Searching for God # 117

 In his provocative work, 21 Lessons for the 21^st Century, Yuval Noah Harari, subtitles a section on secularism, ‘Acknowledging the Shadow,’ in which he writes:

….Christianity has been responsible for great crimes such as the Inquisition, the Crusades, the oppression of native cultures across the world, and the disempowerment of women. A Christian might take offence at this and retort that all of these crimes resulted from a complete misunderstanding of Christianity. Jesus preached only love, and the Inquisition was based on a horrific distortion of his teachings. We can sympathize with this claim, but it would be a mistake to let Christianity off the hook so easily. Christians appalled by the Inquisition and by the Crusades cannot just wash their hands of these atrocities; they should rather ask themselves some very tough questions. How exactly did their ‘religion of love’ allow itself to be distorted in such a way, and not once but numerous times? Protestants who try to blame it all on Catholic fanaticism are advised to read a book about the behavior of Protestant colonists in Ireland or in North America…Every religion, ideology, and creed has its shadow, and no matter which creed you follow you should acknowledge your shadow and avoid the naïve reassurance that ‘ it cannot happen to us.’ (Harari, p. 217)

There are some ambiguities surrounding a “Shadow”….certainly acts of shame would qualify, and then there are the blind spots in both an individual consciousness, as well as an institution’s consciousness, providing one accedes that an institution does/can have a consciousness as well as an unconscious. From an imaginative frame of mind perspective, the application of the notion of Shadow to an institution comes readily, as does the notion, borrowed from James Hillman that a building/institution also has a soul. Many might point out that the United States’ shadow involves its history of profound racism. And then there is a question of America’s blindness to its dependence on guns, military power and zero-sum competition and increasingly unfettered capitalism. Can those last four observations be considered part of America’s shadow? Some might argue that America’s obsession with the individual ego is another blind spot that implicitly results in inordinate pressures on each person to accomplish, to achieve, to be successful and to conform. A blindness to the impact of the ‘culture’ and the ‘ethos’ and the kind of society that prevails in America might also be considered when considering America’s shadow.

Canadians, too, have a profound obligation, duty and lingering insouciance over a legacy, the national shadow, concerning the treatment of indigenous peoples. Token, lip-service, for the purpose of assuaging national guilt seems to be the order of the day, specifically with respect to the implementation of the 94 recommendations of the Truth and Reconciliation Commissions’s report. According to Indigenous Watchdog, 14-15 of the Commissions’s Call to Action are complete; CBC says 15 have been completed; Yellowhead Institute noes 13 Calls toe Action are completed. The Government of Canada, on the other hand, states that 85% are complete or well underway. (FromAI)

The  notion of a Shadow, whether of an individual, a family, an organization or a nation, is by its very nature, ephemeral, abstract and outside the boundaries of the human senses. The acknowledgement, recognition, ownership of a ‘shadow’ is a process to and for which none of us as individuals is either prepared or really voluntarily open. Robert Bly depicts is as a bag of trauma, shame, guilt and memory that ‘we’ hang over our shoulder, only to experience an opening involuntarily, spontaneously, and surprisingly given the ‘trigger’ of some word, image, event that mysteriously brings the unconscious pain to consciousness.

One of the more impactful, yet surprisingly unacknowledged, aspects of modern life, especially in a culture driven by the economy, the pursuit of profit, the manufacture, sale and distribution of goods and services, all of it (extrinsic and interventionist in the extreme) operating on the backs of individual ego’s competing for various rewards and awards, is that ‘busyness’ (under rubrics like ‘housekeeping, account-managing, responsibilities, duties, chores, decision-making, personnel management, career planning, not to mention all of the domestic responsibilities) tends to flood the ‘to-do’ list of millions. In fact, ‘to do lists’ easily, readily and also unconsciously, eclipse reflection, downtime, meditation, and even deep and connecting conversation. Even meditative exercises like yoga bring with them a rigor of body discipline to be mastered prior to the more profound impact of silent introspection.

To venture that families, schools, corporations, certainly churches and especially nations take very little time for personal, or collaborative reflection that offers a pathway for ‘self-critical’ reflection and examination. The ‘privatizing of sin, as well as both medical and legal professions focusing exclusively on the ‘individual’ problem, taken together, coalesce into a culture, an anima mundi of dependence on the empirical and denial of the unconscious. The divide between the conscious, empirical, scientific on the one hand and the unconscious/ethereal/ephemeral on the other exceeds the most profound and contentious divides between religions, ethnicities, social classes, and environmentalists v capitalists.

