I just reread George Orwell’s Animal Farm. That was because I was trying to help my 11-year-old grandson understand the “isms” portrayed in the book, which his class has been assigned for reading and discussion. I’m talking about Marxism, communism, capitalism, socialism, mixed economy, and fascism. They’re all there. And at its early stage of development, my grandson’s class is trying to understand what those terms mean with the aid of Orwell’s allegory.
So, let me try to explain them one-by-one, and then draw some simple conclusions about Orlando’s Orwellian project.
Economic Systems
To begin with, Marxism (simply defined as the philosophy of Karl Marx), hangs over the book like the specter he and Friedrich Engels warn about in the first line of their “Communist Manifesto.” That philosophy holds that (1) capitalism necessarily exploits the working class and the natural environment, (2) workers will rebel against such exploitation substituting socialism for capitalism, and (3) socialism will eventually evolve into communism.
That’s the basic story of the animal farm allegory. A drunken Farmer Jones runs Manor Farm without concern for the pigs, horses, donkeys, chickens, cows, ducks, dogs, cats, and even rats. All the latter live under the capitalist system with its (1) private ownership of the means of production (Manor Farm itself), (2) free and open markets (where eggs and milk are sold), and (3) unlimited earnings (all horded by Farmer Jones). Under that arrangement, Jones gets rich while the animals find themselves overworked, underfed, and highly resentful.
So, they revolt against their master and take over his farm, even changing its name from Manor Farm to Animal Farm. They replace Farmer Jones’ capitalism with socialism which is the exact opposite of capitalism. It’s about (1) public (i.e. community) ownership of the means of production, (2) controlled markets, and (3) earnings limited by considerations of human welfare – reinvesting profits above that into improving community life.
At least in the beginning, all that works out quite well because the animals are guided by a “North Star” ideal called communism (expressed in their popular anthem “Beasts of England”). Communism is an unrealizable ideal (like the Kingdom of God) that guides the planning of socialists. It shoots for (1) abundance for all, (2) consequent elimination of economic classes, and (3) no need for a state (i.e. for a central authority to impose on entire communities the will of the dominant class, be it capitalists or workers).
Eventually however, the Animal Farm project finds itself threatened by a counter-revolution led by Farmer Jones and his fellow capitalists who want to reverse the gains of the animals’ socialism and reclaim their lost private property. Together the dispossessed capitalists launch violent attacks on the socialist experiment. They kill and maim the Farm residents. They destroy their infrastructure (most notably a windmill that would provide electricity for Animal Farm giving workers there with more leisure, light, warmth, and power for labor-saving machinery).
Eventually too, the leadership of the commune realizes that it needs goods and services that it cannot provide for itself, such as iron, nails, and paraffin oil. This realization causes the community to move from a socialist economy to a mixed economy. Mixed economies combine the best features of capitalism and socialism. They incorporate (1) some private ownership and some public ownership of means of production, (2) some free markets and some controlled exchanges, and (3) earnings which though limited allow capitalists to earn profit.
For a while, this new system works. However, Animal Farm leadership becomes so comfortable with their former sworn enemies (the capitalists led by the lawyer, Mr. Whymper) that the community governors gradually identify more with their outside trading partners than with the Animal Farm community. They end up dressing like the capitalists and adopting their ways (such as drinking previously forbidden alcohol, sleeping in luxurious beds, excluding animals from their meetings, and adopting the practice of capital punishment).
All of this enrages Animal Farm residents not only against the capitalists, but against their own increasingly repressive leadership. Rebellion simmers once again on the farm. The capitalists and their Animal Farm allies feel threatened causing them to institute a system of fascism (i.e., capitalism in crisis featuring a union of interest and policy between government and capitalists). Fascism might be defined as (1) capitalism in crisis, (2) forced on resentful workers by a police state and (3) blaming the system’s dysfunctions on “the usual suspects,” viz., communists, socialists, Jews, non-whites, immigrants, and sexual “deviants.” In the case of Animal Farm, Snowball the Pig is a stand-in for all the latter. He’s blamed for everything!
Conclusion
So, what’s the bottom line of Animal Farm? Many see it as a diatribe against socialism and communism illustrating the old saw: “Communism is great in theory, but it doesn’t work in practice.”
Perhaps more discerning conclusions would be that:
The book illustrates the clear superiority of socialism over capitalism. The animals were much happier under communal ownership of the means of production than under Farmer Jones.
However, capitalists do not give up easily. They inevitably launch counter revolutions involving mayhem, murder, and cynical property destruction – all aimed at making workers dissatisfied with their new situation.
Capitalists can also buy off socialist leaders with money, gifts, prestige, and privilege causing them to identify more with their former enemies than with the people they are supposed to serve.
Revolution is not a one-off affair. It is a constant process always in need of periodic renewal.
Or as Thomas Jefferson put it: “Every generation needs a new revolution.”
Sadly, my nearly year-long saga in Spain is coming to an end. Today is my last full day here. Since last September, my wife, Peggy, and I have shared a sabbatical with my daughter and son-in-law and their family of five children (ages 4 to 15). Right now we’re in Mallorca.
The whole experience has been life changing – almost as important as my study of liberation theology in Brazil (1984), my frequent visits to revolutionary and post-revolutionary Nicaragua (beginning in 1985), all those times I’ve visited Cuba (starting in 1997), and my years of study and teaching in Costa Rica (1992-2013).
In Spain I’ve learned more and changed more than I could ever have anticipated.
Unexpectedly, I’ve entered an unusual community here – of street musicians, cave dwellers, hippies, and grassroots philosophers. I love them all, and as I said, it’s changed my life.
One of them, Simon (from Chile) introduced me to the great Chilean film director, Alejandro Jodorowsky, and to Ana Rodriguez Sotomayor and her milestone book, The Precursors of Printing.
My troglodyte friend, Simon
Those sources and my desire to improve my Spanish comprehension sent me back (via YouTube) to my early teachers from Chile, Costa Rica, Argentina, and Puerto Rico: Franz Hinkelammert (who died last week), Enrique Dussel, and (more recently) Ramon Grosfoguel. Together their drive to decolonize world history has rendered irrelevant my previous understandings (and teaching!) of Eurocentric universal history.
Simon and I also studied together the Mayan sacred book, The Popol Vuh. He introduced me to Tarot, marijuana, and mushrooms. At least once a week, we talked for hours.
Another dear friend, Francesco from Italy, showed me how to read tarot cards. Cesco’s a Bob Dylan scholar. My friend’s two long essays (in Italian) helped me appreciate Dylan more deeply and enthusiastically than ever.
That made my attendance at Dylan’s Granada concert (with my 15-year-old granddaughter, Eva Maria) richer than I could ever have imagined. Eva and I had an artistic experience that night (in the Alhambra) that neither of us will forget. It was magical.
Eva Maria & I pose before entering the Alhambra’s General Life
So, I found it somehow fitting that just a few days ago, with my time in Spain running out, it was Eva who suggested that I read Dan Brown’s novel, Origin. Her suggestion was inspired by connections she saw between my recently published essay on artificial intelligence (AI) on the one hand, and our frequent conversations about faith and religion, along with our shared experience of Spain itself on the other.
Origin is a 2017 “who dunnit” that involves the biblical Book of Genesis, science and evolution, Christian fundamentalism, and artificial intelligence. All of it is set in Spain and many of the places my family and I have visited over the last year.
I’m talking especially about Bilbao and its Guggenheim Museum and Barcelona’s iconic Sagrada Familiacathedral created by Antoni Gaudi. Involved too is what I’ve learned here about Spanish politics, the enduring power of the Spanish Catholic Church, the dictatorship of Francisco Franco (1939-1975), the monarchy in Spain, and resistance to that apparently outmoded institution.
Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia Cathedral in Barcelona
In short, Origin has Dan Brown’s perennial hero, Robert Langdon attempting to solve the murder of the brilliant futurist scholar, Edmund Kirsch. Kirsch claimed to have discovered definitive atheistic answers to religion’s two most persistent questions: (1) Where did we come from, and (2) where are we going?
Scholars from Christianity, Judaism, and Islam found Kirsch’s discoveries so threatening that the only solution to the problem he represented was to silence him permanently.
With the dastardly deed done, Langdon must locate the responsible forces.
Not surprisingly, doing so involves a stunningly beautiful heroine, several additional murders, frantic chases, and Brown’s usual long (sometimes pedantic) discourses on symbols, codes, architecture, history, mythology, science, and technology.
Also involved are long conversations with “Winston,” a computerized embodiment of the very artificial intelligence that my earlier-referenced essay had speculated might represent the next step in human evolution.
The whole thing was quite fascinating and even exciting from its opening interfaith exchanges to its cliffhanger conclusion.
Still however, the book’s central problem seemed somehow outdated. I found it difficult to imagine that in 2017 the “entire world” [actually, 250 million (of 8 billion) people with access to computers and iPhones] would still be interested in, much less threatened by long-resolved (or dismissed as irrelevant) questions of creationism vs. evolution explained in those pedantic screeds.
Except for a quickly shrinking cadre of Christian fundamentalists, that controversy was solved cinematically years ago by Spencer Tracy in “Inherit the Wind” (1960). Granted, the Scopes Monkey Trial (1925) did garner fevered national attention at least in America. But that was almost a century ago.
Since then, we’ve had the death of God movement, John XIII‘s Second Vatican Council, the Catholic Church’s pedophilia crisis, and the resulting general discrediting of organized religion that has all but emptied (Catholic) churches across the world. (Just go to Mass here in Spain on any given Sunday, and you’ll struggle to find anyone under 60 among the worshippers.)
Today (at least among Christians) only religious crazies (like bombers of abortion clinics) are willing to commit murder over differences about the Bible (in which btw, there’s no denunciation of abortion).
Yes, that’s true about questions of creationism vs. evolution, and believers who understand the Bible as:
A single divinely authored book with 73 chapters
Whose most important chapter is Genesis
Whose data conflicts with modern science
And whose meaning is confined to the personal sphere,
While supporting American patriotism
And “spiritual” questions
Of feeling good about oneself
And about life after death,
Punishment and reward
And an apocalyptic, God-willed
World destruction
As punishment for sin
To repeat: very few among Christians are willing to kill or die for such arcane beliefs.
