‘And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strawed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it’ (Exodus 32:19-20).
I recall rather vividly my interlocutor’s appalled face, agape in horror after I committed what I discovered by his reaction to be an unpardonable sin. We were discussing religion, and at the mention of Freud’s infamous critique I did not, as I was apparently supposed to, discard it with supercilious and upturned nose, but instead said something altogether scandalous: that I believed, for the most part, he was correct. Naturally, after the initial shock had subsided and some semblance of colour had returned to his pallid face, my conversant began to interrogate my reasoning, seeking to have all contradictions compute. By way of brief summary, even if you are unacquainted with the specifics of Freud’s critique I imagine you will have encountered it in some dilapidated form in general discussion about religion: all theism is merely symptomatic of a psychological yearning for a perfect father figure in whom all trust may be placed and anxieties dissolved; a fictitious imagining to ease and comfort the individual after they come to discover the many sufferings and anarchies of existence, chief of all being death. With the definition in full, I am happy to admit that my response to my interlocutor was a tad provocative. But otherwise I do stand by it.
What Freud’s view represents within the history of thought is the culmination of a certain intellectual fatigue at the many dogmatists who so consistently place themselves in the path of authentic human curiosity. And although there is, of course, a certain petulance in attempting to reduce all reverence of the numinous Divine to the psychoanalytic paradigm of ‘Mummy-Daddy-Me’, it is nonetheless a petulance matched and often far exceeded by the efforts of religious people themselves. Far too much discourse surrounding religion, even unto our present hour, is pervaded by puerile presumption, tribalistic intolerance, and - above all - misplaced devotion. The general thesis for this article (which, due to length, I have divided threefold), will be something along the following lines. Belief in God can and historically most often does turn into a kind of pious idolatry, in which a perfectly valid desire for his continual self-disclosure manifests as a settling for the ‘next best thing’. Namely, one fashions an image of what they think God would do as the perfect father, one begins to conceive all particular aspects of one’s life as specifically governed and ordered by him, and therefore ultimately – rather subtly – lets him slip from the Being beyond all being to one particularly elusive, powerful, and invisible demiurge who is directly responsible for all that occurs, meaning goodness should be met with gratitude and obeisance whilst suffering should be understood as just punishment from God for the society or individual erring in their ways.
By way of preliminary caveat: there is something here that seems somewhat inevitable. Whenever a religious idea finds its incipience, in order to market itself to those whose interests are vested in other domains it must necessarily transpose itself into those keys, and assume a syncretic form familiar to the patois and symbolism through which it must announce its arrival. Often, then, in order to cohere with worldly habits and practicalities, religion must accept a certain worldliness. This is sensible, but all the same flirts dangerously with and often indeed proves guilty of a kind of idolatry; Moses spends a little too long at the summit of Sinai and the people at the base become agitated, so they create an object of worship whose effects they can easily see, touch, and grasp, made quite literally out of material wealth and so therefore validating our earthly concern for the maintenance of that wealth, and all else associated with worldly living. It is simply rather convenient to have a God who, for all intents and purposes, is exactly the kind excoriated by Feuerbach, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud in turn – namely, again, the ‘Perfect Father’ who looks over one’s shoulder, guides all things, both intentional and accidental, and ultimately proves to be a kind of superlatively qualified assistant in our passage through life, omnipresent but also always strangely removed from our actual intentions and desires.
Perhaps we want a job of a certain sort, and know the field will be competitive, so in our stress we head to the local masjid or gurdwara or mandir or church, kneel down before an object of devotion or orient ourselves toward a certain location, proffer our prayers of petition and then, comforted by the thought that our divine parent will carry out existence as they best see fit - and they always know best - we are able to go home that night and sleep easy. And then, in the morning, when we receive that email of congratulation, we leap for joy, run to the very same sacred place and kiss the foot of Krishna again, or cross ourselves before the Madonna, or whatsoever we would like to do to express our unending gratitude to the divine aid in having brought us what we truly want. At this stage one tends to imagine God peeking at us through the clouds, having saved the day again, perhaps turning to an off-centre camera and giving the audience a wink; maybe even letting out a ‘That’s all folks!’ before the screen fades to black.
