CHAPTER 7         

A MATRIX OF DANGEROUS RELIGIOUS IDEAS

Peoples in the ancient Near East had special relationships with their tribal gods; in essence, each was “chosen.” The Philistines were favored by Dagon and the Moabites by Chemosh. Initially formed by this model, Israelite religion had to grapple with the profound implications of its developing monotheism on such a relationship. If Yahweh is indeed the God of all the world, what then does it mean to choose a nation? There is no simple answer; Tanakh records multiple perspectives on the significance of election and God’s relationship to other peoples, while also wrestling with its impact on how humans relate to each other.

Within New Testament, too, there is an evolving understanding of chosenness. It moves between “We are Israel also” and “We are Israel instead,” as the authors fashioned the criteria and consequences of belonging. Hellenistic influence reshaped the formation of identity, with religion less rigidly attached to nationality. As with philosophical schools, individuals could navigate a religious path based on compatible praxis and perspective, not simply the people among whom they were born or dwelled.¹ To be chosen, then, came to mean affirming the singular mission of Jesus in the service of the one God. Election to eternal salvation—a concept foreign to Tanakh—became central within Christian thought, but it is not the only possibility explored within the gospels and epistles.

The language of chosenness in Qur’an is most often attached to individuals whom Allah reportedly favored and guided in the generations before Muhammad (Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Ishmael, Elisha, etc.). In the Prophet’s time, however, those who submitted to God’s will as conveyed by Muhammad as the final messenger—Muslims—became the elect. Faithful embrace of his teaching could earn a place in the heavenly gardens and save one from the fire. “They are the people guided by their Lord; they are the successful” (f-l-h, 2:5). Qur’an transmits ayat that seem to affirm the salvific capacity of previous revelations—even presenting religious pluralism as a key component of Allah’s redemptive plan—but other passages are stridently supersessionary.

As assertions of election were increasingly contested, these competing religious claims played out in governance, public affairs, art, scriptural exegesis, and other literature with substantial consequences. Yet chosenness does not mean the same thing in each tradition, nor does it have a single significance within any one of them. Particular interpretations become normative, but never static. Even the questions it raises shift in response to historical context. In the modern age, moral implications have moved to the forefront: Why would the God of all humanity choose some and not others? How has presumption of such status justified wrongdoing? What about the “unchosen?” The idea seems dangerous. Two of its most prominent problems can be categorized as conquest and the evaluation of difference.

CONQUEST

“The biblical idea of election is the ultimate anti-humanist idea,” Jeremy Cott asserted in a critique that posits conquest as the primary expression of chosenness.² He identified the issue as one of scarcity. Limited availability of land, resources, and power has been a source of human conflict throughout time. Religion magnifies the potential for violence by offering divine justification to take these essentials by any means necessary, and by inventing new forms of scarcity—one treasured people, one path to God or to salvation.³ Historical examples abound that illuminate the dangerous linkage of conquest and election, and it is not uncommon for peoples to imagine that God takes their side in battle. Anticipating war with the Canaanites, Deuteronomy 9:3 states: “Know now that YHWH your God is the one who passes before you, a devouring fire. God will wipe them out and subdue them before you so that you may quickly dispossess and destroy them, as YHWH has told you.” Centuries later, dramatic early successes in building the Islamic empire were interpreted to vindicate the singular truth of Islam. According to Tim Winter,

Islam could claim to have outmoded Judaism by the sheer fact of its triumph: as Freud cynically put it, “Allah showed himself far more grateful to his chosen people than Yahweh did to his.” And in respect of Christianity, it was assumed that the absorption of the great patriarchal cities of Antioch, Alexandria and others into the Muslim world could never have been allowed by a God who did not regard Christianity as obsolete. . . . Jerusalem’s Islamic monuments yield an allegory of supersession which is no less deliberate than that of St. Peter’s Basilica and the other signs of Christian mastery of the once-pagan capital of Rome.⁴

Conquest can be conceived in spiritual as well as political terms. Western colonialism was motivated by desire for dominance and material gain, but facilitated by aspirations to “convert the heathen” and a sense of entitlement as God’s elect. The world convulses still from the subsequent transformation and decimation of subject populations and cultures. Each example reveals the insidious power of rationalization that election provides: Gerónimo de Mendieta, a sixteenth-century Franciscan commissioned to write a “History of the Indian Church” in Mexico, believed Spain was chosen to lead the final conversion of the world. Having expelled Jews and Muslims from the Iberian peninsula, the Spanish set out to the New World to convert the “last” pagans and usher in the kingdom of God. Cortés was his Moses, liberating the Native Americans from demonic powers and winning more souls for Christ than Luther had taken from the Catholic Church.⁵ John Cotton invoked 2 Samuel 7:10 in a sermon for Puritan voyagers to the New World in 1630: “Moreover I will appoint a place for my people Israel, and I will plant them, that they may dwell in a place of their owne, and move no more; neither shall the sonnes of wickednesse afflict them any more.”⁶ A sense of being God’s chosen people provided consolation for their suffering at the hands of Anglican authorities, and clear title to the land they were going to occupy.

