lavendersparkle (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
lavendersparkle) wrote2009-03-16 05:50 pm
lavendersparkle) wrote2009-03-16 05:50 pm
Left-wing Christians and antisemitism
I was faffing on the internet and came across this. It struck me as a bit off and you can see my reply to it. The thing I found objectionable wasn't so much their anti-Zionism in itself, although I'm never going to agree with a position that removes the country of many millions of Jews, it was the fact that the 'occupation of Palestine' was the only conflict they mentioned specifically. There are 2 billion Christians in the world. The whole of the EU, the US, Canada, Australia and Russia are all Christian majority, at least culturally speaking. Could they not have found a conflict involving Christian majority powers to have mentioned? It just strikes me as a bit odd and clueless. If you're going to have a group of left wing members of group X, which has huge amounts of privilege compared to group Y, which has been oppressed by group X for hundreds of years, starting off by criticising a large section of group Y for being all nasty and oppressive is probably the wrong way to go. It's a bit like a group of middle-class feminists focussing on domestic violence among the working classes. Stop trying to make yourselves feel better by concentrating on the perceived misdeeds of a group you've othered. It never ends well.
Unrelated to Israel, is the other thing which makes me get twitchy around some left-wing Christians. A tendency toward Marcionism. Angela Tilby gave a lovely sermon about this heresy which is reprinted in Heresies and How to Avoid them. The problem comes that if you are a nice liberal Christian there are lots of bits of the Bible which aren't so nice and liberal and lots of actions of the early church weren't so nice and liberal either. So they have a bit of a problem. So, like Marcion, some of them decide that bits of the Bible are 'inauthentic' and edit those bits out. In the late 1990s the Jesus Seminars colour coded the Gospels to show what was authentic and inauthentic accounts of the words of Jesus. Oddly enough this left wing group came up with a picture of Jesus who was an anti-authoritarian hippy who wasn't big on rules.
According to Angela Tilby, antisemitism is one of the diagnostic tests of slipping into Marcionism. Marcion attributed the bits of Gospel he disagreed with to the Gospel having been corrupted by Jews. Left-wing Christians tend not to go in for that sort of conspiracy theory, but they do sometimes tend to attribute any bits of the Bible they don't like to the patriarchal nastiness of the culture its authors came from, and guess which culture that was. Acknowledging that all writings which have been written so far have been written within and influenced by patriarchy is a perfectly sensible thing to do, but sometimes it turns into externalisation, if one doesn't acknowledge the patriarchy of one's own tradition. There's a strain of left-wing Christianity which portrays Jesus and Christianity as this great liberation from patriarchy, homophobia etc. This works to better effect if you can portray what came before as really really patriarchal and if you shift all of the troubling bits of Christianity to Judaism. So some Christians forget that 'love your neighbour as yourself' appears in that much maligned book, Leviticus (Leviticus also instructs us to love the stranger as ourselves, so we've got everyone covered) and ascribe anything which might seem a bit sexist in Paul to his Jewish side getting the better of him. In its most extreme manifestation German Protestant feminist theologian, Christa Mulack, saw Judaism as analogous to Nazism, obedience to the commandments of G@d as analogous to obedience to the commandments of Hitler. She saw Judaism as the source of patriarchy and therefore responsible for all genocides of Western civilisation, including the Holocaust.
Rhetoric like that is bad enough in the pulpit, but the idea of The Jews as wicked, violent, sexist and militaristic compared to pacifistic feminist Christianity can easier spread from the pulpit into the streets and everyday and political discourse. I suppose this is where it comes full circle. I can understand why Western Christians would be genuinely concerned about the welfare of Palestinians. However, when Christians fixate on the misdeeds of Israel to the exclusion of consideration of any other conflicts, particularly those involving Christian aggressors, one has to worry that the Marcionite habit of externalising all the sins of patriarchy to the Jews has reared its head again.
Unrelated to Israel, is the other thing which makes me get twitchy around some left-wing Christians. A tendency toward Marcionism. Angela Tilby gave a lovely sermon about this heresy which is reprinted in Heresies and How to Avoid them. The problem comes that if you are a nice liberal Christian there are lots of bits of the Bible which aren't so nice and liberal and lots of actions of the early church weren't so nice and liberal either. So they have a bit of a problem. So, like Marcion, some of them decide that bits of the Bible are 'inauthentic' and edit those bits out. In the late 1990s the Jesus Seminars colour coded the Gospels to show what was authentic and inauthentic accounts of the words of Jesus. Oddly enough this left wing group came up with a picture of Jesus who was an anti-authoritarian hippy who wasn't big on rules.
According to Angela Tilby, antisemitism is one of the diagnostic tests of slipping into Marcionism. Marcion attributed the bits of Gospel he disagreed with to the Gospel having been corrupted by Jews. Left-wing Christians tend not to go in for that sort of conspiracy theory, but they do sometimes tend to attribute any bits of the Bible they don't like to the patriarchal nastiness of the culture its authors came from, and guess which culture that was. Acknowledging that all writings which have been written so far have been written within and influenced by patriarchy is a perfectly sensible thing to do, but sometimes it turns into externalisation, if one doesn't acknowledge the patriarchy of one's own tradition. There's a strain of left-wing Christianity which portrays Jesus and Christianity as this great liberation from patriarchy, homophobia etc. This works to better effect if you can portray what came before as really really patriarchal and if you shift all of the troubling bits of Christianity to Judaism. So some Christians forget that 'love your neighbour as yourself' appears in that much maligned book, Leviticus (Leviticus also instructs us to love the stranger as ourselves, so we've got everyone covered) and ascribe anything which might seem a bit sexist in Paul to his Jewish side getting the better of him. In its most extreme manifestation German Protestant feminist theologian, Christa Mulack, saw Judaism as analogous to Nazism, obedience to the commandments of G@d as analogous to obedience to the commandments of Hitler. She saw Judaism as the source of patriarchy and therefore responsible for all genocides of Western civilisation, including the Holocaust.