There is nothing inherently harmful about this – in fact, this is really the psychology of the vast preponderance of religious people the world over, and I would argue that the preponderance of that preponderance are indeed kind, loving, caring, gentle, and fundamentally decent people, in large part because of their unwavering commitment to the ethical injunctions of their ‘Super Dad’ God. But it must be said that there is something quite indelibly dangerous latent within it; indeed, a latency drawn out with almost frightening frequency by its exposure to daily life, resulting at times in behaviour which proves utterly antithetical to the doctrines of many of the main proponents of the affiliated religions. The first danger is the most obvious: in just the same way that all children must, through the many human imperfections of their parents, come to learn that old Ma and Pa are really, contrary to initial belief, not infallible Gods, so too must the particularly inquisitive believer in the ‘Super Dad’ image of God come to discover cracks which, if not simply suppressed and ignored (which almost exclusively leads to yet more trenchant tribalism and insecurity), eventually burst forth in an irrepressible deluge, washing away all the warped, rotten timber which had priorly held the antiquated dam in place. That is not to say that everyone gets to that point; many religious people, again, are simply not interested in the myriad complexities which lie behind the history and logic of their dogma, and so never bother to ask. Many Christians will stand up in church each Sunday and profess their belief in the triunity, coequality, and consubstantiality of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but not so many will be even remotely acquainted with the intensity and sheer (there is no better word) messiness of the theological debates between Church Fathers and heretics – these two parties not yet parsed at the time – which produced such creeds.
But again, this is the nature of this kind of religious psychology. Without wishing to be overly blunt, it is simply easier to treat belief in God as though it were the same as belief in a particular array of facts (that is, an epistemic leap to a conclusion when reason can take you no further), and so when a religious institution comes along and insists that the two really are one; that professing this or that creed, or coming to this or that service on this or that day, or not having sex with this or that person is the same as believing in and being devoted to God, for human beings this often seems a profoundly attractive proposition. Again, I would argue – perhaps reductively, but my psychoanalytic predilections must be forgiven – that this a matter of simply wanting the security of someone or something who will come along and tell you that they have sorted it all out, that you do not need to worry or think too hard about this great big thing called life, because there is a set of rules which they wrote down earlier just for you, to help whenever you get a little confused by life’s more difficult quandaries and its strange and rather inconvenient habit of not telling you exactly what you should do at each of its junctions.
I do not think I need to spend much time glossing what may arise from a belief such as this. It is abundantly clear that blind fidelity to a particular ideology or morality, no matter how compassionate or dignified its tenets may read on paper (and they always do in the eyes of those who confess them), all too often morphs into a kind of fanatic attachment, inspiring some of the most rancid forms of human hatred whenever anyone happens to suggest that life may indeed, in its endless richness and complexity, spill beyond the parameters neatly carved by those systems, and at certain moments even wash their lines away completely with its oncoming, ever-moving tides. This is perhaps its most insidious latent issue: the moment one becomes threatened by alterity of any variety, one often inadvertently reveals one’s true allegiance; namely, not to the God who is beyond all creation, but to the God so conceived by me, to the God who has articulated these specific rules at these specific times, quite conveniently unchanging over the usually multi-centuried history of my religion.
It is in this way that religion itself becomes an idol. It is perfectly possible – indeed, what is this if not the rebuke of Christ to the Pharisees? – to cling so hysterically to the Law that one comes to contradict the Truth of the very God who ordains it. In the general reception of the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10:25-29), some rather important details are often neglected. Rather than painting the priest and the Levite as mere heartless and pusillanimous brutes, it would be perfectly accurate to portray them as two men who, perhaps even quite contre coeur, decided to do what was ‘right’ according to their Jewish morality, to follow the injunction that the priesthood should keep the dead far hence (Lev. 21:11, Num. 19:11-16). It is quite conceivable that both men agonised over the sight of this helpless traveller, empathised with him and wished with all their might to aid him, perhaps even muttering a prayer to Elohim to deliver him from his suffering, but knew that – according to the inflexible Law – contact between them was strictly forbidden. But Christ does not extol this. Rather, he magnifies the gentile, the foreigner, the other; the Samaritan who, in his blundering ignorance of Jewish Law, aids and saves the dying man. True, he is no priest, and so would not necessarily be transgressing Torah, but one thinks that this is precisely the point; he is entirely unaware of the particular moral impositions of the given culture, and so loves without concrete or ‘objective’ reference to guide him.
