Lost and Found

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As a young lad I was fascinated by the supernatural. This may explain, but in no wise excuses, my choice of a career in religion. As I grew in years and skepticism, this interest began to feel like a security blanket in a college dormitory — an embarrassment to be jettisoned as quickly as possible. Along the way, of course, I’d given away what I thought to be the detritus of childish fantasy, including my collection of cheap, pulp fiction, tending toward the Gothic.

As I grow more ancient, and more observant, I see that sometimes the impetuousness of youth cradles a profound wisdom. Sometimes we do get it right the first time. I still haven’t figured out if that’s the case with me, but it seems to be a hypothesis worth the exploration. Part of my current search for reality is the reassessment of my childhood learning in the school of classical Gothic fiction. The books are no longer as cheap as they used to be, and when I take them out in public I hide them inside a larger, more academic book so that no one really knows what I’m reading. As a friend once observed, people think that those of us who hang out in the religion sections of Borders are immediately suspect. More so the adult toting a beaten-up paperback written for a teen readership a number of decades ago.

One of my lost memories was a juvenilized version of Rod Serling’s Stories from the Twilight Zone. I had shoveled my copy off to Goodwill along with many other shards of my childhood when I “grew up.” The memories of the angst that the very cover generated in me led to a frantic online used book hunt a few years back. Inside the stories seemed flatter than I’d recalled, but the larger ideas they generated were still worth paying attention to. Perhaps the real lesson is that childhood should not be dismissed as wasted time playing and indulging in carefree amusements. Our childhood proclivities, it now seems, preset the trajectories for our lives. So I still have a quasi-career in a religion department, and I have a copy of a book that started me asking the bigger questions.

Anybody else remember this?

Anybody else remember this?

And We All Fall Down

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Welcome to the latest podcast on the Sects and Violence blog — please pardon the technical difficulties (old dog, new trick!). The topic of this podcast is the phenomenon of sects-uality, or how religions split into sects. The focus is particularly on Christianity, and especially Orthodoxy.

Enjoy!

Vampires, Mummies and the Holy Ghost

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One of the many quirky things I experienced in my teaching days at Nashotah House was the fascination of theological students with the (then current) Jimmy Buffett hit “Vampires, Mummies and the Holy Ghost.” Not really a Buffett fan (I must confess, however, to being strangely touched by “Margaritaville” although I’ve never had a margarita and I’ve never been to Mexico) I was nevertheless intrigued by this juxtaposition. One student confessed to being a vampire-novelist wannabe. The vampiristic connection with the Eucharist was kindergarten, but there was a more ancient tale hidden here.

With a career crashing down around me, I found myself habitually watching horror movies — something I hadn’t done since my own seminary days. One bleary-eyed morning it struck me how our nightmare-zone creatures are religious in origin. Vampires can be traced back to ancient Sumerian mythology. Mummies? Ancient Egyptian burial practice to preserve a body for the afterlife. Ghosts, apart from finding a feared spot in most cultures, are attested in the Hebrew Bible and even earlier. They are, of course, from the supernatural realm. Werewolves are a branch of the lunar worship tree, again an ancient form of religion. Even Frankenstein’s monster toys with the account of Adam’s creation, although Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley associated him with the Greek mythological figure of Prometheus. While Godzilla (apart from his apparently theophoric name) may fall outside this scheme, most of our nightmare creatures are ancient kin of the gods.

My favorite vampire

My favorite vampire

At a professional conference last year I found and purchased a book entitled Sacred Terror: Religion and Horror on the Silver Screen, by Douglas Cowan (Baylor, 2008). Given my renewed penchant for fright flicks, I was intrigued by Cowan’s contention that religion lies at the heart of horror. Indeed, one may think of them as fellow ventricles in the anatomy of fear. Perhaps ancient religionists were on to something when one of them penned “the Lord taketh pleasure in them that fear him” (Ps 147.11). Religion may be a response to fear, or to a world that for us has become natural and upon which we wish to project a human (or divine) face.

Sects and Violence

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Religion-sanctioned violence has a long (overly long) pedigree. Early myths going all the way back to the Sumerians incorporate violence on the part of the gods. Depending on one’s school of interpretation, this could be seen as “form following function” — people saw the violence inherent in nature and projected its causation onto the source of nature, namely, the gods. Ancient people did not perceive of the world in terms of natural phenomena. “Nature” behaved the way it did with will and reason, the will and reason of the gods.

The stories preserved from ancient Ugarit stand as witness to this conceptual world. In one story, Kirta by title, the eponymous king Kirta seeks a family and has his wish granted by El and Baal. Hedging his bets, he makes a vow to Asherah that he forgets to fulfill. Asherah sees to it that Kirta’s divine gift comes undone. More obvious is the tale of Aqhat, another divinely granted child. Aqhat is given a bow by the craftsman god Kothar-wa-Hasis, only to have it coveted by Anat. When he refuses to release it to the goddess he is unfortunately pecked to death in a hitchcockian demise by a swarm of buzzards with attitudes. Violence is introduced into the human realm by the gods themselves.

Today, some 3,000 years after Ugarit, we still find ourselves living with violence sanctioned by religion. Whether it is as obvious as extremist factions of a religion calling for outright attacks on others, or as subtle as self-professed righteous believers destroying a colleague’s career in the name of Jesus, religion is used as a mental crutch for striking others. While I can not walk all the way with Christopher Hitchens, I do have to acknowledge that when it comes to human-on-human violence religion is a socially accepted motivation, no matter how pure its original intentions.

Hypatia, a scholar-martyr due to religious violence

Hypatia, a scholar and martyred victim of religious violence

God is Great (not)?

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As a teacher/editor with an “advanced” degree in religious studies, I was intrigued by the sudden popularity of Christopher Hitchens’ God is Not Great (Twelve Books, 2007) a couple years back. I bought it as soon it was available and read it cover-to-cover after a morning out picking strawberries.

Reading Hitchens’ analysis I found myself nodding my head quite a bit; he scores a substantial number of points on which various religions should plead “guilty.” And while I found many of his arguments persuasive, part of me still wonders if perhaps religion, that most ancient of cultural forms, has not had at least some positive impact on humankind. In the most basic sense, our civilization would not be here to critique religion if religion had not been an impetus to get our civilization to begin its motion towards today’s civilization. Black and white are not in the palette of serious religious studies.

For the scholar of religion, however, Hitchens should be required reading. Sometimes we have to stare hard into the face of the facts of what our object of study has become and wonder, with Samuel F. B. Morse, “what hath god wrought?” Religion bears the mark of Janus, and scholars of religion have to pay attention to what people are saying about it.