Rhetoric like that is bad enough in the pulpit, but the idea of The Jews as wicked, violent, sexist and militaristic compared to pacifistic feminist Christianity can easier spread from the pulpit into the streets and everyday and political discourse. I suppose this is where it comes full circle. I can understand why Western Christians would be genuinely concerned about the welfare of Palestinians. However, when Christians fixate on the misdeeds of Israel to the exclusion of consideration of any other conflicts, particularly those involving Christian aggressors, one has to worry that the Marcionite habit of externalising all the sins of patriarchy to the Jews has reared its head again.
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However, I've been thinking quite hard about your post today. Feminist theology (I think) has taken a back seat in relation to queer theology. But pondering what you've said, I suspect that the same criticism applies (if not more so) to some kinds of queer Christian theology.
For example, today I've been reading (at least a bit of) a booklet called "Exploring Diversity":
http://www.tssf.org.uk/Members/Resources%20and%20Downloads/Exploring%20Diversity%20-%20final%20proof.pdf
It quotes from Gareth Moore's book, "A Question of Truth – Christianity and Homosexuality" on pg8-9, where it says this about the passages in Leviticus that mention same-sex activity:
"Moore addresses these verses by drawing attention to the sexual inequality that existed at the time they were written.
‘It was considered the role of men to active, to lead, to command, to be strong, to possess, and of women to be passive, to follow, to obey, to be weak, to be possessed.’"
But, the question that springs to mind for me, considering your points is: "what is Moore saying of the Judaism lived out by those who feature in Leviticus?" and "did/does Judaism consider that it's the role of men to be strong, possess etc. and women to be passive and obedient?"
After that, the booklet continues to quote Moore:
"In this context, the man was considered to be superior to the woman, and their (basically penetrative) sexual activity was thought of as embodying this."
Now in one sense, one could just nod and continue to read the text, but whoah!!! Were men considered superior in Judaism? Not according to my reading of Genesis, but I might have a non-Jewish reading. Even still, I've never heard anybody say that Jews regarded men as superior. And secondly, erm, how on earth does he get to the conclusiont hat penetrative sexual activity embodies superiority? I find it a bit odd.
The booklet goes on to quote Moore:
"'There was perceived to be a divine plan of male dominance, which was symbolised by the sexual penetration of the woman by the man. Consequently, this quoted law forbids a man treating a man sexually as he would treat a woman, because it is counter to the accepted divine hierarchy rather than a homosexual act as such.'"
Now, whilst it's fairly clear what Moore is attempting to do... he's basically trying to say that Leviticus doesn't condemn same sex activity, but men "changing roles". I'd rather just say that Leviticus condemns same-sex activity because what Moore does in actuality appears to me to be quite an anti-Jewish reading.
But there are other questions raised by an attempt to wrestle with Scriptures that make us feel uncomfortable. Rather than dismissing them in quite this way, I suspect that a dialogue would best be begun by feminist Christian theologians speaking to feminist Jewish theologians... I say that because I presume that feminist Jewish theologians might have an interpretation of the same-sex activity passages in Leviticus that is not anti-Jewish.
What do you think?
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I've heard this a similar argument made by Jewish gay apologists. The argument goes, gay sex was forbidden because, at the time it tended to involved exploitative power relationships. This either a stupid argument or a sexist argument because surely heterosexual relationships in that time were even more exploitative than homosexual relationships, so why would G@d institute these rules to protect the men but not ban heterosexual sex to protect women.
I don't think that criticising the culture of Leviticus is necessarily antisemitic. For one thing, modern Judaism is incredibly different to the Judaism within which Leviticus was written. One could take offence at the dismissal of a book of my scripture but that would get me upset at everyone who wasn't my religion.
One thing I find annoying is the way that Moore takes an Jewish idea which may be relevant to our understanding of Leviticus 18:22, but distorts it to make it nastier than it is. Maybe the idea was originally nastier and Judaism has made it nicer over the millennia. The idea is the importance of classification and separation. This theme runs throughout the Torah. The word 'holy' in Hebrew is likely to have been derived from words for 'separation' and 'withdrawal'. Jews today still have prayers at the end of sabbath and festivals which bless G@d for separating the holy from the everyday. According to Rashi, in the story of creation G@d actually made everything on the first day and the other five days were spent putting everything in the right place. The Torah contains commands not to mix different crops in a field, not to mix different types of fibres in clothing, not to yoke different types of animals together. Different types of people have different sets of obligations: men, women, Jews, non-Jews, resident aliens, slaves, priests, first-born. There's an understanding that holiness and creation are about separating types and clear boundaries. A place for everything and everything in its place. This doesn't have to be about better and hierarchies. There are definitely Jews who interpret this idea as making Jews superior to non-Jews and men superior to women, but I don't think that there is anything inherent in the idea of separation require this interpretation.
The most thoughtful discussions of homosexuality in Judaism I have seen have been about how the prohibitions on sex between men should be seen within this framework and then the discussion becomes how much leeway is there in the halacha when this idea is balanced against the need to mitigate the harm the halacha may do to Jews who fall in love with people of the same sex. How can we balance the wish to have clear separate roles in society with the problems that might pose for Jews to live fulfilled lives.
Of course, the other avenue Jews tend to go down, which I've never seen Christians do, is to get very technical and explicit about what sexual acts Leviticus 18:22 might actually be prohibiting. This discussion can lead to a position where some sexual acts are allowed between men and others are prohibited.
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