Rachel Mikva on the dangers of religion

Rabbi Rachel Mikva wrote the book, Dangerous Religious Ideas, and she is here to discuss the ways that religion is harmful.

Listen here, read the transcript below, or click here for the full video version.

George Mason:
Welcome to Good God, conversations that matter about faith and public life. I'm your host, George Mason, and I'm delighted to be able to welcome to the program today, Rabbi Dr. Rachel Mikva. Rachel, it's great to have you with us, I'll introduce you here in a moment, but it's a real treat to have you on Good God.

Rachel Mikva:
Thanks so much, George. I'm delighted to be here.

George Mason:
Wonderful. Well, for those of you who are joining us for this program, let me say that Rachel is the Chair of Religious Studies at Chicago Theological Seminary and a Senior Fellow for the InterReligious Institute there. And she has also been a congregational rabbi and so she knows her work, both from the congregational practice of religion side of things, and also from the academic side. And so, she brings both of those things into play and all of them converge, in a sense, in this book that, as I hold it up, is called Dangerous Religious Ideas. The subtitle of which is The Deep Roots of Self-Critical Faith in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. All right, so there it is. Dangerous Religious Ideas is the main title. Provocative, of course. And then the subtitle, which is, I think, kind of a way of qualifying the main title. So let's talk about that aspect of it before we get deep into the subject itself. How is the title and the subtitle related, in your mind?

Rachel Mikva:
So the title flows from a conviction, really, that all of our religious ideas are dangerous. And progressive people, religiously progressive people, like to imagine that, oh, I've already reformed my religion. My religious ideas aren't dangerous. Dangerous religious idea are those peoples. Somebody else. And so, I want everybody to grapple with the tension, with the capacity ... The fact that something that flows out of our deepest religious convictions, not some marginal possibility that we hold off on the side, but even from our deepest convictions, actually also at the same time has the potential to cause somebody harm. And we have to be able to grapple with that. So I wanted everybody to pay attention and that's where the provocative title comes from. The red cover, that was the publisher. I think that contributes to the idea that it's a scream against religion.

Rachel Mikva:
But I am, in my scholarly life, what I study is the way that scriptures have been interpreted and embodied over time. So in the academy, we would call that history of exegesis. That's what I do. That's what I study. And it's clear to me that when you look at the history of that interpretation, and the embodiment of those interpretations, that religion is always both a source for blessing and has this potential for harm. And my training as a rabbi is very much in a dialectical tradition. Always holding these truths in tension one with another and using that tension to find our way. And so that's where the title and subtitle come together to do that work.

George Mason:
Well I think that people who are even faithful and regular in congregational worship and study have a conviction, regardless of where they fall on the ideological spectrum, whether more conservative or more progressive. They do have a sense that scripture is foundational for them in terms of their faith tradition. And even those who claim that it is authoritative, and maybe even the word of God itself, when you actually ask them about particular texts, there's an interesting thing that happens in my experience. You'll have people who will say things like, "Well, you can't interpret the Bible the way you want to. You have to take it all or you have to reject it all because it's God's word and it's therefore absolutely authoritative."

George Mason:
And then you ask them something like, "Jesus said, if your eye offends you, pluck it out or if your hand causes you to sin, cut it off and throw it away." And you don't see anybody plucking out their own eye or cutting off their own hand. They read that and then they say, "Well, that's obviously hyperbole or some such thing." And right there, they're already doing something of self-critical faith that is an interpretive exercise to qualify this dangerous nature of a text.

Rachel Mikva:
Right. Absolutely.

George Mason:
And we do this in all of our religions is, I think, actually part of your point, right? Although you cover the three Abrahamic religions, this is actually true even, I think ... For example, I've recently become more and more acquainted with the Sikh tradition, the Sikh religion, and they move from an original emphasis on fighting and swords as an act, knives and all of that, as an act of defending people for the sake of justice. To making that more of a figurative understanding of fighting. And so, there's a sense in which we've all done this in our religions, haven't we? So can you talk more about that?

Rachel Mikva:
Sure. I think one of the things that I'm trying to demonstrate is not only are we doing that currently, but we've always done that. And that even if we believe that this is the word of God that we're holding in our hands, it's always been an interpreted text. And the traditions ... And the reason I wrote about these three are that these are the three I know enough about to write about them. The others, I dabble in learning about the beautiful manifold diversity of spiritual life stances. But Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, I know enough about as a scholar to write about. So first, sticking with scripture as an example, for instance, first I talked about what the dangers are. Even for those of us who don't necessarily feel that we're holding God's explicit word in our hand, but rather a human record of the efforts to hear the voice of God and the teaching of the divine, people will wield the word against one another to justify their own worldview.

