scorned.”[9]

The Norse understood things in the same terms. “Anal penetration constructed the man who experienced it as whore, bride, mare, bitch, and the like – in whatever guise a female creature.”[10]

To put it bluntly: A hole was a hole was a hole, and quite literally, since the Roman word “vagina” (which means sword-sheath) applied equally to vagina and anus and certain Norse words served the same dual purpose.[11]

The evidence suggests that for the Norseman’s “character was not either male or female, but lay on a spectrum ranging from strong to week, aggressive to passive, powerful to powerless, winner to loser.”[12]

To be called a man was the highest compliment a man could pay a “woman,” as we see in Laxdaela Saga when Snorri of Helgafell says of Gudrun the Fair, “Now you can see what a man Gudrun is, when she gets the better of both of us.”

To be a man was to be hvatur – bold, active, and vigorous – and this was to be admired, whatever sort of plumbing you had. Likewise, to be blauður – soft and weak – was to be despised, whatever sort of plumbing you had.[13]

CONCLUSIONS

In our world of assumed certainty, things are far less certain than we like to pretend. As it turns out, gender roles and categories are nebulous, shifting things. In the end, they are what we say they are from age to age and culture to culture. We decide man = x and woman = y but x and y are neither fixed nor universal.

The moralizers in some ancient pre-Christian societies decided that men were penetrators and women were penetrated. The old ditty about Caesar demonstrates this, that he was “every woman’s man, and every man’s woman.” In contrast to today’s paradigm, by sodomizing another man Caesar would not be seen as effeminate; but being sodomized was another matter altogether.

Christian moralizers, following Jewish Law, presented the Western world with a new paradigm: Not only did men “insert” and women “receive,” but men could only be insertive with regards to women and women could only be recipients of men. Any toying with this equation was an abomination that had unhappy results for all concerned. And the derision of your fellows (in Pagan cultures) and a relatively quick death (in Judaism) was replaced in Christianity by an eternity of hellfire.[14]

And so it remains today.[15]

Except that these distinctions are all artificial. In mathematics numbers added to or subtracted from other numbers have certain, unchangeable results. But nature – and life – don’t work that way. There is homosexuality in the natural world outside of the human species – or at least we label it as such (we can’t possibly know how the animals involved would think of it).[16]

It is the human-imposed synthetic categories of “moral” and “immoral,” “normal” and “abnormal” that is unnatural. They are not universal; they are not constant and unchanging. They are what we say they are. And if we want, we can say they are something else. The irony is, for the West, that it is a religion that distances itself from nature that has decided for us what is and is not natural.

Some Pagan moralizers sound like conservative Christians; they like to say that homosexuality is immoral but they have forgotten to change their moral filters. For a reconstructionist religion making this determination isn’t reconstructing the past; its imposing modern prejudices on their model of the past (which had an entirely different set of prejudices).

On reconstructionist grounds alone, there is no basis for 21^st century ideas about gender roles and categories; you cannot reconstruct what did not exist. It seems the pathology of the 19^th century can capture those who escape the clutches of Judeo-Christian moralizing.

The monolithic and universal category of male/female is a myth, the determinants differing for every culture and/or religion. For one group to say “our way is the True way” is not only arrogant but wrong-minded. Just as every ethnic group or culture has a religion that is true for it (true because it works) so every culture has gender roles that work for it. We may not approve of them, but then, who are we to say that we are right and they are wrong? Put the shoe on the other foot and see how you feel about it.

Once we start imposing our particular views, once we start categorizing our local views as universal, we open ourselves up to a world where might makes right, where the dominant culture (which in recent centuries has been Western and Christian) determines in a blatantly ethnocentric manner what is right for everyone: this is what a woman is, this is what a man is. These are the rules permissible for men and women; conform or die.

But ancient Church Councils aside, universal truths are not attainable by popular vote. One book, developing out of one culture and society (and religion) no matter how popular, cannot dictate for everyone what determines gender roles and categories. Such an understanding is only one out of many thousands of possibilities.

If we are going to come to a new understanding of these matters, we have to set aside our arrogance and our ethnocentrism; we need a new paradigm…and a new discussion.

---

[1] Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and ‘The Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece,” History and Theory 31 (1992), 92. With regard to “homosexual” or “gay/lesbian,” and the effect of using one term over another see Steve Williams, “Gay and Lesbian or Homosexual? What’s in a Word?” http://www.care2.com/causes/civil-rights/blog/gay-and-lesbian-or-homosexual-does-it-matter/

[2] See Ray Laurence, Roman Passions: A History of Pleasure in Imperial Rome (Continuum, 2009), 84-86 for a discussion of views of “homosexuality”in the Roman world.

