religious labels, or in which animal and i Get Into It

tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-9493326.post-8989647929399010552008-06-02T15:09:00.000-07:002008-06-02T16:27:59.009-07:00religious labels, or in which animal and i Get Into ItLast week Animal wrote a <a href= http://scottrharding.blogspot.com/2008/05/flag-faux-pas.html > post</a> about the little-known rules in the United States Code pertaining to uses of the US flag. In that post, he wrote this: I want people to adhere to the rules that are set down, to understand them and then not ignore them, but abide by them. In this, modern American "patriots" are a lot like many modern American "Catholics," who claim to BE that thing, but ignore so many of the rules that it borders on lunacy. If the Pope is the voice of God on Earth, and if the Pope says GOD says you can't use birth control...well, then you can't use birth control. I responded: The real flag rules sure do expose the hypocrisy of a lot of flag-wavers, but I think the Catholicism analogy is a little simplistic. Organized religion just doesn’t work quite this way. It’s probably the postmodernist coming out in me, but look: Saying that you’re Catholic can mean any number of things. To some people, it means that you follow the Pope and obey every dictate of the church to the best of your ability. To others, it might mean that you think the Pope is a flawed human being that you disagree with on stuff but you grew up Catholic and going to services nourishes your soul in some way you don’t need to fully understand, so you do it anyway. Is one person more Catholic than the other? By one definition, yes. But if you assert that the only true members of a particular faith are the ones that unerringly follow the rules set down by that faith, and that everyone else who claims that faith is by definition inconsistent and/or a hypocrite, you’re going to get lost, because rules always have hidden ambiguities, particularly in religion. Beyond that, defining religion by the parameters of rules cuts off, oh, about three-fourths of the culture of any given faith. Catholicism, for instance, has an incredible history of intrafaith dissent, as well as a near-infinite number of local interpretations that would probably give the Pope a heart attack.    The real problem, it seems to me, is when you identify yourself as someone who follows all the rules, exert judgment over other people for not following the rules, support policy that punishes other people for not following these supposedly sacred rules, and then secretly break the rules yourself. But identifying yourself as a follower of a given set of rules is not the same thing as calling yourself a Catholic, or an American. And back to Animal: I dunno Steph; I guess (not being a religious person myself, in the standard definition) that in this instance I DO see things as being that simplistic. Fudging the rules of Catholicism so that one can live according to one's personal tastes seems like it would create so many offshoots that the definition of being "Catholic" loses its very meaning. I think a person should be able to go to a Catholic service and be welcomed there in order to receive soul nourishment...but if that person doesn't believe that the Pope is here to deliver God's word and will...well, then, that person ain't really Catholic.   I guess "the rules" are there for reasons, and if enough people no longer follow them, then the rules should be changed; but, to claim that they ARE important, and then not follow them...well, that doesn't seem very ambiguous to me. Either follow the tenets of your faith or change them for ALL...or, create an offshoot faith that uses YOUR rules. But let's not have an infinity (or, infinity minus one, if you will) of different interpretations and then call all those things THE SAME. I had been struggling my way through a post that addressed the multitudinous nature of religious definitions last week, and this exchange with Animal came along and I realized that between the two of us we frame the conflict I was trying to address so succinctly that I should just use our comments as a springboard to explore my ideas on this subject. What’s most striking to me in Animal’s comments is this sentence: “Fudging the rules of Catholicism so that one can live according to one’s personal tastes seems like it would create so many offshoots that the definition of being 'Catholic' loses its very meaning.” But what definition? And its very meaning according to whom? And who gets to decide what constitutes “fudging the rules,” or what really and truly are the “tenets of your faith”? I don't mean to pick on Animal, but I think that from outside of a religion the legalistic aspects tend to look more black and white than they are from within. Rules are subject to interpretation, and sometimes people within a faith defy their leaders because they believe their leaders are interpreting things incorrectly. To lump principled dissent in with old-fashioned duplicitous hypocrisy and call it all "fudging" strikes me as both uncharitable and inaccurate. Relying on the most powerful and rule-obsessed figures in a religion to provide us with the definitions of said religion is only one way of going about it. It’s the most convenient way, of course, but it’s no more real or accurate than any number of other approaches. And this begs the question: Is there quantifiably, measurably a meaning that we can attach to any religious label that can’t be seriously challenged on one front or another? And if there isn't, is this something we need to be overly concerned about? While I doubt he did so intentionally, the non-religious Animal articulated an anxiety about the boundaries and borders of religious groups that is shared by a lot of religious people who fear the supposedly corrupting influences of “secularism” and “relativism.” And in fact I think it’s shared by a lot of people who are completely hostile to religion as well (not that this is a quality I attribute to Animal), because without legalistic definitions of religion to rely upon, arguments against religion become