Partnership and Dominator Versions of Christianity

 

by Brian Griffith

For some years I’ve been trying to look at religious issues, using Riane Eisler’s insights about the competition between different kinds of values — values that are appropriate for partnership, and values appropriate for domination. Since I’m most familiar with Christianity, I wrote a book called Different Visions of Love: Partnership and Dominator Values in Christian History. It starts with my personal experience of various Christians, Muslims and Jews, and then sets out recounting Christian history from the first century forward. I’m trying to see how all the major events in Christian history look when viewed through Eisler’s values screen. Here are some portions from early parts of the book, that give some sense of how the inquiry goes: 

What’s Fundamental for Me?

My friend Nina is a Muslim woman who taught me a lot. She was a divorced mother who faced some harassment from certain Muslim men, and the way she responded changed my relation to Christianity. She mentioned one day that several men at her mosque were complaining about her.  She had noticed these men several times, watching her from the doorway as she prayed in the women’s area. She is, after all, a beautiful woman. But after watching her pray, these men complained to the community elders. They said Nina was inspiring sinful thoughts in their house of prayer. 

I asked Nina why she put up with it. Why did she remain in a community where this kind of bigotry seemed to pass for morality? But Nina dismissed those men’s prejudices, and mine, saying such people know nothing of Islam. The women in Muhammad’s family included a trading company manager (Khajida), an army general (Aisha), and a major religious leader (Fatima). What, Nina asked, did self-righteous bigots against women know of the real Islam?

It seems Nina responded to those men differently than I. When they posed as guardians of fundamental Islamic values, Nina did not believe their claims. She felt that she was the real Muslim. I, on the other hand, was ready to believe these men. If they claimed to represent what a Muslim should be, I would probably accept their words as accurate. And this kind of gullibility had plagued me before. While I was a teenage Christian in Texas during the 1960’s, my town had its fair share of bigots, who commonly insisted that their prejudices were fundamental Christian values. And basically, I believed them. I thought, “If you’re the real Christians, then I want none of it”. I accepted their claims to own the Christian heritage, and yielded them the field. What if I responded like Nina?

…

Clearly there were big differences of opinion among Texan Christians as to what was “fundamental” in our religion. And it seemed to me that a lot of things most Christians believed were not in the Bible at all. I expected to find something in the Bible about the sanctity of private property. But that principle was actually attacked by several prophets and apostles, most of whom displayed extremely outdated views on economics. Many Christians I knew were deeply divided over the morality of contraception and abortion. But as I learned later, the Bible didn’t directly rule on these issues.[i] I had the impression that Christianity was a patriotic religion, but many parts of the Bible seemed to treat devotion to any state as a kind of idolatry. I heard that Christianity upheld traditional family values, but Jesus and his followers sometimes showed contempt for the family as they knew it (as in Matthew 10:37 and 23:9, Mark 3:21 and 3:31-35, or Luke 14:26). Some members of my congregation claimed it was counterproductive to help the needy, since that would only teach them to depend on others. But in the New Testament I noticed only old-fashioned praise for charity. I wondered if the phrase, “the cream always rises to the top” came from the Bible, but I failed to find it.

As an occasionally rebellious teenager, I began to suspect that Jesus would hardly recognize Christianity as we knew it in modern Corpus Christi. I felt sure that some aspects of our religion were true to Jesus’ spirit, but other beliefs had slipped in from other sources, and served totally different values that Jesus would reject. I suppose everybody in my church felt this way to some extent, but that hardly helped us agree on what was fundamental. 

Since the various members of my church tended to pick and prioritize different messages from the Bible, it was hard for us to agree on what was Christian. And this sort of disagreement was just what fueled the “fundamentalist” movement, for declaring certain beliefs as the bedrock foundation for any real Christianity. I could sympathize with the desire to identify fundamentals, but our disagreements over what they were tended to drive us apart. Eventually I grew angry, and went off to India and Kenya, trying to do something helpful to relieve my guilt. When I came back to North America years later I settled in Canada, where it happens I was born. Like millions of other Protestant splinter groups of one, I was looking for a community I could fully agree with. It was years before Nina helped me see how I let other people own my religion, and define me as an outsider to it. Then it was years more before I rejoined a church, and resumed talking about the Bible with people who were all different from me.