[3] Katz (1992), 92.

[4] Beate Wagner-Hasel, “Frauenleben in orientalischer Abgeschlossenheit? Zur Geschichte und Nutzanwendung eines Topos,” Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 2 (1989), 19.

[5] Joan Breton-Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton University Press, 2007), 19-20.

[6] Breton-Connelly (2007), 22.

[7] Carol Clover, “Regardless of Sex: Men, Women, and Power in Early Northern Europe,” Speculum 68 (1993), 372.

[8] Clover (1993), 380.

[9] Anthony Everitt, Augustus (Random House, 2006), 149.

[10] Clover (1993), 375.

[11] Clover (1993), 378.

[12] Nancy Marie Brown, The Far Traveler: Voyages of a Viking Woman (Harcourt, 2007), 74.

[13] Brown (2007), 74.

[14] And in Uganda, with the support of extremist American Evangelicals, we are seeing the return of the death penalty for homosexuality. See “Human Rights Impact Assessment of Uganda’s Anti-homosexuality Bill,” The Zeleza Post, January 17, 2010 http://www.moveon.org/r?r=86439&id=18903-6770804-EYlalox&t=5

[15] See the discussion at ReligiousTolerance.org: http://www.religioustolerance.org/hom_legis.htm

[16] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/5550488/Homosexual-behaviour-widespread-in-animals-according-to-new-study.html

It is a wonder to me that people today can scoff at Pagan divine birth stories but accept without a blink the details of Jesus’ birth as given in Matthew and Luke (Mark wasn’t interested in where or how Jesus was born and John had a different conception altogether – pardon the pun).

In Matthew (1:18-2:23, Mary gets knocked up and Joseph figures she has been sleeping around and he’s going to dump the tramp until he has a dream that says the Holy Spirit is responsible. They get married; Jesus is born.

In Luke (1:4-2:40), it’s a bit more fantastic: Here an angel tells Elizabeth, a cousin of Mary, and who happens to be barren, that she will give birth to John (the Baptist). Apparently, the Holy Spirit is responsible (at least for making it possible for a barren woman to give birth). An angel also appears to Mary (not Joseph) and tells her that the Holy Spirit is going to knock her up personally and that she will give birth to the Son of God.

It gets more bizarre, rather like a bad Broadway play: Mary visits Elizabeth, who is six-months pregnant at the time, and the little tike leaps in her womb because the “Lord” has come into the room (via Mary’s tummy). Mary suddenly starts singing like Maria in Sound of Music. John comes popping forth, and Liz’s hubby, Zechariah, has a spontaneous fit of prophecy. Finally, Jesus himself is born.

Believable? You tell me. Christians don’t even blink. But if they get a whiff of anything faintly miraculous from the Pagan side of the aisle and eyebrows go up. Suddenly it is absurd (far too absurd to be given any credence) – and a myth.

An example of this attitude comes in an otherwise excellent book, Anthony Everitt’s Augustus (2006) – and this is just one example out of many thousands. The author makes some statements that you are unlikely to find being made about Jesus’ birth:

Dio preserves an unconvincing tale that echoes one told of Alexander the Great’s mother and was no doubt designed to encourage a divine comparison. When Julius Caesar decided to make Octavian his heir, he was influenced by “Atia’s [his mother’s] emphatic declaration that the youth had been engendered by Apollo, for while sleeping in his temple, she said, she thought she had intercourse with a serpent, and it was this that caused her at the end of her pregnancy to bear a son.”

On the day of Octavian’s birth, Atia dreamed that her intestines were raised up into the sky and spread out all over the earth, and during the same night her husband, Octavius, thought that the sun rose from her womb. The following day the elder Octavius came across a learned expert on divination, Publius Nigidius Figulus, and explained what had happened. Figulus replied, “You have begotten a master over us!” (201-202).

Now, I ask you, the reader, to tell me how one of these stories is any more fantastic than the other? Does it matter if a snake or a spirit makes you pregnant? Is one more believable than another?

The only difference is Christianity. Because there is only one God, only one of the stories can be true, even though it’s as patently ridiculous as those same Christians claim these Pagan birth stories to be.

It is perhaps significant here that there are incredible similarities between the language used of Jesus and that used for Augustus. It is almost as though the early Christians used the cult of Augustus (the Imperial Cult) as a model for their own religion. One little known example is found in Luke 24:13 (and remember, Luke was an educated Greek speaker). Luke’s account of the risen Jesus bears a striking resemblance to the report of the appearance of the deified Romulus in Dion. Hal. II.63.3f, and Livy I.16.5f .