But that’s not nearly so about the Bible and questions of social justice. Instead, as Noam Chomsky (a Jewish atheist) has shown, the U.S. government has shown itself quite willing to kill hundreds of thousands (including a whole team of liberation theologians in El Salvador in 1989) precisely over biblical interpretation that differs from that of the Christians whose irrelevant fundamentalism U.S. leadership approvingly identifies with Christianity.
On the other hand, the assassination-worthy theological enemies of the United States include those who ALONG WITH VIRTUALLY ALL OF MODERN BIBLICAL SCHOLARSHIP:
See the Bible as a library of books written by various authors in various historical periods for various reasons and from various theological (often conflicting) perspectives.
Within this canon, the Book of Genesis and its creation myths are peripheral,
While the Book of Exodus and Israel’s nation-founding story of the liberation of slaves from Egypt represents the Bible’s central focus
Reflecting ancient and modern conflicts between the world’s poor and its rich and powerful classes
[And to “America’s” (and empires’ in general) preferential option for the rich],
While identifying the Book of Revelation’s “Apocalypse” as predicting not the end of the world, but the annihilation of the Roman Empire and (by extension) of empires in general.
With all of that in mind, it’s no wonder that Dan Brown chose a safer and less politically controversial approach to religious controversy than that pinpointed by Chomsky, biblical scholarship, and contemporary politics.
Instead, Brown chose to stick with worn out cliches and simplifications.
Regrettably, he steered far away from Chomsky’s advice: “Keep away from clichés, this world is much more complicated.”
What is the connection between liberation theology and its feminist theologians refusing to wear underwear while writing their articles and books? That’s right: no underwear.
And what is the connection of their resulting theology with the poor lemon vendors in Buenos Aires who, also without underwear, squat defiantly in their full skirts and urinate on the sidewalks in front of watchful and disapproving city police? (Meanwhile, the lemon sellers complain about their “shi*ty priests”, “mafia politicians” and those “puta policia” – fu*kin’ cops).
And what about the mothers, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers, who proudly display their completely unrobed bodies on so many contemporary internet sites? Presumably many of them identify as Christians. But by religious standards, isn’t such display “indecent?”
And finally, is there any relationship between feminist theologians and those Argentine lemon sellers, on the one hand, and rock ‘n’ roll music, Tina Turner, and Chuck Berry on the other.
The late liberation theologian Marcela Althaus-Reid (1952-2009) provocatively raised and addressed questions like those during her brief career as Senior Lecturer in Christian Ethics, Practical Theology, and Systematic Theology at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. In doing so, she shed light on women’s rebellions against oppressive patriarchal norms across the planet.
You know what I mean. Think about the reaction to the effective repeal of Roe v. Wade by the U.S. Supreme Court. Think of those Muslim women in Iran who cut their hair in public and refuse to obey the “morality police.” Even consider, if you can, the unspoken meaning behind those mature women around the world who provocatively display their unclothed bodies online for all to see.
Althaus-Reid argued that the above are all doing what she called “Indecent Theology.” Here the reference is to her thesis from her 2004 theological potboiler, From Feminist Theology to Indecent Theology: Readings on Poverty, Sexual Identity, and God.
Because of the important light the book sheds on the feminist rebellions just referenced, as well as on liberation theology itself, please consider with me what Althaus-Reid means. Consider the relevance of indecency to liberation theology and to issues like abortion, the morality police, what some might call “pornography,” as well as to patriarchy in general. Consider its connection to rock ‘n’ roll and to popular “saints” like the recently deceased Tina Turner (1939-2023) and Chuck Berry (1926-2017).
Female Indecency
Althaus-Reid begins by reminding readers that Christianity itself is a highly sexualized affair. It is claustrophobically decent. (In what follows, all references in parentheses are to the book just cited.)
She says it’s not that the morality of the Bible in any way endorses Victorian sexual standards. It does not. Instead, its main concerns are liberation in all the senses (economic, political, and spiritual) that the word “liberation” connotes.
That’s because the Biblical tradition was based on the freeing of slaves from Egypt. Its resulting concern was for the welfare of widows, orphans, and resident aliens. Its prophetic tradition boldly spoke radical truth to priests, kings, and other bosses who legislated against, ignored, and/or exploited the poor.
In general, the biblical tradition promised the latter a new and brighter future. The prophet Yeshua called that future the “Kingdom of God.” By that he meant what the world would be like if God were king instead of the world’s oppressive “Caesars.” Such a world would be turned upside down. Its standards of decency would be transgressed at every turn.
Yet despite such a clear emphasis on social justice, it was the biblical tradition itself that ended up doing a headstand instead of the imperial world order. The revolutionary thrust of “The Book’s” pivotal story was tamed by the kings, princes, and popes of the world (27, 28). Far from being scandalous and revolutionary, the Judeo-Christian tradition thus became the defender of the status quo. Its point became the social control of the revolutionary lower classes, with oppressive standards of decency, especially for women.
And why so much attention to women? It is because of their embodiment of the revolutionary energy that the Greeks called eros. As psychologists and philosophers such as Sigmund Freud and Herbert Marcuse have pointed out, eros represents the basic creative energy of the universe.
In a capitalist patriarchal order dependent on overwork, the powers of patriarchy identify eros in the form of female sexuality as the fundamental factor threatening to undermine their entire project. Hence the powers-that-be covertly vilify women for deliciously “tempting” men to find meaning, fulfillment, happiness, and joy in human (and sexual) relationships that undermine the system’s requirement of “surplus repression” in the form of overwork.
And so, repressive concepts of decency in general and of theological decency in particular emerge to dominate women and, by extension, their potential partners. Theological decency decrees that:
• The woman’s body is a source of temptation
• Therefore, it should be covered by layers of clothing.
• Women need men to regulate female bodies and behavior through special rules written by men and (depending on culture and historical period) governing the integrity of women’s sexual organs, their menstrual periods, and issues surrounding marriage, birth control, abortion, divorce, voting and the ability to own property.
• To do theology (i.e., to speak authoritatively about God even in relation to themselves and their bodily processes), women must earn professional degrees grudgingly bestowed by the patriarchal establishment of academia.
• Therefore, the “degrees” informally awarded by the “School of Life” with its deviant and indecent logic are invalid (14, 32, 137). So is the spirituality resulting from lemon vendors engaging in “witchcraft,” in the informal healing arts, working as midwives, abortionists, and spiritual guides.
Theological Indecency
With all this in mind, feminist liberation theologians like Althaus Reid insist on transgressing the limits of theological decency. They insist that:
• Doing theology is a profoundly sexual act (4, 76). To repeat: this is not because sex was central to Jesus’ preaching. Rather it is because the church has for centuries distorted the teachings of Jesus in the service of the empire, acting in the process as an instrument of social control as explained above. Therefore, theologians are forced to write endless pages refuting such distortions.
• Poor women provide the most radical view of theology (16). Their enforced “otherness” teaches us something new about life and about the Greater Queer that some still insist on calling “God” (19).
• Yes, God is Queer (9, 146) in the sense of exceeding all categories and definitions (175) while subverting decent bourgeois concepts like family. [For those who live on the peripheries of society – under bridges, in slums, favelas and shanty towns, “family” ends up being an oppressive category. It arrogantly invalidates alternative basic social groupings that are just as valid, functional (and dysfunctional) as their bourgeois counterparts (159, 160, 164).]
• Far from being a liberating model for Latin American women, the cult of the Virgin Mary ends up functioning as another instrument of social control, this one aimed directly at women (13, 23, 39, 55). After all, Mary is presented as “a gadget” (88) having sex with God without any pre-coital romantic relationship (85). She does not experience sexual pleasure or orgasm from the union (88). And then afterwards she enjoys no meaningful sex life with her husband, Joseph. Such factors are supposed to set an example for all Christian women.
• Similarly, Jesus himself is strangely asexual: a young Hebrew man with no compañera and no unambiguous sexual interests. He also serves as a model of sexual abstinence (45).
• Thus, Jesus was queer in the sense indicated above: an outcast who rejected and was rejected even by his own family. They thought he was crazy (Mark 3:21). He spent a lot of time in the desert. At least once he was tempted to commit suicide by jumping from the pinnacle of Jerusalem’s Temple itself (170).
• In addition, the evangelical representations of Jesus show him as a victim of the machismo of his own culture (45, 48, 51, 80). Yes, he comes to the aid of a woman considered “impure” because of a menstrual problem (Lk 8, 43-48); and yes, he rejects the male executioners of a woman sentenced to death for adultery (John 8: 1-11). However, Jesus never questions the misogynistic patriarchal laws that govern those situations. He does not reject the laws regarding the stoning of women caught in adultery, nor those that classified menstruating women as “unclean” (6, 13).
• In summary, if liberationists take Jesus’ poverty and otherness seriously along with Paul’s dictum that in Christ there is neither male nor female (Galatians 3:28), perhaps the best contemporary identification of “the Master” would be a twelve-year-old girl prostituted by two men in a public toilet in Buenos Aires (84).
Unclothed Theology in the U.S.
Those are just some of the reflections of Althaus-Reid operating as a professional theologian. Meanwhile, she points out, her less academically prepared Latinx sisters do their theology based on popular beliefs and practices. Their well-earned degrees come from the school of very hard knocks. Their insights, Althaus-Reid suggests, are no less valid than their sisters’ teaching in places like the University of Edinburgh.
So, they defiantly continue to honor Santa Evita Perón. She, after all, secured voting rights for Argentine women over the objections of Argentine bishops (79). They also pray to Santo La Muerte (St. Death), Jesús Bandito, and local popular “gangster saints” who are seen as robbing and stealing from the real thieves and criminals who support those who run the government (161). They have “canonized” deceased popular singers like Rodrigo and Gilda offering them prayers and novenas in chapels dedicated to El Angel Rodrigo and La Santa Gilda(157). Those who honor such avatars kneel in church like Althaus-Reid herself without underwear, engulfed, she says, in the fragrance of female sex, and offering fervent prayers to rock stars no doubt considered “indecent” by church authorities.
