What is Religion? Medieval Heresy/ Modern Islamophobia
Today, 18 December 2015, the Augusta County (Virginia) Public Schools are closed. It’s not snowing. It’s not raining. They closed because a High School Social Studies teacher assigned her students an exercise in Arabic calligraphy, related to a world geography lesson. Angry parents (as well as a number of people with no connection to the community) responded with threats credible enough for the county sheriff’s office to advise closing the schools. The parents’ anger stems from:
Kimberly Herndon, an Augusta County parent… said that by having students write “indoctrination,” [the teacher] took away the students’ right of religious freedom…. “If my truth can not be spoken in schools, I don’t want false doctrine spoken in schools.”
Leaving aside the fact that this assignment was entirely within state guidelines and that a similar assignment was done related to China, the interesting issue here is one of religion. What I mean is that the fear shown by Herndon and those who support her position is that study = advocacy and (more interestingly) that there’s a seamless correspondence between what you do and who you are. If you copy the shahada — particularly in Arabic — then you have been “touched” by Islam, that (for Herndon) lies have been presented as “truth,” that you have been polluted.
This is precisely the concern that permeated Europe beginning in the late 12th century. The threat, however, wasn’t Islam but rather Christianity itself.
Around 1200, Christianity began to eat itself.
The loss of Jerusalem to Saladin in 1187 and, more importantly, the failure of the 3rd Crusade to recapture the city, created a sense in Europe that God was angry with His new chosen people. There must be sin. What else could explain the Christians’ failure in the Holy Land? What else could justify the sufferings upon them that Saladin had inflicted?
So, the overwhelmingly homogeneous population of Europe at the time began to look inwards. They looked for that sin and found it. The devil, the old enemy, was working secretly in their world.
Since the first centuries, Christians were sure that the devil and his demons could work in this world. Monks, the “soldiers of Christ,” fought against the demons’ wiles in a spiritual battle that ensure not only the monks’ own salvation but the right ordering of the world. This continued. But in the 11th century, the demons began to manifest themselves physically in the form of Jews and (especially) Muslims. The First Crusade was an apocalyptically-tinged confrontation, a cosmic war between good and evil that began as a call to fight against the “enemies of Christ” and led to attacks on both Jews and Muslims, as 2 heads of the same beast.
But, Christian Europe thought, the devil wasn’t done. He didn’t just work over there but was also at work right here. As the father of lies, he corrupts, but he hid his deeds. And he had agents. Heretics.
They strive… to separate the flock from the care of Peter, the shepherd to whom the Good Shepherd entrusted it. Inside they are violent wolves, but they pretend the tameness of sheep until they can get inside the sheepfold of the Lord…. They are sons of depravity from the father of wickedness and the author of evil, who are resolved to deceive simple souls.
The image above shows how the devil could hide in plain sight. Heretics put on the appearance of the good but were corrupted inside. This evil would pour forth from them, the work of the devil would only appear, at an unexpected time. Christians in the Middle Ages found the perfect metaphor for this concern in the health of the body. Heresy, inspired by the devil to lead good Christians astray, to corrupt their souls, was a “disease,” a “pollution.” Once a contaminant was allowed into the sheepfold, into the body, it spread. Corruption occurred through deception, with words. Then these words became deeds.
Note the tension here between “internal” and “external.” The “real” part of religion was internal — something inside a person. The danger of the heretic was that, superficially, they looked like everyone else and acted like everyone else. They hid what was was “evil” about them, slowly leading an innocent soul astray until their new, evil internal beliefs were demonstrated by evil actions.
In the first place, they usually say of themselves that they are good Christians, who do not swear, or lie, or speak evil of others… They invoke with their own interpretation and according to their abilities the authority of the Gospels and the Epistles….
Then they attack and vituperate…
There is not so much distance between Bernard Gui’s 14th-century Manual for Inquisitors and the “indoctrination” that Herndon and others are, still, so worried about in Augusta County, Virginia. This is the “danger” seen by Trump and his bigoted supporters railing against the evils of Islam and Syrian refugees. They must be kept out of the sheepfold. “They come,” Trump says, “dressed as sheep, but they are secretly wolves.” Their presence, their existence among us, poses secret, yet cosmic danger.
The unrecognized paradox that lies behind the concern about teaching about Islam, or even simply cultures of the Middle East, is that tension between internal and external. Religion for Herndon et al. is an internal matter — a privileged relationship between the individual and God. It isn’t shaped or challenged by action. In that sense, nothing someone else does should challenge the belief that lies at the core of their religion. Nothing someone else does should be able to challenge one’s “religious freedom.” The paradox, the problem, is that modern evangelical Christianity still owes much more than it’d like to admit to its medieval roots, to the 13th and 14th centuries — both concerned that the world is changing, that the world isn’t as homogeneous as it used to be, that people are asking questions, and that there are people out there who are fundamentally different from them.
