Clean hands and dirty deeds
Just as our aural imaginations supply the ‘right’ notes (that we have not actually heard) so as to resolve musical dissonances (that don’t actually resolve), so too can what we may call our social imaginations supply the ‘right’ facts and perspectives to enable us feel good about ourselves. Now, not everyone has a sufficiently powerful social imagination to make themselves come up smelling of roses no matter what they have done, so they may purchase cognitive-dissonance resolutions ‘off the peg’ from the nearest religion.
Experiments have shown that washing their hands with soap and water makes people view unethical activity as more reasonable than they did before. Feelings of disgust apparently make people act more morally. It is intuitively plausible that fastidiousness is transferable from body-perception to the envisaged act; so that if you feel you are dirty, you may more easily feel that any act you desire at the moment to perform is also dirty, or wrong. That might explain why ascetics were so reluctant to bathe – it would make them less disgusted with themselves, ergo less self-critical. Contrariwise, ritual purification might be expected to produce a more relaxed attitude to morality; when my feet or hands or genitals are clean, then I am clean; and if I am ‘clean’, then it doesn’t much matter what I do.
If this is so, the next question we should ask is cui bono? If physical cleanliness serves to fool the conscience, religions based on ritual purification may be powered by the desire to feel clean while doing ethically dirty things. Even though he was probably not at all religious himself, one of our key pieces of religious symbolism has been furnished by Pontius Pilate. Or, as Augustine might have put it, ‘Wash, and do what thou wilt’.
It shouldn’t happen to Me!
The Psalmist kvetches about the things he does when someone else for once is doing it back to him. He suffers because the natural order has been disrupted; woe, woe, woe, he is receiving it rather than handing it out! In the Psalms there is no sense of karma, of ‘what goes around comes around’. What we do unto others is right, and what they do unto us is wrong, end of story. What the Psalmist wants is not help in improving his own conduct, but a divine guarantee that in future, he will always be the one handing it out, and always be patted on the head by God for it. The spirit of the Psalms is one of narcissistic self-righteousness.
The Goodman deal
The New England Puritans used ‘Goodman’ and ‘Goodwife’ – often abbreviated to ‘Goody’, which we moderns have trouble hearing without fits of the giggles – as perfectly serious titles of address. We meet them, for example, in ‘The Crucible’. There are two ways of looking at this. We might think it respectful, as suggesting a willingness to consider everyone good citizens until proven otherwise, or even as detecting a spark of the divine in all men and women. Or else we might find it intolerably smug and self-satisfied. Our suspicion is then that the convention is a mutual admiration society, whereby I agree to afford you the narcissistic pleasure of being addressed as Goodman if you reciprocate and grant me the narcissistic supply that I myself desire. Such a system will, of course, only work if there are people in the neighbourhood that are not vouchsafed the title of Goodman.
The varieties of religious entertainment
Time was when church attendance was compulsory; in some parts of the world it still is. In other parts of the world it is not formally required, but non-attendees can forget all about doing business in the community. Networking is important everywhere, particularly for immigrants, the poor and the corrupt. Perhaps some people go in order to improve their own ethical conduct, although this has always been a minority sport. The more church attendance fails to cover these other bases, the more we will find people going to services primarily for the technology of emotional auto-manipulation.
Religion will always be a part of the entertainment industry. But people differ in their tastes: some are entertained by peace and quiet, others are entertained by glitz and spectacle, others again are entertained by righteous indignation and the persecution of their neighbours.
Christian services fall into three categories: Boring, High and Charismatic, and these attract quite different personalities. The deal with ‘Boring’ is that you get to congratulate yourself on enduring it and look down on those who lack the Moral Fibre to do the same. ‘High’ attracts those introverts who get off on stained-glass windows, polyphony and incense, which they find alters their brain chemistry to make them feel serene and peaceful. ‘Charismatics’ are those with high cortical thresholds, which means that they need very powerful stimuli in order to feel anything at all; their services are therefore arranged to work them up into a state akin to hysteria, using the techniques of the rock concert, namely huge stadia, laser-light shows, earth-shattering sound levels, yelling and stomping. Rather than the peaceful space for thought provided by both Boring and High services, this ‘Sunday Night Fever’ offers the dissolution of personality into the hysteria of crowd solidarity against demonised outgroups: what one might call ‘Nuremburg Christianity’.