All of which brings me to rock ‘n’ roll, Tina Turner, Chuck Berry, and those unclothed grandmas.
Take the grandmas first. Althaus-Reid I think would see them as doing a kind of negative theology protesting the false church-supported Victorian standards earlier referenced. They take indecency to the extreme not just rejecting underwear, but displaying their bodies completely unclothed — not for personal gain like strippers or aspiring models, but just for the hell of it.
Their wordless indecency is consistent with Althaus-Reid’s identification of the female body as a privileged locus of rebellion against patriarchal systems of power (45). Such rebellion echoes the status of their sisters in the Global South as “single women” with no visible men (35).
After all, under patriarchy, the skirts that once signified femininity and even priesthood (37), now only convey a deep alienation (20). Set them all aside!
“Do you want indecency?” rebellious women seem to say. “Well, take a look at this! The patriarchs will not tell us how to behave and what to do with our bodies!”
As for rock ‘n’ roll, Tina Turner, and Chuck Berry. . .. How much saintlier can you get?
During their lives, their music performed the basically feminine function of distracting millions from the overwork mandated by the reigning system denounced by Marcuse. In the process, they brought joy, fun, and happiness to millions of people who ended up attending and participating in the huge liturgies we call “concerts” – even over the protests and askance gazes of uptight Victorians and clergy.
By the standards of Althaus-Reid nothing could be more constructively indecent and therefore holy. Thank you, Saint Tina! Thank you, holy Chuck! Thank you, dear Marcella.
As I’ve mentioned in an earlier post or two (e.g., here and here) I’ve made a friend here in Spain who lives in a cave and makes his living playing guitar on the street. Simon is 60 years old and manages to live on the 10 Euros or so that his music affords each day.
At my invitation, I spend at least an hour or so with him weekly in conversation — usually on Wednesdays. The point is to better my grasp of Spanish. In the process, I’m learning about the underclass in the Granada area, and about simple living among those who have chosen to drop out of the rat race. I’m learning so much.
In any case, my friend is very thoughtful. He and I are studying together the Mayan “Bible,” the Popol Vuh. It contains that culture’s myths about the origin of the universe. For ecologists such as Joanna Macy, the book points us in the direction of the “deep ecology” that all of us must travel to save the planet. Simon is definitely moving that way.
For those who might be interested, my next number of posts will share my thoughts on the readings my friend and I are discussing. For instance, what follows is my summary of the book’s 40 page introduction (complete with page references to the volume pictured above). See what you think.
The Popol Vuh
The Popol Vuh is the Bible of the Mayan people (31). Unlike some other indigenous peoples, the Mayans were particularly sensitive ecologically speaking (11).
Accordingly, and unlike the West’s mechanical view, the Popol Vuh represents a work of what Joanna Macy calls “deep ecology.” It imagines an organic, living universe inhabited by conscious animals who communicate with human beings in ongoing dialog (9-11, 17).
Moreover, according to the Mayan Bible, everything in the universe is part of a whole – of a “holonarchy” (10). It contains no distinction between human beings and nature. Rather, everything exists within a network of relationships (11). Each human embodies a connection with particular elements of created reality, e.g., with mud, wood, or corn. (17). Besides this, every human has a twin spirit (or nahual) within the animal kingdom. Examples of nahuals (totems?) include the swordfish, jaguar, quetzal, serpent, owl, etc. (17, 21).
At its beginning, the Popol Vuh recounts the origins of the universe as created by Great Spirits called “Creators” and “Shapers.” They represent different aspects of Nature – viz., Gaholom [the infinite Divine Empty Space within which creation takes place] Tzacol [the Divine Will incarnate in nature), Bitol (the Divine Energy found within every creature], and Alom [the DivineMystery — the incomprehensible, and ineffable within created reality] (39-40).
Creation results from an interplay between those Creators and Shapers. Gaia (a complex entity comprising soil, oceans, atmosphere, and all living beings) is the result (21). Creation is divided into four parts, north, south, east, and west, represented by the colors white, yellow, red, and blue (14).
According to the Mayans, human beings are complex creatures. They have somehow evolved from simians (21). The masculine embodiment, Hunahpu and Ixbalanque are at the same time heroes and abusers of their powers. They often are depicted as mistreating animals. Sometimes they even practice human sacrifice – though it’s not clear to what extent such inclusions in the Popol Vuh were late additions influenced by colonialism, feudalism, and their accompanying bellicosity (28).
Meanwhile, their mother, Xquic, is kind to the animals and always enjoys success in her relationship with them (24). However, it is the Great Abuela, Xmucane, (not a masculine God) who turns out to be the Heart of the Earth (25). She embodies the ethic of care for the other who always has value and manifests Spirit – even the humble ant (26).
The moral of the Popol Vuh is “Treat all creatures – all of creation – with loving care or one day disaster will strike” (20). The entire non-human world will rise to mutilate and destroy its abusers (21).
Recently, a friend (also a former priest) allowed me to read a master’s dissertation he wrote while in Rome 40 years ago. As a 34-year-old Kiltegan missionary with experience in Africa, my friend (now in his early 70s) was exploring the meaning of the term “conversion.” It was a query, I suspect, sparked by his personal struggle with questions raised by his own discomfort with missionary work aimed at converting “pagan” Africans to Christianity.
Reading my friend’s dissertation recalled my own similar struggles as a member of the Catholic missionary group, the Society of St. Columban. Like the Kiltegans, the Columbans emerged from Ireland in the first half of the 20th century. My group’s original work was converting Chinese rather than Africans. As I was completing my graduate studies in Rome, I too had my own doubts about the Columbans’ project.
So, for me reading my friend’s work was a trip down memory lane. His thesis addressed the work of theologians I remember admiring during the late 1960s.
I’m talking about the revered thinkers Bernard Lonergan, Karl Rahner, and a lesser-known Jesuit theologian, William Lynch. I recall so well puzzling over their dense prose as it tried to make sense of the Judeo-Christian tradition in the light of the Second Vatican Council (1962-1965). Who was Jesus, they asked, and what was his relationship to the “modern world?” As I said, my friend’s question to them was about their understanding of the term “conversion?”
Lonergan’s, Rahner’s, and Lynch’s answers to such questions revealed their developed world perspectives. Lonergan was a Canadian; Rahner a German; Lynch, an American. All three were heavily influenced by existentialist and Heideggerian philosophy that at the time contrasted so refreshingly with the Thomistic approach of pre-conciliar theology that heavily relied on Thomas Aquinas and medieval scholastic philosophy.
However, I (and theologians in general, including, I presume, my friend) have long since moved beyond the impenetrable, abstract, thought of the three theologians in question. Influenced by Jesus scholarship and by liberation theology, the reflections of today’s scholars are much more biblically and historically grounded – much more reliant on concrete social analysis than on existential speculation.
Let me try to show what I mean.
Lonergan, Rahner & Lynch
Without venturing too far into the deeper weeds of their relevant speculations, here’s how Lonergan, Rahner and Lynch approach the question of conversion:
Lonergan: Conversion is acceptance of truth rather than the world’s falsehoods. Its end point is awakening from an uncomprehending slumber. Its heightened consciousness yields a changed attitude towards the problem of evil, which is ultimately theological before the world’s otherwise incomprehensible tragedies. Conversion emerges from one’s unique experience of God which is analogous to falling in love. It is not rational; it is not dependent on argument. Conversion simply happens as a gift from God to one inexplicably grasped by the reality of Christ crucified, dead, and risen.
Rahner: Conversion is the owning of one’s human nature which is absolute openness (potentia obedientialis) to ultimate reality (aka “God”). Conversion is the process of becoming receptive to what the world discloses about itself against the backdrop of the Ground of Being. That receptivity is modeled in the person of Jesus the Christ.
Lynch: Conversion represents a radically changed way of experiencing the world. The world of the convert revolves around a different center than it does for the unconverted. He or she perceives and embraces the fact that all of creation is driven by eros – by the basic life-force that informs everything that is. For Lynch, Jesus understood that fact and because of living its truth, represents the ultimate version of humanity. He reveals to human beings who they are.
All these insights are profound and helpful to academics seeking a deeper understanding of the term conversion. And, as I earlier indicated, I once found them to represent the apex of theological reflection. I agreed, that (1) human beings are basically asleep to life’s deeper dimensions, (2) conversion entails awakening and (3) finally embracing a shared human nature as fundamental openness to Ultimate Reality that some call “God.” (3) Accepting that reality involves perceiving the Life Force (eros) that informs and unites all of creation. (4) Such perception gives the lives of the converted a new center not shared by “the world,” but (5) embodied instead in the person of Jesus the Christ crucified, dead, and resurrected.
That’s what I once believed. But that was before I encountered Jesus-scholarship and liberation theology. It was before (precisely as a Global South advocate) I took seriously the imperative to change the world rather than explain it to intellectuals.
Jesus Scholarship & Liberation Theology
Jesus-scholarship and liberation theology agree that conversion involves awakening to a reality other than that generally accepted by “the wisdom of the world.” But it understands awakening as development of class consciousness. Theological awakening moves the center of reflection from imperial locations such as Rome, Canada, Germany, and the U.S. to the peripheries of neo-colonies and the slums of Sao Paulo, Managua, and Mexico City.
For liberation theologians, reality is not fundamentally theological or philosophical, but historical, economic, political, and social. It has been created by phenomena that Raul Peck says summarize the last 500 years of western history. Three words, he tells us, encapsulate it all – civilization (i.e., white supremacy), colonialism, and extermination. Those terms and the bloodstained reality they represent rather than abstract theological speculation, summarize the real problem of evil. That problem is concrete, material, and historical, not primarily theological. It is not mysterious, philosophical, or even theological.
