A Contemporary Case of Religious Narcissistic Superiority

A pastor friend of mine from seminary recently visited me in Houston where I am a professor at a medical school. He was in town for a church-related conference; I offered to let him stay with me for a few days in order to save money. At the end of each day, we would talk for a couple of hours, catching up on each other’s lives.

On one of the evenings, we happened to take up the subject of Islam. My friend held the position that Islam is inherently a violent religion because its central sacred text is violent and its founder had blood on his hands. Islam is, as it were, rotten at the core, he suggested, and all attempts at “reforming” or “modernizing” Islam are bound to fail because of this rotten core. This position was offensive to me—all religions, I know from over a decade of study, have blood on their hands. Further, I have also learned that it is inappropriate to characterize any religious tradition; none are monoliths, never mind the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are nonviolent. My friend’s assumptions about Islam are apparently informed by the media in this country, which is unfortunate, because to judge Muslims by how they are presented in this country’s media would be like judging Christians by the Christian anti-abortion activists who bomb family-planning clinics.

I knew, however, that I would not get very far with this pastor by talking theory and politics. The conversation, I realized, needed to be concrete, or else the discussion would veer off into countless tangents. So I reminded my friend that the Hebrew Bible is quite violent (e.g., Psalm 58.10: “The righteous will rejoice when they see vengeance done;

Page 174

they will bathe their feet in the blood of the wicked”). My friend agreed. But, he said, “That’s the Old Testament; Christianity is a religion of love and peace.” I then reminded him of Paul’s letters, which have been used to exclude women from power (e.g., 1 Timothy 2.11: “Let a woman learn in silence with full submission”). Next, I pointed out that Paul apparently approved of slavery and that pastors in the pre-Civil War years would justify slavery by quoting him (e.g., Colossians 3.22: “Slaves, obey your earthly masters in everything, not only while you are being watched and in order to please them, but wholeheartedly, fearing the Lord”). My friend conceded this point as well. But, he countered, “Jesus is the core of Christianity, and Jesus was about love and peace—Christianity, therefore, is a religion of peace at its core, unlike Islam.”

I then brought up Richard Fenn’s recent book, Dreams of Glory: The Sources of Apocalyptic Terror (2006), where Fenn, a psychoanalytically informed sociologist of religion, argues for taking the Book of Revelation out of the New Testament because, as he reads the text, the book is fundamentally and hopelessly violent. My friend did not concede this point. I refrained from quoting scripture at him—I didn’t, in fact, open up the Bible and directly quote any of the above passages at him, but I mentioned them—if I had, I would have opened up the Bible and quoted these less well known words from Jesus: “Those who conquer will inherit these things, and I will be their God and they will be my children. But as for the cowards, the faithless, the polluted, the murderers, the fornicators, the sorcerers, the idolaters, and all liars, their place will be in the lake that burns with fire and sulfur, which is the second death” (Revelation 21.7-8, my emphasis). It is a small step from verses such as these—words, according to St. John, from the mouth of Jesus—to the crusades of the Middle Ages, when knights literally crusaded for Christ.

Page 175

If I had pressed my friend further, I would have had to demonstrate problems with Jesus as depicted in the Gospels, because this is the core of Christianity for him, as it is for many Christians. I would have had to point out anti-Semitic portions of the Gospel of John, where Jesus talks about “the Jews” as if he were not Jewish (cf. John 9.22, 16.2, 20.19) or in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke where Jesus derides the Pharisees (Matthew 23; Luke 11.37-54). My friend would have probably answered that Jesus’ critique of the Pharisees in the Gospel of Matthew and the Gospel of Luke, as well as Jesus’ critique of “the Jews” in the Gospel of John, represents a critique of particular forms of Judaism, not Judaism per se.

Such a reply is fair enough, but there is a danger with this kind of disavowal. Indeed, my Jewish friends know the danger of these kinds of responses, because they have lived through, or have had relatives live through, the effects of anti-Semitic preaching—the very passages that I referenced above have been used against them in practice. Moreover, they have heard with their own ears sermons that interpret Jesus chasing the money-changers out of the temple as a rationale for excluding Jews from positions of power or, worse, as a rationale for exterminating Jews when contemporary Jews are understood to be contemporary money-changers (Matthew 21.12-13; Mark 11.15-17; Luke 19.45-46; John 2.13-17; also see the documentary, The Cross and the Star: Jews, Christians, and the Holocaust). It seems that if this disavowal was meant to signify that Jesus only intended to criticize particular subsets of Judaism (such as the Pharisees and the Sadducees), then Christians who argue for this interpretation need to find scriptural examples of Jews whom Jesus approved of who did not join his movement. Otherwise, it is unclear what the point of making this argument actually is, especially when, in practice, it has led to a great deal of Christian violence against Jews.

Page 176

Freud, in a number of places in his writings, called upon Jews to give up their own narcissistic belief that God, the creator of the universe, chose them as a special people, and wished good things for them as a people in contrast to the rest of the world. Also, he called on Christians to give up their narcissism as well. If Jews and Christians would give up their own narcissistic senses of superiority, then and only then would a more open society emerge. If we are to speak of a rotten core of any particular religion, perhaps we would be better off speaking about the rotten core of all monotheistic religions. Or, if monotheistic religions are not essentially rotten at the core, we should, at the very least, talk about the tendency of all religious traditions to have more than a few bruises at the core.

Page 177