“This Fourth of July, let’s bear in mind that what many Americans value in this country is its inclusion and protection of everyone, regardless of their beliefs.” So writes Pamela Paul today. Sounds great. Except her essay is called “Your Religious Values Are Not American Values” (New York Times, 7.4.24).
Get it?
And I get it. People are getting desperate. I understand the impulse to yell like this.
The last sentence of Paul’s essay includes. But the title excludes. It’s a paradox. I’m sure it’s not deliberate. That’s a problem. The irony being that the ideal religion would be one centered on “inclusion and protection of everyone, regardless of their beliefs.” Including and protecting, not excluding and destroying.
René Girard pointed out ages ago that something about religion was irreducible. Religion is all too often about scapegoating, ejecting evil or the evil one(s). This can easily be performed by people who claim not to be religious. Religion gets scapegoated—and why not? as the essay itself says, the Bible advocates for slavery. But this scapegoating of religion is within the phenomenological structure of…religion.
It’s like Alice trying to leave the Looking Glass House and finding herself arriving at the front door the harder she tries. You can’t leave like that. That would be like trying to live without intestines.
Ejecting evil is how very often the phrase “deliver us from evil” is heard. But believe me, and Treena Balds and I are writing about this right now, this is far, far from what Jesus meant. Trust me, I know Greek.
I use the adjective “religiose” to describe such prose in my new book Hell: In Search of a Christian Ecology. This is a perfectly normal British English word but Americans hear it as a neologism (listen to my interview), which is interesting in itself, given how white America was founded by religious fanatics. By people whose sin was to be religiose, from the viewpoint of the Church of England.
Elizabeth I created the secret service specially to root out the “wrong kinds” of religion, a religious gesture in itself. And explicitly so—Church of England versus Catholics. But even more deeply religious than that, having to do with inclusion and exclusion on a basic level, the one on which murder and war and torture can be sanctioned by some.
Somewhere during the writing of this new book, Hell, I stopped talking to “you.” I started saying “I.” This gave rise to a lot of mistakes as I swapped the second person out for the first person, which I may not have ironed out perfectly in the printed version.
Something about how provocative, how personal, how intimate…how religious…I was sounding invited me to own my thoughts and feelings on the page, and not point them at the reader. I thought it would be easier on their soul, mind, self, whatever you want, to say “I” and not “you” or “we.” As much as I could, at any rate. There are some places where I do say “you” and “we.” But they aren’t common.
The term “religion” is an intensifier. It makes things more intense, more intimate. You can even say something like “religious religion” and understand what I mean. “Religion is great, but don’t be religious about it.”
When I add “religion” to any word it seems to do this. “Politics…religion.” “Sex…religion.” “Contemplation…religion.” “A religion of food.” “A religion of religion.” “A religion of train tickets.”
See what I mean?
Whatever it seems to be pointing to, whatever “religion” is aiming at, it seems to make things more intimate and intense, closer, more breathless, more desperate or wondrous or claustrophobic.
So to say “Your Religious Values Are Not American Values” is like saying “Your entrails aren’t allowed in my house.” But when I enter your house, my bowels come with me.
It’s not even an analogy really. Religion names whatever is also named in words such as narcissism, shit, vomit, food…the basic basic boundary conditions of a lifeform, sentient or not (although I’m someone who thinks that to be alive just is to be sentient, but we’ll leave that for now).
To this extent, religion pertains as much (and in the same way!) to bacteria as it pertains to humans.
How that lifeform coexists with other lifeforms in the biosphere out of which they grow. How much it includes and how much it excludes. Total consistency would be the equivalent of death. The Freudian death drive is the beyond-life maniacal drive towards this consistency, and there’s a whole lot of it in social space, the white kind I mean. “Civilization.” “Progress.” All that. Maniacal churning, work till you drop or work others until they drop, in the name of a never-arriving weekend. It’s like geometry ruling chemistry ruling life. A single celled organism exists because of rotation, which exists because of pi. Just as a circle is a line being deviated at every point by a number from another dimension, so life is chemicals deviating at every point from totally destroying one another…but too protective a boundary (“close the border!”) is fatal.
You can’t get life right, because it’s made out of time, that mist that falls like slow motion transparent vomit from the mouth of the Holy Spirit. (I should explain that but I shan’t. This is a post, friends.)
A lot of this occurred to me late in writing Hell last year, when I had an operation that cut into my own intestines five different ways, four and a half hours of surgery that changed my life.
Hell itself is often depicted as the bowels of the world, and the bowels are often excluded…as if excreted, by the bowels!…from public speech. We’re in a loop made of intestine.
I am very keen on marrying these bowels to feelings and thoughts about them, marrying this “hell” to the “heaven” of ideas, thoughts, ideality…the marriage of heaven and hell (Blake). The marriage of religion and the biosphere. This would be a remarriage really, since the time of their divorce at the hands of the slavery paradigm that separates mind and body, master and slave, thought and the physical, subject and object.
The remarriage would make religion much more like indigenous spiritual traditions. Paradoxically, I see figures such as Jesus and Buddha as allowing for this, in a genuinely transfigurational way. I see white European Christianity as a war against what is called the Holy Spirit in that religion, and what is called Spirit in the world of Sobonfu Somé, a Dagara shaman who was one of my teachers. A war against so-called “animism,” a pejorative term for holding that “inanimate objects” are nothing of the kind and butterflies are people too. In their different ways, Jesus and Buddha had time for the bowels, for grapes and rice pudding. (It’s all in Hell if you’re interested.)
Don’t point at “you” when talking about religion. It’s…religious. It creates confusion and sorrow. I still haven’t mentioned the obvious basic sorrow, the “Wait, you mean mine? But I’m a Unitarian!” (or what have you). The all too understandable “you” just alienates. As my therapist’s teacher said, “There’s only one thing I’m afraid of, and that’s justifiable anger.”
A much better title would’ve been something like, “When I Think about what Fundamentalism Is Doing to America, I Feel Sick.” Or just “Fundamentalism Makes Me Sick.” Fundament, fundamentalism.
We’re stuck with fundaments, with bowels, with whatever is named by “religion.” As a very great Black American pastor (forgive I forget her name) said on Jemar Tisby’s podcast many months ago, Jesus is all about stank.