Accordingly, liberation theology’s reflections start with the real world of endemic poverty, climate change, and threat of nuclear war. Closer to home, they begin in biblical circles where poor slum dwellers ask why there’s no electricity or plumbing – why their children are threatened by gang members and drug dealers. Only as a second step does theological reflection enter the picture. In reading the Gospels, the poor (not developed world theologians) discover the fact that Jesus and his community faced problems similar to their own. In the process, they find new relevance in the narratives of Jesus’ words and deeds.
This leads to a third step in liberation theology’s “hermeneutical circle” – planning to address community problems and to the identification and assignment of specific tasks to members of the reflection group in question. Will we demonstrate in front of city hall? Who will contact the mayor? What about community policing?
Answering and acting on questions like those represent the third step in liberation theology’s circle of interpretation. They are a form of reinsertion into community life. That reengagement then begins the circle’s dynamic all over again.
In summary then, liberation theology begins with social analysis that defines the context of those who (regardless of their attitudes towards theology) would not merely understand the world but are intent on transforming it in the direction of social justice. That by the way is the purpose of liberation theology itself – highlighting the specifically biblical stories whose power can change the world. Accordingly, liberation theology is reflection on the following of Christ from the standpoint of the world’s poor and oppressed who are committed to the collective improvement of their lives economically, politically, socially, and spiritually.
And this is where Jesus enters the reflective process in ways that traditional theologians (even like Lonergan, Rahner, and Lynch) end up avoiding. For liberation theologians, Jesus is not merely crucified, dead, and risen. He also had a life (traditional theology’s “excluded middle”) including actual words and deeds before the eventuation of those culminating events.
In other words, Jesus is not primarily the transcendent Universal Christ. He is an historical figure who (as William Lynch correctly has it) relocates the center of the world and history. However, as just seen, he moves that center from the privileged terrain of Rome or the United States to their imperialized provinces and colonies. For liberation theology, kings and emperors are not the center of history, but people like the construction worker from Nazareth. That’s the astounding revelation of Jesus. It turns one’s understanding of the world upside-down.
Put still otherwise, (according to biblical stories whether considered historical or fictional) Jesus represents God’s unlooked-for incarnation in the earth’s wretched. He was the son of an unwed teenage mother, an infant refugee from infanticide, an asylum seeker in Egypt, an excommunicate from his religious tribe, a friend of drunks and street walkers, and a victim of torture and capital punishment precisely for opposing Rome’s colonial control of Palestine.
Conclusion
Yes, I remember admiring the likes of Lonergan, Rahner, and Lynch. But they no longer speak to me. Their abstract words, tortured existential questions, and impenetrable grammar obscure the salvific reality so easily accessible and fascinating in the character of Jesus belonging to the Gospel stories – and to those impoverished and oppressed by what bell hooks calls the white supremacist, imperialist, capitalist patriarchy.
Unfortunately, however, the world and its theologians have always been reluctant to recognize that figure for what he was. The change he requires is too drastic. It would mean taking sides with the wretched of the earth.
Instead, theologians even like Lonergan, Rahner, and Lynch have preferred to focus on Christ crucified, dead and resurrected without the biblical narrative of the construction worker’s words and deeds that stand 180 degrees opposite truths taken for granted in the world’s imperial centers.
But it is precisely that down-to-earth Jesus that our world today needs more than an abstract Universal Christ. Conversion to that despised and rejected messiah means rejecting identification with empire’s pretensions and goals. It means taking to the streets with the Sunrise and Black Lives Matter movements. It means running the risk of sharing with Jesus his own fate as a victim of arrest, torture, and even capital punishment.
That’s what Jesus meant by urging his followers to take up the cross and follow him.
If you’re like many who read these pages, you might be skeptical about religion and its claims. You’re put off by apparently childish beliefs in a God who according to the teachings of Jesus is a loving parent, but who also ends up committing and ordering acts (like Noah’s flood and military slaughters) that can only be described as immoral and even genocidal.
Yet, if you’re like me, you also recognize in ancient biblical traditions powerful sources of wisdom and inspiration for transforming the world. I’m talking about biblical interpretations by Jesus himself, by the prophets, and their more recent embodiments such as Martin Luther King, Dorothy Day, William Barber II and Liz Theoharis. You’re probably loathe to throw out the baby represented by the heroes just mentioned with the bathwater of demeaning beliefs unworthy of adults concerned with peace, justice and saving our planet from the ravages of climate change and nuclear war.
If you fall into either category, I recommend that you read Escaping from Eden: does Genesis teach that the human race was created by God or engineered by ETs? It is authored by Anglican priest and scholar Paul Anthony Wallis. The book vividly describes the religious dynamic we’re all used to with its tendencies to enslave and stunt human growth on the one hand and to liberate and call us to our higher selves on the other.
It also offers cogent exegeses of familiar Genesis stories that centralize an unfamiliar theogony that involves us all.
Let me explain.
Escaping Eden
Perhaps shockingly to most, Wallis’ basic thesis is that the Eden and subsequent stories in the first eleven chapters of Genesis are not about God at all. Instead as the book’s full title suggests, many of the tales describe extraterrestrial aliens (ETs) and their interactions with early humans. For Wallis, recognizing the aliens hidden in plain sight within the Genesis myths and legends can help liberate us from powerful contemporary actors who use religion to infantilize and enslave the rest of us.
Does all that sound too far out? Wallis insists that it shouldn’t. In fact, he argues, his observations are grounded in sound, long-standing biblical scholarship that has puzzled over and/or ignored references to plural gods in a text ostensibly promoting monotheism.
On top of this, Wallis emphasizes the fact that we humans live (and always have) in a universe populated by many human-like species. This is attested to by worldwide myths and stories found among humans everywhere – e.g., in Sumerian cuneiform tablets, in Greek and Roman mythology, in the Popol Vuh, and in the Judeo-Christian Bible. It is also verified by innumerable “close encounters” throughout history, by science-fiction writers like Erich von Daniken in his Chariots of the Gods, as well as by NASA astronauts, the U.S. government and even by the Vatican itself.
More to Wallis’ point, the Bible is an especially noteworthy source attesting to the existence of extraterrestrial agents who visit the earth and interact with human beings. Some of the ETs help humans; others attempt to enslave them.
Though commonly overlooked as such, (and as we’ll see below) interactions with ETs are found in the myths involving the First Man and the First Woman, in the legends of Abraham and Sarah, of Sodom and Gomorrah and elsewhere. They are also found in the prophetic books of Ezekiel and Elijah as well as in Christian Testament conception stories of John the Baptist and Jesus himself. Additionally, they are suggested in “apocalyptic” literature found throughout the Bible.
In all these accounts, one finds tales not only of gods, angels, monsters, and devils, but of giants so large that they make humans feel like grasshoppers, of agents with extraordinarily long lives, of divine beings of immense physical attraction begetting exceptional children with human partners, and of vehicles that we today would call UFOs.
For Wallis, the key to perceiving such overlooked realities is found in accurately translating the plural Hebrew term Elohim which is centralized in the familiar creation myths of Genesis. Normally, this term has been translated simply as “God.”
However, Wallis points out, this fatal mistranslation leads to insoluble problems linked to monotheism (e.g., why is Elohim plural in a monotheistic text?), and to moral quandaries where a biblical God commits and orders genocidal acts of extreme cruelty.
Actually, Wallis explains Elohim’s plural form is correctly translated not as “God” or even “gods,” but as “Sky People,” the “Powerful Ones,” or the “Engineers.” Elohim refers to extraterrestrials who rescue an already created world rather than constitute it from scratch. Among them is that minor entity called “Yahweh.” Eventually, the Mosaic tradition identifies him as the one and only god of the Hebrew people.
In developing these ideas, Wallis shows that a close reading of the first chapter of Genesis reveals that the Hebrew Bible contains no account of the world’s creation at all. Instead, in what is often taken as a creation myth, the earth and seas already exist as does “darkness” which assumes the existence of a contrasting sun and/or moon and stars.
This leads Wallis to conclude that Genesis’ ancient “creation story” is really about a recovery or planetary reset following some sort of extinction level event that geologists tell us occurred following the last ice age, or the collision of earth and a meteor, and/or a planetwide flood. According to this interpretation, the tale in Genesis describes how “Powerful Ones” (Elohim) – extraterrestrials – used their extraordinary powers to restore order to a planet suffering from a post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Genesis Retold
To show what I mean, here how Wallis retells the Genesis story:
Following a planetary catastrophe, the earth remained shrouded in darkness, empty, barren and covered in water. In response, Spirit-Beings, the Powerful Ones (Elohim) from beyond the earth came to its rescue. They hovered over the planet’s watery surface dissipating its darkness. Soon light manifested itself as the sun, moon, and stars once again became visible.
Next the Powerful Ones separated the earth’s waters to create saltwater seas, freshwater rivers and habitable land. Vegetation, fish, birds, and animals returned to fill the air, land, and seas.
Within a plain called Eden the Sky People created an enclosed safety zone and filled it with animal and botanical life. In the soil of the plain near the Tigris and Euphrates, precious mineral deposits, including high grade gold also came to light.
Using the elements of the earth to make clay, the Engineers next fashioned Earth Creatures (Adam) to look like their makers. Their bodies lay silent and motionless until the Powerful Ones breathed spirit into them.
Once animated the new humans were put to work in the enclosed zone. They ate a vegan diet and lived a subsistence lives in harmony with the animals.
Gradually the Powerful Ones noticed that the humans were depressed. All the other animal species were male and female. The humans needed such companionship too. So, the Powerful Ones generated females of the species from the asexual Earth Creatures’ bodies. As male and female, human society was then poised to begin its journey.
Then one day the humans found themselves in conversation with a Sky Person known as “the Snake.” He walked upright and had arms and legs. The helpful Snake showed the humans how they might achieve a higher level of consciousness. The change would raise their understanding and self-awareness and improve the quality of their lives. Not surprisingly, the humans accepted the Snake’s offer. Here, the female of the species took the lead. The resulting upgrade brought with it moral conscience and sexual awareness. Humans began to wear clothes and gender roles emerged. With the first childbirths, human society began to take form.
