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SOCGRAD MINI-LECTURES
No. 22 in a Series of minilectures written for graduate students in sociology.
INTRODUCTION: The Sociology of Religion is, for the most part, a
description of that which is: a survey of the social organization of existing religious
forms, their own self knowledge, bits and snips of their history together with some
demographics. For Marx, Weber, Durkheim and a few others, the soc/religion deals with how
given socioreligious institutions fit into the larger political economy in which they
are found. There is great concern for both degree and direction of causal efficacy as
between religious philosophy and the other institutions of a society; esp. economics and
politics.
Recently, much soc/religion is oriented to the misfits in 'modern' society; vide the
Kephart and Zellner book on 'Extraordinary Groups.' Then too, there are studies of
cults, covens and curious eastern religions; sort of a 'My goodness, look at the quaint
folks who live at the margins of civilization' approach which minimizes and marginalizes
ways of life most important to the human project. Of late, fundamentalist religious
movements are getting a lot of attention since they do not fit well into a fully
commodified and secularized political economy....papers, articles and books on these tend
to pick out that which is slightly different and magnify it into a sort of demonology or,
conversely, as a pathway to salvation out of the faults and failings of modernity.
In this minilecture, I'd like to do something a bit different. I'd like to approach the
typifications of the Christ figure at Easter time using three methods from postmodern
critique: first as 'storytelling,' then as 'geneology' and finally as 'deconstruction.'
Such approaches might help the grad student better understand postmodern methods and,
perchance, better understand the ways in which the image of Christ changes. In all this,
the reader should keep in mind that I have a profound respect for religion, especially
those which expand their Dramas of the Holy to include rather than to exclude and oppress.
Then too, I have not 'believed' in most of the storys about the Christ figure since I was
figure...especially those oriented to social justice, compassion, forgiveness, redemption
and renewal.
A. As 'story telling.' Much in the postmodern camp treats all books, theories, songs,
dances, descriptions and explanations as stories which have a politics and a poetics.
Those of you who have studied or read the works of my most esteemed colleague, Laurel
Walum Richardson [Ohio St. U.] have seen this format used with great effect.
Each of the epochs in the knowledge process has its own 'story' about the Christ figure:
1. In premodern sensibility, Christ was either the Son of God sent to redeem
and to teach those for whom the temple was merely another convenient market place....or a
false prophet who preempted the power and majesty of God to his own purpose. In some
religions, Christ is seen as one in a line of prophets but not divine in his own person.
For most of the 1+ billion Christians, the Christ figure is essential to the end of
alienation; the sufferings, tragedies and sins of the world are set aside by the love and
help of the Christ figure.
and renewal in the Spring time. Through the long winter, both nature and humanity dies to
some degree only to reawaken with the coming of the summer sun and the promise of food
and warmth. As a pathway to knowledge, the Christ figure has been supplanted by science,
mathematics and the method of successive approximations to Absolute Truth as embodied in
formal theory.
dead; and modern science, advanced monopoly capitalism killed them both off. For some, the
Christ figure is much like my own reading of it....a good, wise and compassionate man who
tried to drive the oppressors from the temple and to invite people to live a life more
congenial to the human estate. For some, the Christ figure is much like that depicted in
Monty Python's 'Life of Brian,' a nice young man into whose life and times were read a lot
by those who, in their own venality and sensuality, need a personal savior. Some feminists
reject the male images of the divinity and turn to more feminist images for inspiration
and guidence. There are many in postmodernity who see the Christ figure as part and parcel
of the sociology of fraud; for Marx, the message of Christ and Christianity worked as an
opiate leading people away from the sources of real oppression; Feudalism, slavery,
capitalism and the 'idiocy' of primitive communism. For Freud, God, Moses and Christ were
various images of father, externalized and, variously, hated or loved...or in the curious
world of the subconscious, both.
B. As Geneology, Christ emerged at a time when tribal life was being displaced
by Empire...the old tribal gods were inadequate to the more Universal Being which trade,
commerce, and travel required. With his message that the only test for membership in the
Drama of the Holy was a) acceptance of God and b) living His plan fully and wisely. The
old tests for membership in tribal Dramas of the Holy required one to be born [or adopted]
into the tribe; to change one's ethnicity and to deny one's origins. Christianity emerged
in history at a time when 'civilization' was replacing tribalism. Note: I have an article
which makes this case in much more detail in the J. of Religion and Theology published at
U/Wisc. for those who would like to see a more macrostructural exegesis of 'Universal'
religions.
The next historical turning point which shaped the meaning of Christ and Christianity was
in the 4th century, a time of great economic troubles in the time of Constantine...the
story goes that the mother of C. turned to this new religion and that, C. in large part to
buy social peace, adopted Christianity and its message of social justice...one of the
messages of both old and new testament is the forgiveness of debt...one must forgive debts
every seven years in Deuteronomy...not a bad message for all those made homeless by their
debts to money lenders, tax collectors and minimonopolies in the market place.