Traditions of Mutual Love and Force-Backed Authority

Another person who helped me reclaim my heritage is Riane Eisler, a Jewish woman who is most famous as author of The Chalice & the Blade. Eisler spent her early years in a genteel Vienna society, just before the Nazi takeover of Austria. When the Gestapo seized her father, Eisler’s mother barged into the Nazis’ jailhouse, and by sheer audacity browbeat them into releasing her husband. The family then fled as refugees to Cuba. Eisler attended a Catholic school in Havana, receiving a full dose of old-fashioned Christian education. Her Cuban neighbors were vibrant, deeply religious people, in a country where corporate corruption and family violence seemed traditional. “I learned,” Eisler wrote later, “that what people consider ‘just the way things are’ is different in different places. And I learned that not every cultural tradition should be preserved”.[ii]

Eisler’s somewhat traditional parents taught her to pray every night for all her relatives and friends back in Austria. When she learned what happened to them under the Nazis, she temporarily lost her faith in God.

Years later, in thinking through the seeming wreckage of her world, she felt both re-inspired and newly troubled by the different strands of tradition she found in Jewish history. On one hand stood a great line of prophets and teachers who upheld justice, freedom, and universal compassion as the ultimate concerns of Judaism. For these leaders, the law of life was a law of mutual love. It went roughly like this: As I would not be robbed, so I would not steal. As I would not be killed, so I would not murder. As I would not be punished for the crimes of another, “Fathers shall not be put to death for sins of sons, nor sons for the sins of their fathers” (Deuteronomy 24:16). As I would not be sold into slavery for debt, so Nehemiah said, “Speaking for myself, I and my kinsmen … are advancing them money and corn. Let us give up this taking of persons as pledges for debt” (Nehemiah 5: 10). Some Jewish leaders extended the law of compassion to all members of their community. Others would extend it to the world:

When an alien settles with you in your land, you shall not oppress him. He shall be treated as a native born among you, and you shall love him as a man like yourself, because you were aliens in Egypt. I am the Lord your God. (Leviticus 19:33–34)

But these were not the only kinds of teaching recorded in the holy books. The Bible also recorded arguments for “traditional” divisions between social groups and the clear ranking of certain people over others. Concerning the “God-given” authority of males over females, some verses instructed fathers to kill disobedient women. According to one tradition cited in Deuteronomy, a girl who fell in love with a boy of her choice (before her father gave her in marriage to the man of his choice) had to be stoned to death for the crime of unauthorized love (22:13–21). Other voices in the Bible claimed that God ordered the extermination of enemy populations, that He required “visiting the guilt of the fathers upon the children” (Exodus 20:5), and even that God upheld blind obedience as the primary tenet of morality. For example, in a passage describing God’s punishment of the Hebrew’s worship for other gods, we are told that Moses instructed the Levites (the priestly class) as follows:   

Jehovah the God of Israel says “Get your swords and go back and forth from one end of the camp to the other and kill even your brothers, friends, and neighbors”.  So they did, and about three thousand men died that day. Then Moses told the Levites, “Today you have ordained yourselves for the service of the Lord, for you obeyed him even though it meant killing your own sons and brothers; now he will give you a great blessing”. (Exodus 32: 27–29)

So in reviewing her history, which was the whole history of the Middle East, Europe, and the Americas, Eisler found deep traditions of both real fellowship and fearful cruelty. She grew convinced that chronic cruelty has never been simply “the way it is”, or “God’s will”. Cruelty has always been a human choice. And where cruelty is justified as a moral choice, we have a human invention of what Eisler calls “dominator morality”.

In “dominator ethics” according to Eisler, morality lies in subordinates obeying superiors, and inferiors knowing their assigned places. Such morality requires an imposed order of ranking ― “man over woman, man over man, race over race, and nation over nation, that can only be maintained by inflicting or threatening pain”.[iii]  All this can appear quite inevitable. If people accept that someone or some group must be on top in every situation, then the main questions are (a) who the top dogs will be, and (b) how their dominance will be enforced. So throughout Western history, Eisler found the same sort of  “dominate or be dominated” fear, that drove the Nazis her family fled. She grew convinced that there has always been an alternative to such “realism”. The Bible amply testifies to such an alternative, which Eisler calls “partnership”.