Despite the evocative biblical summons to love the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt (Lev. 19:34, Deut. 10:19), experiences of persecution offer no protection from becoming a persecutor. A more common human response is to emulate the violence inflicted upon us and release the torrent of resentments that accumulate under subjugation. As Musa Dube pointed out, the Israelites suffered under numerous empires and the early Christians under Roman oppression, yet both developed their own theologies of conquest, operating under claims of chosenness.⁷ Conquest is not intrinsic to chosenness, however. In the following chapters we will read of countervoices, both historical and contemporary, that work to decouple them. Thickly entwined with political agendas and embedded in the “will to power,” justification of conquest is an intractable problem of election, but it is a byproduct.

DIFFERENCE

Ultimately, the fulcrum of election is the identification and evaluation of difference. Conquest cannot be justified without formulating a distinction between us and them. Establishing a chosen people simultaneously creates peoples who are not; an in-group constructs an out-group, potentially leading to discrimination, persecution, and violence. Thus, the consequences of election are bound up with attitudes toward the other in religious traditions.

Difference is a pervasive element in human existence. It is a building block of the way we think, as is poetically illuminated by the biblical creation narrative that envisions God creating the universe through distillation of difference: night is separated from day, water from land, etc. (Gen. 1). More simply, we can examine how Sesame Street uses the sorting song “One of These Things (Is Not Like the Others)” to teach basic cognitive skills. Difference is how we learn, how meaning is made possible, and how we understand our relationship to the rest of the world.⁸ It is significant, not only to the issue of chosenness, but to the religious project as a whole—integral to identity, faith, and practice. We can mark difference without viewing it as evidence of inequality, but humans frequently conflate the two. Research in social identity theory has demonstrated that group membership, even if arbitrarily assigned, provokes favoritism for members and discrimination against those outside.⁹ Religious ideas such as election and salvation are certainly prone to burden distinction with dangerous baggage. Consider Rousseau’s argument that democracies must affirm multiple paths to salvation: “It is impossible to live at peace with people whom one believes are damned. To love them would be to hate God who punishes them. They must absolutely be either brought into the faith or tormented.”¹⁰

Navigating difference is further complicated because it is constructed by those who hold power in society. William Scott Green noted, “A society does not simply discover its others, it fabricates them by selecting, isolating, and emphasizing an aspect of another people’s life and making it symbolize their difference.”¹¹ The ones with power get to define themselves—and to define others as their (inferior) opposite. In this social structure, deviant is the other of normal, alien the other of citizen, criminal the other of law-abiding, animal the other of human, woman the other of man, black the other of white. Assertion of dominance depends on the creation of an “other,” so self and other are mutually constituted.¹² It is ironic that the most similar is often set up as one’s opposite. There is no creature on earth as similar to man as woman, for example, and yet she is his “other.” It is this proximate other that stimulates the greatest anxiety: “While difference or ‘otherness’ may be perceived as being either like-us or not-like-us, it becomes most problematic when it is too-much-like-us or when it claims to be-us. It is here that the real urgency of theories of the other emerges, called forth not so much by a requirement to place difference, but rather by an effort to situate ourselves.”¹³

As a consequence, struggles for the power to define self and other within the religious “family” of Abraham, Sarah, and Hagar can be especially fraught. Jews, Christians, and Muslims are often the most proximate others—geographically, historically, and religiously—and they have depicted each other so as to define themselves. An honest reckoning with the dangers of election must investigate historical instances of “othering” within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—and the ways in which they can still infect relationships between people of different religious traditions. The catalysts may be social, economic, and political concerns, but conflicts are often constructed around cultural identities. Religious values, beliefs, and narratives give them meaning, frequently framed by a moral binary of good and evil.¹⁴

The following chapters explore these dynamics in greater detail within each tradition, but several examples here serve to elucidate the unique ways in which religion shapes the problem. While there is an unfortunate tendency to collapse the polysemic scriptural teachings into one voice, the sacred texts do include passages with troubling views of difference that are animated by ideas of election. In the Tanakh, Canaanites and Amalekites are to be obliterated; no one is considered innocent. A number of New Testament texts present “the Jews” as a singular and malevolent entity: blind to the meaning of their own scripture, responsible for the death of Jesus, cast off by God for their sinfulness, children of the devil. Qur’an repeatedly denigrates pagans, Jews, and Christians.