In the 13th century, plague, pestilence, hunger, and poverty moved people toward
resistence and rebellion. Clerics and Nobility alike were successful in turning these
troubles into a pretheoretical social movement in which tens of thousands of young men
marched to Jerusalem to cast out Islam and, thus to please God and end the calamities He
had sent in his righteous anger upon Christians for allowing the Holy Land to be occupied.
Generally the Crusades failed. By the 15th Century, Islam had blocked the ancient trade
routes to the East where silks, spices and ceramics were obtained for European markets.
This lead Prince Henry of Portugal to encourage exploration to the West for a trade route.
The result of this event was several centuries of colonial expansion in the name of the
Christian God and the Christian kings.
In this geneology, the Christ figure is taken around the world and, every where is
assimilated into the local customs, beliefs, and human need for comfort and for
understanding of the meaning of a thing. The Learning Channel ran a series of the images
of the Christ figure as it was accomodated in the Americas, in the Asian countries and in
Africa...each very different from the neat and tidy bearded Christ in European imagery.
The advent of Copernicus, Galileo, and Newton profoundly changed the status of all
religions in human affairs. Bacon, in 'De Novum Organum' laid out the structure of this
'new body of knowledge' by which scientists were to replace priests and prophets in the
quest of a New Jerusalem. Newton, in 'Principia Mathematica' gave the world of scholarship
both a method and a mission. One was to find the laws of nature and society lurking with
the data [hypo=below; theses = that which is visible]. The long history of warfare between
Science and Theology is well chronicled in the magnificence treatise by A.D. White
entitled, The History of Warfare Between Science and Theology in Christendom. A. D. White,
for those of you at Cornell, was its first president.
In recent times, the Christ figure has been combined with structural marxism in Liberation
Theology. Those in Lib theology speak both of personal sin and of structural
sin...personal sin is that activity enjoined by the Decalogue and again in Deut.
Structural sin is that personal sin which over time, has been institutionalized: racism,
sexism, class inequality and political elitism. It speaks in a powerful voice to the
oppressed in the 3rd world...in Nicaragua, Guatemale, Honduras, the Philipines, in Haiti
and now in Chiapas, Liberation theology and radical transforming social change is
reunited as in the first and third century, B.C.E.
One final note in this geneology of the images and imagery of the Christ figure; with the
collapse of bureaucratic, elitist socialism, Pope John Paul has issued new
encylicals...his 'Centissimus Annus' was most interesting. In it, JP moved far to the
left in his economic policy calling for economic justice. The next series of Popes should
be interesting as they, too, shape the doxology and theodicy of Christendom to serve the
needs of their parishioners.
C. As deconstruction, the Christ figure is returned to the larger social life world in
which images and understandings of it are embedded in order to make visible that which is
omitted or emphasized. The point is not to destroy any given 'reading' of the Christ
figure but rather to consider other possible readings. What follows is from an article I
wrote several years ago entitled, The Typifications of Christ at Christmas and Easter. It
is in the book, the Drama of Social Life along with a lot of other essays about how the
symbolic interactional process works and is worked in late monopoly capitalist societies.
Machery, 1978, holds that the irreconcilable cleavages in society can be transformed by
religious song and story frm the ungraspable richness of everyday life into the
understandable, solvable symbol. Machery adopts Althusser's point that ideology woerks to
dispel the contradictions inherent in everyday politics, religiong and economy by offering
a solution framed within the logics of some one privileged group.
In the article mentioned, I return to the ways in which the Christ figure is
presented/represented in the American media at both Christmas and at Easter time...in
short, the Easter Christ in most mass media are typified in the following ways:
1. In many churches and televangelic broadcasts, we see the suffering Christ
who looks at the world through the eyes of the poor and those who are weary of heart. He
looks out with compassion, forgiveness and redemption. This message appeals greatly to the
many, many millions living on the margins of wealth and affluence. This Christ does not
look at the masses throught the eyes of the merchant, the usurious money lender [Visa,
MasterCharge, 1st Chemical or Chase Manhatten]. This Christ is far to charged with
suffering and anguish to be used as a vehicle into which to insert advertizements...not so
the infant Christ used at Christmas time. This Christ is far to dangerous to be used for
political legitimacy by the Whitehouse. Instead, the Whitehouse reduces the message of
Christ and Cruxification to the search for 14,000 brightly colored Easter Eggs today on
the White House lawn...carefully watched by parents, the media and dozens of Secret
Service agents.
renewal and the pastel colors of the eggs as well as the Easter basket recall, in their
colors, the promise of Spring Time. Change and Renewal are the significant typifications
in this facet of the Easter story.
the reconstitution of the moral order oriented to community. Christ did not die for the
individual sinner but rather for the redemption of all humanity and the movement of the
world closer to the City of God.
despari at the sacrifice of her child. This typification of the Easter story reverberates
through the very soul of the 3rd world mother who has lost her children to hunger,
disease, migration, crime, prostitution and the secret workings of police in the night.
outcast on the Cross. Ina world where millions of workers are discarded, where other
millions are homeless, where the mentally ill are made mentally ill and then pushed out
onto the street; in a world where crime is one way for an abandoned mother to feed her
children, pay rent, buy fuel or find money to take her child to the doctor, the affinity
of Christ with the thief resonates with a hope for forgiveness and salvation.