Are you being served?
Small children are sometimes heard to wonder why the tedious events to which their churchgoing parents drag them are called ‘services’. They probably find it a most unconvincing explanation that they are there to serve God, as the innocent childish mind does not see any such serving going on. Unless, perhaps, the church is like a bad restaurant, where the waiters serve the divine customer with three courses of overcooked praise, toxic petitions and warmed-over singing.
It may help to approach from a different angle. In Spain, ‘servicios’ can mean either the lavatories or commercial sexual acts: in tariff advertisements, for example, ‘dos servicios’ equates with the English ‘cum twice’. The church service, therefore, may be considered as a servicing, not of God but of the congregation; a repository for their emotional waste, and – especially with the charismatic rock-concert services – a satisfaction of their needs for emotional excitement.
Mood-making
Religion is not solely about the economic, political and social-climbing technologies. There is also emotional technology, what Idries Shah has termed ‘mood-making’. Different kinds of mood, however, are made. Moreover, Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs is quite wrong. Even when adequately fed, clothed, sheltered and laid, few people seek this thing he called ‘self-realisation’. Some will seek to be ever better fed, clothed, sheltered and laid, although these needs are theoretically finite; others will seek adulation and approval, and these needs are infinite; yet others will devote all their energies to the equally infinite pleasures of putting others in the wrong and making everyone else miserable.
How to make friends and exorcise people
People often wonder why so many charismatics make such a big fuss about otherwise indiscernible ‘satanic influences’ around them; as for example when they refuse to eat at an Indian restaurant because there is a tapestry of Ganesha on the wall. Even other Christians marvel that they have such a low opinion of the power of God as to think their souls endangered by the presence of a piece of coloured cloth. Theologically speaking, this is indeed Dualist heresy, but this behaviour is not actually caused by any conviction that there are two equally matched deities. Nothing so dignified; it is simply a game of one-upmanship, in which victory goes to the one who displays the greater and more obscure sensitivity. That is, if Tom thinks it OK for him as a Christian to eat underneath a picture of Krishna, and Dick points out that Krishna is a demon or satanic illusion, then Dick has demonstrated his superior discernment and commitment vis-à-vis his weaker brother in the Lord.
That St. Paul would have classified Dick as the weaker one, because he is hung up on trivial externals and lacks faith in his own salvation, will probably have escaped their notice; not least because this sort of game is played most by insecure people whose excitability greatly exceeds their erudition. In other words, the same sort of people that St. Paul was addressing in the first place. Rather than quote Romans, however, Harry may try to trump Dick in his turn by finding something offensive in the name or décor of the latter’s own choice of restaurant.
People who can see the SS thunderbolt in the mane of My Little Pony can find anything they want to; and the reason they want to is because it scores them points and propels them up the ladder. Anyone detecting Satan in something where the others failed to detect him wins points, and anyone in whose hobbies Satan can be detected loses points, lots of them. This is actually quite dangerous, as the player with least points gets Prayed Over and even used for up-and-coming exorcists to practice on. Strategy therefore demands pre-emption. We used to see the same dynamic in communist party meetings: the slowest to condemn or the last one to call for bloodthirsty measures got labelled a revisionist or even a counter-revolutionary. The situation is somewhat like that of the two hunters who surprise a grizzly and have to run for their lives; when asked why, since no man can outrun a bear, the surviving hunter replied, ‘I didn’t have to run faster than the bear, I just had to run faster than the other guy’.
An Englishman was once at a multinational religious meeting where a visiting American was describing how every nation had a sort of ‘patron demon’ that inspired its characteristic national vice. What might the proprietary sin of England be? he enquired. Homosexuality, she said. Well, it was true that England was then a more tolerant place for gays than the Bible Belt, and that a mind that enjoyed prejudicial classification might well find some ammunition in its single-sex schools, in its writers and artists, in its campy popular entertainment, and in Tory Party sex scandals, but there appeared to be a bit more to it than that. For, despite the fact that he was not gay, did not appear particularly gay and had not mentioned the subject previously, she replied to him with an extremely ‘meaningful’ look that clearly said, ‘YOU should know better than anyone’. He says he expected to be exorcised on the spot.
