Mythology and Morality

I’d like to begin with two quotes from Gershom Gorenberg, an Israeli journalist and the author of The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount, and The Accidental Empire, a book on the beginnings of the Israeli settlement movement in the occupied territories in the aftermath of the 6-day war in 1967. Mr. Gorenberg has spoken to our group many times, and I have a huge admiration for him and the way he thinks. I'll begin with commentary on the first quote and then, at the end of this post, use the second quote to illustrate my conclusion.

“Religion can interact with history in two basic ways: mythically and ethically.”

"The average sane person believes many contradictory things at the same time...politics is the story of people moving back and forth between the multiple positions that they hold."

I was raised as a child of myth. As a faithful Sunday School valedictorian it was a point of pride to me that around age 9 or 10 that I could successfully answer all of the questions put to me by my Sunday school teachers. Not just the easy ones, either; I aced questions that involved names such as Haahashtari and Ish-Bosheth. The stories of Noah, Moses, and David were significantly more familiar to me than Power Rangers or the Ninja Turtles. Of course, the fact that my family didn’t own a TV at the time was a significant part of that, but my family’s daily reading of the Bible and my weekly dose of salvation history on Sunday mornings (sanitized a little – even the most skilled Sunday school teacher couldn’t keep the attention of a crowd of raucous 8 year-olds when mentioning something like circumcision) on their own provided probably a deeply powerful paradigm with which I grew up to interpret the world, a paradigm which I believe would have held whether or not it had serious competition.

While mythical narrative wasn’t the sole subject of my evangelical religious instruction, it was by far the bulk, and definitely the aspect which stood out most prominently. Perhaps that is inescapable. Children interact much easier with stories than with ethical principles, and David shooting a slingshot at Goliath resonates much more powerfully with a young boy rebelling against his parents’ anathematization of toy guns by pointing long sticks at his brothers and shouting “bang” than “blessed are the peacemakers” does. One might invoke St. Paul’s oft-quoted analogy from 1 Corinthians: we can’t expect children to be ready for “solid food” before they’ve had their “milk.”

But there’s a danger in the power of myth, especially in the teaching of myth to children, who don’t have the means to appropriately integrate the myth into their worldview.

A note first: my use of the word “myth” to refer to the Biblical narratives is not intended to address the question of their historicity, but rather to speak to the use to which they are put within the Evangelical subculture with which I am familiar. The American Heritage Dictionary defines “myth” as "A traditional, typically ancient story...that serves as a fundamental type in the worldview of a people." This is the functional definition of myth, and it is the definition upon which I am operating in this post.

Myth is helpful when it enables us to better understand and interact with the ethical and theological principles of our faith through the concrete illustration of essential archetypes. But when the teaching of myth overwhelms the teaching of ethics, the hierarchy of values in our religion becomes radically skewed.

For example, consider the popular televangelist John Hagee, who makes his bread and butter – and multi-million dollar ranches, but that’s another discussion – from serving as a conduit for people to interpret a morality from their exalted biblical mythology: in this case the morality of Christian Zionism.

Any number of quotes from prominent Christian Zionist figures, including but not limited to Hagee and his compatriots in the lobbying group CUFI, illustrate this function. Take, for example, this quote from a publication put out by the long-standing Christian Zionist organization International Christian Embassy: Jerusalem:

Our position is best identified as “Biblical Zionism,” which…looks beyond the evolving concerns of ‘political’ Zionism in our day and views both the Jewish people and Land of Israel as chosen by God long ago for purposes of world redemption. Thus we have the interest and fate of the entire world in heart and mind when we defend Israel’s restoration to her land.

The quote begins with a mythological assumption: viewing “both the Jewish people and the Land of Israel as chosen by God long ago for purposes of world redemption” and from that assumption moves on to a moral imperative: “defending Israel’s restoration to her land.” This is justified because in this mythological framework, this moral imperative has “the interest and fate of the entire world in heart and mind.”

Christian Zionists are often criticized as being bloodthirsty, or seeking to accelerate the timeline of the end of the world. As someone born-and-raised in the evangelical subculture from which the Christian Zionist movement has arisen, I have a much more benign in some sense but much more critical interpretation: Christian Zionism in America allows evangelicals to subject their morality to their mythology, and thus serves as a comfort in the increasing moral complexity of the postmodern world. The parallels are easily drawn from biblical narrative, and the imperatives are free both of moral tension and of significant personal sacrifice.

It’s not that Christian Zionists are immoral people. They have simply been taught to accept a particular ethical hierarchy which subjects morality to mythology. And in this regard, their ideology is essentially a-moral. This may seem like a semantic distinction, but it is central. If something is immoral, it operates against moral principles. If it is amoral, it operates independent of moral principles.

As a committed believer in Christian nonviolence, I would make the argument that in many senses, the same applies to the baptism of violence by the church, at least by the evangelical church in America today. It is a subjection of clear-minded moral interpretation to a mythological framework. To illustrate anecdotally: the two most common objections I personally receive to my position by fellow Christians are as follows:

“What about the Old Testament, where God commands people to kill entire nations?”

“At the end of the world, God’s going to come down and kill all the evildoers, so how can violence be wrong?”

These are not questions of morality, but questions of mythology, stories from the beginning and stories from the end. Again, as with Christian Zionism, my point is not to speak to each of these arguments as such, but to illustrate the paradigm – the mindset – from which they arise. I have never heard the argument made that Christian Nonviolence is immoral. From the evangelical perspective, the primary objection to nonviolence is that it is not perceived to conform with the movement's mythology.

In my opinion, this is flawed reasoning. Our myths should be the illustrations of our morals, not the other way around.

And this brings me to the second of my quotes from Mr. Gorenberg. Despite my many criticisms of evangelicals, I think that, with a revolution in the movement's view of mythology, the evangelical movement could be one of the world's great forces for peace and justice in the world. Because, as a believer in Christian Nonviolence, I honestly do believe that the moral teachings of Jesus embody the perfect social and ethical system. And the example of Jesus stands in direct opposition to the subjection of morality to mythology. Evangelicals are, by and large, passionate about Jesus, and passionate about "following" him. This a supremely moral position.