religious literacy

I know I said I'm on hiatus, but let me finish this one post, at least, on some fundamentals of religious literacy that a staggering number of people get wrong.

Listen, I have one mission here: Stop making assertions about religion unless you have good reason to believe you know what you're talking about.

These two things do not count as good reasons:

1: I don't believe any of it so the specifics don't matter.

2: I am a member of Religion X, and that alone qualifies me to make assertions about Religion X.

Everyone is an expert on what they personally believe, although in my experience they have not spent much time thinking about it; no one is an expert on theology or religious teachings if they have not specifically devoted time to becoming one. In between ignorance and expertise is a vast middle that should, in a sensible world, be well-populated, but as religious literacy has dimmed, this has ceased to be true.

There are so many fucking areas I could cover here, but let's scratch the surface and see what gets under our skin.

"All Religions Basically Teach The Same Thing"

This is one of the dumbest things people say about religion. There's often a Christian variant of it -- at least I have personally heard it from Christians the most often -- whereby when looking at or asking about another religion, they ask about the analogues to aspects of their Christian faith: how do you get into your Heaven, and who forgives your sins?

The problems here should be obvious, but for starters not every religion believes in an afterlife, and "sin" is at best a problematic term to use outside of the Abrahamic religions (it means more than "wrong thing to do"). Not every religion that has an afterlife has a gated afterlife, and not every religion proffers a relationship between sin and the afterlife.

Going further than that, there are religions that teach that the world is fundamentally evil, corrupt, suspect, or unreal, and that proper behavior requires removal from it, and religions that teach that the world is fundamentally good and sacred, and that proper behavior requires engaging with that sacredness. These are not basically the same thing, except insofar as a square and a circle are both basically not a triangle.

All religions do not teach the same thing. There are some benign factors in recent intellectual history that account for this fallacy -- nineteenth century scholars and the 20th century field of comparative religion were very interested in identifying the common ground shared by many religions, and these findings were often overstated or misunderstood to amount to something like "all religions are basically the same," when it would be more accurate and helpful to say that "most religions deal with similar material, even when they have not had contact with each other." That latter bit was the actual point: the discovery in anthropology and other social sciences that it was not necessary to posit one original prehistoric religion from which other early religions had descended, but that religions would independently develop in communities that had no contact with one another, and that despite this lack of contact, these religions could have many things in common. However, it's not necessary for the religions to agree for this to be interesting. And we see these similarities in language, economic systems, political systems, and family units, without also saying "all governments basically do the same thing."

Social sciences have also muddied the waters, though.

For example, we have one word for "soul" in English, and in discussing the beliefs of various systems, this can make it seem like we're talking about a disagreement over what "the soul" is. It's more accurate and helpful to realize that we're using one word to refer to many very different and distinct concepts. There is no single soul-concept that is present in all religions, or even in all religions that have some kind of soul-concept.

The soul may or may not be located in the body and have a physical presence.

The soul may or may not be the part of an individual that persists after death, either in the afterlife or through rebirth.

The soul may or may not exist before the individual's body is formed.

There may be one soul or several (I think one constant we can point to is that while an individual may have multiple souls, any given soul belongs to only one individual at any given time -- but I could be wrong about this).

The soul may or may not be related to the phenomena of consciousness, emotion, and personality.

When a Christian asks about another religion, "what do they teach about the soul?", the conversation is already at the point where it needs to be backed up in order to explain that it's misleading to think that all religions basically agree on what we mean by "the soul." Some religions have little to no official teachings about the soul, in fact, because across time and cultures, "the soul" is not always within the purview of religion. Our modern separation between science and the supernatural, and classifying the soul in the latter camp, is a recent thing.

There have been attempts to distill the world's religious teachings into a proto- or world religion, but these attempts belong in the crank file alongside schematics for perpetual motion machines and proofs of the Hollow Earth. When serious scholarship, they are not successful. When seemingly successful, they are not true.

"All religions teach basically the same thing" is often the mantra of someone who is trying to make the case for religious tolerance -- or, especially some decades ago, the case that non-Christian religions are not "primitive religions." In this form it's a variant of "people are the same beneath their skin," which is a statement that tends to normalize the experience of the dominant culture and minimize the importance of the experiences of the marginalized and minorities. It's counterproductive to emphasize that people are "the same beneath the skin" when it glosses over the very different experiences resulting from the skin, and it's equally damaging to teach that all religions are "basically the same."