What was happening here was a game of one-upmanship, in which she set up the board and waited for a sucker to be dumb enough to ask the question. She could then name the national sin of the mark’s birthplace with an implication that he was himself consumed by this evil; it could equally well have been the Demon of Smelly Socks who afflicted Outer Rhubarbia, and then everyone would look at the poor Rhubarbian and sniff. One up to her, one down to him. Everyone was now looking at the poor Englishman as if they expected him to start buggering them on the coffee-table; any remark to the effect that he wasn’t actually homosexual himself, however, would probably have triggered Round Two of the game, involving her charismatic gift of Discernment of Spirits that said, ‘Neena neena neena, you are so a homosexual, you have the characteristic English demon without knowing it’.
I myself heard another Christian fundamentalist happily engaged in listing the demonic influences on the world. One of these was homeopathy. It may legitimately be argued that homeopathy is a scam, but then the same can be said of a host of other ‘alternative medicine’ practices, none of which appeared in the speaker’s demonic list. I wondered whether the speaker knew what homeopathy actually was, or whether he had jumped to conclusions from the resemblance of the word to ‘homosexual’. Perhaps he would have been equally happy condemning the Demon of Homeostasis and exorcising engineers.
For ‘happy’ is very much the operative word; anyone who has ever listened to a group of such fundamentalists discussing demonic influences will know that there is not only an element of competition, as described above, but also joy of the classifier. Great pleasure may be derived from imperiously dividing all the phenomena of the world between the kingdoms of the Lord and Satan, namely the heady wine of being ‘like gods’, as the Serpent promised Eve; although as the example above suggests, quite innocent of the factual knowledge one might expect from gods.
And so it comes to pass that individuals who in the official hierarchies of wealth, social status and political power are complete nobodies, may in their fantasies sit in judgement on the entire universe, airily pronouncing on how this, that and the other thing, and most particularly everything that their prosperous and well-adjusted non-Christian acquaintances hold dear, is of the Devil. No wonder they sound happy.
The clergyman bows to me!
It may be that they are now dying out, but there used to be a sizeable social group in England who described themselves as ‘churchpeople’. Not, nota bene, as ‘Christians’ or ‘believers’; they never used to ask if you believed in God or even if you were religious, but only whether you ‘went to church’. Nor did they ever mention God themselves, if they could help it. This may have been due to the historical Anglican suspicion of ‘enthusiasm’ in religion, or merely the natural English reticence and embarrassment about anything emotionally serious. Or perhaps it was a faithful representation of their true allegiance, which was not to a deity or a doctrine or even a morality, but to a social ritual. After all, they always wanted their family members to ‘come to church’ too, even if they knew full well that said members did not believe a word of the religion; that may make us wonder whether the principals believed any of it themselves. It was like having their family members with them when posing for a formal portrait; they proclaim that they are bona fide members of society, and behold, here are my status symbols, my proof of reproductive success. And if they had not in fact succeeded in reproducing, being ‘churchpeople’ fast-tracked them with the adoption agencies, which used to be run entirely by other churchpeople.
A passage in Wilkie Collins’ ‘The Woman in White’ admirably demonstrates the function of the church in an English community of the mid-19th century. Mrs. Catherick had been branded (wrongly, as it happens) as an adulteress, and had then worked for years at regaining her reputation. ‘“I stand high enough in this town, to be out of your reach”, she now tells an interlocutor. “The clergyman bows to me. Aha! you didn’t bargain for that, when you came here. Go to the church, and inquire about me – you will find Mrs. Catherick has her sitting, like the rest of them, and pays the rent on the day it’s due. Go to the town-hall. There’s a petition lying there, a petition of the respectable inhabitants against allowing a Circus to come and perform here and corrupt our morals: yes! OUR morals. I signed that petition, this morning. Go to the bookseller’s shop. The clergyman’s Wednesday evening lectures on Justification by Faith are publishing there by subscription – I’m down on the list. The doctor’s wife only put a shilling in the plate at our last charity sermon – I put half a crown. Mr. Churchwarden Soward held the plate, and bowed to me. Ten years ago he told Pilgrim, the chemist, that I ought to be whipped out of town, at the cart’s tail. Is your mother alive? Has she got a better Bible on her table than I have got on mine? … Ah! there is the clergyman coming along the square. Look, Mr. what’s-your-name – look, if you please!” She started up, with the activity of a younger woman; went to the window; waited until the clergyman passed; and bowed to him solemnly. The clergyman ceremoniously raised his hat, and walked on.’ The petition, the paid pew, the lectures, the collection and the greeting by the clergyman: all serve the same purpose, of defining who is In and who is Out.