All of this incited a long-lasting conflict among the Powerful Ones. Some of them were afraid that the newly empowered humans might become too independent. As punishment for breaking rank by effecting an unauthorized human upgrade, the Snake Sky Person was shorn of its limbs and forced to eat the other Powerful Ones’ dust.
For their parts, the male and the female humans faced parallel repercussions. The Engineers locked them out of the enclosed zone and forced the humans to fend for themselves in the wild, untamed country of Eden. There the humans continued to produce children. However, the land of Eden had not been prepared or cultivated for this eventuality. Consequently, circumstances forced the humans to work hard just to provide for their families.
In addition, exiled from the enclosed area, the humans no longer enjoyed access to the healing plants which before had cured their every injury and ailment. Denied such cures the humans began to die.
As human society grew and became harder to manage, the Council of Powerful Ones decided that the human beings were living too long and took a decision to limit the humans’ lifespans. Additionally, troubling news of abductions of human females and resultant hybridization by some Powerful Ones (bnei Elohim, sons of the Powerful Ones) also reached the ears of the Council. This was not what they had intended. After a period of intense debate, a final solution was reached. Earth was to be wiped clean of the human menace by means of a massive flood.
But not all the Powerful Ones concurred. Along with a warning about the impending flood, the dissenters gave a man called Noah instructions about constructing a rescue vessel, sealing his family inside (together with a stock of plants and animals to eventually reseed flora and fauna) and re-booting the human population with the DNA of Noah’s extended family. Then came the deluge.
In the aftermath of the flood, as human society re-expanded, the people migrated east of Eden. When they reached the Shinar Plain, Mesopotamia – the home of Sumeria and Babylonia – they settled and built a huge tower – as a gateway between the people and the Powerful Ones, a means of reaching the heavens from Earth.
However, when some members of the Council observed the project, they were deeply disturbed. Old fears resurfaced about humans usurping the power of their betters. Another brutal response was called for. Accordingly, the Sky People used their great powers to arrest the development of human civilization. They did this by taking from the humans the language which had united them, confusing their ability to speak so that the humans would no longer be able to communicate with one another and operate as a single society.
Two Types of Biblical Aliens
The tale just reviewed reveals a powerful internecine “Battle of the Elite” hidden in the Genesis accounts and continues to our day. It pits some Powerful Ones (Elohim) who were benevolent towards the emerging race of humans against other Sky People who sought to keep humans subordinate and unconscious.
In the biblical stories benevolent Powerful Ones:
Reconstitute planet earth after the unprecedented cataclysm referenced above
Create earth creatures who physically resemble their creators
Divide the earth creatures into male and female to relieve their creatures’ loneliness
Provide a safe zone where humans live in the company of their powerful mentors and where food, shelter, and healing plants are provided.
Instruct the earth creatures (through a Powerful One called “the Snake”) about how to achieve moral consciousness
Intervene to save at least some humans from an approaching universal deluge
And eventually in the deified Powerful One, Yahweh, liberate people enslaved by the Pharaohs of Egypt.
Meanwhile, more malevolent Sky People:
Take measures to keep the earth creatures subservient
By forbidding humans from attaining moral consciousness
Punishing them for doing so by inflicting painful childbirth experiences on their women and harsh labor upon men, and by driving both women and men out of their paradisical safe zone, thus depriving them of food and healing plants, while consequently introducing sickness, shortened lives, and death
Punishing the Snake (the humans’ moral mentor) by amputating its arms and legs
Sending a universal flood
Preventing humans from cooperating with one another by eliminating their universally understood common language
Routinely ordering humans to commit genocide on the Powerful Ones’ enemies
Conclusion
None of this is to say that the stories Wallis examines should be taken literally, though he gives an impression of doing so. My own tendency is to continue treating the stories Wallis examines as myth and legend and as such to mine them for the extremely rich meaning they contain.
However literal or not, the tales in question serve to highlight the facts that:
We do exist in a populated universe
Religious traditions across the planet are strangely unanimous in recording close encounters with extraterrestrial entities
Earthly elites (emperors, kings, popes, and priests) have typically used such records to instill fear within and enslave their subjects
Those same powerful agents have ignored and obscured accounts with ETs that empower non-elites by inspiring them to rebel against their enslaving masters
In any case, Paul Anthony Wallis’ book calls us to re-examine our prejudices about the biblical tradition, whatever they might be. He suggests that it is more powerful and relevant to our postmodern world than we’ve been led to believe.
Two years ago, my good friend from Berea, Kentucky, Roger Jones published a thought-provoking extended parable about the current human condition shaped by post-modern capitalism. It’s a wonderfully insightful and artistically composed novel called The Mists of Arltunga. I highly recommend it.
Set In a mining camp (Arltunga) in central Australia 100 years ago, the story presciently portrays a world so polluted by chemical industries that the companies in question mine the foul-smelling air itself. They do so with glider air ships that draw behind them fine nets to capture jelly-like discharges from the open-pit mines below.
Of course, the putrid mists are also ingested by the mine workers whose nostrils and lungs end up hosting the foul emissions. They suffer and die accordingly.
But none of this matters to the chemical company’s absentee owner, nor to the mine overseer. The overriding concern of both is meeting production goals. To achieve those ends, the overseer browbeats his workers, alternatively threatens and sweet-talks them, punishes their shortcomings, and offers meaningless incentives. Worse still, he proves willing to kill troublemakers directly by using his pistol and covertly by provoking a fatal landslide by means of dynamite. He colludes with a competitor for purposes of controlling the workforces of both companies and of mutually enriching themselves.
In short, The Mists of Arltunga presents its mesmerized readers with a tale of unfettered capitalism that is both cautionary and actual.
But of course, (as in the real world) the most rebellious among the story’s exploited mineworkers take none of this lying down. Though they find themselves caught in a web of exploitation, they cannot initially free themselves. They’re impotent because employment in the mine represents their only source of sustenance without which they’d starve to death. Though the mine’s glider pilots can soar above it all for hours each day, they must eventually return to earth to eat the camp’s miserable gruel, turnips and thin soup. Eagles by day (an important metaphor in the book), they’re reduced to precariat slaves when they return to earth.
All of this holds true till one day a zeppelin from Perth crash lands with a deafening explosion and searing ball of flame near the mine site. All the vessel’s crew and passengers perish, except for the burnt and wounded daughter of Arltunga’s absentee owner. She’s saved by one of the mine’s glider-pilots who works in Arltunga alongside his father and younger brother. Unaware of the “sheila’s” true identity, both brothers immediately fall in love with her.
The girl, however, maintains a friendly but aloof distance from the pair. Under threat from the mine overseer, she is forced to conceal her true identity. She blends into the working community proving herself to be invaluable as a gardener and infirmary caregiver. Most surprisingly of all, she reveals herself as a competent glider pilot capable of flying with the best of the men.
A turning point comes when the camp overseer’s collusions with a competing mine operation come to light. It all involves the earlier-mentioned landslide, the resulting near-death experience of the mine owner’s daughter, and her abduction according to the plan of Arltunga’s mine overseer – again, the only character aware of the girl’s real name.
All of this catalyzes worker rebellion led by the story’s love-struck brothers. The climax involves a thrilling glider chase, another crash landing, and a surprising disclosure of hidden identities.
In the end, the revelations concluding The Mists of Arltunga point towards a mythic, parable-like and robust affirmation of the unity of the entire human family. They offer hope that acknowledgment of that single household can unite bosses and workers even altering the behavior of greedy absentee proprietors.
Do yourself a favor. Read Roger Jones’ splendid, hopeful and critical parable. Be inspired accordingly.
I’ve just finished Barack Obama’s remarkable autobiography, A Promised Land. Its biblical title invites reflection about the theological orientation and resulting policies of the man the book portrays. By his own testimony, that direction was originally set by Jeremiah A. Wright, Mr. Obama’s former pastor at Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s South Side.
James Cone, the father of Black liberation theology has described Dr. Wright as Black liberation theology’s foremost contemporary exponent. So, in Mr. Obama, the United States experienced not only its first Black president, but its first chief executive to have been shaped spiritually by liberation theology.
With all of that in mind, the point of the following review of The Promised Land will be that had Mr. Obama employed what he learned at the feet of Jeremiah Wright, his policies would have been markedly different from their actual forms. Practically speaking, they would have more resembled those of Franklin Delano Roosevelt than a continuation of the neoliberal legacy of Bill Clinton. They would have set the country on a profoundly different and more widely beneficial trajectory from the one we are currently following.
Professed devout Catholic, Joe Biden, should take note. The radical biblical tradition espoused not only by Wright and Cone, but by King and William Barber – i.e., championed by thought leaders among Mr. Biden’s most crucial constituents – won’t support a return to “normalcy.” It requires policies that prioritize the needs not of Wall Street, but of the poor. It demands departure from Barack Obama’s business as usual.
Liberation Theology
And that brings me precisely to liberation theology.
In case you’ve forgotten, liberation theology is reflection on the following of Yeshua the Christ from the viewpoint of the poor and oppressed committed to improving their collective life economically, politically, socially, and spiritually.
Its Judeo-Christian orientation is about political and economic starting points and end points.
Sociologically speaking, it begins (as OpEdNews’ Rob Kall would say) from the “bottom up.” In the case of the Jewish tradition, it starts with the liberation of slaves in Egypt by a Life-Force they called “Yahweh.” It ends with Yahweh’s pledge to give the enslaved (as Mr. Obama’s book title reminds us) “A Promised Land.”
In its Christian form, the tradition starts with a poor houseless child who grows into a prophet. He promises dispossessed victims of the Roman Empire the end point of “the kingdom of God.” By this he meant a world where God is king instead of Caesar – a world with room for everyone. For liberation theology, that’s the North Star – the guiding vision meant to shape all of life, economically, politically, socially, and spiritually – a world where no one is excluded or marginalized
Following that star, liberation theology emphasizes what the Christian Testament’s Paul of Tarsus calls “the wisdom of God” contrasted sharply with “the wisdom of the world” (I Cor. 2: 1-16). In modern terms, the wisdom of the world is trickle-down; it begins with the well-off. It holds that if the wealthy prosper, the tide that lifts their luxury yachts will lift all boats. By contrast, God’s bottom-up wisdom begins with the well-being of the poor.