It is downright eerie when you get down to details, which is what I will proceed to do now.

Son of God

Augustus was the Son of God (“divi filius“) before Jesus (the only difference – if it can be called that – being that Augustus was son of one of many gods and Jesus was seen as son of the “only” god). Augustus was already the Son of God before Jesus was even conceived.

In Greek, his official title was “Emperor Caesar Augustus, son of god.” An inscription from Pergamum reveals Augustus as “The Emperor Caesar, son of god, Augustus, ruler of all land and sea.” A coin of Tiberius reads “Son of the Divine Caesar, the Divine Augustus.”

Christians have tried to differentiate between Augustus as “son of god” and Jesus as “son of god” but Robert L. Mowery (“Son of God in Roman Imperial Titles and Matthew,” Biblica 83 (2002), 100-110) argues that “this Roman imperial formula exactly parallels the distinctive Christological formula in three Matthean passages (14,33; 27,43.54)” and that “the Matthean formula qeou=ui(o/j would have evoked Roman imperial usage for at least some members of Matthew’s community.”

He was spoken of in messianic terms, as the savior of Rome. Virgil wrote in his fourth eclogue,

The firstborn of the New Ages is already on his way from high heaven down to earth

With him, the Iron Age shall end and Golden Man inherit all the world.

Smile on the Baby’s birth, immaculate Lucina [goddess of childbirth];

your own Apollo is enthroned a last.

Anthony Everitt (2006:115-116) believes the child spoken of was the predicted offspring of Augustus and Scribonia. Augustus had from the beginning identified himself with Apollo. It is a bit of a no-brainer.

We have here a god made man but still god himself, and an immaculate birth as well – and the dawn of a new age (analogous to the waited-for “kingdom of god/heaven”).

All this, needless to say, predates Christianity by a long margin: Virgil wrote that poem almost forty years before Jesus was born.

The Star of…

But there is more. Everyone is familiar with the famous “star of Bethlehem.” But Augustus had a star first. The star (or comet) became a symbol of Augustus early on and can be seen on these coins from 17 B.C.E.  This star is an appeal to the comet that appeared during the games Augustus held in honor of Caesar (in July 44 B.C.E.) and was thought to mark the ascent of Caesar to the divine abode (unlike the star of Bethlehem, we know this comet to be real – it is documented by Chinese astronomers).

Just as the “Star of Bethlehem” emphasizes Jesus’ divine origins, so the Star of Augustus emphasized his – but again, Augustus was there first.

The Gospel of…

Augustus was not deified until Tiberius did so, and it is Tiberius who is “largely responsible for propagating the cult of the Divine Augustus.” As Larry Kreitzer writes, “Tiberius was emperor during the public ministry of Jesus.” (“Apotheosis of the Roman Emperor,” The Biblical Archaeologist 53 (1990), 211-217) Significant, don’t you think, that all this imagery should be there for the Gentile Christians to see when they co-opted Jesus the Jewish seditionist cum messiah as their god?

Kreitzer calls this period “one of the most formative in terms of the development of Christianity” and he is absolutely correct. It is also quite clear that the Romans did not get their idea of man as god from Christianity as it has a long history in ancient Near Eastern cultures (as it did in the Far East – see Samping Chen, “Son of Heaven and Son of God: Interactions Among Ancient Asiatic Cultures regarding Sacral Kingship, Journal of the Royal Asiatic Society 12 (2002), 289-325). As Brian Bosworth writes, (“Augustus, the Res Gestae and the Hellenistic Theories of Apotheosis” JRS 89 (1999), 1-18), “Augustus used motifs which had become familiar during the previous centuries, emphasizing simultaneously the protection of the gods, and his own godlike status” and this is noticeable in his Res Gestae, Augustus’ formal report of his achievements to the people of the empire – the good word, or his “gospel” one might say.

And so it was, as advertised by the Provincial Assembly (koinon) of Asia in 9 B.C.E. (again, Jesus had not even been conceived yet) spoke of the “good tidings” or “evangelion” (that word sound familiar to you?). And so you have it, from before Jesus’ birth: The Gospel of Augustus.

It might be argued that they had identical origins. The imperial cult (to which there was a temple in Caesarea – significant to early Gentile Christian history) was very much “in your face” in the first decades of the first century – a period during which original Jewish Christianity was destroyed (when Jerusalem fell in 70 C.E.) and Gentile Christianity replaced it (by the 90s C.E.). It is no surprise – and no mystery – where Paul of Tarsus got his ideas. He could not possibly have missed what amounted to big neon signs about the new messiah, Augustus and his gospel.