There must be a way out of the misery, poverty, meanness and meanspiritedness of life.
This drama of death and rebirth speaks powerfully to those marginalized by modern, high
tech society. Fundamentalist religion around the world; in Islam, Christianity and in both
the Hindu and the Buddhist tradition promises an after life in which the troubles and the
tragedies of this world are repaired and restored. One does not meet the false peace of
this world or of the grave but rather, one finds a new life and can, with faith and
patience, rise with the Christ figure to the side of his heavenly Father.
day...other than you and I...will go to church and experience it not as a building but as
a community of believers. One does not stay home on Easter morning, one joins the larger
community in pain, penance and compassion.
nation to another life, another time and another place. For those made small and powerless
by the structures of domination; by the great inequalities which daily grow in politics,
economics and social honor, this message is comforting. There will come an end to history;
there will come a reckoning; there will come a transcending justice which smites down the
oppressor and lifts up the oppressed.
In affirmative postmodern religion and theology, the suffering Christ reflects the
alienation of the world in significant ways. The Resurrection of Christ is a promise of
the transcendence of humiliation, indignity, and the suffering of the oppressed. One
cannot find such a message in modern science or modern sociology...one can find it in
religion...especially in Liberation Theology. Richard Quinney, a marxist criminologist,
makes the same point in his recent work...The ideological field in which the Easter Christ
dwells is an ideological field which is fundamentally critical of injustice, oppression,
and that suffering produced by an exploitative and oppressive world.
D. Other notes: Recently I gave a bare bones deconstruction of the wonderful
story about the Wizard of Oz...what I did not say is that the story is another Easter
story...it is about exploitation, oppression, change and renewal. It is not a coincidence
that CBS has shown it for over 25 years near or at Easter time. The story is a morality
play...it says that, with brains, courage, love and community we can defeat the Wicked
Witches who oppress us...that we all are Munchins made small by racism, sexism and, in
Baum's version, by the malefactors of great wealth...the Wicked Witch from the East
symbolized finance capital; the WW from the West represented the land and rail barons who
oppressed farmers and workers alike on behalf of 'bloated plutocrats' as Vachel Lindsey
put it in his poem about the populist movement and Wm. Jennings Bryan.
It was not a coincidence that Dorothy and Toto find the Strawman on a cross in a corn
field...Baum used the imagery of the cruxification as subtext to the story of finance
capital [the yellow brick road represented the gold standard, tight money, high interest
rates and supply side economics. The Silver Slippers [not ruby!] represented the silver
standard for US currency, low interest rates, and demand side economics. The figure of the
Cowardly Lion was also part of the cruxification story...the Lion embodied Wm. Jennings
Bryan who once was brave [his most famous speech was directed to finance capitalists; You
shall not crucify America on a Cross of Gold!!!]...but, after being defeated by the
Repubicans, Byran/Lion became a coward but wanted to find the courage once more to work
for change and renewal of America.
Finally, I want to point to Wm. Blake and his 'rules' about how to read discourse on
religion and renewal. This comes from his New Jerusalem poetics.
The Argument: While the true method of knowledge is [direct] experience, the true method
of understanding experience is poetic genius. This is an early statement about the limits
of science and empirical observation. It is the same message as Machery, Derrida and
Foucault...and earlier, David Hume, that all experience is interpreted out of
sociocultural themes and processes.
1. To be truly human, one must emply one's poetic genius. The 'forms' of all
things [experienced] are derived from that poetic genius...which the ancients called
Spirit or Angel or Demon.
alike in poetic genius.
religious philosophies derive from the infinite variety of truthful but differing poetic
genius.
access to the common experience of all, a universal poetic genius emerges which is
available to all.
genius....which is every where called the Spirit of Prophecy.
the true source is the true Human, s/he being the Poetic Genius.
I do hope this minilecture helps you come to the fullness of your morality...and validates the keeping of moral sensibility in your writing, speaking and teaching of sociology...it is your poetic genius which must take hold of the findings of modern sociology and make them work for an infinitely various but more universal sociology than has been the case to date.
Go in peace with your God,
T.R. Young