Does the Seminary Curriculum Support a Fundamentalist World View?
Recently I had a conversation with a parent of a seminary student who was exposed to an article that attempted to justify the wholesale slaughter of the people of the land of Canaan by saying the following:
Ritualistic Baal worship, in sum, looked a little like this: Adults would gather around the altar of Baal. Infants would then be burned alive as a sacrificial offering to the deity. Amid horrific screams and the stench of charred human flesh, congregants — men and women alike — would engage in bisexual orgies. The ritual of convenience was intended to produce economic prosperity by prompting Baal to bring rain for the fertility of “mother earth” (quote attributed to Pastor John Mabray)
Bisexual orgies? child sacrifice? institutionalized prostitution? First of all let’s think for a moment about how ironic it might seem to sacrifice infants to a fertility god. Even if this statement made logical sense, the above statement does not reflect our best understanding of the Canaanite religion, or the ritual worship of Baal. It is an effort to dehumanize the people of Canaan. If they aren’t real people they are animals, or merely objects to demonstrate the glory of God. Perhaps they are not deserving of God’s efforts to save them as he tried to save those people of Nineveh by sending Jonah, as one example.
The first question we should ask is this: Did the conquest of Canaan really happen as it is described in the Old Testament? While there is evidence of warfare and certainly conflict in and around Jericho and the land of Canaan the biblical accounts and the historical accounts are not congruent. The closest they come (in hypothetical terms) is about 150 years, but it’s not widely believed among archaeologists that it was occupied as a walled city in the late 13th century BC during Joshua’s conquest.
I tried to take some comfort in the fact that this Seminary teacher had gone off script, and was teaching his own world view, but a survey of the seminary curriculum, in particular a survey of the lesson he was likely teaching from contains the following quotation that seems to indicate he wasn’t very far off the script:
“[Warfare] is a grim and ugly if necessary matter. The Canaanites against whom Israel waged war were under judicial sentence of death by God. They were spiritually and morally degenerate. Virtually every kind of perversion was a religious act: and large classes of sacred male and female prostitutes were a routine part of the holy places. Thus, God ordered all the Canaanites to be killed (Deut. 2:34; 3:6; 20:16–18; Josh. 11:14), both because they were under God’s death sentence, and to avoid the contamination of Israel [Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (1973), 279]”
The message is that God ordered the Hebrews to kill all the Canaanites because they were under a divine death sentence. Never mind the gross liberties taken in his characterization of Baal worship. On the one hand God causes a nation to be slaughtered down to the children and animals. On the other hand, instead of doing his own dirty work he employs his chosen people to do the slaughtering, as if engaging in divinely sanctioned genocide is in some way a glorification God. Given our own history, we Mormons need to avoid any suggestion that divinely sanctioned murder can be justified. In addition, this justification is dangerously close to the now disavowed doctrine of blood atonement in which god demands death to atone for some sins.
This quote from the seminary manual is similar in a a lot of ways to the previous quote from Pastor John Mabray. There’s a reason for that. Rousas John Rushdoony founded a movement that is known as Christian Reconstructionism. Christian Reconstructionism represents a brand of Christianity that advocates for the establishment of Old Testament biblical law in modern society. Under its order secular law is inferior to Theonomy: a christian theocracy. In Theonomy the death penalty would be sanctioned for all kinds of actions including homosexuality, blasphemy, idolatry, and witchcraft. This kind of belief raises the specter of a christian Taliban, or ISIS in which legitimate secular governments are ignored, and sectarian beliefs form a government conforming to an image of belief. The more I look at Christian Reconstructionist ideology the more I worry about its apparent influence in mainstream Mormon schools of thought, and especially its influence in curriculum given to children in early morning and release time seminaries.
Beyond the source, there is also the context of this particular quote. Why was it included? It’s not in the main body but in the “Commentary and Background Information”. It’s prefaced with two pieces of context “God may declare the destruction of the wicked to prevent sin and unbelief from spreading” then follows with this quote:
“The Lord … doeth not anything save it be for the benefit of the world; for he loveth the world, even that he layeth down his own life that he may draw all men unto him” (2 Nephi 26:23–24).
. . . God so loved the Canaanites he wiped them out. So far I’m appalled. It seems that the manual is trying to answer the question: Why did God order the genocide, rather than the more important question: Did God order the genocide? I think that the latter question is more helpful, and leads to a better discussion of what it means to have an account in our scriptures of a God who commands people to do an evil thing, who subsequently do it. In recent history God has been credited with, among other evils, support for slavery, racism, sexism, and polygamy.
When we start looking to God to excuse our own behavior we’ve already lost ourselves. When we put our conscience aside for obedience to laws written 3000 years ago it means we need to start asking hard questions about what those words tell us. Are they really telling us what God wants? Alternatively, are they a record of one people’s understanding of their dealings with God? In this instance the most likely explanation is that the Jewish people needed a grand origin story, it probably never happened, at least not the way it’s written. The battle of Jericho may have happened, but it was probably less grand, and on a smaller scale. Did God help the ancient Jews? Perhaps, but we can have serious doubts that God commanded a genocide.
Is my point to destroy the Old Testament as a source of truth? No. My point is to reconcile an idea of a loving God with a book that ascribes to him an awful act of murder and genocide. Is that faith? or does that destroy faith? On the one hand some people would say that I am rejecting scripture if I reject its infallibility. On the other hand I might say that maintaining faith in a loving God and maintaining faith in a literal interpretation of scripture is impossible, at least for me. So to me, and people like me, this exercise is helpful in maintaining any faith at all in God, even if it destroys infallibility in the process.
Why is there evil in the world? and the more important question for anyone who believes: why is it done in God’s name? A world view that objectifies people as pawns in a divine game is not one that can lift them up to mercy. There are narratives here that can inspire, rather than show gratuitous deference for biblical infallibility and the raw power of God to destroy the wicked. Once we get beyond the black and white, or once we are the victims of suffering that world view becomes cruel. There are few things more poignant than the suffering of the Jews in the Holocaust. If God was responsible for everything we have blamed him for (in the bible) his trial would destroy the faith of anyone with empathy for his fellow travelers.
We have some very good resources for garnering a basic understanding of how the bible was composed within our community, and without. Unfortunately these ideas have not made it through the correlation committee. I understand that writing the curriculum is a difficult and arduous endeavor, I’ve done some myself in a past life, but considering the impact that this material has on young minds I am disheartened that we’re not seeing a more diverse set of views in the curriculum. Frankly, it is disturbing that an extreme inerrantist ideology has become mainstream Mormon orthodoxy as defined by CES and taught to our children.
Does the seminary manual need to resort to referencing theological viewpoints that do not support the idea of a loving, merciful God? Viewpoints and sources that would lead an inquisitive reader to assume that fundamentalist readings are sanctioned, or even good? I would suggest that we re-evaluate the seminary curriculum. A devotional reading is fine, in fact important, but source criticism can add the human element needed to save our faith from an apparently cold, bitter, and angry God.