Unfortunately, the policies, Mr. Obama describes in A Promised Land ended up reflecting the former over the latter.
Jeremiah Wright’s Influence on Mr. Obama
That reflection contrasts dramatically with what scandalized America’s right wing when it first encountered Jeremiah Wright’s liberation theology. The discovery occurred soon after they realized that Barack and Michelle Obama not only were parishioners of a fiercely radical black pastor, but that he had officiated at their wedding (A Promised Land 23).
That sent conservatives scurrying to unearth evidence of Wright’s (and by extension Obama’s) unacceptably extreme viewpoints. In fact, what their excavations uncovered nearly terminated Mr. Obama’s political ambitions (140).
That’s because (true to liberation theology’s form) Wright’s words explicitly foregrounded the experience of the poor as victims of what he called U.S. terrorism. His sermons often traced it from the genocide of Native Americans, through the enslavement of Africans, to Middle Eastern policies that, he said, invited the tragic events of 9/11/2001. It led him to refer to his country as the “USA of KKK,” and to conclude, “Not God bless America,” but “God damn America” (140).
Despite all of that, and notwithstanding his eventual repudiation of his former pastor, President Obama’s testifies in A Promised Land that Rev. Wright remained an important part of his consciousness (142). And so, throughout his narrative, the former chief executive gives indications of critical truths often reminiscent those voiced (albeit more forcefully) by his one-time pastor. For instance, Mr. Obama recalls that:
Personally
As part of a generation willing to question the U.S. government (456), he frequently found Wright’s black liberation theology inspiring and as channeling the understandable rage of black people in general (119, 141).
Not only did Rev. Wright’s disturbing insights become part of his consciousness, but so did the radical thought of W.E.B. Dubois, Martin Luther King, John Lewis, Bob Moses, Fannie Lou Hamer and Diane Nash (11) – along with those of the Hindu Mahatma Gandhi and the belatedly revered socialist, Nelson Mandela (598).
He realized that despite the convictions of many liberals, America’s race problems are far from being solved (128).
He felt impatient with having to soften blunt truths that whites find disturbing (121).
He himself had often experienced police harassment (395).
Internationally
He found sympathy with the assessment of critics like Wright that America’s “. . . ideals have always been secondary to conquest and subjugation, a racial caste system and rapacious capitalism, and that to pretend otherwise is to be complicit in a game that was rigged from the start” (xv).
In fact, after World War II, the U.S. had “. . . bent global institutions to serve Cold War imperatives or ignored them altogether . . . meddled in the affairs of other countries, sometimes with disastrous results;” and its “. . . actions often contradicted the ideals of democracy, self-determination and human rights. . .” (329).
America’s war in Vietnam was no less brutal than the Soviet Union’s repression of Hungary (469).
The criminal U.S.-supported Shah of Iran and his feared SAVAK secret police were typical of murderous client regimes supported by America in the Global South following World War II (310, 450-1).
The Shah’s regime was part of U.S. Mideast policy that needlessly alienated Muslims throughout the world. That policy tolerated corruption and repression in the region and routinely humiliated Palestinians (358).
China represents an attractive alternative (to the United States’) model for the developing world (481).
That’s true especially after so many Global South countries embraced the illusory “wisdom” of the Washington Neoliberal Consensus and thus followed America over a fatal precipice (330).
Obama’s Repudiation of Wright(and radical change)
Despite such insights, Mr. Obama’s presidential ambitions not only made it necessary for him to repudiate Jeremiah Wright, but evidently to adopt a series of policies that contradicted the tenets of liberation theology. His policies prioritized the welfare of the rich over those of the working class and poor. Accordingly, the president ends up admitting that:
Because of the financial crisis, he did not follow through on his campaign promises to U.S. workers (177).
For him, the financial markets (presumably as opposed to wage earners) were the only audience that really mattered (304).
His interventions alone were responsible for saving bankers from wage earners’ justified anger and retaliation (297).
Resulting white working-class anger, e.g., in Pennsylvania about jobs lost through such neoliberal policies, was justified (144).
In retrospect, bank nationalization and prosecution of crooked bankers might have been a better solution to the Crisis of 2008 than the bailouts favored by his economic team (280, 296, 305).
By avoiding that solution and bowing to bankers’ interests, Obama consciously missed a once-in-a-generation chance to reengineer the overall economy in a bottom-up way reminiscent of FDR’s New Deal (304).
He could have done so, because of his 70% approval rating coupled with the super majority he possessed in the Congress at the outset of his first term (225, 378, 243).
Nowhere in his autobiography does Mr. Obama reveal his repudiation of Wright’s outspokenness than in the case of the Deepwater Horizon oil tragedy of 2010. There, BP Oil had unleashed the most devastating oil spill in the history of offshore drilling. It lasted for 87 days and pumped out into the ocean at least 20,000 (and possibly 50,000) barrels of oil daily (569).
As time wore on and scientists and engineers scrambled to cap the leaks, Republicans increasingly blamed the president for the failure to do so. They even referred to it as “Obama’s Katrina” (569).
What Mr. Obama’s best instincts told him to say in response was reminiscent of Wright’s candor – this time in favor of perhaps the earth’s most oppressed being, Mother Earth Herself. According to the former president, he should have said:
“. . . the only way to truly guarantee that we didn’t have another catastrophic oil spill in the future was to stop drilling entirely; but that wasn’t going to happen because at the end of the day we Americans loved our cheap gas and big cars more than we cared about the environment except when a complete disaster was staring us in the face, and in the absence of such disaster, the media rarely covered efforts to shift America off fossil fuels or pass climate change legislation, since actually educating the public would be boring and bad for ratings; and the one thing I could be certain of was that for all the outrage being expressed at the moment about wetlands and sea turtles and pelicans, what the majority of us were really interested in was having the problem go away, for me to clean up yet one more mess decades in the making with some quick and easy fix, so that we could all go back to our carbon-spewing, energy-wasting ways without having to feel guilty about it” (570-71).
Again, that’s what, Obama admits, he wanted to say: stop drilling altogether, get rid of your big SUVs, pay the true price of gasoline, and pass courageous climate change legislation despite effects on the “American Way of Life.”
Instead, the president describes his Casper Milquetoast response with the following words: “. . . I somberly took responsibility and said it was my job to ‘get this fixed.’”
Missed Opportunities
In other words, in contrast to liberation theology’s and Jeremiah Wright’s “preferential option for the poor,” Obama’s policy preference supported the corporate status quo. He short-changed those represented by what he elsewhere describes as “his kind of crowd” from the days when he worshipped at Trinity United – “democracy activists, heads of nonprofits and community organizers working at a grassroots level on issues like housing, public health, and political access” (466).
That in a nutshell encapsulates Obama’s choice not to follow the outspokenness not only of Jeremiah Wright, but of FDR’s ghost with whom POTUS #44 wistfully compares himself throughout his memoir (177, 239, 240, 264, 388, 524, 547, 549).
Following Roosevelt, Mr. Obama’s legacy could have been different. He could have bailed out wage earners instead of the bankers. He could have instituted a 21st century New Deal prioritizing health care, infrastructure renewal, clean energy technology, and a green counterpart to the Civilian Conservation Corps.
Moreover, Barack Obama was more up to selling those programs than any president within living memory. He was better equipped for game-changing fireside chatting than even Roosevelt himself. No chief executive since FDR enjoyed his natural charm, charisma or eloquence.
Yet by his own admission, he wasted what that other Roosevelt called his “bully pulpit” by failing to persuade the American people to support legislation in their own best interests regarding single-payer health care, immigration reform, clean energy, nuclear disarmament, and cessation of endless wars (594).
Conclusion
None of this is to say that his own words in A Promised Land reveal President Barack Obama as somehow nefarious or intentionally two-faced. As presidents go, he emerges as a decent man. And no one can deny the significance of his enormous achievement as the first black man to overcome the tremendous obstacles barring election to the highest office in the land. Moreover, once in office, #44 acquitted himself with impeccable moral integrity (595). His staff worked extremely hard. Mr. Obama was the kind of boss most of us would like to work for – upbeat, sensitive, inclusive and willing to laugh at himself (534). He is also a gifted writer.
Neither is any of this to say that Mr. Obama should have been as outspoken as Jeremiah Wright. Such style might be appropriate for a prophetic pastor on Chicago’s south side, but it’s surely not the way to get elected president.
As a theologian however, I find it regrettable that the former president so completely cut himself off from the lessons learned at the feet of his early mentor. (And this is where Catholic Joe Biden has something to learn from his boss’ admitted regrets.) Had President Obama quietly embraced Dr. Wright’s lessons, had he ignored the Geithners, Emanuels, and Sommers, had he prioritized the needs of the poor, had he offered us another New Deal, we’d likely be living in a far greener country with far less wealth disparity, injustice and anger ( 522, 524).
And judging by Mr. Roosevelt’s success with the electorate, the Democrats would today enjoy much firmer standing in the White House and halls of Congress.
Biblically speaking, Barack Obama would have brought us all that much closer to A Promised Land.
Like every other basketball fan, I’ve just finished watching ESPN’s ten-episode series, “The Last Dance.” It was about the 1997-’98 championship year of Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls’ – their sixth such triumph in eight years.
The series took on special meaning for me, since at the same time, I was reading the late Allan G. Johnson’s book, The Gender Knot: unraveling our patriarchal legacy. Johnson’s analysis made me realize that I was witnessing in the Jordan video saga the stark exposure of the same system Johnson was explaining in his book. Feminist scholar, bell hooks, calls it the “white supremacist, capitalist, imperialist patriarchy.” That’s the oppressive paradigm in which all of us – men and women alike – live and move and have our being. Hooks and Johnson agree on that point.
