I
continue to explain some of my responses to Elicka Sparks’s book The Devil You Know.
Sparks
claims there is a link between fundamentalism and a violent, crime-ridden
society. What, exactly, is that link? Sparks points out components of the link.
I will describe one of them here, and others in later essays.
The
first link is this. From a fundamentalist viewpoint, Violence is frequently the godly thing to do. This principle contributes
to a violent society in which crime is common.
The
Bible, revered by fundamentalists, contains many very violent passages.
Especially in the Old Testament, but also in the New, God commands violence,
sometimes extreme forms of it. Sparks has page after page of Biblical quotes.
When God led the Israelites to the Promised Land, as fundamentalists would say,
or when the Israelites conquered it, as history would say, the Bible indicates
that God commanded the Israelites to kill every man, woman, and child in the
Canaanite cities, with a special emphasis on stabbing pregnant women to kill
their fetuses. Except when, once in a while, God told the Israelites to take the
young women for themselves, that is, the virgins who cannot possibly have evil
fetuses in them. But there are also violent passages in the New Testament.
Some
of these passages can be deeply disturbing. The prophet Isaiah (that is, one of
the prophets by that name) predicted that God’s Army would utterly extinguish
the Babylonians. One of the ways this would happen, according to chapter 13, verse
16: “Their
infants will be dashed to pieces before their eyes; their houses will be
looted and their wives violated.”
It
is not just during war that the Bible claims God commanded violence. The Old
Testament also commands violence as part of normal jurisprudence. In Numbers
chapter 5, a jealous husband can, without evidence, demand that his wife be
subjected to a trial by ordeal to establish her guilt or innocence. She has to
consume water containing dust from before the sacrificial altar—dust that may
contain lots of bacteria, though they did not know this. It is referred to as
“bitter water,” which may or may not refer to water that contains an
abortifacient herbal extract. If the woman’s abdomen swells, and she has a
miscarriage, then she was guilty. The intention was not to kill the woman, but
of course this was a very great possibility. The main point, though, is that
the woman may get sick or even die regardless
of whether she had committed adultery or not: there is no connection between
the outcome of the ordeal and the truth of the charge.
It
is, as no one reading this essay will find surprising, extremely hypocritical
for modern conservatives to claim that every embryo and fetus is precious when
their Old Testament God commands a trial by ordeal in which an unborn baby is
killed for the supposed sins of the mother or of the pagan society into which
it might otherwise have been born.
The
first link between conservative Christianity and crime, then, is this.
Christians may say that God is love, but the Bible depicts a God who is at
least sometimes very bloodthirsty. To the extent that Christianity influences
our culture, then, it opens the collective national mind to violence as an
option. Criminals know that violence is part of a Christian society, and as a
result they feel free to embrace the option of violence. Violence is quickly
and easily thinkable as a mode of social interaction, because violence is part
of Who God Is.
Today,
Trump Christians want us to go back to a frontier mentality of solving conflict
through guns. And they can cite book, chapter, and verse to support this.
In
the next essay, I will explore another link that Sparks makes between
conservative Christianity and crime.
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