Kreitzer claims that “The Roman concept of apotheosis moved a man from earth toward heaven, whereas the Christian concept of incarnation moved God from heaven toward earth” but that is not strictly true when you claim divine descent, as Augustus did. This claim also conflates the various early Christian concepts of Jesus into the later orthodox idea perpetrated by John. The divine status of Jesus is missing altogether from Mark and Matthew and Luke had quite different conceptions of Jesus – in Matthew Jesus was not literally the Son of God and in Luke it is possible that originally it did not read as if Jesus was “born” as the Son of God. In the earliest manuscripts Luke 3.22 reads, “You are my son, today I have begotten you” when John baptizes Jesus (see note below). In other words, Jesus did not become incarnate until that moment (see the discussion in Bart D. Ehrman, Jesus, Interrupted (2009): 39-40).

A Fulfillment of Prophecy

Early Christian apologists (like Matthew where everything about Jesus is a fulfillment of scripture) were keen to show that Jesus’ coming had long been foretold. So, too, as it happens, had that of Augustus, at least according to Vergil, who has Anchises the Dardanian say that “prophecies of Augustus’ coming are already causing panic, over a millennium before his actual birth” (Aen. 6.798-9). Needless to say, this was written before Jesus’ birth and the mad scramble to find prophecy about his coming. According to Anchises, “Augustus will revive the golden age of Saturnus and bring felicity to Latium – and indeed to the human race in so far as it came under his sway” (Bosworth, 6).

The hopes of the early Jewish and Christian apocalypticists come readily to mind – a Golden Age, a Kingdom of God on Earth, the restoration of Israel for the Jews, a restoration of Rome for the Romans.

What comes across is a sense of inferiority complex – the early Christian writers were anxious to compare Jesus – who compared unfavorably – with Augustus, whose own accomplishments were more in line with the messianic aspirations of the time (see for various ideas of what the messiah would be like, Jacob Neusner, William S. Green, Ernest Frerichs, ed. Judaisms and Their Messiahs At the Turn of the Christian Era (1987).

It is perhaps no coincidence that both Vergil and the Gospels are strongly Hellenic in character and both written in Greek. Language is, after all, a reflection of the culture that created it. As Bosworth says, Vergil places emphasis on “conquest, deliverance, and benefaction”(Bosworth, 9)  – three elements quite familiar to apocalypticism and indeed, the New Testament.

Bosworth points to 9 B.C.E. and the koinon of Asia (already mentioned above) which proclaimed Augustus god (Bosworth, 12): “Since the providence that has divinely ordered our existence…has brought to life the most perfect good in Augustus, whom she filled with virtues for the benefit of mankind, bestowing him upon us and our descendants as a savior – he who put an end to war and will order peace, Caesar, who by his epiphany exceeded the hopes of those who prophesied good tidings (evangelion), not only outdoing benefactors of the past, but also allowing no hope of greater benefactions in the future…”

Sounds pretty Christ-like to me – and two years before the earliest postulated birth date for Jesus.

Summary

Is the idea of a God-man improbable, as Kierkegaard asserts (Christian faith being necessarily a belief in the absurd)? (see the discussion in Robert Herbert, “The God-Man,” Religious Studies 6 (1970), 157-174). For Christians, yes, given their conception of the divine; for polytheists? Not at all. The apotheosis of Augustus has at least as much to recommend it as that of Jesus as it eventually came (under the auspices of orthodoxy) to be conceived.

What is of paramount importance in all this is that all the ideas of Christianity are more pre-existent than their savior. Every element of Christianity can be found previous to Jesus’ birth – including John’s logos, which is Pagan in origin and dates from the 6^th century B.C.E. – a logos which, incidentally, is not found in the other three Gospels.

Augustus is just one example, one small slice of the pie. Everything is already there, in the first century – a century of faith indeed – but Pagan – and no intolerance of other forms of belief are part of the equation. All beliefs can be true, and they can coexist peacefully, without strife, without war, without inquisitions, and without burning books, witches, or heretics.

If the truth is not quite the golden age Augustus and his court poets advertised, it still has something to recommend it on that basis alone. Universal tolerance may be a logical impossibility, but that does not mean we cannot strive for tolerance – as much tolerance as a functioning society can manage. But for the discourse on tolerance to have any meaning, it must appeal to the facts, and not simply to pious history “as it should have been” and it must not privilege one set of miracles over another.

In speaking of god become man and man become god, I have used deliberately provocative language. Such language is fitting for what is a provocative subject. The ancients understood that it was no trivial detail, the degree to which an individual might partake of the divine. It was a powerful message Augustus and his publicists put out, just as it was again a powerful message the Gentile Christian publicists put out in the name of Jesus decades later.

