The devil gets lost in the mix

PAT JOHNSON

No rational explanation can explain why otherwise progressive people who support equality for women, respect and protection for sexual minorities, free collective bargaining, minority rights, freedom of expression and the press, and the constellation of "progressive values," would align themselves with the most misogynist, anti-gay, union-busting, minority-repressing forces in the Middle East against Israel, the tiny bastion of liberal pluralism and the only entity in its region that reflects the values progressives claim to support.

There may be an explanation and, by definition, it is irrational.

It has been said that, "Israel is the new Jew." This facile statement implies that those who have traditionally despised Jews, and their ideological or theological descendants, now treat Israel in the same manner. This may have some merit, but the phrase may be even more literally true.

The current generation of young Canadians is the first to be raised in what is effectively a post-Christian society by parents who, according to regular studies of religious adherence, are increasingly atheistic or agnostic. It should be no surprise that in this secular new world, we have not ironed out all the kinks presented by this radically new theological vacuum.

Observant people of faith are flummoxed by the idea that millions of Canadians now replace worship of God with rituals that reflect a new identification as "spiritual but not religious."

The range of such rituals, formal and informal, through which Canadians receive their spiritual nourishment runs from tai chi, yoga and various forms of meditation, to hiking in nature, lighting incense or, in British Columbia perhaps more than elsewhere, to consuming marijuana or other psychotropic and psychedelic drugs.

Such freelance "spiritual" activities, however traditional believers might view them, do little, if anything, to harm the social fabric. The idea that one cannot be moral without a god, that many believers hold as a self-evident truth, is nonsense. The absence of a god should not raise spectres of human moral disturbance. What should be disquieting is the corollary that those without a god probably also have no "devil" – and therefore no scapegoat upon which to unload blame for what evil there is in the world. Dealing morally in a world without a deity is, frankly, easy enough. Functioning without someone to blame for the presence of evil may prove far more challenging. The loss of a devil, in the end, may have scarier repercussions for society than the loss of a god.

A recent hypothesis advanced by geneticist Dean Hamer contends that behavioral genetics and neurobiology may have created a gene that predisposes us to believe in a higher power. This potential "God gene" may explain much about the persistence of religiosity across cultures and time. A devil, or similar evil entity, is a force on which human beings of almost every tradition have blamed for the presence of evil in the world. For a number of secular Canadians, that devil is Israel.

As disordered and as unconscious as this theology may be, it may be the best explanation for the otherwise inexplicable irrationality that defines the "progressive" hatred of pluralist, democratic Israel. Consider: the sins that secular Canadians see in our own country are precisely those sins of which Israel stands accused: inequality of ethnic minorities, theft of lands from indigenous inhabitants, greed, disparities between rich and poor, racism.

These are sins some secular Canadians project onto Israel even though our own country is equally or, in some instances, more guilty of the same actions. Because it is easier for Canadians to accuse a far-off land of these sins than to confront our own complicity in similar acts right here at home, from the social and economic conditions of First Nations, to economic inequality generally and racism right in our own backyard. And the harder they condemn Israel for these "sins," the more cleansed the accuser is of our own societal sins.

But why, if we assume any truth in this theory, would these secularized Canadians obsess on Israel when so many other, far more obvious, devils are available?

Notably, these sins of which we are all guilty, but of which Israel stands uniquely accused, are also the sins that have traditionally been ascribed to Jews throughout history. Jews have been equated in the Western imagination with the devil. Not only have Jews been accused of doing the devil's work, but from Michelangelo's "Moses" to contemporary cartoons in the Arab world, Jews are depicted as horned figures literally representing the devil incarnate.

That this whole conflict centres around a place we call the Holy Land probably also conjures no end of childhood memories and suppressed Sunday school lessons among former believers. The theological imagery that dovetails with this theory could take up volumes, from the association of Jews with blood (the blood libel is a staple of Christian anti-Semitism, even though it is, ironically, Christians, who ritually drink the transubstantiated blood of a Jew in the church service, not vice versa), the deicide accusation (which undermines the very premise of Christianity; in a fair reading of Christian theology, Jesus died for the sins of Christians through the ages) and "Chosenness" (how much easier is it rather than addressing one's own sins to instead focus on the faults of others, especially those who claim to have invented ethical monotheism but are failing, in this narrative, to live up to these high ideals?).

After theological constructs, the other primary depiction of Jews in Western tradition centres on money – with all that entails. Since the Industrial Revolution at the latest, Jews have been the mirror upon which Western civilization has projected its primary human conflict: between the spiritual and the material realms, between money and God, and between greed and goodness.

The increasing demographic of secular Canadians seem to be getting along quite nicely without a god. But many of them may not have considered the other ancient reliance our ancestors had in conjunction with god-worship: the assumption of a devil-like force. Though maybe unconscious, there are parallels between the blaming of Israel by secular Canadians and the way our grandparents blamed evil on the devil. If there is a God gene, could there also be a devil gene?

Pat Johnson is, among other things, director of development and communications for Vancouver Hillel Foundation.

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