Sex, COVID-19, and Racism: Part 2
It’s probably best to get this out of the way early: I don’t know how to answer the question, “What is your religious affiliation?” or “Are you a Christian?”
Image: Jeremiah Gibson, from Toronto
For starters, I’ve experienced a lot of personal pain at the hands of church leadership, which Julia and I will discuss in greater detail in the podcast. The Western Church has also distributed high levels of pain throughout history, from the Crusades to its more recent intertwining with nationalist strands of the Republican party in the US. The exploitation of power by the Church (and other theocracies, be that the Shia/Sunni conflict in the Middle East or the Buddhist terrorization of the Uighurs in Western China), on dyadic and macro levels, is deeply unsettling to me.
But I’m still committed to Christianity, because I believe in the core goodness of the religion. Religions serve an extremely important function in the development of nations. They establish morals and values that create order and continuity for the constituents. They design a narrative that ties people to each other and to the supernatural. They develop rituals and activities that gather folks together around a common goal.
At the core of Christianity and Judaism is this central theme: the Israelites were a minority.
The Israelites are almost always surrounded and subjugated by larger, more powerful nations. The Egyptians. The Sumerians. The Babylonians. The Assyrians.
When you are subjugated, when you are enslaved, when you are threatened and assaulted, the primary goal is to stay alive.
The Pentateuch becomes, in a sense, a Constitution for this small collective of Abrahamic descendants. Genesis provides the nation building story, introducing us to unexpected heroes and including ways of distinguishing itself from other nations (primarily, monotheistic, Yahweh, as opposed to polytheistic). Exodus describes the experience of liberation and the initial joy and fear that accompany freedom. (To quote King George from Hamilton, “It’s much harder when it’s all your call.”). Leviticus is the first draft of a legal system. The assumption is that adhering to the laws and upholding high moral standards will keep this fledgling nation alive. Numbers is the first attempt at enacting said legal system. It doesn’t go particularly well because, well, people and the struggle with autonomy, which leads us to Deuteronomy, a second draft of a legal system.
The second part of the Old Testament, from Judges to 2 Chronicles (more on the book of Joshua in a later post), describes how Israel interacts with other fledgling nations in Canaan. Remember, Israel is a minority group of people—its goal is to stay alive. And for about 80 years, not only does it stay alive, but it begins to operate as a more or less autonomous nation.
It’s interesting that King David gets all of the airtime when we discuss Old Testament history. King David is a military and propaganda mastermind. He becomes King of Judah, and then, after his son Absalom, gets appointed king of Israel, fights off an uprising from the tribes of Israel to unify Israel and Judah, and begins to secure its borders by picking off smaller regional groups—the Philistines, the Moabites, parts of the Arameans.
There’s no documentation that David is a great human being. While David shows the region that Israel isn’t to be physically messed with, he also rapes Bathsheba and orders the death of Bathsheba’s husband, a foreigner (Hittite). The text suggests that quite a few of the uprisings against David were in direct correlation to his own militaristic behavior. Sound familiar?
Israel actually becomes a regional power under the reign of King Solomon. There are 40 years without wars. The borders open and collaborative, and friendly, fair trade begins to happen with other regional nations. Solomon develops an enormous amount of wealth through these trade relationships, and uses the wealth to invest in numerous public works projects, including a new temple, and, more importantly from a sociological perspective, the rebuilding of several cities. It’s only after Solomon’s death, when future kings fail to maintain international relationships and internal uprisings, that Israel and Judah become enslaved again by larger nations.
So let’s go back to the original question: Why does King David get more theological praise and air time, even though King Solomon was by many metrics the more effective king?
For starters, it’s assumed that the narrative of the Golden Age of Israel was written while Israel/Judah were in exile. The books of Judges-2 Chronicles were written as an historical analysis of the rise of its regional nation and potential reasons for its fall. While exilic writers make brief references to the dysfunction of numerous kings in Israel and Judah,. both historians and prophets return to the function of Leviticus when explaining its fall: Adhering to the laws and upholding high moral standards will keep this fledgling nation alive.
David, for all of his flaws, participated in a cycle that we’ll see enacted throughout the history of Christianity: Make a mistake, come back to Yahweh (the true King of Israel), and receive forgiveness, with some potential reprimands if this cycle perpetuates itself. The good kings are the ones that participate in this cycle. The bad kings are the ones that don’t. The return to God, in the case of David, represents the reunification of Israel, this minority nation that’s doing whatever it can to stay alive. The violence and manipulation that comes with military expansion is largely ignored because Yahweh, the representative of Israel, is the unifying force.
