If the title of this blog entry led you to believe that its purpose is to criticize theology, you would be correct.

As used here, ‘Freaking’ is not an adjective, not a clean version of the ‘F’-bomb, and certainly not a placeholder for ‘Damned’ (although prepending ‘God-’ to the latter as a description for God-talk would not take us too far from the matter at hand, it would, nonetheless, be unnecessarily hyperbolic).

Freaking is used here as a verb, similar to the way that an economist and a journalist (i.e., a pair of geeks) ‘freaked’ economics, to give us the NY Times bestseller Freakonomics. While Freakonomics presented the social and pop culture side of economics, or as the book’s title suggests, “the hidden side of everything,” my hopes are definitely not as ambitious. Over the next few blogs I will try to present aspects of the social side of theology, especially its monotheistic variations of Islam, Christianity, and Judaism, that escape because they are associated with an all-powerful God, the fear of whom extends to fear of criticizing anything associated with It. Freaking becomes necessary because much of what goes without saying is nothing more than debated and debatable double-talk, whose dubiousness was appended to ‘God’, written down as ‘transcendent,’ and then transmitted as if it ‘self-evidently’ comes without saying.
A basic premise underlying this exercise in freaking is that as monotheism evolved from monolatrism, henotheism, and polytheism, there were political and economic factors influencing and determining this evolution, as much as, or even more than, the processes of moral rationalization and providence. As such monotheism can be subjected to historical (process of evolution), sociological (economic and political), or other empirical evaluation, since it was not the result of a miraculous Immaculate Conception.

If I can be permitted to borrow Durkheim’s useful definition of religion, we will define it as “a unified system of beliefs and practices relative to sacred things, that is to say, things set apart and forbidden – beliefs and practices which unite into one single moral community called a Church [or Ummah, or Jewry], all those who adhere to them.”

For our purposes, theology comprises the system of beliefs and dogmas that justify the division of the world into sacred and profane; mythology comprises the stories, legends, and wisdoms that employ colorful and multi-layered imagery, and folksy charm, targeted at mass appeal, for the same purpose of theology; rituals and ceremonies are the practices that produce and reproduce the feeling of powerful forces that are sensed by the community and individual. This religious trinity is ‘unified’ because relative to societies today, all strata and classes of early human societies shared in the expression of the three religious aspects and we can point to their ‘theology’ only in the classroom.

As the social and economic life evolved from family and clan based hunter/gatherer orientations to accommodate family, clan, tribal, and empire-based agriculture and trade, a division of labor occurred that assigned responsibility for rational and mythological explanations of the religious experience, as well as the vision and division of the world, to a class of priests. The more civilized and cosmopolitan a society or empire, the more wealth, power, and prestige are concentrated in a complex of political, financial, and military elite and away from a complex of wage and slave laborers.

A ‘civilized’ society hides the fact that the elite not only relies on physical means of domination (which to the civilized is considered as uncivilized), but also must increasingly implement and rely upon symbolic (misrecognized) means. The more layered and stratified a society, the more misrecognition must be built into the symbolic means of domination. It should be obvious where we are headed with this line of reasoning: the mythological and rationalized explanations of the division of the world into sacred and profane include symbolic means for elite domination that are not recognized as such.

I am quite aware that the religious believer might view the preceding statements with some suspicion, if not reject this entire enterprise as blasphemous and irreligious. To my religious brethren I submit that in societies where economic and symbolic capital are concentrated in an elite, the priestly class usually depends on patronage provided by the elite, and this patronage secures for the class, an existence set away from the fields, markets, battlefields, and councils, where its members can reason more complicated means of symbolic domination into existence.

It is little wonder that prophets and heretics target this class in their assault on the political and economical situation, while the priesthood redirects attention from these “worldly” ascribing otherworldly destinations of salvation and doom for their admirers.

I am quite aware that the scientific believer might agree with one or more of the preceding statements as being based on a fair sense of history and empirical data. To my scientific brethren I submit that science and philosophy – scholasticism in general – also fell under the purview of the priestly class, and science became a separate and autonomous discipline no more than a few hundred years ago, but not independent of the elite social classes. Science and philosophy began as ‘natural’ and rational explanations, respectively, of the religious experience; their explanations tightly related to God-talk theology in monotheism-oriented societies. If the critique of symbolic domination is true for the priesthood, it is also true for the scientific academy as well.

Monotheistic God-talk invented the curse of Ham to make the symbolic domination of dark-skinned people holy, while scientific Nature-talk invented eugenics and race theory to make that same domination scientific. All societies (especially the major monotheist and atheist ones) in history consecrated both slavery and the unequal treatment of women, using theology and science, and it is rare indeed for the descendants of slaves or women to occupy anything but dominated positions in the multiple layers of societies, past and present.

While ‘scientific’ has replaced ‘holy’ as the basis for what separates sacred from profane, these rational and mythological (that is to say symbolic) justifications for the vision and division of the world continue to be concentrated in a diminishing complex of political, financial, and military elite away from a growing complex of wage slave-laborers. As theology (and science) continues to rationalize domination or demand absolute devotion, the dominated must demand from God-talk (and nature-talk) that it start serving the right master.

Next Freaking Theology: Prophetic-Heresy.