I’m not saying the idea of divine birth or apotheosis is impossible. As Bart Ehrman points out, that is not the domain of the historian but of the theologian. My point is that many historians, Christian themselves, accept without criticism the story of Jesus’ birth but still speak of similar (and far older) stories told of Pagans as absurd or mythical or openly propagandistic and self-serving.

What I am saying is that miracles are miracles. You cannot classify one set of miracles as more possible than another. If you are going to accept miracles about Jesus, you have to accept miracles about Apollonius of Tyana – and about Augustus and Alexander and others. And if there is to be a discourse between Pagans and Christians it cannot be on the basis of “my religion is better than yours.” We need to agree either that all miracle stories are equally absurd or equally likely – or at least possible. That’s a big leap for the folks who claim to have sole possession of the truth, while it’s much less a problem for those who understand that there are many truths.

In the end, we Pagans can make the approach, but discourse is possible only with a willing audience and acknowledgment that there is room for more than one iteration of “good tidings.”

Note:

With regards to Jesus’ apotheosis Luke actually offers three methods (I chose one above for the sake of argument):

Acts 13.32-33:  Upon his resurrection (also Acts 2.36)

Luke 3.22: Upon his baptism by John (noted above)

Luke 1.35:  Via virginal conception by the Holy Spirit (also Luke 2.11)

When you construct a neat little box for yourself and call this box “purity” or “truth,” then by definition all that falls outside that box becomes “impure” and “false.” That is a necessary result of such box construction. It is a process followed by monotheism (where everything outside itself is seen as “paganism”) and by particular groups within that genus – the Israelites themselves and a sub-category, the Essenes, and later, by the Christians. The objective might be to “box in” the “constructed other” (everyone outside that box) but it has the concomitant (and therefore unavoidable) effect of also boxing in those who lay claim to that purity and that truth.

They have, by creating the “other” category, also created a category for themselves: “We are special. We are real Americans; you are false.”

We have seen this construction of a purity box in American politics. Especially since the election of Barack Obama, Republicans who do not object to every proposal the president makes are accused of not really being Republican. This once unofficial trend has become doctrinaire (the ranting of Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck, Hannity and others) and has now been codified as of Friday, January 29, 2010: A proposal for a “litmus test” which would have required candidates to affirm ten core conservative positions (Ten Commandments anyone?) did not materialize but what did still amounts to a creed:  GOP candidates must support the party’s platform if they want gold for their war chests.[1]

The religious undertones are unmistakable. More and more, the GOP has become “God’s Own Party” – a party in which political purity closely aligns not only with religious purity but adopts the language of religious purity.[2] As Regina Schwartz says of monotheism,

Politics are not hardwired into theology. Worship of one deity need not necessarily produce this violent notion of identity, but monotheism has been caught up with particularism, with that production of collective identity as peoples set apart, and it so happens that when the biblical text moves more explicitly toward polytheism, it also endorses a more attractive toleration, even appreciation of difference.[3]

And it is this sense of collective identity, this idea that Republicans are a people apart – a people of God, a Chosen People like the Israelites – that epitomizes the recent polarization of the American political – and religious – landscape. It is not only required that you be Republican to be acceptable; you must also be a Christian, and not just any Christian, but a certain type of Christian.

Shades of the so-called Old Testament (more correctly, the Hebrew Bible).

In Upstate New York, recently, Republican Dede Scozzafava was forced to withdraw from the campaign for NY-23 Representative because she was not Republican enough to be truly a Republican. As Politico reported at the time, “Conservatives have asserted that Scozzafava, a GOP establishment-backed state assemblywoman who supports abortion rights and gay marriage, is far too liberal for them to support…”[4]

As the Washington Post tells it, “[former Alaska governor Sarah] Palin and [Minnesota Gov. Tim] Pawlenty cast the contest as a fight for the direction of the GOP.” But it is more than this. For purity ideologues, Scozzafava is not really a Republican at all. Pawlenty was strident: “we cannot send more politicians to Washington who wear the Republican jersey on the campaign trail but then vote like Democrats in Congress.” Glenn Beck denounced her as “ACORN-supported” and an “Obama-Lite Republican” and conservative robo-calls in the district describing her as a “child killer,” a “lesbian lover” and a “homo.”[5]

Rush Limbaugh was more blunt:

We can say she is guilty of widespread bestiality. She has screwed every RINO in the country. Everyone can see just how phony and dangerous they are. 2010 might be a nightmare for PETA. Tow animals may become extinct: RINOs and Blue Dog Democrats.[6]

CBSNews reports that “Michelle Malkin mocked her as a ‘radical leftist.’”[7]

Quite clearly, it is not political issues that define one’s political affiliation, but what are perceived to be violations of the Ten Commandments.

