I’m not interested in
The Atlantic article, I’m interested in
The New Yorker article. It’s a slighting (well, what would you expect from a general interest magazine?) but still somewhat worthwhile examination of cults* that includes this curious and misunderstanding observation:
Whether or not one shares Kapur’s admiration for the spiritual certainties of his forefathers and mothers, it seems possible that Auroville prospered in spite of, rather than because of, these certainties—that what in the end saved the community from cultic madness and eventual implosion was precisely not faith, not the Mother’s totalist vision, but pluralism, tolerance, and the dull “compromises and appeasements” of civic life.
The "dull 'compromises and appeasements' of civic life" is precisely what church membership is about. And it's probably the root cause of churches foundering now: old people who are tired of making compromises and appeasements (believe me, I understand that better and better now. I've never liked crowds, but more and more my inner dialogue is about why people won't just GET THE FUCK OUTTA MY WAY! Old age is like drinking: it lowers your inhibitions, which, it seems, take energy to maintain. In old age you care less about the consequences, because you've been through most of them already.) v. young people and "new" people (i.e., strangers) with whom the old have to compromise and appease. And the latter just don't want to do that anymore.
It's also true, from what I've read from monks, of monastic life. Cloistered monks live in a voluntary community you join by long application. You live with the community; take vows; and agree, freely and willingly, to abide by the rules. If you can't, or no longer want to, you get to leave. The focus is on seeking the presence of the living God, not on following the dictates of the person in charge. The article points out the problems with the term "cult," but surely one marker of a cult is the domination of the individual will by a leader. Churches don't dominate individuals; not even the most moss bound fundamentalist churches. They may demand fealty to a strict set of beliefs and behaviors, but most people even among "true believers" find ways to skirt the rules they don't really want to abide by. Where I grew up, Southern Baptists dominated the culture and pridefully identified fellow Baptists in the streets (although adherents to one pastor at one church made you almost a heretic among the adherents of the other pastor at the other church). But the joke was Southern Baptists greeted each other in public everywhere except at the liqour store. And how do you keep a Baptist from drinking all your beer while you're fishing? Bring another Baptist along. And so on. No, Southern Baptists were never a "cult," but there are easy distinctions between religious believers and people who think the leader of the group must have sex with all the women, or even engage them in BSDM, because it's the will of God or somehow for their salvation.
Which is what the article is about. There's a very wide gap, in other words, between members of a group cut off from the world, and members of a group of religious believers. Even among those in the latter who are monastics. (Though I had a Southern Baptist friend swear to me that Catholic priests impregnated the nuns and the aborted fetuses were buried behind convent walls to hide the truth. This was long before we knew how many Catholic priests were diddling young boys, which truth is actually worse than that baseless slander.)
Pluralism and tolerance test the bonds of churches now. The Methodists are losing congregations which refuse to reject LGBTQ+ persons as unfit for ministry. Again, the dividing line (as it was portrayed to be in my youth) is between young and old. I had to learn to accept people as fully human despite their skin color or sexual preference (more shame on me). My daughter takes it as a matter of course. She also doesn't attend church. Well, she grew up in the parsonage. She's seen the "pluralism and tolerance" of human beings in the pews at first hand. I don't think it's a lot better than in the editorial offices of The New Yorker, to be honest. But the people there are bound by an interest in earning money. The people in religious settings are supposed to be bound by something else.
But that "something else" is never pure, is it? That's the stone we try to break everything on: purity. But there are no unalloyed choices, no decisions without some dross not purified out of them. It seems to me what the cult members (bad term, but easy shorthand) described in the article are seeking is simplicity. Easy answers to hard questions, simple guidance to life's complex situations.
As I say, the scholarship in this article is not strong:
Perhaps one way to attack our intellectual hubris on this matter is to remind ourselves that we all hold some beliefs for which there is no compelling evidence. The convictions that Jesus was the son of God and that “everything happens for a reason” are older and more widespread than the belief in Amy Carlson’s privileged access to the fifth dimension, but neither is, ultimately, more rational. In recent decades, scholars have grown increasingly adamant that none of our beliefs, rational or otherwise, have much to do with logical reasoning. “People do not deploy the powerful human intellect to dispassionately analyze the world,” William J. Bernstein writes, in “The Delusions of Crowds” (Atlantic Monthly). Instead, they “rationalize how the facts conform to their emotionally derived preconceptions.”
Atlantic Monthly? Really? And the idea that "human intellect" is capable of "dispassionately" analyzing the world? Pray, tell, from what point in space and time does one stand outside of space and time in order to analyze it both dispassionately and (what I think it actually meant by "dispassionately" in that sentence) disinterestedly? Did Bernstein miss all of Western thought since the 19th century? Completely? And if you "dispassionately analyze the world," don't you end up with Robert McNamara championing the Vietnam War to LBJ? Because that's pretty much what history records, and even McNamara owned up to that mistake.