But Johnson goes further. He suggests guidelines for escaping the paradigm to make room for its replacement. Following Episode 10 of “The Last Dance,” I found myself wishing Michael Jordan and the Chicago Bulls had followed their direction. If they had, we might today be living in a very different world.
Before I get to that, consider first The Gender Knot, and then “The Last Dance.” Together they reveal our patriarchal dilemma.
The Gender Knot
The main thought of The Gender Knot is that every one of us is influenced by a powerful force called patriarchy. It represents our culture’s fundamental paradigm – its unspoken social arrangement and set of assumptions – this one driven by men’s fears and their need to control. It promotes male privilege by being male dominated, male identified, and male centered. It’s what undergirds capitalism, racism, classism, and, of course, sexism.
For Johnson, patriarchy sets the rules of the game. It’s like we’re playing “Monopoly” barely aware that its instructions force us to adopt attitudes and activities that would be disturbing in other situations. “Sorry to drive you into bankruptcy,” we might find ourselves saying, “but those are the rules of the game.”
Understood in this sense, patriarchy governs the jokes men tell, our banter with other men. It governs male self-images as we compare ourselves with peers, competitors, co-workers, friends, characters in movies and on the field of play. It also governs workplace interactions between labor and management.
For many, that thesis in itself might be familiar. What was not as familiar (to me at least) is Johnson’s more penetrating insight that patriarchy is not primarily about men’s fearful and controlling relationships with women.
Instead, patriarchy is chiefly about relations among men. Psychologically, it’s about men justifying and protecting our “manly” and strong self-image before other men whose scrutiny hovers over every aspect of life – on the athletic field, at the bar, in the stadium, in the bedroom, and on the job. In all of these venues, we judge ourselves through a patriarchal gaze. At the deepest level, then, it’s other men we fear – how they might threaten, ridicule, replace, or even rape us.
Economically, it’s about how they might fire us from our jobs after our work has made them rich.
Jordan’s Last Dance
Those watching “The Last Dance” with such analysis in mind can see it played out in the series.
It brings us into the hyper-male context of locker room, court, fawning reporters, and fans. (Virtually no women have significant roles in any of the episodes.) It’s an entirely man’s world and so provides a kind of petri dish for observing and testing Johnson’s theory about men’s fears and desire to control. It also provides a context for analyzing the bigger patriarchal issue of white supremacist capitalism.
At the psychological level, “The Last Dance” displays situations where males must continually prove their fleeting manly worth through attitudes and activities that would be disturbing in other situations. The rules of the basketball world turn them into super patriarchs – openly, proudly (but also fearfully) competitive, aggressive, greedy, self-promoting, belligerent, domineering, vengeful, trash-talking, and preening – again, in an exclusively man’s world completely devoid of women and children.
All of that is true especially of Michael Jordan, the principal focus of the ESPN series. Under the threat of inevitably waning powers and the advent of younger rising stars, he’s driven to constantly prove he’s the best by vanquishing and humiliating all comers. He has to defend his position as GOAT (greatest of all time) by winning more scoring championships, All Star Game nominations, MVP awards, Olympic gold medals, and (above all) NBA championships than any other player.
And that brings us to the economic aspect of “The Last Dance” and its unwitting depiction of the white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. . .
Though universally admired, Jordan’s a kind of tyrant on the job. In labor terms, he’s the ultimate foreman. As a result, grown giants of men – Michael’s teammates – alternately cower and obsequiously smile under M.J.’s judgmental gaze. His leadership style embodies the fear and control Johnson identifies as patriarchal system’s underlying values. So, he berates his teammates, makes fun of them, gets up in their faces, laughs at them, calls them names, and (on one occasion at least) punches them out – all for the sake of more efficient production.
Ironically, Jordan is particularly hard on his boss, Jerry Krause, the General Manager of the Chicago Bulls. Jordan constantly taunts him for being fat and short – at 5’6, a full foot below his tormentor. But like a kid bullied in the school yard, Krause too does the sheepish smiley thing, rolls over and takes it.
However, beneath it all, Krause, perhaps the most unathletic person in the story, is actually its most powerful patriarch. Yes, he’s fat, short and white in a world of giant African American supermen. Yes, they make fun of him and resent his taking credit for the Bulls’ success and for his vendetta against Phil Jackson, the team’s popular coach.
But in the end, it’s Krause along with Jerry Reinsdorf (the Bulls’ owner) who’s the boss – the one who finally decides to break up the greatest basketball team of all time. And this despite his “workers’” desires and those of millions of fans.
And the reason? In episode ten, Reinsdorf explains why. It’s the money. It’s profit. Referring to some of his frontline players, he said, “Now after the sixth championship, things are beyond our control, because it would have been suicidal to bring back Pippen, Steve Kerr, Rodman and (unintelligible). Their market value was going to be too high. They weren’t going to be worth the value they’d be getting in the market . . . So, . . . I realized we were going to have to go into a rebuild. . .”
In other words, the reason for not pursuing a seventh world championship was that that the organization would have to pay the workers too much. So, white ownership and management (Reinsdorf and Krause) bit the bullet. Or, rather, they forced their African American workers and the consumers of their product to do so.
But that’s the point. It’s the way the racist capitalist patriarchy works. It delivers to a few (usually white) men absolute power over the many. If it were up to the workers, if it were up to the consumers, the Bulls would have gone on to compete for and probably win a fourth consecutive championship. But it wasn’t profitable to the powerful few. So, it didn’t happen.
So much for consumer sovereignty. So much for workers’ rights.
Lines of Greatest Resistance
Confronted with such dynamics both psychological and economic, Johnson’s Gender Knot asks its central question: What would it take to shift the entire paradigm even as so clearly depicted in “The Last Dance?” What can be done to transform the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchal paradigm both psychologically and economically?
Johnson’s answer: take the line of greatest resistance. That’s because, like all paradigms, the very purpose of patriarchy’s system is to shunt all of us towards lines of least resistance. Its intention in all spheres is to make it easy for us to go along to get along.
On the other hand, effective resistance means:
Following Gandhi and embodying the paradigm we’d like to see the world adopt.
Realizing that most of humanity’s 250,000 years were lived under matrifocal, matrilineal, non-capitalist societies.
Therefore, rejecting the myth that patriarchal capitalism is somehow inevitable and permanent.
Giving up the comforting idea that there’s nothing we can do to synchronize our lives and decisions with history’s ineluctable paradigm shift.
Rejecting the related myth that change is meaningless or irrelevant unless we’re around to see it. (We can’t use our human lifespan to judge social progress.)
Embracing in every sphere every chance to interrupt the flow of “business as usual.”
Daring to make people feel uncomfortable.
Beginning each day with the question, “What risk for change will I take today?”
To that end, adopting the slogan “Organize, organize, organize.”
Conclusion
The great Larry Bird once described Michael Jordan as “God pretending to be Michael Jordan.” Indiana Pacers legend, Reggie Miller, called him “Black Jesus.” Such transcendent references make me think. . .
Imagine if the collection of black workers called the Chicago Bulls led by their highly driven and charismatic foreman had shared the consciousness explained in The Gender Knot. What if they had organized, interrupted the flow of business as usual, and taken (admittedly large in their case) risks for change in the white supremacist system of capitalist patriarchy?
What if Michael Jordan had used his charisma and marvelous talents in the service of Johnson’s suggestions? What if the Bulls had not simply rolled over for the two Jerrys — Krause and Reinsdorf? What if they had employed their unprecedented status and star power in the eyes of millions worldwide to similarly raise public consciousness about the patriarchal paradigm that oppresses us all.
What if Jordan and company had just said “No!? We’re embracing and appropriating our own power. What’s more, we’re going to organize the NBA Players’ Association into a collective worker-owned cooperative run by us, for us, and for our fans? After all, you owners need us more than we need you. You’re history!”
It would have been revolutionary – and not just for the NBA.
That’s what might have been. But it’s not just fantasy. Changes like that are entirely possible. The fact is that workers united have far more power than Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls ever had.
And as both The Gender Knot and “The Last Dance” suggest, the white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy is more vulnerable than it seems.
Biblical scholars Lynn Picknett and Clive Prince present a compelling answer in their 2019 gem, When God Had A Wife: the fall and rise of the sacred feminine in the Judeo-Christian Tradition.
We’re all upset, they tell us, because our patriarchal universe is completely unbalanced. Politically it is overwhelmingly run by members of a single gender. It’s a man’s world whose arrangement excludes almost completely more than half the human race.
That’s true even spiritually. For instance, the Roman Catholic Church with more than 1.3 billion members has a hierarchy composed entirely of men. Outrageously, it holds officially that women are divinely excluded from its ruling elite. Other Christian denominations as well as the Jewish and Islamic communities are not far behind in their patriarchal orientation.
How could we expect balance and harmony in a world like that? No one can.
Of course, none of that should come as a surprise to anyone – especially to women. What is surprising and extremely important in Picknett and Prince’s exposition is their argument that our culture’s spiritual imbalance stands in sharp contradiction to earliest biblical traditions. There in both its Jewish and Christian Testaments the sacred feminine was originally honored as much as the sacred masculine.
To demonstrate the truth of their position, Picknett and Prince reinterpret the concept of monotheism itself. They take readers on a tour of often-overlooked and downplayed middle eastern biblical sites, expose them to goddess-centered texts, and centralize the figures of Simon Magus, his lover and inspiration Helen, as well as Mary Magdalen who fulfills the same role for Jesus himself. It’s a mind-blowing trip with momentous implications for those committed to solving the world’s problems at their patriarchal and profoundly religious roots.
Monotheism and Patriarchy
Begin by considering the connection between patriarchy and monotheism itself. For the authors of When God Had A Wife, monotheism does not represent a sophisticated advance over a “primitive” polytheism. Quite the reverse. Monotheism instead embodies a drastically narrowed impoverishment of human spiritual experience. It entirely excised the divine feminine which humans across the planet have always thirsted for, recognized and honored. In fact, according to our authors, monotheism is synonymous with “the menfolk.” It is itself a patriarchal project.
