Thanksgiving and Theonomy

I'll warn you up front. The theme I'm going to be expounding is really pretty simple, so obvious and transparent that the kind of explanation I propose giving you will only serve to cloud and burden the issue. But I can't resist seeing how the phenomenon invites "explanation" in needlessly abstract, theoretical terms! Bear with me. Or not. I may be an atheist (my Catholic mother-in-law says I'm not), but I'm still a theologian. So obfuscation, you might say, is my job.

A couple of days ago, on Thanksgiving, I read a post on our Bible Geek Facebook discussion page where some of the geeks were relating what the holiday meant to them. You see, many of The Bible Geek listeners are irreligious atheists. Yet they don't necessarily want to annoy others by making themselves conspicuous in their refusal to observe Thanksgiving—no One to thank, after all. What to do on that day? Can they munch turkey with a clear conscience? Or would that be atheist hyper-scrupulosity, the very kind with which we are familiar from fundamentalist legalism?

I also learned of the President (I guess I am thankful for his exterminating Osama bin Laden) neglecting to mention God in his yearly Thanksgiving radio address. A commentator proceeded to pontificate on the "real," "proper" meaning of Thanksgiving. Obama described it as a time for appreciating good things, like the courageous service of our troops. A time for community sharing and solidarity. You bet! But Obama didn't mention God. Perhaps the President is, as Eddie Tabash says, essentially a secularist. Or maybe he cared more about not "offending" the secularist minority (e.g., my pals at Freedom from Religion Foundation) than about the religious majority of his subjects (as he seems to perceive them). It is the kind of crazy thinking that will eventually lead to the banning of religious affirmation as hate speech. (On the other hand, certain big-mouth Muslims might give some credibility to that!).

Anyway, the commentator did not seem aware of the fact that the meaning of words and customs evolves. Like Christmas, it may simply be that Thanksgiving has grown to denote the things the President highlighted, even more than literal gratitude to a Providential Creator. One of the Bible Geek listeners said he was "grateful" for the good things in his life and felt nothing particularly theistic about being "thankful" for them. And why not? I would argue that Christmas, too, has become predominantly secular even for most Christians, though no less wholesome for that, a celebration of family, childhood, and giving. Why not? What's the problem with that? I remember hearing a fundamentalist years ago quipping, "For the Christian, Easter is where the action is, anyway." The New Testament would certainly back her up on that.

Pedantic weirdo that I am, I could not help noticing how the issue of a secular Thanksgiving is a good instance of something Friedrich Schleiermacher and Paul Tillich (my favorite theologians along with Thomas J.J. Altizer and Don Cupitt!) discussed. In Schleiermacher's terms, a secular Thanksgiving would be an example of the feeling of dependence but not of Absolute Dependence, the latter being the key element of religious consciousness. You see, Schleiermacher (my beloved Professor Robert F. Streetman, AKA the Swami Streetmananda, used to pronounce it with his unrepentant Mississippi accent, as "Sligh-uh-mok-uh") explained how we are all relatively dependent on all others in our world because we are interdependent. My safety depends on drivers not being drunk, on contractors not using flimsy materials, druggists not making mistakes like Mr. Gower's or employees like young George Bailey failing to catch those mistakes. We ought to recognize this fact. But to be religious, we need to recognize an absolute dependence upon the divine and infinite totality of Being, which is traditionally called "God." (Schlieiermacher was heavily influenced by Spinoza, dontcha know.) Well, our atheists and secularists who chew up turkeys and are thankful for the chance to do so are relatively but not absolutely dependent and acknowledge it. President Obama was showing his relative dependency on the people of his excellent country. But with no larger frame of reference, there was by definition no religious element.

Tillich, borrowing some terms from Kant, spoke of a dialectic between theonomy, heteronomy, and autonomy. He says that "religion is the substance of culture," while "culture is the form of religion." It is a philosophical approach to the same insight sociologist Peter L. Berger describes as the Sacred Canopy of values, myths, and meanings that constitutes traditional cultures. Everything has its place and derives its meaning from the Great Chain of Being, to switch metaphors again. Cultures like ours, in their modernism and pluralism, lose that integrating, defining center and have to come up with an artificial substitute (like Civil Religion or patriotism), sort of like that moon of Jupiter that anciently exploded but then imploded again to form a new sphere made of the same bits and pieces. Well, Tillich speaks of historical periods in which the culture was "transparent to its divine Ground." No tension was felt between the religious worldview and everyday life or even intellectual pursuits. Laws were to be obeyed because God or the gods have given them. One pursued scientific research because nature was the good creation of God. And so on. This condition can be called Theonomy (which has nothing to do with the use of the same word by the Christian Reconstructionist movement), or "divine law." Divine law is the inner law of one's own being, so there is harmony with it unless one be alienated from oneself.

But cracks begin to form. Scientists discover things about the world and about human nature that do not square with religious dogma, The Church cracks down and prosecutes "heresy." It censors scientific achievements and artistic creations, bans books with philosophies that ignore the theological party line. In this case religion has made an idol, a false god, of itself. Theonomy has soured and turned into heteronomy (an "alien law"), a counterintuitive law that must be imposed from without, outside of the individual's conscience and better judgment. Free souls and free thinkers have no choice but to reject heteronomous religious authority and to trust their own admittedly fallible judgments, Of course this is what happened in the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, and the French Revolution. The resulting condition is autonomy, steering one's course by one's own law. One's essence is still in harmony with its divine Ground so long as one searches for Truth, Beauty, the Good, which can never be other than Divine. But the autonomous thinker naturally does not see this, given the social and institutional options open to him. The autonomous person for the moment accepts the Church's claims to have a copyright on religion and therefore rejects religion along with the tyranny exercised in its name by those who made it into an idol. This, it seems to me, is where we find our militant secularists and atheists.

Tillich would say such autonomous souls are still grasped by the ultimate concern. A real and genuine "secularist" or "atheist" would be, he says, someone who sees no depth in life, who has nothing to live for. One addicted to superficialities. And that's no atheists I know. This means atheists/secularists are still grounded in the divine Depth, in the Ultimate, though they have for the time being had to repress knowledge of the fact, given the Church's arrogation of the "religious" label for itself. You can see exactly what I'm talking about in the virtually superstitious fears some secularists have toward myth and symbol. They know these things only from religion and religion's heteronomous use of them, so they recoil in terror when they come across them. I recall a friend of mine, an ardent Secular Humanist, who was fully as wary of the Harry Potter books as any fundamentalist, and for the same reason: the books depict magic as a reality, and children must be protected from that! Yet that same Humanist was a great fan of Star Trek. The imaginative realm is fine, then, as long as there is no fantasy about the supernatural! That's autonomy so afraid of heteronomy that it shuns theonomy, too, having forgotten the difference.

In a secular celebration of Thanksgiving, I see autonomy beginning to reopen itself to the "divine" grounding of its underlying depth, theonomy. Those who stubbornly refuse to eat the sacramental turkey and instead poke fun at the day by observing Norm Allen's anti-holiday "Blamegiving" are still on the far end of the pendulum swing.

If we understand this, we can see why Tillich seems to be co-opting idealistic, dedicated atheists as "religious" despite themselves (sort of like Karl Rahner's "anonymous Christians"). It is not a sneaky tactic of some kind, like registering Mickey Mouse or dead people as voters. It is a way of understanding the irreligious sympathetically in religious terms instead of considering them enemies. Come to think of it, maybe this is what my mother-in-law Cecilia has in mind when she says I'm not really an atheist. Maybe you aren't either.

So says Zarathustra.