Rachel Mikva:
Not only do I think you're wrong, God says you're wrong. Or the scripture says you're wrong. And we'll need to reckon with voices that are left out of the canon. But it is an eternally relevant text that continues to guide and inspire and move us to do what we believe to be right. So in the past, scripture was believed to be the divine word, explicitly, but there was always an awareness of multi-vocality in scripture and in its interpretation. So if you think about it, the gospels themselves in the cannon, it's the gospel according to, and you tell the same story multiple times. But it's not exactly the same because it was experienced a little differently in each voice. In Muslim tradition, in Islamic tradition, there's an idea that Mohamed received the Quran in seven [foreign language 00:09:07], seven variants or versions. And that the miraculous nature of the Quran is that they all are really teaching the same thing, but at the same time, we're able to speak directly to particular context peoples.

Rachel Mikva:
And the fact is that they knew, in the early stages, that there were variants in what was beginning to be written as a text. And somehow this was the way they understood that multiplicity. Judaism valorizes multiplicity. These and these are the words of the living God. But in addition to that you also have, in the traditions, going way back, a strong insistence that we should be somewhat humble about our belief that we understand God's intent. Nicholas of [inaudible 00:10:07], borrowing terms from Augustine, talked about this learned ignorance. I tell doctoral students, by the way, this is what I tell them, that what you learn as a doctoral student, is how much you don't know. That's advanced learning. But humility about the limits of our understanding, especially when it comes to the divine, that's deeply embedded in all of our traditions.

Rachel Mikva:
There's also a profound awareness of the provisional nature of truth, that what faith is about is not certainty. These are truths to live by. This does not have to be an absolute. The mystery of it is the capacity to guide one's life by faith. And they also, all through the tradition, also value doubt as part of faith. Not as the opposite of it, but as the piece that keeps you growing and keeps you learning and keeps you searching and keeps you awake. And when we become complacent in our faith, then our faith begins to shrivel a little bit. And the other thing, and this surprises people is, there's actually a deep consciousness of historical change. We imagine that's a modern awareness, but they understood historical change and it's impact on the meaning of scripture. My favorite example of this comes from Jewish tradition where Moses is imagined to be sitting in Rabbi Akiva's classrooms.

Rachel Mikva:
Akiva is an early rabbinic figure from the first century CE. And so this is a fabulous story where Moses shows up in the classroom, but he has to sit in the back, because he's not a particularly good student. He doesn't understand what they're talking about. So he's getting more and more confounded by what they're teaching and finally one of the students further up says, "Rabbi Akiva, how do you know this?" And Rabbi Akiva says, "It's from Moses on Mount Sinai." And Moses, of course, feels better and the story goes on because it's very complex and has multiple dialectical layers of what it's trying to get at. But in this moment, it's saying it could be simultaneously true that this is an authentic continuation of the [inaudible 00:12:40] revelation and completely unrecognizable, the guy who was standing there on Sinai. And I love, I mean that consciousness of historical change is deeply embedded throughout the traditions. And we have this weird assumption that what we think something means, it's always meant that. And that's just not the case.

George Mason:
I come from a tradition, Baptists, that have a sense that our duty as a church, as theologians in the Baptist tradition, is to try to get back to the New Testament understanding of the church. And that we're always almost leapfrogging from our time back to that time, in order to understand what is the pure truth of things. That before it got diluted across time and culture and all of that, if we could only reclaim that original. But it's an elusive goal, isn't it? And in fact, it creates all sorts of problems of its own. So there's a sense where ... Judaism wrestled with this.

George Mason:
And what you're talking about in the story of Rabbi Akiva is partly this sense of the oral Torah that has come from the written Torah. And that there are varying ideas within Judaism of how authoritative the oral Torah is and depends on what denomination or outlook you have about that. But there's a kind of inevitability, I think is what you're saying, about our interpreting these texts in any given time and place, and recognizing that that's actually not unfaithful, it's the only way you can actually have a religious community, is to acknowledge that process and then be self critical about it.

Rachel Mikva:
Right. And I appreciate the interest in going back to recover this kind of pure teaching that we feel somehow tradition has muddied. And obviously the Protestant, the Reformation is a big drive around that, and there are multiple denominations within Protestant Christianity that are still trying to do that in various ways, and often, really inspiring drivers for that work. Is there a less patriarchal message coming from Jesus if we get rid of a millennium of a patriarchal tradition. But I feel like tradition has just, like religion has, because these are bound up with one another, both added to the good stuff and problematized things. Or made things more problematic. So for instance, both Jesus and the rabbis clarify what it is believed, that scripture is saying when it says eye for an eye, tooth for tooth. The rabbis say that what the Torah was teaching was actually restorative justice.

