A Defector for 100 Percent Americanism

Long ago in a life far, far away (4,676 miles away, to be precise), I spent an hour and a quarter every Tuesday and Thursday seated in a Barnard Hall classroom, avidly following the lectures of a woman I now think of as my favorite college professor. Celia Deutsch was not one of the "star" professors at Columbia who develops a cult following among Columbia students, or who ends up appearing in every PBS documentary about her field (her field being Second Temple Judaism and Early Christianity, there are few such documentaries for her to appear in). A devout but liberal Catholic--I used to describe her to college friends as a plainclothes nun--she was simply a woman who had a deep passion for her subject and an ability to pass that passion on to the right kind of student. And in the autumn of 1999, I was just that kind of student--intrigued by religion but knowing very little about it, just the kind of student who would not only take but excel in her Introduction to Western Religion class.

I have described Professor Deutsch as liberal, because, though she never devoted class time to tirading against it, she plainly had no sympathy for fundamentalist religion. But if she had no sympathy for fundamentalism, she was not the kind of academic fool who thinks that any viewpoint must be treated as "valid" or "true" simply because someone, somewhere happens to hold it. Words for her actually did have meanings (an idea I did not often hear expressed during my Columbia days).

I remember wel when I realized this fact of Professor Deutsch's character. It was during one particularly pitched battle with another student in class, who insisted that someone could be a theologian in a religious tradition without being a believer in that tradition. Professor Deutsch, no doubt thinking of Thomas Aquinas's definition of theology as faith seeking understanding, insisted that the world theologian had never been used this way, inside of any known religion or by scholars of religion. She explained carefully but firmly that a person can be a scholar of religion without being a believer, but to be a theologian, one must be an adherent.

Several years have passed since I had any cause to think about what properly makes someone a theologian. But my memory of this day in Professor Deutsch's class came flooding back to me this weekend, when I had the chance to watch online a documentary called The God Who Wasn't There.

Briefly, The God Who Wasn't There is a vitriolic film that, I had read, advocated what scholars of religion call the Jesus Myth Hypothesis--a theory held by a tiny minority of scholars that there was, in fact, no historical Jesus. I had read a little about the Jesus Myth Hypothesis when I was in college and had not been particularly impressed by it. Though I am not a Christian and do not consider Jesus to be the Messiah, the Son of God, or anything else that Christians generally consider him to be, I had never felt a need to question whether a man called Jesus had ever lived and preached in Israel. But I was open-minded enough to be interested to see if The God Who Wasn't There would make an interesting case.

The film I actually saw on my computer was nothing like what I had read it would be. Although the film did spend some time discussing the Jesus Myth Hypothesis, it was, in the end, more a diatribe against what I would call a caricature of Christianity in general and of fundamentalist Christianity in particular. I suppose it's asking too much for an hour-long film not to boil down incredibly complex scholarly and theological issues into rhetoric, but The God Who Wasn't There did this to an extent I found shocking.

The worst of this boiling down came when filmmaker Brian Flemming, having presented his case that there was no historical Jesus and having made a number of scriptural and moral arguments about fundamentalist Christianity, set his sites on liberal Christians. His entire thesis about liberal Christianity amounted to this: liberal Christianity makes even less sense than the fundamentalist version, because it claims that the Bible is God's word but then decide it will only "sort of" follow it.

There are two main problems with this assertion. The first is that it does not accurately state the claim liberal religious movements make about the nature of scripture, Christian or otherwise. Fundamentalist religion takes the view that scripture is God's direct dictation; liberal religion takes a view that it is God's word as understood by people in a particular time, place, and context. For a religious liberal like myself, then, the Bible, though written by fallible human beings, is nonetheless a reflection on a real experience of God. But Flemming leaves this important distinction completely out of his film.

The other problem with this assertion is that it assumes there is agreement about what the Bible "actually says" when in fact there is not. In the film, Flemming commits this error most greviously when he condemns "Christianity"--he does not say "fundamentalist Christianity", just "Christianity"--for its treatment of homosexuality. Not surprisingly, he quotes Leviticus 18:22 and just assumes the most literal reading of this verse is "what the Bible actually says."

Coming from a religious denomination--Conservative Judaism--that has been wrestling particularly hard with this verse in the past few years, but which has nonetheless liberalized its position on homosexuality, I know that the more traditional, literal reading of this verse is not what the Bible inherently says. In fact, the verse in Leviticus is situated between two sets of laws--the first dealing with family relationships, the second dealing with idolatry. As evidence has come to light that homosexuality is likely genetic, liberal religious movements, Jewish and Christian, have tended to reexamine their assumption that this verse is an unbendable, unchangeable law regarding the family, akin to the Bible's prohibitions on incest. Instead, liberal readers of this text tend to see it as a historically contextualized condemnation of a type of ritualized homosexual sex that took place in the ancient Near East, and which is referred to elsewhere in the Bible. So the most literal reading of this text is not inherently "what the Bible actually says".

Flemming is not the first atheist I've encountered who has made clear his belief that a fundamentalist version of a particular religion is that religion in its purest form. He will probably not be the last. But to me, people like Flemming are not even really part of the discussion, because they have taken themselves out of it. They are like the student Professor Deutsch challenged that day long ago and far away, in my Introduction to Western Religion class--people who think they can be theologians without being believers.

To me, people like Flemming are like defectors from American citizenship. A person who renounces his American citizenship can, of course, express any opinion he wants about the American presidential election, or about what is best for America, but his opinion is no longer meaningful. Once you give up your membership in a community--as Flemming has done by declaring himself no longer a Christian--you don't get to say what the truest or best form of that community is. Once you defect, your opinion about what constitutes 100 Percent Americanism is not one anyone can or should listen to.

Not only do I not accept the claim, made by fundamentalists and by atheists like Flemming alike, that liberal religion "makes even less sense"; I do not understand it. As near as I can tell, there is nothing that makes extremely conservative interpretations of a religious tradition more authentic than liberal ones (indeed, I would argue that, in the case of homosexuality at least, the conservative interpretation of the tradition is less authentic, since it denies the religious values of compassion and intellectual honesty). The claim of fundamentalists and other religious conservatives that they are is only that--a claim.

It often frustrates me that we religious liberals seem unable to say this often enough or loudly enough--that we don't expose The Man Behind the Curtain for who he really is. Perhaps we don't because a liberal understanding of religion is one that, by its nature, admits that infallibility is neither achieavable nor even desirable.

But far too much is at stake for us to remain silent.