By “partnership”, Eisler means relations of mutual support and mutual gain. In partnership, power is “power with” others, not “power over” them. It is the positive power to nurture and stimulate life rather than the power to control or destroy it. Morality from a partnership view means honoring people as fellow souls, not ranking them as superior or inferior beings. Of course Eisler recognizes that different people have different degrees of influence and ability. There are valid “hierarchies of actualization” in personal growth and accomplishment, which should not be confused with “hierarchies of domination”. Some people in every situation are teachers and leaders, while others are learners and followers. But in a context of partnership, the leaders and teachers try to raise the others to greater selfhood — not to keep them permanently subordinate.[iv]

From her studies of history Eisler came to see our whole civilization as caught in a tension between partnership and dominator values. Both kinds of culture and morality competed through the pages of the Bible, as they did in the pages of other history books. Eisler undertook to disentangle the strands of these traditions, to clarify her spiritual choices, and create her own vision to live by:

We need standards for what traditions should be strengthened or left behind. Slavery, serfdom, and public stonings of women once were, and in some places still are, cultural traditions. They are cultural traditions appropriate to maintain dominator relations. So when we look at cultural traditions, the key question is what kind of relations do they maintain? … We should ask if a cultural tradition promotes cruelty and abuse or caring and respect.[v]

Though Eisler was always more concerned with society in general than religion in particular, she felt an inescapable need to confront and reclaim our religious heritage:

Sorting out partnership from dominator teachings in our scriptures is one of the greatest challenges. It isn’t easy. There is much opposition, both inside and outside of us. But if we do nothing, we can’t successfully counter the religious hate-mongering regaining strength today in both East and West. … We need to expose those who use the name of God to perpetrate cruelty, violence and pain. [And] We need to counter those who would indiscriminately discard all religious teachings.[vi]

Concerning the Jewish heritage she wrote,

… much in Western Civilization that is humane and just was derived from the teachings of the Hebrew prophets. For example, many of the teachings of Isaiah, from which many of the later teachings of Jesus derived, are designed for a partnership rather than a dominator society. Nonetheless, interlaced with what is humane and uplifting, much of what we find in the Judeo-Christian Bible is a network of myths and laws designed to impose, maintain, and perpetuate a dominator system of social and economic organization.[vii]

In the New Testament also Eisler found contrasts between teachings of mutual love, and other words requiring obedience as the primary virtue for inferiors, women, and slaves. With comments inviting further inquiry she said,

[Jesus] rejected the dogma that high-ranking men — in Jesus’ day, priests, nobles, rich men and kings — are the favorites of God. He mingled freely with women, thus openly rejecting the male-supremacist norms of his time. And in sharp contrast to the views of later Christian sages, who actually debated whether woman has an immortal soul, Jesus did not preach the ultimate dominator message: that women are spiritually inferior to men.[viii]

I read Eisler’s book The Chalice & the Blade in 1988, after returning from seven years of village development work in Africa and Asia. Her insights helped me make sense of the painful situations I saw in those countries. During my years outside North America I had turned my back on organized Christianity. I saw it as a religion of colonial conquest and racism. When I finally came to reexamine that tradition, I was, like Eisler, both re-inspired and freshly horrified by the history of my faith.

In Sum

Concerning the rest of the book, the Christianity’s history of ongoing struggle over basic values has been as momentous as all the struggles recorded in the Bible. At times the story grows horrific, as in the age of holy wars and witch hunts. Other episodes show history-altering steps toward a society of real partnership. Riane Eisler graciously wrote a foreword statement for the book, and in part of this she writes:

 

“I want to congratulate Brian Griffith on this masterful, controversial, and highly readable account. His book offers hope in a divided world, where reaction against globalized ‘godless corporate secularism’ meets with a ‘war on religious fundamentalism’. I hope to see other writers do comparable work in highlighting the partnership and dominator visions within their religious traditions around the world.” 

— Riane Eisler, author of The Chalice & the Blade, Sacred Pleasure, Tomorrow’s Children, The Power of Partnership, The Real Wealth of Nations

 

Different Visions of Love is published by Outskirts Press and is available from Amazon.com, Barnes & Noble, and as an e-book from the publisher website at http://www.outskirtspress.com/briangriffith .

 

Notes: