Craving Spiritual Certainty
Whether it's God, Xi Jinping, or Christian Grey, we all just want a Daddy...
I’ll admit it, I read Fifty Shades of Grey when it came out. My best friend and I were both pregnant and in a full-fledged panic about impending motherhood, and only too ready to turn our brains over to 514 pages of lightly edited Twilight fanfic. Its cringey prose lent us to fits of giggles as we emailed ridiculous quotes back and forth. We joked that if we hadn’t been pregnant, we could’ve made a drinking game of how often “inner goddess” was mentioned.
The only thing interesting about Fifty Shades (other than the question of how it managed to sell so many copies) is the fantasy it presents: a billionaire who micromanages every aspect of his paramour’s life. Grey makes Steele (see what she did there?) sign a contract which stipulates not only sexual obligations, but what she can wear and eat, what kind of exercise and grooming she will attend to, and even how long she must sleep (8 hours each night, of course!)
Why in the fourth wave feminist world, would women fantasize about becoming the plaything of a domineering billionaire? Romance podcast Fated Mates observed that the rise in popularity of billionaire romance heroes coincided with The Great Recession, which many economists referred to as the “he-cession” due to high rates of job loss in male-dominated career fields. Many women were overwhelmed with both breadwinning and the notorious second shift; this led to fantasies about someone who would come in and take care of absolutely everything. “All you have to do is have orgasms,” quipped co-host Jen Prokop.
You can see the appeal, right? One downside of capitalist abundance is pervasive decision fatigue. Five o’clock sometimes finds me paralyzed before the freezer, weighing the competing demands of my children’s palates, our nutritional needs, fighting food waste, and eating an ethically sourced, environmentally friendly diet. That’s a lot of pressure to put on a pork chop.
There seems to be a universal craving for an authority to step in when times are scary, stressful, or confusing. In the early days of COVID-19, I sighed over photos of field hospitals being rapidly constructed in China. Comparing their speedy action to our disorganized federal response, one could be forgiven for envying them their totalitarian regime. (Of course, we know now how that turned out.)
My deepest fear has always been that I am a bad person. I crave the certainty of black-and-white rules: they give me a rubric for grading myself and others. Christianity promised me that only by surrendering every decision to God could I be saved from my evil nature. The rules were black-and-white: follow the ten commandments, obey the teachings of the church, sacrifice your personal desires as needed. Obedience salved my anxiety. I’ve had my fill of moral turmoil: just tell me what to cook for dinner, already!
But then comes the problem of conscience. One of my earliest points of contention with church teachings: the idea that “sexual impurity” was the worst form of sin. (Many Christians maintain that “all sin is equal” but will exclude LGBT people from serving in their churches. It’s hard to find another “sin” singled out in this way.) When I found my conscience objecting to LGBT exclusion, I was faced with either suppressing this dissonance or admitting that I granted my own conscience more authority than the church. Cue the ethical discombobulation!
I’ve found a kindred anxious spirit in Diana Butler Bass. In her book, Freeing Jesus, Butler Bass confronts the idea of a single, definitive Christian orthodoxy. During her time at a cutthroat Calvinist seminary, rather than becoming the target of seminarians who fancied themselves the next Martin Luther via bulletin board call-outs, Butler Bass hid by studying church history.
During her studies, Butler Bass was able to trace back the church’s concern with creeds and orthodoxy to Emperor Constantine. In Constantine’s era, Christianity transformed from upstart sect to state religion. Differences in doctrine just won’t do if you’re trying to solidify power over an empire, and so Constantine called the Council of Nicea, which, after weeding out many newly minted heretics, created The Nicene Creed.
Butler Bass’ studies eventually led her to believe that the idea of a single Christian orthodoxy is ludicrous:
“This quest is a mapless journey—there is no single road—the only guides to it are nature, saints, poetry, song, and Spirit. When you dare leave the map behind, Jesus emerges as the road itself and the Light that guides. The Quakers refer to this as the “inner light”; medieval mystics speak of Jesus likewise. Of it Meister Eckhart wrote: ‘There is a journey you must take. It is a journey without destination. There is no map. You soul will lead you. And you can take nothing with you.’ Conventional Christianity (of many different denominations) prefers to see Jesus as a directive or destination rather than this path; for them the way is a noun, not a verb. On the mapless journey, however, all is movement. There is no destination, only the enveloping presence of love.”
There is something wonderfully universal about the idea that the light is inside you and all around you. No one owns or controls access to it. It’s in others, in nature, in art, and, yes, also in religion. I’m starting to understand that no matter what faith a person holds to (or whether they hold no faith at all) we are all ultimately responsible for our choices. No one can give me the right answer, it’s something I must muddle out for myself, using whatever guides jibe with my conscience. It may be scary, but it’s the cost of finding the truth.
Journal/Discussion Prompts (feel free to leave your ideas in the comments!)
Do you find yourself experiencing ‘decision fatigue’? If so, in what areas of your life?
What “guides” help you make tough decisions?
What is the worst book you have ever read?
Only when I'm working to far out of this moment ,for I've died a thousand deaths over things that never occurred.Attempting (after a lot of practice) to do the next correct thing.The bible
If you want to see a contemporary daddy figure, how about Canadian intellectual, media personality, clinical psychologist, author, pilot, canoeist, and professor emeritus at the University of Toronto, Jordan Peterson? Who amongst us has tackled his 12 Rules for Life? Now there's something to tell you how to make decisions!
I wouldn't claim for a moment it's the worst book I've read, but....
I could see how it was seductive. It just made sense in many ways. Yes, of course let's sort ourselves out before we start sorting out others. Mote and brother's eye here for the Bible reader. Matthew 7:4, maybe.
But then I saw that he follows none of his rules himself. He does not “assume that the person he is listening to might know something he doesn’t”. He is far from “precise in his speech”, throwing “being” and “chaos” around until they lose meaning. He dishes out injunctions against straw-manning, but his Postmodernists and Marxists are the flimsiest of straw men. He is oppressive and hectoring.
The writing is not good. He writes that “expedience is cowardly, and shallow, and wrong”, because “meaning is what emerges beautifully and profoundly like a newly formed rosebud opening itself out of nothingness into the light of sun and God”. His claims are so high that the fall is further than most. I could see that without taking care you could imagine you were in the presence of a deep thinker. But you would not be. You would have been seduced.
I eventually decided I'd had enough, and gave my copy to Brandon, a young American I'd met in the gym. But only after I'd discovered he was a Trump supporter and so couldn't be harmed further.