The exilic writers essentially blame immigration and the inability to uphold peaceful relationships with other nations as a primary reason for its downfall. And they use an unsurprising scapegoat to pin the downfall on: Sex. Check out the first four verses of 1 Kings 11:
King Solomon, however, loved many foreign women besides Pharaoh’s daughter—Moabites, Ammonites, Edomites, Sidonians and Hittites. They were from nations about which the Lord had told the Israelites, “You must not intermarry with them, because they will surely turn your hearts after their gods.” Nevertheless, Solomon held fast to them in love. He had seven hundred wives of royal birth and three hundred concubines, and his wives led him astray. As Solomon grew old, his wives turned his heart after other gods, and his heart was not fully devoted to the Lord his God, as the heart of David his father had been.
Prior to the 1800s, sex strictly served three functions: procreation, display of power, and economical/business unions. (Many theorists suggest that this has changed very little in the last 200 years, but that’s for another blog post.) Marriages were seldom solely out of love or autonomy, but were for political or business gains. One of the ways that Solomon expanded the kingdom of Israel was by entering into trade agreements with numerous nations, and sex/marriage was one of the ways that Israel’s prosperity grew.
To suggest that the fall of Solomon has anything to do with sexual impropriety is nonsense.
After all, David employed sex workers; interestingly, Absalom, David’s son, is ordered by Ahithopel, a key advisor to David and potential grandfather of Bathsheba, to have public sex with ten of his concubines. These sexual partners weren’t foreign dignitaries though—they were under the control of David, and thus, the kingdom of Israel.
The explanation for the fall of Solomon, the impetus for Israel and Judah being in exile, is about immigration. The explanation for the fall of Solomon is about racism: “If only Solomon hadn’t “fallen in love” with those damn foreigners, we wouldn’t be in exile. We wouldn’t be minorities. Again.”
In the first blog post, I explained how masks serve as a representation for othering during COVID-19 through Schrodinger’s Effect: By wearing a mask, we assume that everyone has COVID-19, even if we don’t; therefore, relational safety is established by uniformity, the mask. Only if we adhere to the laws and uphold high moral standards will we be able to eradicate COVID-19.
If you don’t wear a mask, or if you wear it in inappropriate ways (remember to cover your nose with your mask), you’re deemed unsafe, and are treated as an outsider, be that through public shaming on the Internet or other more direct forms of criticism. Never mind that the wearing of masks also seems to negatively impact the ways that folks are actively engaging in relationships and intimacy.
Over the last 1600 years, the Christian tradition has developed around the Levitical purpose: If we adhere to the laws and uphold high moral standards, we can keep our fledgling religion, and the nations that incorporate it (i.e. European nations and the U.S.), alive.
All burgeoning groups, be they families, businesses, or churches, need to establish some sense of structure in order to survive. Religious and relational problems come when we forget that Israel was a minority nation. We read the Old Testament through the lens of King David, where we are most successful if we can gain power and expand our realm of influence. We read the Old Testament through the historians and prophets in exile, longing for a return to the glory days that never actually existed.
These privilege-focused interpretations lead to exploitative processes. They repress sexuality into a legalistic form of practice, only to be done in the context of marriage (to a hopeful insider), forgetting that sex can serve numerous functions, and overlooking the fact that sex is most successful when it is consensual. They encourage racism and hyper-nationalism, and reinforce the dangers of mingling with “outsiders”. They take the perspective of the dominant voices and delegitimize voices of marginalized folks.
In the next blog post, I'll describe some ways that we can engage with religious texts from the perspective of minorities and oppression, with the hope that these lenses can open us up to a myriad of “hot-button” conversations: sex, racism, sexual orientation, ageism and ableism.
But for now, I’d ask you to pick something literary—it could be the Bible, or a work of fiction/non-fiction—and answer the following questions when you read:
Which voices are being represented in this story? Which voices are not?
What are the sociodemographic features of the protagonist (race, gender, orientation, etc.)? How might their perspective change if we were to switch a sociodemographic feature?
If I were to align myself with voices that are not being represented, how might their perspectives enrich the dialogue or themes that I’m reading about?