Rachel Mikva:
You don't poke the guy's eye out. You compensate the victim for the loss of the eye, for healing, costs of medical care, for any permanent earning loss, for pain and suffering. There are five criteria for which the mission is quite clear, this is how you do an eye for an eye, and it's all about restorative justice. And I know Jesus was similarly trying to say, "Well, don't think about it this way, think about it this way," in a more restorative of kind of way. And without those teachings of later tradition, of our Torah teaching, it could look like a brutal kind of scripture. A very dangerous religious idea. So, tradition's done a lot of good stuff in terms of helping us think about distilling out the dangerous stuff and trying to rescue the parts that are the force for blessing in the world. But it's also added layers that can be problematic too. Sometimes the same traditional idea can do that.

Rachel Mikva:
So in Islamic tradition, there's a concept of [foreign language 00:17:44], which is abrogation. So an older religious idea could be, whether it be something that Mohamed received via revelation, could be overwritten by a later revelation. But so too could an older scripture be overwritten, so too could an older tradition be overwritten. So at the same time that it made room for progress, it was also used as a tool of supersession over the previous traditions. In Christianity, accommodation gets used the same way. Both for very good things. That sacrifice was about what the people needed at the time and we don't need to do that anymore. We understand different ways we can approach the divine. And so that's set aside, so that's great. But at the same time, the ideas about accommodation were also used to supersede Judaism. So again, tradition's a mixed bag, just like religion is.

George Mason:
Well, if we have a moment we've got to get back to supersessionism. I think that's another a topic in your study, but I think before we do, let's get onto another religious idea that is dangerous in all of our traditions. And that is the idea of chosenness or election. When you have a sense of a people who understand themselves as a people, the very idea of a people of faith, that is a covenant community of some sort around a religious idea or experience. Then you almost inevitably have both the blessing of this unifying binding force that religion is, but also the tendency to otherness, which makes people outside of it. So talk a little bit about how, in our three traditions, this idea of chosenness or election has played out as a dangerous idea that is also mitigated in various ways.

Rachel Mikva:
You ask little questions.

George Mason:
Yeah. Yes. The whole subject, right?

Rachel Mikva:
I think it's like 100 pages in the book. It's a big section. Well first, again, I start with, well, what's really dangerous about this? And I come down to two things, you named one of them, that's othering. The way that we ... If we're going to create a community, that's great. But there is a complimentary problematic element of that, which is whoever's not inside the community is outside. And the way that human beings tend to think about people who are outside or other or different. And our scriptures make it really clear how easy it is for human beings to do this. So you look at the beginning of Exodus and all Pharaoh has to say about those people who had been welcome guests in the country is, "Oh, there's so many of them now. What if our enemies came and they became a fifth colony?" Or if you look at the book of Ester and all Haman has to say is, "You know those people, those Jews, they don't actually ... they have different laws. They're different. And it doesn't really serve your purposes to suffer them." It's what he says to King Ahasuerus.

Rachel Mikva:
So it's awfully easy to other people and we, unfortunately, readily load judgment onto difference. So it's not just different than, it's greater than or less than. So that's a problem in the way that human beings think. That's not a religious problem, but because religion is so good at building communities, it magnifies the problem. And the other danger that I name is conquest. And we can look at the of chosenness and the way that an election and the ways that it has justified conquest. So again, there are all kinds of ways in which the traditions themselves have grappled with this. So in Jewish tradition, for instance, there's, from Deuteronomy, horrible instructions about essentially genocide against the Canaanites when taking the land. And it's clear from archeological evidence that that never happened, but it's still there as a commandment. But the rabbis teach that when the Assyrian empire conquered Northern Israel and the Babylonians came to conquer Judah, even in that first wave of Assyrian empire, the way that the Assyrians dealt with people was to move them all out of their land so that they had no sense of being home, no land reclaim.

Rachel Mikva:
They weren't home, they weren't there. And moved other people in. So they mixed up all of the ancient tribes under the Assyrian empire. And the rabbis say, "[foreign language 00:22:58], there are no more Canaanites because [foreign language 00:23:00] mixed them all up." So these teachings in Torah are completely irrelevant. So there is a recognition of certain kinds of dangers in the way that stories were told in scripture. The way that we other people, the justifications for conquest. But there is this need in all of our traditions, that have a God centered theology, it's a little redundant, but to recognize that not all spiritual life stances have a God, but ours do. And there's a need to believe that God is invested in what we're doing. We're trying to shape our lives, our world, in response to what we understand of the divine call.

Rachel Mikva:
And we have to believe that God has a stake in this. So the tendency to think about chosenness election, the ways that our actions do matter to God, or itty bitty little human actions matter to God, is wrapped up with this, the theologies of chosenness in election. And there are, again, beautiful things that draw from it, which you started to also name. But they can become problematic in the way that we other folks. And I do, I go through various examples in history of how that unfolded, but also the things that our tradition names, that our traditions name as problematic about it, and how to try to tease our way between those.

