Spirit Versus God in Native American Culture. (04/08/2002)
A question I have always dreaded being asked, mostly because its answer is potentially damaging to my reputation, is whether or not I believe in God. Since native Americans generally privilege the notion of Spirit over the idea of God, even to the point of affirming belief in the former and denying it altogether for the latter, it becomes difficult and embarrassing to be forced into an identity, as a consequence of that choice, where the only applicable term for definition is expressed by the word "atheist." Being defined as a person who does not believe in God, being called an "atheist" by anyone at all, reduces your status to a level so low in European Christian society that you might as well not exist at all if you are foolish enough to admit to being one. Early colonial documents in America demonstrate why being identified as an "atheist," even if that word is not actually used in defining native beliefs at the time, became such a burden to people who had failed to adopt the terminology of a truly religious ideology characterized by the Christian faith of the colonizers. George Alsop, for instance, writing in Maryland as late as 1666 AD, stated that "[t]he Devil . . . is the only God they own or worship" when he described his impressions of native American belief systems. He also expresses the opinion that, if native Americans have a belief in God as Creator, they cannot say where He is, they do not know whether He is alive or dead, and do not worship Him in any acceptably civilized or significant way. Alsop even claims that native Americans sacrificed children to appease the Devil, a claim that is absolutely false. The idea that native people were either devil-worshippers or "atheists" made it infinitely easier, even essentially possible, for the colonizers to kill them without pangs of conscience, since ridding the Christian world of such horrible deformities was only what God expected His true and faithful believers to do.
This long legacy of lethal bias and hatred against the indigenous people of the Americas on the part of European invaders has created a residue of fear, even of self-loathing, that carries a sentence of damnation against anyone who claims to lack a certain faith that God actually exists. Because I was raised in white society, never lived on the reservation, and had only spiritual contact with my ancestors, I was particularly susceptible to the sense of condemnation that being a non-believer carries with it. Anything I say here, as a consequence, may well reflect only my own experience and may not be widely applicable to other native people and certainly does not apply to anyone from the nations who has been converted to a theistic point-of-view. So, when confronted with the question of whether or not I believe in God, or even with just the threat that someone might ask that question, I tend to panic. I don't want to answer and thereby condemn myself to the adverse consequences of admitting my own lack of belief, my own atheism. That aversion to being condemned by 90% of the people now living in north America who do believe in God has literally driven me to think of an answer that denies my unbelief, on the one hand, and allows me to remain true to my spiritual values, my native beliefs, on the other. At the same time, the answer I have been forced, by a perceived necessity of self-preservation, to fabricate opens a door with other questions, ones that are never asked by believers, for an examination of the consequences that accompany a firm and unshakable belief in the existence of an otherworldly and all-powerful Deity.
What I say now when the question of belief arises is that I certainly do believe that God exists as an idea in the minds of most people, most of the time. Since I vehemently affirm the existence of God as an idea, I cannot be called an "Atheist." I cannot even claim, truthfully, that God does not exist in my mind as an idea, since, if that were factually the case, I would not be able to inscribe the word "God" itself in this or in any other context. I would not be able to say the word "God." I would not be able to think it. Since I can do all of those things, since I am doing them now, it must be true that God exists in my mind as an idea.
Were I to leave things here where they now stand, my comments would probably not raise any serious complaint or alarm among most people reading this. Someone well-versed in theological issues, in philosophical concepts and debate, however, someone willing and able to carry this beyond its verbal surface, looking, as it were, toward the logical consequences of the position I have outlined, might call to mind any number of serious objections to what I have said. For instance, when I acknowledge the fact that God exists as an idea in the minds of most people, do I also believe that Deity exists outside the strict limits of human intellect? The simple answer is no, not at all. In other words, God exists only as an idea and not in any other way, or form, or condition, or state, or time, or place, whatsoever. That God is only an idea and nothing more is the position I take for myself here.
The primary reason for my certainty that God does not exist anywhere in the real material world is that every definition of Deity I have seen excludes Him in one way or another from the possibility of presence in material reality. To start at the top with a few examples: people, especially theologians, always insist above all else that God is eternal. At the same time, of course, they always argue that the world of material reality is necessarily temporal; that is, since the world is an object of God's creation, it must take its essential nature from the opposite pole of the dialectic that defines difference between Creator and creature, between that which is eternal without qualification and that which is merely passing out of existence through whatever current material form it embodies. In order to lessen the starkly exclusionary differentiation between the Eternal (God) and His temporal creation (people), several religions, Christianity in particular, have invented the idea that certain elements of creation share God's eternal nature by design in that they possess an immortal soul which transcends the purely temporal body it inhabits. The idea behind the inclusion of the immortal soul in this formula is to make God seem more human and the purely human seem more Godlike without actually sacrificing the radical divide that separates one from the other. Early Christian fathers even went so far as to argue that the soul was a material "body," since it seemed impossible for them to accept the idea that an incorporeal substance could adequately experience the rewards of heaven or the punishments of hell which were to be meted out by God's judgment for good and evil behavior during one's earthly existence. The promise of reward and punishment, of course, was used by the church to coerce moral behavior in a creature defined, by original sin, as radically disobedient to God's eternal and everlasting will.
My problem with this ideology stems mostly from the fact that I fail to see how, in any sensible way, the Eternal can be mixed with the temporal. Material reality, and the world is certainly material from edge to edge of the universe, as far as anyone can say, displays a marked tendency to decay. Seasonal and cyclical death is everywhere apparent in the material world and, while it might be reassuring to most people most of the time to believe that some things are immortal and everlasting, I fail to see any credible evidence suggesting anything material lasts forever. Since the world is material, and since it does decay, it seems impossibly contradictory to assert that God has any material existence in the real world. He is simply defined out of it.
Christian ideology has gotten around this objection to God's presence in the world in several ways. One assertion is that sensibility is not necessarily a quality that ought to be applied to God. His absolute power excludes Him from having to behave in ways that are limited to natural processes. If He wishes to mix the Eternal with the temporal, then nothing can stop Him from violating every existing law of nature. This is referred to as performing miracles. We all know from daily experience that the sun rises in the east and moves at a constant rate across the sky along the ecliptic until it sets in the west. This is a fact of material reality that has not varied over the course of time since the earth came into existence in its present form as a planet orbiting the sun. We also know that this motion is determined by material causes; that is, the mass of the sun naturally generates a gravitational field that locks the earth in a particular position relative to it. The earth's distance from the sun, the speed at which it revolves around the sun, the rate at which the earth rotates on its axis, and so on, are determined by material relationships that determine the appearance of the sun's regular and unvarying motion across the sky. Periodically, reports have surfaced in human cultures claiming that this motion has suddenly been altered by the intervention of God's will. Claims have been made that the sun has stopped its motion across the sky, that it has reversed the direction of its motion, that it has moved backward from west to east, that it has mysteriously changed color, that it has dropped down the sky and approached more closely to the earth, even in a threatening manner. These events are called miracles because they violate the expected and inevitable experience of human knowledge and observation. A event like this was said to have occurred on October 13, 1917 at Fatima, Portugal when the Virgin Mary appeared to three peasant girls there with a prophecy urging the Pope to begin an effort to convert Russia to Catholicism. Many people have connected the assassination attempt against John-Paul II in 1981 with the Fatima miracle because the words of the Virgin at her "appearances" there seem to imply her foreknowledge of that event. John-Paul's subsequent involvement in the events that led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, and to the removal of the Berlin Wall in 1989, are often cited as proof that the Virgin really did appear in Portugal.
The point of "events" like the one at Fatima, of course, is to demonstrate that, while God is essentially removed from the world, even defined specifically as not belonging to it, He nevertheless has the power to intervene in human affairs, through the agency of miracle, any time that He wishes to do so. The ultimate intervention of God in the world, and the one that holds the foundation of the idea itself, in the Christian tradition of the miraculous, was the birth of Christ, who was thought to be both completely God and completely Man simultaneously. As a kind of ultimate contradiction, and hence as an example of absolute miracle, nothing can outshine the nativity of God.
There is a problem at the heart of this ideology however. The bellicose nature of divine intervention, on the one hand, since it usually occurs as a violent suspension of natural law, as it did in association with the prophecies in Portugal, also usually carries with it a verbal incitement to religious activities, wherein at Fatima the Virgin commanded that true Christians should begin the conversion of Russia to Catholicism, that are bound, if actually enacted, to create as much strife, dissension, if not outright war, as any act, or activity, could hope to do. In the case of Russia in 1917, an army of Catholics, whether actually armed or not, would have been confronted by two different enemies at once; that is, the Eastern Orthodox branch of Christianity, which has existed as the only Christian religion in Russia since the Middle Ages, would probably have united with the atheistic communists, who had just come into power there in the Bolshevik Revolution (October 1917), to repel any attempt by the Roman church to convert its people away from their true belief. In short, there would have been a blood-bath if such a thing had been attempted. The prophecy at Fatima also warns that if the effort to convert Russia is not attempted, or if it fails for lack of commitment, the entire world will be condemned by God to eternal Hell.
Maureen Dowd, in her column "Sacred Cruelties" (NY Times, 04/07/2002), addresses issues like these when she notes that she "was taught that religion should inculcate sympathy, patience, compassion, understanding, forgiveness, a love of peace. Instead, the name of God is used to justify vices that are the opposite of these virtues." Dowd, like most other faithful Christians, Muslims, and Jews, has been taught but a single side of the religious ideology that has fueled countless wars in human civilization for the past three, four, or five thousand years, depending on how early you start counting, that has a single source of motivation for the people who adhere to them. That source is the idea of exclusivity, that true belief in any of these branches of religious bigotry demands an absolute commitment to the one true God of the single faith that must one day come to dominate the hearts and minds of every living creature on the earth. The prophecy of Fatima was written around that idea since it is clear that the Virgin Mary is not content with the notion that Eastern Orthodoxy is an adequate faith for Russians, or that they can live as Communist atheists, if they choose; but that they must be converted to Roman Catholicism or suffer the fate of eternal damnation. Dowd concludes her op-ed column by noting that
"It is not news that religion has its ugly, tribalist and bellicose sides. What is news is that those sides are having a field day. Just when we wish to flee to religion for sanctuary, we find ourselves fleeing from religion for sanctuary."
Her reference here, of course, is to the rising tide of violence in the Middle East, where, symbolically, so to speak, a large group of Islamic militants have been trapped for six days in the Christian shrine of the Church of the Nativity by an encircling force of Israelis who mean to arrest or kill everyone of them. This is not aberrant, not bizarre, behavior at all. This is typical. This is an enactment of Western religious ideology par excellance. I say this only because Yahweh gave the ground under the Nativity to His chosen people, the Jews. God gave the same ground to His chosen people, the Christians. Allah gave it to His chosen people, the Muslims. How did "we" get to this sorry pass? "We" did not get here; rather, this is precisely where "we" have always been. Think of this ideology as a train running down a single track. Once you get on the train, it always takes you to the same station-a large group of Islamic militants trapped in the Church of the Nativity by a superior force of Israelis who mean to kill them all. I do not mean to imply, of course, that only Israelis kill the other. The actors in this sad and horrific insanity change places from day-to-day, year-to-year, century-to-century, millennium-to-millennium.
Dowd, as most European thinkers traditionally do, commits an essential error in her thinking which always surfaces in whatever they have to say about the horrific events that periodically overwhelm people of faith. She resorts to the term "tribalist" to characterize the ugly, inhumane behavior that one side of the three-headed monster called Western religious faith inflicts on the other. Native people, the ones who have always been branded as "tribal," and from whom the worst aspects of human behavior are thought to derive, because of their supposed primitive inferiority to European perfection, are actually the only people on the earth who have never engaged each other, or anyone else, in the God-wars that continually threaten Western civilization. Native people do not have an idea of God, do not believe He promises us any sacred ground that is exclusively ours, and certainly does not tell us we have a duty to annihilate anyone of non-belief who threatens our absolute right of possession. Those are characteristics of European faith that have no place, no ground, in native belief systems.