TIMING is everything in the news business. The New Statesman had a really cracking religious story last week, only ten years late: Rowan Williams reviewed a book on biblical archaeology, God: An anatomy (Picador), by a humanist scholar, Professor Francesca Stavrakopoulou. There was nothing in it that should not be taught in churches; but there was also a great deal that no archbishop could say without scandal.
The earliest biblical language about God, he says, “belongs in a mindset for which the divine is a hugely magnified version of physical human dominance — male (and sexually predatory), aggressive, imagined in terms of conventional masculine glamour. The biblical god may have had a comprehensive theological makeover by the time the Hebrew Scriptures reached their present form, but the untamed alpha male deity of archaic west Asian myth is never far away. There is even solid archaeological evidence for the god of Israel, like his earlier counterparts in the region, originally having a female divine consort.”
“God had wife, says Archbishop” would have gone down wonderfully well at the Daily Mail — and, indeed, everywhere else.
The characteristic caveats could only have made the publicity worse. “We are told more than once that this book introduces us to ‘the real God of the Bible’ — a phrase whose oddity becomes more marked the more you think about it,” Lord Williams writes. “‘The Bible’ is a set of very diverse texts bundled together as a canonical unit by Jewish and Christian believers.
“There is a central strand in Jewish and Christian imagination which insists that bodies marked by weakness, failure, the violence of others, disease or disability are not somehow shut out from a share in human — and divine — significance. They have value and meaning; they may judge us and call us to action. The biblical texts are certainly not short of the mythical glorifications of male power that Stavrakopoulou discusses; but they also repeatedly explore divine solidarity with vulnerable bodies, powerless bodies. Is this a less ‘real’ dimension of the Bible?”
NOW, a leap from a man who probably wishes that he’d never been Archbishop to a man who possibly still thinks he ought to have been. Dr Michael Nazir-Ali’s reception into the Roman Catholic Church got a long piece in the The Mail on Sunday, but it wasn’t really about him. Instead, it was pegged on the horrifying report from the French Church about the numbers of sexual assaults perpetrated by priests and lay helpers (News, Leader Comment, Paul Vallely, 8 October).
The same line was taken up in another New Statesman piece, by Megan Gibson, this one starting with the acquittal of two priests who were the first to be tried by the Vatican itself, earlier this month.
“It seems extraordinary that even under the fiercest public scrutiny and an ever-diminishing faith in the Church, the Vatican remains incapable of reconciling its actions with the purported desire to end the problem of sexual abuse,” Gibson wrote. “It’s not just that the Vatican fails to hold individual clergy members to account for alleged crimes, or that it fails to address shocking revelations of depravity on behalf of its members. What is most astonishing is that the Church continues to work against the tide of righting its past wrongs.”
It’s a pity that the magazine should publish something this superficial in the same issue as Williams’s review. But it is a fair reflection of mainstream opinion of the RC Church today, however unfair.
IF I were looking for unregulated power and unreported abuse today, I’d look at the fringes of American Christianity where Charismatic practice shades into outright shamanism. Michael Flynn, a man pardoned by Donald Trump for crimes committed in his service, has been trying to weaponise the QAnon conspiracy movement. This turns out to have unexpected dangers.
You might think that there is nothing too ludicrous to tell an audience of conspiracy theorists, but you’d be wrong. Flynn is now being denounced as a satanist for prayer that he delivered at the Nebraska congregation of the Lord of Hosts Church. The Daily Beast quoted a portion: “‘We are your instrument of those sevenfold rays and all your archangels, all of them,’ Flynn said, later adding, ‘We will be the instrument of your will, whatever it is. In your name, and in the name of your legions, we are freeborn, and we shall remain freeborn, and we shall not be enslaved by any foe.’”
It turns out that this was an echo of the wonderfully named Elizabeth Prophet, who led a doomsday cult in Montana in the 1990s. “In one address to her congregation, Prophet said, ‘In the name of Archangel Michael and his legions, I am freeborn, and I shall remain freeborn, and I shall not be enslaved by any foe within or without.’”
So, to his more excitable followers, this was proof that Flynn was another satanist baby-eater, just like Hillary Clinton. It does seem unfair that this should be denounced as dangerous gibberish, when Paula White, for example, is treated as a prophet, but them’s the breaks. Flynn has had to go on YouTube to deny that he was a literal worshipper of the devil — but only a devoted follower of Donald Trump.