To develop that point, Picknett and Prince show readers that even the Bible is not basically monotheistic in its alleged identification of a single Old White Man in the Sky watching and judging our every decision. It’s not that other gods are merely pretenders who do not exist. It’s not even that the biblical tradition is devoid of goddesses. The latter are evidently visible for scholarly detectives like our authors who have been seeking clues for her presence in primary source manuscripts and secondary scholarship for more than 30 years. (The result has earned them world-wide recognition that even includes a cameo appearance in Hollywood’s version of “The Da Vinci Code.”)
Actually, within Judaism, monotheism (exclusive recognition of one God alone) was a late development. In a tradition that reputedly began about 1200 BCE, monotheism emerged exclusively only around 530 BCE – after the Babylonian exile. It was then that Judah’s elite represented by Ezra, Josiah, and Nehemiah reformulated the nation’s longstanding traditions. Their patriarchal work removed, downplayed, and/or reinterpreted all references acknowledging the existence and power of “foreign” gods other than Yahweh, Judah’s national deity. The reformulators took special pains to erase references to goddess worship.
Ezra’s reforms obscured, for instance, the fact that the people’s origin traditions identified an entire family of Gods as the ones responsible for the creation of the cosmos. Headed by the Great God, El, the family was called Elohim. It included 70 sons. Israel’s Yahweh was one of them – an inferior subordinate of El. His assignment was to protect the nation of Israel. (Note El’s name in the term Yisra-El itself.) Only at the beginning of the first millennium BCE was El replaced by Yahweh as Israel’s particular God.
More importantly for Picknett and Prince, El had a wife. The arrangement was only natural to the ancient mind – divine families mirrored human ones complete with father, mother, sons and daughters. It was just like the Greek and Egyptian myths familiar to all acquainted with classical literature. In fact, El’s wife sometimes had names drawn directly from cultures surrounding the Hebrew nation (Egypt’s in particular). Thus, she was variously identified as Anat, Qadesh, Isis, Sophia, and (the favorite) Asherah. As the quintessential shape shifter, the Hebrew goddess was variously a lustful, raunchy and sexually insatiable seductress, a fierce warrior, a loving wife, a beloved mother, and a wise crone.
Consider Ashera then. Despite patriarchal attempts to write her out of the Bible, and despite similar cultural obstacles obscuring the perception of most contemporary scholars, Asherah’s prominence for ancient Hebrews emerges unmistakably from:
The hundreds of female figurines unearthed from early iterations of pre-exilic Hebrew temples, i.e. before the end of the 6th century BCE. (That’s right: Asherah was officially worshipped in Jerusalem’s temple as well as in a Hebrew counterpart on the Nile Island called “Elephantine,” and in Samaria’s sanctuary on Mt. Gerizim.)
Their absence from similar sites following the 6th century reform
The presence of Asherah’s symbol [some version of a palm-like tree and/or mysterious (and always feminine) cherubim] inscribed on temple doors and other holy places closely associated with worship of El
Even more specific dedications sweetly referring to “El’s Asherah” or “Yahweh’s Asherah” on or near temple sites
Prohibitions by the anti-goddess prophets of outdoor worship associated with Asherah’s iconic trees
Indications in the oldest biblical texts that female biblical heroines like the Judge Deborah may have been priestesses of Asherah herself
Ashera’s reappearance as a domesticated “Sophia” in the Book of Wisdom (and elsewhere) redacted by patriarchs reluctantly responding to widespread popular demand for acknowledgement of the sacred feminine. Describing her as Sophia, even these conservative biblical texts identify the goddess as Yahweh’s first thought and co-creator with him. (More about this below. . .)
The bottom line here is that goddess worship was central to ancient Israel’s past. Only heroic (not to say malevolent) efforts by the nation’s 6th century (BCE) reformers coupled with the cultural blindness of mainstream biblical scholarship has kept that powerful truth from penetrating the consciousness of Jews and Christians everywhere.
Jesus (& Simon Magus) as Feminist
Despite such obstacles past and present, our authors go on to explain the survival of goddess worship within the Judeo-Christian tradition. In the process, they take us on a geographical odyssey from Judah to Alexandria and then to Samaria illustrating how recognition of the sacred feminine was advanced not only by the “proto-feminist” Jesus of Nazareth, but by two unexpectedly key figures: the arch-heretic Simon Magus (i.e. Simon the Magician) and John the Baptist.
As just indicated, even the best efforts of its scribal menfolk, could not keep goddess worship out of Judah’s public consciousness. Without honoring her actual name, popular pressure evidently forced the patriarchs to somehow acknowledge Ashera’s identity and influence. That pressure was increased by the spread of Greek (Hellenistic) culture especially as it emanated from Alexandria where fully 1/3 of the population was Jewish. (Greek culture was far more woman-friendly than its Jewish counterpart.)
Accordingly, as evidenced in the Book of Wisdom (produced at the end of the 3rd century BCE), the sacred feminine resurfaced under the title Sophia, a de-sexualized, sanitized, domesticated and abstract female principle called “Wisdom” and portrayed as God’s First Thought — his co-creator of the universe.
For its part, Samaria also proved central to the preservation of goddess traditions. Contrary to the impression given in the canonical gospels, the region was not a minor, out-of-the-way location. Instead, it covered a major swath of territory in northern Israel which was always more prosperous than its southern neighbor. The opposite impression comes from the anti-Israel and pro-Judah bias of the Jewish Testament in general and from a similar prejudice against Samaria itself in Mark, Matthew, Luke, and John.
In any case, Samaria played a major role in Jesus’ public life as did its inhabitants. Scandalously, a Samaritan emerged as the hero of one of Jesus’ most famous parables. Additionally, according to John’s Gospel, Jesus made his first public declaration of his messianic identity to a Samaritan woman.
John the Baptist had Samaritan connections too. So did Simon Magus, who (as we’ll see presently) was both a disciple and rival of Jesus. And since Simon as well as Jesus were disciples of John, and since both of them ended up centralizing devotion to flesh-and-blood embodiments of Sophia, it makes sense to attribute similar focus to the Baptist.
In fact, all three – Jesus, John the Baptist and Simon the Magician had equal first century claims to the title of Christ or Messiah. (Well into the second century, John’s disciples invoked Jesus’ own praise of their master as “the greatest prophet” to argue John’s superiority to Jesus.) It’s therefore a fluke of history that today’s “Christians” are not Johannites or Simonists.
As for Simon Magus . . . Christian polemic portrays him as a contemptuous minor figure not only in Luke’s Acts of the Apostles but throughout early Christian tradition. However, historically speaking, he himself was widely revered as the Son of God. He was a wonder worker on a par with his Nazarene rival. Both men presented themselves as prophets of Sophia. Both were besotted with women who for them embodied God’s Wisdom complete with all the sexual overtones reminiscent of goddess worship everywhere.
The latter is most evident in the case of Simon, a free thinker who, like Jesus, rejected the group consensus of his own time in favor of the Wisdom of God. Simon’s Sophia went by the name Helen whom he portrayed as God’s First Thought. She was a former prostitute whose status as such, Simon argued, incarnated the patriarchy’s degrading treatment of women in general. Accessing Helen’s wisdom involved daily sexual relations with the beloved.
Jesus’ relations with his own Sophia, Mary Magdalen, mirrored that of Simon the Magician. Clearly his favorite, Mary was Jesus’ link with his many female disciples. She was probably his sexual consort if not his wife and mother of his children. (It was simply a given, the authors argue, that any Jewish man above 20 years of age had to be married. So, at the age portrayed in the gospels, Jesus was either a widower or a divorcee.)
At the same time, Mary Magdalene was a rival of Peter the apostle who according to Magdalene’s Gospel and other recently discovered texts was an extreme misogynist and enemy of the one Jesus saw as the embodiment of the divine feminine – God’s First Thought. Jesus’ identification of Mary as “the apostle of apostles” wounded Peter to the quick.
All of this has evident implications not only for questions about the sacred feminine in general, about goddess worship and church leadership, but also for “the contemporary rise of the sacred feminine in the Judeo-Christian tradition” and for restoring balance in our increasingly troubled world.
Conclusion
Reading When God Had A Wife was like taking a short course in biblical studies. Thankfully, it recalled for me what I had learned more than half a century ago in the most important courses I took in preparation for priestly ordination in the Catholic seminary. And that recollection made me wonder why the knowledge communicated in When God Had A Wife has not yet filtered down to those who occupy the pews in churches and synagogues, and prayer mats in mosques.
It’s as if there were some conspiracy to keep everyone ignorant, naïve and childish in their approach to faith. For instance, our authors reminded me that in the seminary well more than 50 years ago, I had learned about text criticism, form criticism and redaction criticism. I wonder why all of that isn’t common knowledge.
The answer of Picknett and Prince is that there has indeed been a conspiracy by the ruling elite to keep everything secret. The goddess had to be removed from the Judeo-Christian pantheon to more firmly establish patriarchal monotheism, which, remember, has always been about “the menfolk.”
It’s that latter insight that will stick with me long after I’ve forgotten the wonderfully detailed and exquisitely documented work presented in When God Had A Wife. The interests of the menfolk explain more convincingly than anything else the reluctance of those who should know better to share with the rest of us the rich fruits of biblical scholarship.
After all, if “the faithful” knew about variant texts, literary forms and redacted interpretations, they might call into question the exclusive right claimed by priests, bishops, cardinals, popes, rabbis, and imams to explain their Old White Man up in the Sky. They might embrace instead female leadership and Yahweh’s Wife – Ashera, Anat, the Cosmic Mother, or Isis.
For that matter, they might demand ecclesial leadership modeled on the discipleship of Mary Magdalene or Simon Magus’ Helen.
It’s because Picknett and Prince have the courage to forcefully and convincingly suggest such revisions that I cannot recommend more highly their supremely accessibly and wonderfully popularized When God Had A Wife: the fall and rise of the sacred feminine in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
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