Again, we see the shadow of the Old Testament behind opposition to Scozzafava.

Regina Schwartz:

In the myth of monotheism, pluralism is betrayal, punishable with every kind of exile: loss of home, loss of land, even alienation from the earth itself.[8]

Loss of political office.

Schwartz notes the manner in which the Biblical narrative paints “inclinations toward polytheism” as “sexual infidelity” and how Israel itself “is castigated for ‘whoring after’ other gods, thereby imperiling her ‘purity.’ The land itself must be kept clean “or its inhabitants will be ejected, ‘vomited’ out of the land… When Israel is not monotheistic, it is filthy and pollutes the land” (Lev 20.20-25). “When Israel worships a foreign deity, she is a harlot, the land is made barren, and she is ejected from the land” (Jer 3.2-3).[9]

Dede Scozzafava has been vomited forth.

With the advent of the Republican purity test, of its “Ten Commandments” she will not be alone. This move leaves many Republican office-holders vulnerable.  The pressure to conform is intense. Extremist Rush Limbaugh has repeatedly bent Republican office holders to his will. In the case of Dede Scozzafava, CBSNews reports,

[Newt] Gingrich…[who] earlier this week…said conservative support for Hoffman had been a mistake…On Saturday… threw his support behind Hoffman via a Twitter post. Republican National Committee Chairman Michael Steele, who only a few days ago similarly backed Scozzafava, is now behind Hoffman.[10]

Repent or die…a political death. The message has been made clear. Nobody wants to be vomited forth.

Inside that little purity box there can be no tolerance of differing opinions because tolerance = compromise and compromise means surrendering the distinctions between True and false, no ultimate truth and no heresy. You’re one of “us” or you’re one of “them” (the dreaded “other”); you’re for us or against us. From inside the purity box, it is a struggle of good vs. evil, of right vs. wrong, of capital-T Truth vs. moral relativism.

In the same sense that ancient Christians saw themselves as inheritors of the mantle of “Chosen People” today’s extremist Republicans (is there any other kind after “Black Friday” January 29, 2010?) see themselves as today’s Chosen People.

We heard this rhetoric during the Bush Administration in the wake of 9/11: America was chosen by God to be the new Rome, a vehicle for the spread of Christianity and by extension then, Bush was chosen by God to be President. If you opposed Bush, you opposed not only America but you placed yourself in opposition to God.

Politics and religion have become indistinguishable in the new GOP; The Ten Commandments of the Israelites or the “ten political positions of the Republican Party. And as I have demonstrated here, the parallelism is not at all superficial, but reaches to a much deeper level. Be pure or you are not one of us; you will be vomited forth.

As New Testament scholar Gerd Lüdemann observes (Intolerance and the Gospel, 2006), the history of Christianity demonstrates that there is little tolerance for thinking or acting outside the “orthodox” Christian tradition. He suggest (and the evidence of the GOP offers tangible evidence) “that attempts to harmonize Christianity with the democratic ideal of tolerance cannot really work because there is a logical contradiction between monotheism and Christology, on the one hand, and the core values of a pluralistic society, on the other.”[11]

When the purity box makes compromise impossible, what is the prognosis for American politics? We have seen a very centrist-oriented Obama reaching across the aisle to work with Republicans. The Republicans insist that they are willing to work with Obama, but what they are suggesting is not give-and-take, it is not compromise (because compromise is not compatible with purity) but surrender: Obama must do what they want. They seem happily unaware that they lost the election (Democrats, by contrast, seem unaware they won, but that is another story altogether).

As Obama told the GOP leaders, “this is not how Democracy works.”[12]

But the GOP no longer seems interested in Democracy. The GOP’s only interest is in the diktat of “Truth”; the GOP has become the party of extremism. Extremism is “any ideology taken to its extreme, interpreted and enacted in an absolute sense that allowed no compromise with practical considerations or accommodation with the world.” As historian Michael Gaddis puts it, “Extremist discourse, in religion as in other contexts, valued above all zeal and authority in the pursuit of its cause, and strove for a total and perfect expression of its values.”[13]

And presto, we have the Republican Party’s “purity test.”

Religious extremists, Gaddis observes, “convinced themselves that they have enacted not only their own will, but God’s.”[14] We live in a world where political extremists feel the same.[15]

Such an attitude does not leave much room for the rest of us. Nor does it leave much hope for the future of American politics. The only solution, from the GOP’s point of view, is the complete surrender of the Democratic Party to its will. A governing majority is impossible without compromise; this necessity of working across the aisle is built into the American political system.