much more complicated. We want the word “Catholic” to mean something; we want the word “Christian” to mean something. But they don’t mean anything in particular—which is not to say that either of these terms is meaningless. Ask any number of Benedictine nuns (many of whom are openly pro-choice*), or the Catholic governor of Kansas, Kathleen Sebelius, who is being told by a Kansas archbishop that she should be banned from communion for her support of abortion rights, if a person who doesn’t obey all the dictates of the Pope “ain’t really Catholic.” Ask Stephen Colbert, or the brilliant Catholic novelist <a href= http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mary_Gordon>Mary Gordon,</a> or members of the Catholic Worker Movement, or Catholic liberation theologians, the same thing. And then try to answer the question: Who decides what is Catholic? Who decides what is Christian? The rule-makers? The power-arbiters? The most legalistic members of a faith? It manifestly is not that simple. Having an infinity of interpretations under one religious label is only a problem if you have a vested interest in preserving the supremacy of one of those interpretations. One charge against the line of argument I’m pursuing here—which some might describe as a postmodern argument, whatever the hell that means—is that it dilutes religious labels so that they become meaningless. But that is an argument that’s rooted in ideology, not observable reality. When I look at the diversity of beliefs and practices that exist within single religious labels, I don’t observe chaos or meaninglessness. I observe people searching for and creating meaning, using our imperfect language as best they can to describe their beliefs and affiliations. And I should add that I say this without sentimentality or kumbaya. To me the moniker “Christian” is equally applicable to a bigoted televangelist and to an agnostic, pluralist liberal church-goer who enjoys being part of a Jesus-centered community. I may have distinct opinions about which Christians I think are better people or live more consistently with my own understanding of Jesus’ message, but that’s beside the point at hand. Legalistic definitions of faith also tend to obscure one of the most fascinating and enduring characteristics of religion: paradox. Again, Catholicism is a wonderful example, perhaps because in terms of sheer numbers and global reach it is unrivaled among Christian denominations. It is arguably the most hierarchical denomination in Christianity, and yet its culture and theology has proven so rich and malleable that it has come to co-exist in syncretic forms with many religions indigenous to the areas or peoples Catholics have missionized. Many practitioners of Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santeria, for instance, would identify themselves as devout Catholics, despite centuries of their practices being maligned by Catholic authorities as devil-worship.** My own faith of origin, Anabaptist Christianity, contains a paradox rather inverse to the Catholic one I just described. It was founded on countercultural ideals, and many Anabaptists (this includes Mennonites, Church of the Brethren, Amish) set great store in placing themselves in contrast to an entity we persist in referring to as the “wider world.” Yet within Anabaptist communities themselves, conformity is so intensely valued that for much of our history those who violated the rules of the community were punished through means of the <a href= http://www.gameo.org/encyclopedia/contents/B36ME.html>ban,</a> which in its most extreme form involves treating the offending individual as though he or she is dead, and insisting even his or her family follow suit. While the practice isn’t completely gone, you won’t find it much outside the Amish anymore. Nonetheless, its emotional fallout is everywhere present in our communities, and the censorious tendencies that brought about the practice in the first place are far from dead. When I first started writing ethnographically about Mennonites, I was just desperate to make this paradox go away so I could define Mennonites as either conformist or nonconformist and make life easier for myself and for my readers. But I couldn’t do that, because the paradox simply existed. Eventually I came around to writing this in a Mennonite journal last fall: No one thing unites Mennonites, despite what any denominational publication says: not culture, not ethnicity, not beliefs. That’s not a cynical statement, just a comment on our diversity, the web-like nature of our connections to one another. If you grew up in Kinshasa or Bogotá or even Lancaster County, I have little to no idea what being a Mennonite means to you, or what stories you have been told. Sometimes people fall back on defining a Mennonite as someone who attends a Mennonite church, but that, I’ve realized, is just an opinion on the matter, not a definition I can trust.*** Likewise, the infinite interpretations of religious labels simply exist. If you like one definition more than another, that’s perfectly fine; I don’t believe that it’s wrong to be partial. But when you pretend the other definitions and understandings of the same label aren’t there or aren’t in any way worth considering, you’re missing out on a deeper understanding of one of the most varied, contentious and fascinating aspects of human experience. * I learned this from the book <a href= http://www.amazon.com/Unveiled-Hidden-Cheryl-L-Reed/dp/0425195112/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212444194&sr=1-1>Unveiled: The Hidden Lives of Nuns</a> by Cheryl L. Reed. ** Some examples are in <a href=http://www.amazon.com/Mama-Lola-Priestess-Brooklyn-Comparative/dp/0520224752/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212444267&sr=1-1>Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn</a> by Karen McCarthy Brown. ***<a href= http://www.bethelks.edu/mennonitelife/2007fall/krehbiel.php>”Joiner, Agent, Storyteller”</a> in Mennonite Life, Fall 2007.Stephhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03013628807611348775noreply@blogger.com