George Mason:
So Christianity took this idea of chosenness or election and turned it into something that really has to do with salvation. That for Christianity, that turn was really important partly because it was a way for Christianity to account for Gentiles coming out of Judaism, and said that this is a way we can universalize, in a sense. But in doing so, it also established a notion that the whole of chosenness or election is really about salvation rather than what Judaism might say about it or what another religion, like Islam, might say about it. And then we impose that on everyone else. So the point is always whatever our point is.

George Mason:
And so, it seems to me that ... So Christianity has had to wrestle with this, like the other religions, there's an exclusivist point of view and then there's an inclusive point of view and then there's a pluralist point of view. This is a way that we've tried to come about that, that is, it's only us and if you want to get in on this, come and be like us. Or is there a way for it to be true that actually includes more people, whether they know it or not? Or the more pluralist view, there may be many ways to get there. There seems to be something, Rachel, in all of our religions that has to grapple with how does God account for our particularity, but also include other people who don't share that tradition? That seems to be an important move toward a more mature faith that mitigates some of these dangerous ideas, wouldn't you say?

Rachel Mikva:
Yes, I do. At the same time that this book, I deliberately tried to make it speak to exclusivists as well as inclusivists as well as pluralists. It doesn't matter, if you hold God's own truth in your hand, you still require self critical faith in order to make sure that you, as much as possible, do good things with that truth and not things that are harmful to your fellow human beings or your world. And so, I mean, the book I'm working on now, which is an introduction to religious engagement, which is for a lot of undergraduate and graduate classes, in thinking about how we navigate religious difference in constructive ways, has a whole chapter on ... And people have written books, obviously, from single traditions. Much less multiple traditions. But the book has a chapter on what I end up calling parody pluralism, because I used to try to distinguish theological pluralism from a generic commitment to active engagement across religious difference.

Rachel Mikva:
And so the inter-religious space has lots of room for people who are not theological pluralists, who believe that they're going to heaven and nobody else is unless they belong to their tribe. But who are still committed to, while we're living in this world together, we need to get along, we need to use our spiritual commitments to do good in the world. So there are plenty of people who can make that commitment, but not a theological pluralist commitment. Some way in which God understands and celebrates the multiplicity. And so, I want to cultivate that those capacities, no matter where people are on the theological spectrum ... Anyway, I stopped calling it theological pluralism when one can understand God as helping to fashion and to sustain and to celebrate the great diversity of religions, when I realized that I was also trying to make space in this conversation for non-theistic traditions.

Rachel Mikva:
So how do I do that? So I ended up calling it parity pluralism as opposed to the pluralism project that Harvard University tries to recognize that pluralism doesn't require a theological conviction for God wanting there to be religious difference. But I mean, I am a parody pluralist. I am delighted to meet and learn from people of different life stances who are even ... Let me say that a little differently. I am delighted to learn and be with them and believe in the value of their path for them, at the same time, that often meeting them also illuminates my own path. It's not that I want to walk the walk that they're walking, but what they teach and believe about something will capture my spirit and find its language in my own faith.

George Mason:
A really important about the inter-religious aspect is how it's a mirror to us, isn't it? It really forces us, if we are doing it right, if we're not just trying to convert someone in that conversation, it can reveal those places in us that maybe we've forgotten about. Or that we've neglected. And recognize that there's something we need to reckon with in our own faith.

Rachel Mikva:
Yeah. A lot of times some people are afraid of inter-religious engagement, that will somehow weaken their faith. And those of us who work in that space a lot realize, no, it doesn't happen like that at all. It deepens our faith. It, again, awakens and keeps us from being complacent about what it is we think. We have to explain ourselves to somebody and suddenly we have to think about it harder than we used to. One of my favorite examples is a Vaishnava Hindu student was coming to study at our seminary and she was in the first week of the History of Christian Thought. And the professor was teaching about Paul. And she grew up in India, so even as a Vaishnava Hindu in America, she might of heard of Paul. But she'd never heard of Paul. She raised her hand, she said, "Who's Paul?" It was like the best class ever because everybody had to stop and think, well, who's Paul to me? How do I explain Paul to somebody who has no context for it? And it was just great.

George Mason:
Well, this is a good place for us to put a pin in this conversation and come back and have another one, that we're going to do another episode on, because you've already introduced us to the inter-religious space and the idea of a parody pluralism. And we're going to come back and talk more about that in our cultural milieu of democracy and religion in America. So Rabbi Rachel Mikva, thank you for being on Good God. Thank you for this conversation about dangerous religious ideas in these Abrahamic traditions and the need for a self critical faith. We are grateful for all your work and the contributions you make to help make us better.

Rachel Mikva:
Thanks so much.

Speaker 3:
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