Ditching the Siren Song of False Narratives

I've been mulling over the role of religious myopia for many years. But over the past few months I've been thinking about it with some urgency as it seems to me it has become central to our current national crisis. What do I mean by religious myopia? I'll begin with this jarring exchange from Isaiah 6: Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, 'Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?' And I said, 'Here am I. Send me!' He said, "Go and tell the people, 'Be ever hearing, but never understanding; be ever seeing, but never perceiving. Make the heart of this people calloused; make their ears dull and close their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts, and turn and be healed." One of the most puzzling features of Jesus' ministry was how he put these words of Isaiah 6 front and center of his mission. For instance, here is Jesus talking to his disciples in Matthew's account: "Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. This is why I speak to them in parables: Though seeing, they do not see; though hearing, they do not hear or understand. In them is fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: 'You will be ever hearing but never understanding; you will be ever seeing but never perceiving. For this people's heart has become calloused; the hardly hear with their ears, and they have closed their eyes. Otherwise they might see with their eyes, hear with their ears, understand with their hearts and turn, and I would heal them." The reality that Jesus is acknowledging here and the language that he uses is rooted in the Torah (Deuteronomy), the Psalms, and then is one of the central themes throughout the Prophets. Paul goes in hard on this theme in Acts 28. The theme is sprinkled throughout Pauline and non-Pauline epistles. Religious myopia, this 'seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing,' is not a sub-theme, but a central theme in the overarching biblical narrative of the struggle to realize shalom. So what is religious myopia? In every case the idea is that very religious people who have all of the language and rituals of God are incapable of grasping not just the universality of shalom but even its most basic aspects because of their willful hard-heartedness. This willful hard-heartedness and spiritual blindness is the typical and particular danger of those people who most vigorously wield the identity of being God's special or chosen people. And so the biblical narrative is laden with a particular tension, that of a people who are chosen to become a focal point of God's blessing upon all nations (Abrahamic covenant) and the danger for those who identify as elect that they will become instruments of destruction of Shalom because of their religious myopia. This danger, of becoming instruments of destruction through the fervent practice of religion, is held up for a particular form of God's wrath throughout the biblical narrative. Jesus' repeated discussions about hypocrites are particularly helpful in understanding religious myopia. The popular understanding of hypocrites and of Pharisees is that that they believe one thing but say and do another. While this may be a form of hypocrisy and is certainly not a healthy state of affairs, this is not what Jesus was driving at. When Jesus said that hypocrites pray in public, give alms in public and so forth (Matthew 6, etc.) the trouble with this behavior isn't that the hypocrites didn't believe in what they were doing, or that they believed something different in private than what their public practice was displaying, but that their displays of religious fervor were no longer rooted in the humble practice of being servants of shalom but were instead acts that further cemented their identity as God's chosen ones, heard-hearted and blind. The trouble for a hypocrite, for one who is religiously myopic, hard-hearted, spiritually blind is not a lack of belief, but too much belief. The cure, then, is not that they should believe more, but that their faith should be shattered. The biblical testimony throughout is that the more vigorously the hard-hearted elect children of God believe their now false narrative the more dangerous they become, both to themselves and to the world. Healing is no longer a part of the story of the hypocrite, the religious zealot who cannot see or hear. The next move is simply that God casts them out of the narrative altogether. God doesn't create a new narrative for them but rather finds a new people to take part of the narrative, the people who have been cast out, left out, spat upon and ratted on, the lepers, the Samaritans, the prostitutes and tax collectors.

So, what does this deep dive into religious myopia have to do with the crisis we face today in America? A few months ago I wrote in this blog about Bad Religion and the Banality of Evil: "The danger we face during in this current outbreak of authoritarian ethno-nationalism is that many people genuinely are feeling the pain of displacement due to globalism. We genuinely do lack the spiritual and moral capacity to adequately address the loss of identity and meaning that are essential components of being human. The power of false leaders always rests in the vehemence and energy of those who follow, the joiners.  The synergy is toxic and impossible to steer."

The danger with this particular existential crisis is that those who feel it most strongly are ready to be drawn into a vortex of economic and racial resentments that are clearly destructive of shalom. The moment we've been drawn into is one where these resentments have been attached to an already existing narrative of American exceptionalism, providentialism, and the strongly held pseudo-Christianity in which America exists as a refuge for white people. (I lived in Oregon, where this was explicitly the ethos well into the 20th century and still is a vibrant belief system to this day. Ditto for Evergreen Park, Illinois and Utah - other places I have lived). Donald Trump, Stephen Bannon, Stephen Miller and those at the core of Trump's rise have been able to take advantage of this moment and turn it into a political reality.

But what makes this already dangerous powder-keg scenario of an ethno-national political movement of racial and economic resentment a full-blown crisis is the way these resentments have been seamlessly blended into a unifying religious movement blessed by not just by religious leaders such as Franklin Graham and Jerry Falwell Jr., but more importantly galvanized by the 81% of evangelical voters who voted for him. Recently, in an essay in The New Republic, Sarah Posner convincingly argued that Trump, or Trumpism, has hijacked and is now powerfully steering America's conservative religious ship. But perhaps it's not so much a hijacking (as Posner argues) as it is the natural outgrowth of a form of nationalist Christianity that has long ago grown accustomed to its myopia. Perhaps the more fervent American religious expression becomes the more dangerous we become to ourselves and to the world.

