Faithful Magic

Faith stories combine history and literature. Though we do not apply the term to our own faith stories, they are in fact a form of myth. Thus a literal reading of biblical stories and history deprives them of power and fundamental truth. Superficially, they are too fantastical as well as too contradictory to be read for literal meaning. Doing so requires what literary critic Northrup Frye said was required to read fiction successfully, that is, “a willing suspension of disbelief.” To believe that Moses literally parted the sea is to believe that Ramesses II, possibly the pharaoh of Moses’s time (it is open to dispute), was larger than any of his subjects, for that is the way he is depicted in the monumental sculptures that honor him.

Faith documents should not be read as fiction. But they should be viewed, at least in the case of the Bible, as allegorical history. Events are magnified through hyperbole, symbolism, metaphor, and other rhetorical devices to convey important ideas and theological lessons. Ramesses is sculpted in enormous scale not because he was physically large but because he was hugely important. The parting of the Red Sea denotes an event of high historical and theological significance—the freeing of the Jews from captivity, in every sense, through the power of belief in God—not an actual display of supernatural or magical powers, but a magnified iteration of human determination.

When Christianists conflate literalistic faith and modern governance, they apply magical thinking to governance issues and problems that require rationalism. Deus ex machina must be saved for the stage. Magical godly intervention will not solve human problems. Human problems demand human solutions.

Little in biblical history would pass muster by today’s standards of historical scholarship, which has been largely, though not entirely, separated from the story aspects necessary for myth-making. Theological attribution in certain views, however, has maintained the thread of myth-making to the present day—but exactly in reverse of the biblical writers of antiquity. Modern literalists flip this notion of attribution on its head, making storytelling into truth-telling.

For example, we are admonished by those who persist in the ancient belief in a wrathful God, rather than the God of love identified by Jesus, that disasters ranging from the AIDS epidemic to Hurricane Katrina are God’s punishment. This approach to the faith stories of the Bible constitutes a reconceptualized myth-making constrained by an ideologically driven, purposeful misreading of Scripture. It is no coincidence that some literalists’ interpretation of Sodom and Gomorrah, the AIDS epidemic, and Hurricane Katrina all focus on divine punishment for homosexuality, because literalism finds its greatest resonance among fundamentalists with strong antigay sentiments. Christianists who use fundamentalism as a political force would reify this magical thinking in governance policy.

Situating biblical truth outside the contemporary culture of the ancient writers of the Bible is problematic because reading the stories through the lens of modern literalism inevitably leads to misinterpretation. When such magical thinking spills over into government, it leads to unreasonable governance—literally, governance in which reason is obscured or subverted by reference to faith interpretation that is grounded in fundamentally misreading the Bible.

When we approach the Bible as allegorical, rather than literal, and thus penetrate the maze of biblical story, what we discover at the center is not a mythological Minotaur but Truth. That Truth is worth examining by people of good character because at root it reveals humans throughout recorded history engaging in human endeavors. Those endeavors and what humankind has learned from them can legitimately guide our modern endeavors to govern well for the common good.