There is much more that may be said on Jesus in particular in this regard – indeed, I would personally make the case that this is precisely the nature of his life and teaching – but I wish here to speak more broadly. In any case, if we fail to recognise the true implications of God’s universality, it seems perfectly sensible that religion itself should become nothing more than yet another category of life, a sanguine, idyllic, aromatic retreat situated amongst our habitual existence which may – depending on the cultural and political prevalence of that religion within the given epoch – either be of significant or minimal estate, and therefore swells or diminishes always in opposition to some ‘other’, whether this be another religion or, more pertinently for the late modern West, that looming spectre of ‘secularism’. It should be clear to us that the constitution of this arrangement is one which – to detail another latent threat – implicitly endorses an imperialistic spirit. If religion is defined according to an identity as merely ‘some’ aspect of reality which happens to contain the truth in contradistinction to the rest, then it becomes patently necessary to conquer in order to avoid being conquered. If religion is simply my – to rather facetiously employ a contemporary term – ‘safe space’, set against the frightful horrors of the outside world, a refuge to whose familiarity I am inordinately and humanly attached, the one true hearth upon whose carpets I have walked and sat all my youthful days, then it makes perfect sense to take up arms at times of perceived crisis, to slaughter the heathens and the infidels, and to ensure the glorious, stately perpetuation of that warm happy feeling I had when I was a little child and grandmother read me verses from that holy book before tucking me into bed.
The beauty of authentic religious understanding is that it simply does not have a dog in this fight. If – and I must confess, I do not find this especially debatable – true wisdom is in the love and fear of God, then it will be located at an infinite remove from any concepts we predicate of God through the language of religion. What this is categorically not (one must foresee the kind of thundering rebuttals that will be flung at criticisms like these) is an endorsement of mere perennialism. Saying that all religions are ‘equally true’ is something of a non-statement, one that could only really be made by a spiritual tourist who is yet to grasp the elusive and irreducible beauty of living within one such tradition, and thus knowing – aside even from the more obvious irresoluble contradictions between dogma – that different religions are different ways of life (etymologically, the word derives from the Latin religio, which described the rather nebulous inhabitation of certain positive traits, not a commitment to a manifesto of cosmic axioms), and so cannot be collapsed into one universal systematic truth. We neither cling fervently to particular religions nor blithely relinquish them. Proper religion should be understood as a culture that knows itself to be nothing more than a very large metaphor, indeed a great complex network of metaphors, all connecting to each other in wonderfully technical and innovative ways, through liturgy, practice, scripture, theology, ethicality, dogma, symbolism, community, art, and so on, all utterly and entirely aware that they are elements which are not God, and thus must in themselves never be presumed to be eternally unwavering and unchanging. As the Shahadah reads, ‘an lā ʾilāha ʾilla -llāh’. There is no God but God; to predicate Being-in-itself of anything else is, as the Sufis have most eloquently understood, tantamount to shirk; polytheism – idolatry.
We can reach this same conclusion by way of modern scholarly criticism, by scrupulous genealogical analysis of the shifting, tectonic plates undergirding any particular stance on any particular issue at any particular moment in history and acknowledging that, to all those except the wilfully blind, it is known that such things do not remain the same over time. I, personally, would far prefer to arrive there by way of religious piety, by a keen awareness of and immersion in one’s own tradition (for Christians, recall, we are ‘ministers of the new testament; not of the letter, but of the spirit’ (2 Cor. 3:6)), and by a recognition that there is, as most religions profess, a distinction of some variety between Creator and creation; and that whilst the former is eternal, irreproachable, absolutely actual, utterly perfect, the latter is protean, evanescent, temporal, ephemeral, multiplicitous. The paramount knowledge is that the former is the cause and ratio of the latter, and so is not thought of as some entity floating above and aside creation, but simply is, and creation comes to be and remains only as a kind of extension (again, with qualifications) of it, bearing no real or permanent essence (svabhāva, as we would read in Mahayana Buddhism) in itself, but owing absolutely everything that it is to God.
Again, there are likely to be myriad protests from the type of religious psychology at whom I am directing this criticism. For many, there is something quite unshakably obvious, it seems, about ‘God’s morality’ sharing in the very same immutability and incontrovertibility as God himself, and – of course, because how could it be otherwise? – it is my religion which happens to be correct on this front, whilst all the others are incorrigibly wrong, and most likely are to suffer torment of an eternal duration for the foolish blunder of having been born in a household which worshipped deities different to mine, or perhaps even the very same God, but believed a slightly different thing about what he said or did. But once again I would rather strongly suggest that one scrutinise precisely what one is devoted to, whether one is bowing down before the golden calf of this or that doctrine or moral rather than the God who actually supplies them. To persuade the more obdurate on this point, I shall have to make a little clearer the nature of what is an otherwise unapparent distinction, but which – as is evidenced exhaustively in the writings and deeds of all manner of theological minds throughout history – is the true foundation of all religion.
Forgive the cliffhanger: part two is imminent…