Even when the "basically the same" argument is whittled down to "every religion teaches the same fundamental ethics" -- which is the Dalai Lama's argument, for instance -- it's both incorrect and damaging.

"Basically the same" is what encourages conversion, for instance. It trades gods and spirits for saints, renames religious celebrations, burns old idols. "Basically the same" usually secretly or not-so-secretly means "basically the same as Christianity, you know, the normal one." Positing a "normal" religion is counter to the ideal of religious freedom, because if we undervalue our religious differences, we turn them into something no longer worth protecting. Why not leave "In God we trust" on the money, why not put the Ten Commandments up at the town hall, if "all religions are basically the same." after all? Where's the harm -- if they're all basically the same, then any Christian utterance, any endorsement of Christianity, is basically fine, right? Let me give you a spoiler: this has already fucking happened. This is already how people are thinking.

"All religions teach basically the same thing" normalizes the Christian experience, and the secular experience of those raised in a predominantly Christian culture, in the same way so much of the rest of American culture normalizes whiteness, and should be opposed for the same reasons. This normalization affects the way we view and are able to understand other religions -- Buddhism is misrepresented in numerous ways because it's so unlike Judeo-Christianity, and the lower the levels of religious literacy become, the more the general public's understanding of religion becomes coequal with its understanding of the dominant religious culture. This leads to attempts to map Buddhism (a religion founded by someone who said that the creator deity and the idea of a divine creation are either untrue or completely irrelevant) to an Abrahamic framework (in which the divine creation and a covenant between the creator deity and the followers of the religion are among the most defining elements of the faith), or even to reject its religiousness altogether and call it "a philosophy."

On top of all these problems, the very impulse to say "all religions teach basically the same thing" should be questioned. Why is "we're all basically the same" the argument in favor of tolerance or compassion? This implicitly condemns difference -- there is no way to say "we should be kind to each other because we're the same" without saying "let's be less kind to those who are not the same" -- and differences among people are never going to go away.

What's crazy to me is that most people know there are significant differences between, for instance, Protestants and Catholics, or Jews and Christians, and yet they can't take an extra ten seconds to recognize that such profound differences among cousins must surely imply even greater differences between family trees.

The myth of "scripture alone"

I got into an argument not long ago with someone who thought the best way for them to learn about religions -- not as a religious party themselves (I have no idea what his religious views were) but just out of interest -- was to read the sacred texts of every religion he could think of, and nothing else about the religion. He wanted to "come to his own conclusions," see, rather than read "what other people think." This is one of the worst possible ways to learn about religion. More than that, I think I can fairly say that it is not actually possible to learn about religion this way.

Let's confine our remaining discussion to Religions of Sufficient Age and Population, with the understanding that a religious group founded thirty years ago, or practiced only by a small group with little geographic distribution, may be an exception. I'm specifically going to talk about the Bible, and mainly from a Christian perspective, but it's important to understand that similar things could be said about any other religious scripture -- I promise, every religion with a scriptural tradition has a theological one -- and further, that not every religion has a text that is as central to that religion as the Bible is to Judaism or Christianity.

The Bible tells you next to nothing about Christianity or Judaism, and again, since everyone knows there are fundamental differences between Jews and Christians, how could anyone think that reading "The Old Testament" would be sufficient to understand Judaism, and that by simply adding the New Testament to your reading list, you'd arrive at an understanding of Christianity? The Jewish Scriptures aren't even arranged in the same order by Christians, nor are they read or understood in the same way. The fact that I even have to point this out is making me grit my fucking teeth.

Which part of the Bible tells you what a Presbyterian believes that a Catholic doesn't?

Which part of the Bible tells you about the Rapture? Abortion? Christians have historically vilified premartial sex -- where's that in the Bible?

Do you have any idea how little about the afterlife is in the Bible, compared to the detailed beliefs Christians have about it? Even most non-Christians can tell you more about the Christian view of the afterlife than the Bible can.

Jews and Christians alike have experienced two thousand years of history since the Bible was assembled, and before Christians even had a chance to assemble their New Testament, there was as great a diversity of belief among different Christian groups as you find today, if not greater. Multiple councils and other orthodox (little-o) efforts were required to create what we now call the Catholic Church, and to define mainstream Christian belief -- a process of centuries, and arguably a process that never ended.

Religion is not scripture.

Religion is, among other things, scripture as interpreted by tradition, amplified by both doctrinal and folk belief and practices, informed by theology, philosophy, and other elements of culture.