In her observations of mid 20th century atrocities Hannah Arrendt famously observed that normal people are capable of tremendous evil - an observation that is now widely understood in shorthand as the banality of evil. I believe that this is simply another way describing modern religious myopia. Normal people, good people, deeply religious people, otherwise nondescript people when captured by a structure of 'seeing but not seeing, hearing but not hearing' are capable of any manner of atrocity.

In his highly perceptive essay 'Misreading Eichmann in Jerusalem', Roger Berkowitz writes:"That evil, Arendt argued, originates in the neediness of lonely, alienated bourgeois people who live lives so devoid of higher meaning that they give themselves fully to movements. It is the meaning Eichmann finds as part of the Nazi movement that leads him to do anything and sacrifice everything. Such joiners are not stupid; they are not robots. But they are thoughtless in the sense that they abandon their independence, their capacity to think for themselves, and instead commit themselves absolutely to the fictional truth of the movement. It is futile to reason with them. They inhabit an echo chamber, having no interest in learning what others believe. It is this thoughtless commitment that permits idealists to imagine themselves as heroes and makes them willing to employ technological implements of violence in the name of saving the world."
Exactly. Religious myopia. Spiritual blindness. Seeing with your eyes but not seeing. Hearing with your ears but not hearing. Hardness of heart. Destroying shalom not out of a lack of belief, but too much belief.

One of the great heroes of today's evangelical movement is Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Rightly so. Bonhoeffer was one of a handful of Christians in Nazi Germany who was able to pierce the darkness of false religious narrative that took over his nation. Shortly before his death he wrote a letter that wasn't nearly as poetic as the prophet Isaiah. He didn't feel the luxury of time to speak in parables. He didn't talk about religious myopia or spiritual blindness. But he spoke of the power of hypocrisy, of a false religious narrative, to destroy the individual person's capacity to struggle for shalom just the same. The letter is bluntly titled, "On Stupidity." He writes:"Upon closer observation, it becomes apparent that every strong upsurge of power in the public sphere, be it of a political or a religious nature, infects a large part of humankind with stupidity. … The power of the one needs the stupidity of the other. The process at work here is not that particular human capacities, for instance, the intellect, suddenly atrophy or fail. Instead, it seems that under the overwhelming impact of rising power, humans are deprived of their inner independence and, more or less consciously, give up establishing an autonomous position toward the emerging circumstances. The fact that the stupid person is often stubborn must not blind us to the fact that he is not independent. In conversation with him, one virtually feels that one is dealing not at all with him as a person, but with slogans, catchwords, and the like that have taken possession of him. He is under a spell, blinded, misused, and abused in his very being. Having thus become a mindless tool, the stupid person will also be capable of any evil and at the same time incapable of seeing that it is evil. This is where the danger of diabolical misuse lurks, for it is this that can once and for all destroy human beings.”

What then is needed to counteract this stupidity, this religious myopia that tends to make us simultaneously capable of any evil and incapable of seeing that it is evil? Going back to Bonhoeffer we see that in his time of overwhelming religious myopia he called for a 'religionless Christianity' capable of detaching from ideology, from mythological narratives that blind us. 

In his letter, "After Ten Years," written in December 1942 it is clear that Bonhoeffer had already divorced himself from the false narratives of bad religion. It was as if he was living through the moment Isaiah faced when God came to him and asked, "Who will go for us?" Bonhoeffer's response to the question is to acknowledge the dreadful choice faced by so many: to acquiesce to the empty pursuit of false narratives or to be ground into a form of cynicism as the community attempts to hold on to whatever shreds of unity remain."We have been silent witnesses of evil deeds: we have been drenched by many storms; we have learnt the arts of equivocation and pretense; experience has made us suspicious of others and kept us from being truthful and open; intolerable conflicts have worn us down and even made us cynical. Are we still of any use?"

But Bonhoeffer doesn't remain there. Again, without artifice, without poetry, Bonhoeffer brings us to the precipice of the truth that was beating in his heart like a sledgehammer:
"What we shall need is not geniuses, or cynics, or misanthropes, or clever tacticians, but plain, honest, and straightforward men. Will our inward power of resistance be strong enough, and our honesty with ourselves remorseless enough, for us to find our way back to simplicity and straightforwardness?"

And then the dreadful truth of the loneliness of the only true way forward:"Only the one for whom the final standard is not his reason, his principles, his conscience, his freedom, his virtue, but who is ready to sacrifice all these, when in faith and sole allegiance to God he is called to obedient and responsible action: the responsible person, whose life will be nothing but an answer to God’s question and call." 

Bonhoeffer does not entertain the siren-call of religious narrative. He eschews all sense of Christian unity that is willing to walk the terrain of myopia. Instead he walks the path of a voice crying in the wilderness in honest and humble simplicity. This requires an individual reckoning in which the words of Jesus about losing one's life in order to find it ought to haunt any of us. Which side am I on? No one wants to choose to live outside of a false narrative just because it's false. It's lonely and dangerous to live on the outside. But such a choice must be faced when our narrative actively destroys shalom. 

We face a new context of an ageless crucible. If any of us have ears it's time to listen.