In recent years, the evangelical right wing has embraced attitudes and behaviors 180 degrees antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. Where Jesus taught people to ‘love their neighbor’, evangelicals hate blacks, Hispanics, Jews, LGBTQs, immigrants, and anyone who does not look or think exactly like them. This behavior is pointed out and condemned a lot in the media, but I’m not hearing any cogent explanations as to WHY this is happening.
Let’s start by citing study after study showing that religious people do not behave more or less morally than non-religious people. This is quite startling, since religion is all about morality. We can only conclude that religion has little or no relationship with actual behavior, but somehow is closely tied to perceived goodness and morality.
Let’s also rule out the Bible as a source of morality. People cherry-pick the Bible to justify or to mean anything they want. This is especially true because of the black-and-white difference between the eye-for-an-eye morality of the Old Testament and the love-thy-neighbor morality of the New Testament. Even Jesus’ saying, “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword,” is twisted by Christian theologians as meaning the precise opposite, i.e. it really means he came to bring peace.
I see several possibilities for Christians and other religious people:
- God forgives our sins. Jesus died to save me. I may commit all sorts of evil deeds, but God will forgive me and everything will be just fine. This thinking is related to the doctrine of original sin; we are all born sinners, so I commit sins all the time, but God always forgives me. (This possibility applies to Christians but not to most other religions.
- I am religious; I pray and go to church; therefore, I am a good person; therefore what I do is good.
Let me explore this second option in more historical detail. Consider the Inquisition, in which thousands of normal people were tortured on the rack or burned at the stake. The perpetrators of this atrocities were often cardinals and bishops. By destroying these heretics, they were doing God’s will. After all, cardinals and bishops are men of God, so in their own minds they must be doing good. (This possibility applies to all religions.)
There is a possibility that the pedophile priest understands that he is doing wrong, but that his other priestly acts more than compensate for his bad behavior. On the whole, he is good: “I’m helping so many people in good ways, that I can be allowed this slip-up in morality.”
3. There is a third category of perceived moral/immoral behavior — tribal thinking. Sociologists like Emile Durkheim saw religion as the embodiment of the tribe. He saw morality as the collective adherence to tribal values. In today’s world, ‘tribe’ can apply not just to ethnic groups, but to groups who share a common ideology or social status. Vance Packard, in The Status Seekers, saw the various sects of American religion as reflective of social class values. Thus, Baptists, Methodists, and Episcopalians, reflected the class thinking of lower, middle, and upper classes of society.
In Durkheim’s view, ‘God’ is just a symbol of the tribe. Idols and totem poles are just symbols of the tribal values. For Christians, the Cross is just a totem of Christian society.
In this view, moral behavior is simply behavior that reflects the tribal values of some group, be it an ethnic group or a social class. The phrase “God tells me that homosexuality is wrong” translates to, “My tribe tells me that homosexuality is wrong.”
A totem is the symbol or embodiment of solidarity of a clan or social group.
It is only a small jump from this view to a hatred of other tribes, whose gods tell them something else. Almost by definition, other tribes’ differences can be seen as the work of the devil, and must therefore be eliminated. God not only gives me permission to kill members of other tribes, but He (i.e. my tribe) proclaims the obligation for me to kill them.
Donald Trump recently put this tribal morality into understandable language. While describing Hispanic immigrants as rapists and murderers, he said that he welcomed immigrants from ‘nice’ countries. Of course, we know what that means.
In fact, Trump understands this very well. That scene where he crossed the street of rioters and held up an upside-down Bible was symbolic of the tribe, even though Trump has never read the Bible, nor does he have any idea what it says. Similarly, his sale of patriotic Bibles is a clear link of the religious symbol of the Bible to the tribal values of white superiority.
In the biblical Battle of Jericho, Jahweh commanded His Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the city, as well as every animal they found. How’s that for tribalism?
So Christian values like loving your neighbor apply only to your own tribe. The old phrase ‘Southern hospitality’ applies to hospitality to white people of your tribe, but not to non-white outsiders. One of my favorite stories is about American missionaries in Africa who set up a mission school several decades ago. One African student at their school was so intelligent, that the missionaries got him a scholarship to a prestigious American university. When in America, he went to visit the Southern church that had provided his education, but he was denied entry because he was black.
When you look at American Evangelism through this tribal lens, it all starts to make sense and hang together. It explains, for example, the close relationship between Evangelicals and Politics, in which one’s political positions are simply those of the tribe, and are not to be questioned. Even ‘the facts’ are subject to tribal ‘relative truth’.
To the Evangelicals, Jesus and the Bible are just symbols of the tribe. It doesn’t really matter what Jesus said or what the Bible says. They don’t exactly hate Jesus; rather, Jesus’ teachings are irrelevant to the current tribal values.