Historians like Harari are unlikely to venture into the psychic framework when examining a religion’s shadow. They are likely to focus on the events empirically proven to have taken place. And herein lies a potential intersection of history, psychology and religion, especially in a culture in which psychological terms originally applied to individual personal mental/psychic/emotional states and conditions are not infrequently transferred into organizational, civic, structural and even environmental domains. This becomes particularly complex and potentially dangerous when lay persons, untrained in any formal development in psychology feel both free and unchallenged when they apply negative psychological diagnostic terms to people whom they neither know nor have the legitimacy to apply such terms. Non-diagnostic adjectives that attempt to describe a person’s behaviour, for example in the workplace: energetic, intense, lethargic, detail-oriented, collegial, challenging, deep thinker, verbose, shy, social, lazy, and the list could go on….these words offer considerable opportunity for both observation and some process of evaluation, both from the referee and the prospective hiring agent. The ‘fit,’ after the qualifications have been established, is regarded as highly important.

The short-coming of the empirical, if one even considers that is conceivable, is that what is not said and what is not done and what is not demonstrable, the silent-truths, often become embraced as ‘subjective feelings’ of the evaluator. Every box about fulfilling the job description may be checked, and the ‘sense’ and ‘opinion’ of the referee may still be ‘negative’ …..trusting the subjective yet professional views of another demands both a firm sense of the culture, and a confidence in the relative objectivity of the referee.

When it comes to evaluating a religion, or an institution, or a nation, for example, from the perspective of its shadow, ‘much of conventional verbiage is little more than ‘flagrant’ and often intensely biased ‘prejudices, including, unconsciously, the personal experience of the referee/evaluator with the subject of the evaluation. And these evaluations are being made moment-by-moment every day by each of us.

 

 

Here we come again to one of the vortices of human existence. Two forces are in tension: what applies to individuals and what applies to groups and the intersection, turbulence, conflagration, explosion and intemperateness when a small group elides, slides, or explodes into a dangerous collective.

The concept that God ‘speaks’ to and through individuals has a long history in Christian tradition. Some argue it (focus on the individual) has its roots in the ancient world of Greece and Rome where an individual’s identity and rights were tied to their social ‘group’ or class. The Renaissance (14th-17^th century) celebrated human potential creativity and personal achievement and the Enlightenment (18^th century  +) saw writers like John Locke arguing for ‘natural rights’ of life liberty and property and Adam Smith advocating laissez-faire economics based on individual self-interest. The word individualism came from France in the 19^th century to depict the breakdown of social cohesion. However, in Great Britain and the United States, it evolved into a core ideology fusing concepts or religious freedom, economic liberalism and democratic rights. Even today it remains as a defining trait of Western societies, while continuing to be debated. (From AI)

Hardly surprising, then, to read from a renowned Roman Catholic scholar and theologian, Gregory Baum, in his Religion and Alienation, A Theological Reading of Sociology, 1975:

(about) the weakest side of moral theology. This branch of theology has become so excessively individualistic that it concerns itself almost exclusively with the personal pole of the personal-social dialectics. Here we blame the sinner and condemn the criminal. We leave a certain room for social pressures by taking into account the gradual loss of freedom that reduces culpability. But we do not submit the social environment to the detailed criticism that we apply to the actor…..Most people in society, in the climate created by the churches and the dominant culture, evaluate the faults of people in this excessively privatized manner…Our present (and we might add even today, in 2026) moral impulse, encouraged by the dominant current in culture and religion, is to find fault exclusively with the actor. We blame the thief and the robber, but we do not at the same time examine the social order. (Baum, p. 204-205)

The massive tragedies noted by Harari, as also for most such calamities, are carried out under a pervasive cultural ethos of ‘blame the actor (leader, perpetrator, general, or president or even a pope) and ‘ignore the group’…when evaluating responsibility. Fortunately, in recent scholarly development, a new approach, especially to racism, commonly known as ‘critical race theory’ has poked its head into the public conversation in America. CRT is an academic and legal framework that examines how systemic racism is embedded in societal laws, institutions, and policies rather than being solely a product of individual prejudice. Originated by Derrick Bell, Kimberlé Crenshaw and Richard Delgado, the theory holds that race, class, gender and disability intersect to create unique compounding forms of discrimination and inequality. Through the lens of CRT, race is viewed as a socially constructed concept, not a biological reality, historically created to maintain social and political hierarchies. In line with this concept, historical legacies of racial segregation and inequality continue to shape modern outcomes, such as disparate incarceration rates and housing disparities. (From AI)