It was not altogether different in my youth, although such very local publishing was dead, and no one paid for a particular seat in church. The priest was, perhaps, half-way through his transmogrification from an arbiter of respectability to a social worker. But the churchgoers still sat for hours afterward, discussing not the sermon but who had been there and who not, and wearing what hat. Absentees lost brownie points, which meant that the discussers could now move up. The main object of churchgoing was the same as attendance at the cocktail party, except without the coke in the bathrooms or the quickies in the upstairs bedrooms – namely to see and be seen. It was a weekly recalibration of who was where in the status hierarchy. This was, of course, for the middle-class; the underclass achieved the same result with the weekly punch-up.
The Anglican churchwoman who dusts the pews so as to proclaim her place in the hierarchy, and arranges the flowers so as to grind the faces of her rivals into the flagstones, is thus the last descendant of the priestess raising a bloody knife above the altar of human sacrifice.
I know that my attorney liveth
The Old Testament talks about godly people being rewarded by respect ‘in the gates’. I believe that the gates of the Hebrew town were where public business was transacted. A Greek, therefore, might say ‘in the agora’, a Roman, ‘in the Forum’, and a modern, ‘in court’. The Old Testament seems to be saying, therefore, that if you walk with God your peers will fall silent when you speak. Or, in the modern idiom, ‘dey not be dissin’ you, mon’. The human need to climb hierarchies sounds so much more impressive in King James.
One of the payoffs of religion is that you have, not only an invisible friend, but an invisible vindicator – for ‘vindicator’ is a more accurate translation than ‘redeemer’ for the personage for whom Job claimed to be waiting. A vindicator’s job is to tell you that you were right all along, and then to tell everyone else that you were right all along, and if necessary to ram it down their throats. It’s like having a very high-powered lawyer. The emotional attitude with which a thus permanently vindicated person meets the unvindicated is ‘God likes me more than he likes you. Eat my dust.’
A survivor of the massacre of the Rhineland Jews in 1096 wrote: ‘May the Merciful One avenge the spilled blood of your servants – and the blood yet to be spilled – during the lifetime of those who survive us, before their very eyes.’ This seems just a little bit more honest than the Christian equivalent, since the Jew is not obliged to utter insincere hopes that his enemy will convert to his religion and thus become his ‘brother’.
A true story
The reason why religious people are often found making a greater fuss about nudity and verbal bawdiness than about economic oppression – the precise opposite, of course, of the priorities of their founders – is that zealous concern with the rules of polite dress and speech is a class marker but charity is not.
A novel set in Madrid at the end of the Forties contains a true and documented incident: poor people are scavenging for food in the rubbish, watched by the Guardia Civil. Suddenly the wind blows a woman’s skirt over her head, exposing her malnourished flesh. The civiles go beserk and arrest her for ‘offending public morals’. Such a position has its own internal logic: if we, the religious people, are to admire ourselves and consider ourselves superior on the strength of what we do or don’t do, it must be for something that lies within our power. Preventing starvation is very difficult; especially if we are the same people as are responsible for, and benefit from, the economic arrangements that have caused it in the first place. Not revealing naked skin in public, however, is really quite an easy matter to arrange; let us therefore arrange it, begin to congratulate ourselves on our decency, and make visible the distinction between ourselves and the indecent by vigorous police action. That is why the poor woman’s involuntary exposure was an offence to public morals and her starvation was not.