Maybe to those with a low level of religious literacy, they don't understand the importance of that interpretation because they're thinking of English class. In a serious literature class, you don't just read Huck Finn, you read Huck Finn and what people have said about Huck Finn. You talk about Huck Finn in its historical context, in terms of language, in terms of race. But the purest experience of Huck Finn, at least until our language changes enough to push it into the Shakespearean past, will always be to simply read Huck Finn.

The Bible isn't Huck Finn. Religious texts don't occupy the same space, aren't written for the same end, aren't used in the same way. By itself, the Bible is meaningless -- though read by itself, most contemporary Americans would bring to it an unconscious model of Christian belief that they've absorbed through osmosis, reading into the text things that are not actually on the page, things they've absorbed from political arguments and 7th Heaven and whatever.

Every religion has some tradition of theology, interpretation, and supplementary text; every religion, furthermore, has sects, denominations, or other groups that are defined in part by their disagreements over interpreting their shared texts (written or oral). On top of that, every religion has changed over time. You are not practicing the religion of your great-great-grandparents. It's often very important to people to claim that they are, but these claims are incredibly flimsy. Consider the fact that the most backward-looking, modernity-rejecting form of Christianity -- fundamentalism, Biblical literalism -- is younger than the automobile.

To understand Christianity, in addition to reading the Bible you would need to define some goals -- what exactly is it you're trying to understand? Current practices? The history and origins of those practices? The origins of the religion? I would argue that there is an important sense in which what we now mean by "Christianity" didn't exist until the fourth century, and was preceded by a wide variety of religious groups descended from the movements founded by John the Baptist, Jesus, Paul, and a handful of Jesus's disciples. The Bible won't tell you anything about that because all of its texts were written in the second century or earlier, but it's the formative period of Christian history, and leads into the period in which Christian belief began to incorporate elements from classical philosophy to fill in gaps left by the Bible or to help interpret it.

Reading the Bible alone will leave out many of the key elements of Catholic faith, including the existence, nature, and function of the saints, the immaculate conception and most other beliefs about Mary, the role of the Church, or the sacraments.

Reading the Bible alone will not tell you why there are so many different Protestant denominations or why they differ, or how the evangelicals who arose in the early 20th century differ from the mainline Protestants they have gradually overtaken.

Reading the Bible alone will not tell you what to do with the book of Revelation, nor what the Old Testament is supposed to mean to Christians.

One incredibly important thing that varies is how much leeway is left to the individual practitioner. Most Christian denominations, for instance, do not have an official stance on evolution beyond declaring that they are not opposed to it -- in other words, members are free to believe in it but it's no more a specific tenet of belief than is gravity or arithmetic. (Obviously there are cultural reasons why nonopposition to evolution plays out differently than nonopposition to arithmetic.) One reason this is important is because the fundamentalist takeover of the discussion of religion in this country has promulgated the myth that the Bible requires a very extensive set of beliefs, and Christians are helpless to do anything about it. The New Atheists have co-signed this myth, further weakening liberal or moderate Christianity's influence in the culture.

Requirements of belief and practice come almost entirely from traditions of interpretation, as codified in official doctrine or as passed down through the theological traditions of a given denomination. "Interpretation" is not the same as "taking liberties with." The Bible simply doesn't cover everything, and is often unclear, and consists of numerous parts with undefined relationships to each other, and interpretation is a necessary part of using the Bible as the basis for a moral and ethical code, and for deriving from it a view of the world and of human nature.

The New Testament in particular is not a manual of religious belief and practice. It consists of a series of stories that contradict each other in ways both minor and significant, a series of letters addressed to specific early churches, and a prophetic text in the form of Revelation. Despite the tighter focus, ostensibly on Jesus, it is a less complete text than the Old Testament -- which itself can only be understood in a Jewish context when amplified by the midrash and the Talmud, and which is extremely difficult to approach from a Christian standpoint without a lot of theological supplement.

I sometimes use the comparison of trying to apprehend American law by only reading the Constitution and somehow extrapolating everything else from that, but American law is only 200-something years old and doesn't exist in the form of dozens of related but distinct systems. Christianity is 2000 years old and shares a heritage with a religion even older than that. To expect to come to terms with it by reading an ancient text and nothing that has come since is ridiculous, and yet this keeps coming up.

As I said, I'm using the Bible, and mainly Christianity, as my examples here, but similar things are true for all religions. No church just passes out a book and says "okay everybody, just do what it says," and even those that would attempt to do so wind up with theology anyway if they survive long enough for people to ask questions or forget the cultural context of the original text.