This rhetoric is polemical, used to strengthen group identity and to demonstrate why they are God’s elect. Nonetheless, the demonization of the other in sacred texts breeds abiding hostility because these biases do not remain isolated on the page. One of the hallmarks of “successful” scriptural religions is a hermeneutic that makes the text eternally relevant, so the images become archetypal in our religious imagination. Time and again, for example, Amalekites stand in for the demonized other: Protestant reformers identified the Catholic Church as this eternal enemy, Luther and his student Johannes Brenz invoked it against the Jews, many American colonists cast Native Americans in the role, and some ultranationalist Israeli settlers see Palestinians as the Amalekites of today.¹⁵ Always, the biblical association assigns transcendent significance and kindles deep-seated emotion. Always, the identification justifies what might otherwise be seen as immoral action against them—killing, deportation, occupation, legal discrimination—because they stand over against God’s elect.

There have been interpreters, past and present, who sought to limit hostile passages within their historical context. Modern readers frequently invoke such strategies to circumscribe the potential dangers. Farid Esack, for example, has struggled with a number of troubling ayat (including those that vilify some Jews as apes and pigs) and lamented the way they continue to poison conceptions of non-Muslims. After recounting the tension that arose between the communities in Muhammad’s lifetime when most Jews did not embrace his prophetic status and some stood against him in early conflicts, he concluded, “Historicizing the text is probably the only way that the text itself can be saved in a world where we understand a bit more about a) the insidiousness of attributing to any historical community—and all communities—ahistorical characteristics of praise or opprobrium, and b) the interconnectedness of all forms of life and the fact that the diminishing of any species really spells the diminishing of all species.”¹⁶

Even without violence and demonization of the other, the concept of chosenness is fraught. It can encourage chauvinism (you are good, but we are better) and division (you are all right, but association with you may draw me away from the chosen path). Families have been ripped apart by imagining that one of their own will be going to hell for abandoning the path of the elect. Interreligious understanding is undermined by suspicions that people want to persuade everyone that their faith is superior, or that they stand closer to God’s own truth.

Yet election also provides the traditions with valuable sustenance, helping to fashion the boundaries of community and solidify its glue. Beyond the raw survival advantage of a strong group identity, it instills a sense of purpose among adherents. God has a stake in their embodiment of the divine promise and supports their endeavors. Chosenness strikes on all the cylinders discussed in chapter 1 that give religion its power. Critiques are weakened to the extent that they fail to reckon with its positive potential or reduce the meaning of election to something singular.

To grapple with the very real problems, then, we begin with an exploration of chosenness in the scriptural material. The theme is so pervasive and polysemous that this review cannot be comprehensive, but it demonstrates a range of thought that broadens the possibilities of meaning. Dangerous ideas are embedded there, but so are contrapuntal voices that suggest different understandings of and insights about the hazards of election illuminated within the texts themselves. Then, selecting from historical layers of interpretation, the discussion concentrates on issues of conquest and difference. How were the scriptural texts understood, and which ones came to dominate the religious imagination? What happened as the dangers became alive, wielded through erasure, discrimination, demonization, oppression, or warfare? How do recent representations still echo older tropes, revealing how complicated it is to expunge religious bias? Some examples manifest the problems and others diminish them, demonstrating the longstanding capacity within religious traditions to uncover their own weaknesses and to transmit multiple and even opposing ideas. There are voices that reject conquest and writings that acknowledge the fundamental humanity, equality, and value of religious others. These redemptive readings plant seeds for more fruitful possibilities of meaning.

Each tradition is treated in its own chapter. Because we should not allow the dangers of election to determine its meaning, each chapter concludes with focal points of chosenness that indicate its positive religious value and enduring significance—not unalloyed blessings, but capable of nurturing worthy aspirations and profound ideas, addressing a compelling range of human needs. Since even these powerful teachings cannot erase the threats of conquest and othering, however, the final chapter of the section examines how they continue to play out in the public square.

Two caveats are in order: (1) Since the subject would require a book-length study to provide a thorough review of a single religious tradition, the history is necessarily selective. It presents a series of exegetical snapshots. Like any anthology of material, the selection itself is an interpretation and my reading of it comprises only one of many possibilities. (2) Although the details in each tradition are obviously unique, the challenges they present are shared. The snapshots are designed to convey urgency in dealing with the dangers and to excavate strategies for containment, not to judge one faith or another.

We can neither wish chosenness away nor permanently purify the concept of its poisonous elements. Despite the real harm inspired by history’s living out of election, these ideas are deeply embedded in the sociological, philosophical, psychological, and political dimensions of our being. But we can identify the dangers and the benefits, recognize the common burden, and recover the strength of alternative readings—including those that demonstrate the self-critical foundations of faith—as we reckon with the place of dangerous religious ideas in the construction of the human.