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. 

Falsifying Faith

Galileo Galillei once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” The Italian physicist, astronomer, and mathematician who shook his head in dismay in the seventeenth century at the Catholic Church’s opposition to heliocentrism—the scientific discovery that placed the sun, rather than the earth, at the center of our solar system—would be equally dismayed and bewildered today by the coopting of Christian faith by persons and parties determined to enshrine their ideologies as “true religion” and thereby to subvert democratic governance.

The discussion that follows here will be as heretical to these interests, which I cluster under the rubric of “Christianist,” as Galileo’s advocacy of heliocentrism was to the dogma of seventeenth-century Catholicism. A definition is necessary. “Christianist” must be understood as distinct from “Christian.” Time magazine columnist Andrew Sullivan (2006) made this distinction: 

Christianism is an ideology, politics, an ism. The distinction between Christian and Christianist echoes the distinction we make between Muslim and Islamist. Muslims are those who follow Islam. Islamists are those who want to wield Islam as a political force and conflate state and mosque.

Christianism falsifies faith through ideological alignment, which is almost universally negative in character—excluding rather than including. Ideological alignment involves a calculated cherry-picking of faith documents, such as the Bible. For example, to justify homophobia and thereby a plethora of antigay civil rights actions, from DOMA to state constitutional amendments that enshrine homophobic prejudice, ideologues often cite the Bible. Leviticus 18:22 is popular; it can be translated, “Do not have sexual relations with a man as one does with a woman; that is detestable” (New International Version). While they adopt this passage (through a willful misreading) as justification for homophobia, these same ideologues completely ignore other literal admonitions in Leviticus, such as:

19:26. “Do not eat any meat with the blood still in it.” 

19:27. “Do not cut the hair at the sides of your head or clip off the edges of your beard.” 

19:28. “Do not cut your bodies for the dead or put tattoo marks on yourselves.” 

19:31.  “Do not turn to mediums or seek out spiritists, for you will be defiled by them.” 

19:33. “When a foreigner resides among you in your land, do not mistreat them. 34. The foreigner residing among you must be treated as your native-born.”

So, if taken literally, the Bible would admonish true believers to avoid rare steaks, haircuts and shaves, tattoos, and spiritualists (presumably of the ilk routinely consulted by Nancy Reagan during her husband’s presidency). And what about all those anti-immigration laws that ill treat foreigners residing among us? But, of course, these strictures do not accord with Christianist ideology, and so they are ignored—faith falsified to serve political ends.

It is no great leap from falsification of one’s central religious documents to the falsification of other historic documents, such as the Constitution, which, if read honestly, contravenes the secular ideology that accompanies Christianism. The founding documents of American democracy provide numerous examples of ignorant, willfully ignorant, or malignly ignorant reading to suit ideological ends. The furor over Second Amendment rights is an example.

The amendment to the Constitution, as ratified by the states, reads:

A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.

The amendment speaks to weapons in the context of an organized defensive military cohort. It was never intended, nor can it be legitimately construed, to provide justification for maintaining a personal arsenal, as indeed rightwing ideologues, including several Supreme Court justices, have averred. Thus faith in the founding documents also has been ideologically falsified to suit political ends.

Neither Christianity nor our American system of governance—if democracy is to be preserved—are well served by ideological falsification of faith, whether religious or secular. The essential understanding that this is the path on which the Radical Right is determined to set the United States is not yet pervasive enough in our society to provoke a necessary counter-movement to prevent the loss of freedom and democracy as we know them.

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Sullivan, A. (2006, May 7). My problem with Christianity. Time. http://www.time.com/time. Accessed April 8, 2011.