RELIGION VS. THE HOLY

All along in my liturgy manuscript I’ve been evading the question of what one should address if one gets the congregations to the state of “liminal.” Suppose they are now ready to realize what assumptions they have never challenged and to move on to some new understanding. Which assumptions? Which new understandings? It takes far more than one book, one lifetime, one culture, to answer such questions, partly because they change all the time and people don’t agree. Ray Rappaport’s theories of adapting to a changing ecology are useful but hard to make concrete. But to trace and analyze the macro and micro theories of humans is what humanities is all about -- a sea in which we all swim even as the tide turns.

Many everyday ways of thinking, defended by religion as “moral” collide with each other, creating consequences destructive in their power. Religious institutions claim they are rules imposed by God and will defend them with force. “Ricky Raw” who writes the blog called “therawness.com” noted that part of our culture (think Rush Limbaugh) believes or pretends to believe or certainly encourages a portrayal of women who act harmlessly seductive and dependent but have the maws of sharks between their legs. The “feminazi.” Honey traps. The justification for harsh social control. A good illustration (lots of clip art) is “Manhood 101,” a book/website/train-of-thought that explores this thinking . There’s a YouTube vid.

“Ricky Raw” and I visited back and forth a little bit and he said:

“There is an entitlement mindset that creates these horrible women who think they're Cinderella and want to be rescued and pampered, yet they act more like the wicked stepsisters. My problem is I think just blaming feminism over-generalizes because I think the problem isn't so much feminism but the combination of growing up with feminist message on one side combined with daddy's little girl traditional messages on the other side, so they end up taking what's convenient from both sides and becoming manipulative spoiled monsters. This in turn creates guys who instead of trying to transcend a broken system just try to learn to navigate it instead, which is where I think the toxic pickup artist mindset is coming from. But the type of women Manhood 101 describes among the 18-35 year old set are quite prevalent in America.”

I think he’s right. It’s a toxic collision between two trains of thought, one that belonged to a certain class of people in the past (those with the means to indulge their girl-children) and one developed from more recent liberation movements . They ought to be mutually exclusive: either one is a little girl dependent on a big strong man, or one is competent, fully capable of running their own lives. This strange combination does indeed create a scary type. They’re not just a hazard to men, but to anyone who opposes them. I call the ones around here Prairie Princesses. In high school they are glamorous to the point of flaunting, but just underneath they are tough as nails, lethal in their narcissism. They give nothing and take mercilessly, because they sincerely believe this is the way life is supposed to be.

There’s a parallel dysfunctional collision in the convictions of men, also very American. 1) A man is responsible for the success of his family, whatever it costs him -- or them. 2) A man must protect the appearance of respectability, imposing whatever secrecy is necessary. I see it as a product of immigration, frontier, and hard times that justified brute force, ownership, and the use of any means necessary. This generates the craving for control, even beatings or rape, supposedly hidden from society, which purports to object to it but is willing to pretend it isn’t happening IF the man in question is powerful. That power can come from religious institutions.

It is hopeless to simply argue rationally against such internalized convictions as the two sets of conflicting ideas, each gender-assigned, above. The ideas are not thought but “felt” and they feel self-evident, which is why they claim religious as justification. The point of a liturgy would be to free their feelings, to give them an “amazing grace” moment in which they realize the damage they do to others, just as the old sea captain whose repentence caused him to write the hymn.

Serendipitously, this book review came along in the New York Times. “THE RIGHTEOUS MIND: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion” by Jonathan Haidt is reviewed By William Saletan.

Haidt has read ethnographies, traveled the world and surveyed tens of thousands of people online. He and his colleagues have compiled a catalog of six fundamental ideas that commonly undergird moral systems: care, fairness, liberty, loyalty, authority and sanctity.

These are humanities categories as well as religious.

The worldviews Haidt discusses may differ from yours. They don’t start with the individual. They start with the group or the cosmic order.

I would challenge that “cosmic.” Maybe he means universal human principles.

They exalt families, armies and communities. They assume that people should be treated differently according to social role or status — elders should be honored, subordinates should be protected. They suppress forms of self-expression that might weaken the social fabric. They assume interdependence, not autonomy. They prize order, not equality. . .

You don’t have to believe in God to see this higher capacity as part of our nature. You just have to believe in evolution. Evolution itself has evolved: as humans became increasingly social, the struggle for survival, mating and progeny depended less on physical abilities and more on social abilities. In this way, a faculty produced by evolution — sociality — became the new engine of evolution. Why can’t reason do the same thing? Why can’t it emerge from its evolutionary origins as a spin doctor to become the new medium in which humans compete, cooperate and advance the fitness of their communities?

All human social arrangements are contingent, negotiable. Evolving morality certainly seems like work to be done socially in a liminal space and internally on a global neuronal platform, because it is so relevant to our behavior. But we don’t see what our own senses would reveal if we paid attention. Brains are meant to filter the dissonant. It’s tough to bypass that. Institutions don’t necessarily want to anyway.

Morality is a big part of what we call “religion,” but there is another category even bigger that we name “holy.” It is unmediated by any humanities thinking, even the kind we call “religious”, “church”, “sanctified”. The holy is what engulfs us all and exceeds all thought. It is the immense unknowable in which all species on the planet are but a fleck in time. Now that’s raw. It’ll put you on your knees -- if not flat on your face -- and make you pay attention.