But hands cannot reach across the purity box. Or as Egyptologist Jan Assmann puts it (Moses the Egyptian, 1997), “false gods cannot be translated.[16] And the true God lives within the purity box; outside are false gods – real and metaphorical.

We are being asked to choose between the Constitution and God.

Historically, the solution to this dispute has been inquisition, holy war…and theocracy. Constitutionally, none of those outcomes are desirable – or even theoretically possible. The Founding Fathers could have established the new nation as a monarchy or a theocracy; they did neither. We can only assume they meant to have a liberal democracy. The Constitution codifies these ideas. It protects that liberal democracy.

The Constitution, significantly, is the highest development of the ideals of the Enlightenment.

But the war against the Constitution is very real and has proven unexpectedly effective. Church-State walls are under attack and crumbling and adherence to Enlightenment concepts such as diversity, tolerance, and individual human rights are seen as attacks on God. The Enlightenment gave us the Constitution; extremist Christianity and the Republican Party have united to attack – and destroy it.

The purity test – the Nicene Creed of the new republicanism – is not the end; it is only a step in the road that defines the nature of the struggle for the faithful. The purity box does not allow for retreat or surrender; nor for the sake of all our ancestors created in the New World – a land of liberty – can there can any retreat or surrender from progressives.

The outcome of such a surrender is unthinkable.

---

[1] My Oxford American Dictionary (2008) calls a creed “a statement of belief or principles.”

[2] HonoluluAdvertiser.com http://www.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/20100129/BREAKING01/100129052/GOP+adopts+platform+test+for+candidates+during+Hawaii+meeting

[3] Regina Schwartz, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1997),, 31.

[4] Politico.com http://www.politico.com/news/stories/1009/28970.html

[5] Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/09/AR2009110903690.html

[6] MediaMatters for America http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/11/02/limbaugh-scozzafava-guilt_n_342535.html

[7] Coop’s Corner, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/31/blogs/coopscorner/entry5475675.shtml

[8] Schwartz (1997), 47.

[9] Schwartz (1997), 63.

[10] Coop’s Corner, CBS News http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/31/blogs/coopscorner/entry5475675.shtml

[11] http://wwwuser.gwdg.de/~gluedem/eng/

[12] The Huffington Post http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/01/29/obama-goes-to-the-gop-lio_n_442331.html

[13] Michael Gaddis, There Is No Crime for Those Who Have Christ: Religious Violence in the Christian Roman Empire (University of California Press, 2005), 5-6.

[14] Gaddis (2005), 6.

[15] One need only remember Palin’s assurances to the “faithful” that God would do the right thing for America on election day. http://www.boston.com/news/politics/politicalintelligence/2008/10/palin_the_right.html

[16] Jan Assmann, Moses the Egyptian: The Memory of Egypt in Western Monotheism ((Harvard University Press, 1997), 3.

Update:  Please see the recent post by Gus diZerega over at Beliefnet,

James O’Keefe, Conservatism, Racism and a Religious Connection

Thanks go to Makarios for pointing me towards this excellent piece.

If the United States was founded by Christian Europeans, the government established in the wake of the Revolution was secular. This was not only a protection of belief (or lack of belief) but a protection of government. The religious wars of the Old World were a recent memory for those people and they knew firsthand the dangers of government sponsored religion.

More than two centuries later, we live in the most pluralistic society in the world. There are not only Christians (protestant, catholic and denominations too numerous to count), but Buddhists, Hindus, Scientologists, atheists, pagans, and others. Every possible viewpoint is represented as never before in history in a single culture.

It is not always easy getting along. Christianity still dominates American culture. Christians are still a majority, though even defining what makes a person Christian is as difficult as it was in the first Christian century. The process of syncretism, which affects every religion, has had some positive effects. There are Christians who accept that there are other paths to “salvation” and who embrace more New Age viewpoints, such as reincarnation and past lives.

On the other hand, there have been some negative effects. There are those who do not want to lose their “dominant culture” status, who feel threatened by the loss of status in society, who ever more stridently insist that the United States was founded as a Christian Nation and who claim that atheists, feminists, pagans and secular humanists are to blame for all the ills of society, and not only that, but a danger to the country itself.

This argument is right out of the Old Testament. And for non-Christians of every stripe, it smells of rank superstition – a petulant, jealous, childishly angry deity punishing those who dare think for themselves. The Hurricane Katrina disaster is laid at the door of this angry god (punishing the sinful people of New Orleans) as is the recent quake in Haiti. This is what YHWH did to the people of Israel who “whored after foreign gods” we are told.

The irony is that those foreign gods were actually ethnic gods of the Jewish (Canaanite) people and YHWH himself was the foreign god – a god out of NW Arabia (Sinai) brought into the country most likely by Midianite merchants. But conservative Christians have built up a mythical past to which they can appeal at need, one which, while taking little cognizance of history, makes history conform to a system. This is not good history, but as Kierkegaard said, Christianity is belief in the absurd and it is certainly absurd to refuge to acknowledge the facts as they lay plainly before you.

The rest of us are trapped in this mythical world. And not only is ancient history mythologized but so is American history – the myth of a Christian Nation. And as rapidly as events happen in the real world, they are mythologized – re-interpreted to fit, to conform to the system. It is becoming difficult for the real world – and us – to keep up with the spin.

How does the majority of the population get along with a vocal, vitriolic minority who refuse to live in the same evidence based world in which we live? Though pagans and atheists and Buddhists and Hindus have many differences between them, it is far easier for these groups to coexist (along with more moderate Christians) than it is for any of them, singly or collectively, to get along with the extremist minority (whether we identify them as Evangelicals, Fundamentalists – or more pointedly, Talibangelicals).

The forces of reaction demand adherence to their myth. When we decline to play along, when we insist on our freedom of choice in these matters, we are told we are turning away from God. During the Bush Administration it was worse (if that’s possible): we were told that since God chose Bush (he apparently didn’t choose Obama?) if you opposed Bush you opposed God. Similarly, God chose the USA to continue Rome’s work in bringing people together (they’re easier to hammer into submission if you get them all into one place?) so if you oppose American policy you…yes, you see how this works now…you turn against God.

And you know what happens when you turn against God – hurricanes and earthquakes, Sodom and Gomorrah.

And for disagreeing, for embracing choice, we are accused of making war on Christianity, of persecuting them. If universal tolerance is a logical impossibility, we can still try to get along, can’t we? But how do you include somebody who sets themselves apart, who refuses to be included?

Look at it from the perspective of a little child (we’ll call him Tommy) who says, “I won’t play with you!” or “I’ll only play with you if you play by MY rules!” and who then says, when his demands are rejected, “They’re persecuting me!”?

But nobody is telling little Tommy who isolates himself in the corner that he can’t do what he wants. Tommy’s real problem is that Tommy insists the other children do what he wants. Tommy has the right to live and play as he chooses with like-minded children. He does not have the right to dictate to other children.

In the end, Tommy’s claims of persecution ring hollow. Nobody is persecuting Tommy. The other children are not insisting Tommy live and play like they do. They are just insisting he behave when in their company.

The Constitution is set up to deal with this. We do not have a true democracy; Madison understood that in a true democracy that the rights of minorities are trampled by majorities. The Constitution prohibits (in theory – but not in California?) such blatant abuses, which were thought of as the “excesses of democracy.” The rights of all are to be protected. The majority of the children and Tommy too. Each is free to seek happiness. None of them are free to dictate to the other. All are equal. None are privileged.

Tommy claims that his rights are being ignored, or trampled. But they’re not. And Tommy does not really want equal rights. He wants his views to be privileged. But for Tommy, not being free to dictate to the other children is an abridgment of what he sees as his rights – his right to dictate to others. Religiously, Tommy may feel he has that right, but those perceived rights must, in a pluralistic society (as ours is) take second place to equal rights for all. Because if one group has the right to dictate to the other groups, then only one group has rights. And you will find no support for Tommy’s  position in the Constitution. None at all.

Believe what you want, live how you want, we are told, but extend that same right to others. Ironically enough, this very attitude is enshrined in the Bible Tommy holds so dear: Do unto others  as you would have them do unto you.

But when you don’t live in an evidence-based world, you can ignore pesky little inconvenient facts like that, can’t you?

In the end, the rest of us – the majority as it happens – must insist on our rights; our Constitutional Rights. Our right to believe or disbelieve as we choose. As Jefferson said, “it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.” And he is right. It doesn’t. Tommy might be offended that the rest of us refuse to believe him when he says his god will punish us (and him) when we refuse to play by his rules, but the Constitution says (for very good reasons – grounded in centuries of religious conflict and terror) that Tommy doesn’t have the right to impose his rules on us, and that the government also lacks that power.

We have to insist on those rights, and insist loudly, as Tommy and others like him insist on making history – and us – conform to his system. It’s bad parenting, after all, to give into a child’s temper tantrum, and that is what this amounts to.