Biblical
Literalism Makes People Say Stupid Things
There simply is no doubt that faith sometimes makes
people say stupid things. We have just
seen a classic example of it. Ben Carson, the far right candidate for the
Republican Party’s nomination for President of the United States, who as far as
the objective eye can see has no qualifications whatsoever to be President,
thinks that the pyramids of ancient Egypt aren’t tombs. He thinks the Hebrew
patriarch Joseph built them as granaries.[1]
I suppose that’s because it says in Genesis that Joseph, one of the sons of
Jacob, was sold into slavery in Egypt by his brothers, that he rose to a
position of great power there, and that he stored up lots of grain against a
coming famine. See Genesis chapter 37 and 41:41-57. The contention that the
Egyptian pyramids are actually Joseph’s store houses is just plain stupid.
There are lots of reasons to believe that Genesis’ story of Joseph isn’t at all
factual, but we needn’t get into that can of worms to see how stupid Carson’s
contention is. The evidence of the pyramids themselves is indisputable. They
are tombs, the tombs of pharaohs. Period. There is not a shadow of a doubt that
that is true. I mean, just look at them! Look at what is, or was, in them.
They’re tombs designed to facilitate the deceased pharaoh’s life in the
afterlife. No reasonable person can have any doubt about that. To contend
otherwise is just stupid. It can’t be anything other than stupid. It’s stupid,
and that’s all there is to it.
Ben Carson, however, is not stupid. I think his politics
are really bad, but he isn’t stupid. He is a retired neurosurgeon. Stupid
people don’t get to be neurosurgeons. Stupid people don’t graduate college.
Stupid people don’t get into medical school. Stupid people don’t complete
residencies in neurology and neurosurgery. Carson did all those things. He
graduated from Yale and the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He was
Director of Pediatric Neurosurgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital for years. He
isn’t stupid, or at least he’s not stupid about medical science and the art of
neurosurgery. Far from it! But he thinks Egypt’s pyramids are Joseph’s
granaries! He’s a very intelligent man who thinks a very stupid thing and is
quite willing to express that stupid thing publically. What’s up with that?
To understand what’s up with that we have to look at
Carson’s version of Christian faith. He is a Seventh Day Adventist. That’s a
version of Christianity that arose in the United States in the nineteenth
century as part of a much broader cultural effect of the Enlightenment that
reduced all truth to fact. Like other conservative evangelical strains of
Christianity it holds that the Bible is infallible, and it understands the
Bible literally, that is, factually. Seventh Day Adventists believe that every
word in the Bible is literally true, and to them that means factual. Many
Christians, especially Protestant Christians, share that conviction. The
literal inspiration and inerrancy of the Bible has been so widely held and
taught by Christians that most of us probably don’t think much about it. He
hear that someone believes those things and shrug our shoulders. We’ve heard it
before. We’ll hear it again. If we share those beliefs we don’t’ think much about
or react much to someone else holding that belief except maybe to be glad that
they do. If we don’t, and I don’t, we don’t think much of it because it is so
common among us and there seems to be so little we can do about it.
Well, belief in biblical inspiration and inerrancy may be
common, but it is not something we should just ignore, That’s because it is not
harmless. It is in fact very harmful. It is harmful to the spiritual life of
those who hold it. It is harmful to the broader Christian tradition because it
drives so many people away from the faith. It is also harmful to Christianity
because it distracts Christians from the deeper truth of the faith and has them
off chasing literalistic rabbits rather than living into the faith’s great
spiritual depth.
And here’s another thing biblical literalism does. It
makes people think and say stupid things. Literalistic religion creates a faith
that cannot tolerate intellectual curiosity or inquiry. Because it is grounded
not in authentic spiritual experience but on supposed facts, it cannot tolerate
anything that questions the truth of those supposed facts. I have had many
people tell me that they left conservative evangelical Christian churches at least
in part because those churches didn’t allow them to ask questions about their
faith. Spiritual truth is multivalent. It isn’t exclusive. Factual truth is
necessarily exclusive, for a fact is either true or it isn’t. Spiritual truth
is, indeed necessarily is, potentially true and necessarily false because that
to which it points, that ultimate reality that we call God, is essentially and paradoxically
the unknowable known, both being and not being at the same time. Questioning
does, or at least can, drive spiritually grounded faith deeper. Questioning
undermines faith that is grounded only in fact because questioning might lead
to a denial of a supposedly foundational fact.
Therefore even otherwise intelligent people believe and
say stupid things when they adhere to a literalistic faith. Their doing so of
course requires them to engage in a lot of compartmentalization. It certainly
appears that Ben Carson is doing precisely that. As an accomplished physician
Carson must be very knowledgeable about medical science, and he must trust the
truth of the findings of medical science. Yet he won’t let the kind of critical
thinking and investigation that leads to advancements in medical science have
any role in his religious faith. If he did let contemporary critical techniques
influence his faith he would never say anything as stupid as the pyramids are
Joseph’s grain elevators. It is such compartmentalization that makes religious
literalists say stupid things.
Compartmentalization is not what God wants for us. God's
dream for all people is wholeness of life, the kind of wholeness we see in
Jesus Christ. An entity that is capable of wholeness but that is
compartmentalized into different parts that don’t mesh and that don’t
communicate with each other is broken. It is not fully realized or, to use the
term for it from Jungian analysis, fully individuated. It is not, in other
words, whole. It is not fully what it was created to be. So it is with humans
who compartmentalize the way biblical literalists do and must. They are broken,
they are not whole. They have not attained the abundant life that the Gospel of
John tells us Jesus came to give us. Not that any of us attains that life fully
of course. We are, after all, creatures not gods. Yet compartmentalizing our
being so that our brains don’t communicate with our faith is a clear sign of
brokenness. It must surely take a great deal of spiritual and emotional energy
to maintain that compartmentalizing, energy that could be put to constructive
not destructive uses. God calls us to wholeness of life. Biblical literalists
put a significant obstacle toward getting there in their own paths, or at least
they let some church leader put them there for them.
Faith doesn’t have to make us stupid, nor does it have to
make us say stupid things. True faith never does. God gave us brains, and it
simply isn’t possible that God doesn’t want us to use them. Any remotely
properly functioning brain will know, if it bothers to know anything about it
at all, that the Egyptian pyramids are the tombs of pharaohs. Whether or not
they are also ancient power plants I can’t say, but they clearly are tombs and
not granaries. Saying that they are granaries is stupid. An intelligent, in
some ways perhaps even brilliant, person saying that they are is a sign of the
worst kind of intellectual compartmentalization. I don’t hate Ben Carson, but I
sure hope no one as spiritually broken as he seems to be doesn’t become
President of the United States.
[1]
Not everyone who thinks unorthodox things about the pyramids is a religious
literalists like Carson is. I know a woman who thinks the pyramids aren’t tombs
but what she calls “ancient power plants.” Whatever her reasons are for
thinking that (and I couldn’t possibly tell you what they are), they aren’t
grounded in biblical literalism.
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