These things that pass for knowledge I don't understand.
The truth is we all make assumptions, or take things on trust (faith). Geometry starts with postulates. Descartes did, too, with his cogito. It's not a failure of human thinking to do so: it's a necessary beginning. Ray Bradbury wrote a story about extreme solipsism and skepticism, where a man convinced himself nothing existed because nothing could be proven ultimately to be real. He ended up walking out of a spaceship into open space. Hume tried to reduce all human knowledge to sensory perceptions and then distinquished between synthetic and analytical statements. One category was fairly pointless information ("this stone is heavy") and the other were unprovable by any appeal to reason and therefore false ("that painting is beautiful"). Kant took on Hume in order to restore both reason and philosophical thinking to their rightful place, but nobody really took Hume seriously (except Bradbury, in that story; and it didn't end well.) Wittgenstein opened his Tractatus with the statement "The world is the case." Is that the same "world" Bernstein is referring to? C'mon; if you're gonna run with the big dogs, you gotta bring something better than this. Otherwise, get back on the porch and go back to sleep.
I think we can safely use the term "cult" to refer to a group slavishly devoted to a leader and a set of expectations that can never be fulfilled. The article cites Q-Anon. JFK, Jr. is not going to return, alive, to Dealey Plaza, having never died; nor is his father. The "storm" is never going to come and sweep away the international cabal of pedophiles and restore Donald Trump to the Presidency for Life. Trump is not going to trample on his enemies and drive them before him while enjoying the lamentations of their women (okay, I'm stealing from "Conan," but it fits, right?). The example of Auroville (an actual place founded in southern India in 1968, and still in existence) is an interesting inapt one: it started as a "prophetic community," not in the Hebraic sense but in the sense of a leader who had a truth to teach that no one else was privy to. Not unlike some of the communities in 19th century America which likewise expected a revelation that would set them all apart from the rabble and the rest of the world. Auroville persisted, says the article, in large part because it never was an authoritarian community run by a leader who, like all mortals, eventually died. Her magical thinking (in Joan Didion's terms) attracted people who were shocked when she actually died, but they decided some of her teachings were actually worthwhile. Not unlike present day Norway: "(Norway has figured out how to be “somewhat egalitarian” without the benefit of a guru’s numinous wisdom.)" It's probably true that 'numinous wisdom' is not the way to Paradise, either.
Christianity certainly doesn't teach it to be so. Oh, plenty of sects and denominations insist their "way" is "The Way." I still remember "One Way" in the '70's, a particularly obnoxious fundamentalist based evangelical outreach based on a few misplaced verses from the Gospel of John ("I am the way, the truth, and the life. No man comes to the Father except by me."). It's telling you don't find that sentiment in the synoptics, and even that John undercuts it with the story of the SyroPhoenician woman (the fundies don't like to mix those two, even though they're in the same gospel). But historically Christianity has not taught 'numinous wisdom' as a prerequisite to either salvation or even baptism (the sacrament that is the mark of church membership, or at least membership in the cloud of witnesses). "Religion," as Derrida noted, looking to the example of mystery cults (of which Christianity was believed to be one, in the beginning, in some circles), "is responsibility, or it is nothing at all." But the hallmark of an authoritarian cult, even one like Q-Anon, is the lack of responsibility by the adherents. They are called only to accept that the leader tells them, and to act on it without complaint or inhibition; the opposite of responsibility. Jesus told his followers to love one another (a very hard thing to do. Have you met those people?). Authoritarian cults tell their followers to "believe" and to wait for something to happen that will justify their belief. True, Christianity has had waves of expectations in a millennial apocalypse, or a return that will end time and history; but that's not the primary teaching of any major Christian denomination that I know of. And, IMHTheologicalO, the better teachings are about the kingdom here and now, and doing for the least of these.
Yesterday was Palm/Passion Sunday. We squeezed them together after centuries of one following the other, because nobody wants to hear about the Passion anymore. They want to go straight from the exultation of Palm Sunday to the glory of Easter morning. Skip the "Last Supper" on Maundy Thursday (too depressing, and somebody might try to wash my feet!). Good Friday and death? ARE YOU KIDDING ME? A vigil on Holy Saturday? WHO HAS THE TIME? No, I'm asking; does anybody have a watch? C'mon Easter! Show me a good time! But "religion is responsibility, or it is nothing at all." And in that vein, I end this diatribe against an article you haven't read, and point you to the words of Walter Brueggemann, and the exegesis of those words by Thought Criminal. There are worse ways to spend your time.
Especially since, after all this time, I've pretty much abandoned my seasonal liturgical commentaries.
*Well, it seemed somewhat worthwhile when I started this post. As is often the case, things change.