Naturally, the far-right conservative political and Christian movements find this penetrating, incisive and cogent perspective (CRT) repulsive, and have dismissed it entirely, as it threatens both their political and religious ‘status’ and self-declared superiority. Christian nationalism and white supremacy are political terms loaded with radioactive linguistic searing impact. Originated in the U.S., CRT focuses on the racism of black African Americans. In Canada, the theory has helped to expose historical and on-going settler colonialism rather than individual prejudices, and the over-representation of indigenous peoples in the Canadian justice system. It highlights how indigenous youth and adults are over-policed and more heavily criminalized compared to white populations as well as to analyze and disrupt racism in the Canadian healthcare system where indigenous patients routinely experience unequal outcomes. However, CRT can erase or gloss over the core issue of land theft and the political sovereignty of indigenous nations and, scholars argue that the CRT framework often omits the specific voices of indigenous peoples treating them simply as one of many ‘racialized minorities’ rather than distinct indigenous nations with inherent rights and treaties. (From AI)

Still remaining, however, is the shadow of the Christian church.

See Texas A & M on The Shadow

 

 

 What comprises an organization’s shadow? Specific historic events, yes, and what about deeply entrenched foundational pillars? Is Harari’s note about monotheism paradoxically a part of the shadow of all the major religions? Or, while once considered a significant break-through, is it now perceived very differently? Is Funk’s noting of the myth of the external heroic savior a foundational myth?  And is the hypocrisy of words of the faith extolling humility while declaring the faith ‘true’ part of the shadow?’ Harari trumpets the ‘big’ bloodbaths of the Inquisition and the Crusades.

Funk reminds us of the consensus of the Jesus Seminar about the nature of the Jesus of Nazareth, as compared with the Christ enthroned, and entombed by his admirers and followers following the Crucifixion and Resurrection. So, a pertinent and specific question: are the Creeds and the councils that birthed them a part of the ecclesial shadow? Also, is the churches’ privatizing of sin a deliberate and conscious attempt to avoid, deflect, deny and turn a blind eye to its own serious moral and ethical behavior on finances, sexuality, gender equality, inter-faith relationships while upholding the public, austere and righteous standing and status of the institution?

Is there, perhaps, a parallel critical theological theory, at least from the perspective of Christianity, whereby those who adopt, adapt, integrate with and submit to the teachings of the creeds, the tradition, the rituals, and the literal interpretation of scripture and the authority of the hierarchy are effectively ‘crowned’ as disciples of Christ while those who question, debate, disturb and even doubt are effectively alienated as ‘heretics’ or apostates or ‘subject to excommunication’? As one of those discarded from the institution, I identify with the many others whose lives have been negatively impacted by an institution that, by-and-large refuses to examine itself critically and openly and transparently for its shared responsibility in the conditions to which it subjects many of its ‘field workers.’

My personal story is miniscule when compared with men like Bishop Romero, who was fatally shot by a right-wing death squad while celebrating Mass on March 24, 1980. The Archbishop of San Salvador was a fearless advocate for human rights, and a martyr for the Catholic Church. He consistently, as a voice for the voiceless, spoke out against poverty, systemic violence, and the oppression of his people during the El Salvador Civil War. Impacted by the assassination of his close friend, Jesuit Priest Rutilio Grande, a metanoia moment for Romero, prompting him to become the outspoken champion for the marginalized and a fierce critic of government-backed repression. (From AI)

A human rights advocate’s voice against a repressive government serving as a Christian bishop clearly illustrates the nature of the power-struggle of highly principled individuals when facing an oppressive regime.

And in each and every situation, whether political, military, religions, academic, or ideological, every participant involuntarily serves as mirror and lamp. An composite of the many cultural influences absorbed, as well as a potential light shining a unique focus on the circumstances. If we were to pay more attention to the manner in which the mirror metaphor functions, we might find more detailed, relevant and commanding factors, the shadow we all share in our collective unconscious, for which we might then be open to its acknowledgement and public discourse…..but that is another of those ‘pipe dreams’ of this romantic idealist scribe.