Following the contemplatives, namely Fr Richard Rohr et al, considering the vast benefits to all humanity of nondual thinking (and how important this thinking is to love), it necessarily makes us face love’s opposite — the authoritarian and their fourfold pillars of purity, authority, loyalty and tradition, that incidentally move love out of the way in favour of each of these pillars.
Let me give you more background how purity, authority, loyalty and tradition are taken from the good, how they’re taken and blurred, and how they become idols.
And let me show you the attitudinal and behavioural impacts of purity, authority, loyalty and tradition that go too far. These manifest through many forms of bias.
Purity, authority, loyalty and tradition are good, even necessary things. To a point.
PURITY as an IDOL
When we take purity too far, we become disgusted by anything we think of as evil, and it directs our rejecting response to it, making us impotent to engage in the right ways with that evil, to resist it and advocate effectively against it...
When a pro-lifer demonises someone who has had an abortion, they shun that person away from ‘their’ God. The authoritarianism abuses. They cannot love, even though they may be saying, “I’m DOING this because God loves you/to show you I love you.” Little wonder people scoff.
But, if we’re honest, it’s the same for those of us who demonise abusers. No matter the heinousness of their crimes, and they may be monsters, we lose a part of OUR-SELVES when we cast them into the oblivion of hell, because they have besmirched the name of purity.
We take purity too far when our zealousness attacks those who are made in the image of God — yes, all humanity. There is a place for earthly justice to take its course, and if that isn’t enough for us (and it often isn’t!), God will sort them out (all of us actually!) in eternity.
We who despise authoritarianism ought to be on guard, because authoritarianism doesn’t just self-select those of the patriarchy. Authoritarianism is rooted in dualistic, right-wrong, good-bad, black-and-white thinking. Authoritarianism has its eyes on us all.
Interestingly, anyone given to putting ‘special’ human beings on a pedestal is equally adept at putting ‘repulsive’ human beings in the dungeon.
Would Jesus do either? Seriously. Jesus would find a way to love them into the Kingdom — if that is possible. Even Jesus couldn’t convert many of the religious leaders of his time.
AUTHORITY as an IDOL
If you’ve ever had the question posed to you, “Do you have a problem with authority...?” [I have] you know that, for the questioner, authority has become an idol. This is because true authority uses love to establish moral influence that people WANT to follow. That’s leadership. But the issue with ‘authority’ is no surprise really. Authority was king in the 1950s, and though it is gradually diminishing in deviant influence, it is still an issue today.
Don’t get me wrong. We MUST have respect for and understanding about authority or democracy would fail. But authoritarians have always used the steeping of authority as a platform to hide their abuses.
Those who herald authority be respected at ALL costs are destined to harm people.
These are those who cover up ‘small wrongs’ for the greater good, when ‘small wrongs’ are deal-breakers.
LOYALTY as an IDOL
Hasn’t loyalty become a doozy! The worst of this is when a leader is challenged, and the leader and his followers call the challenger disloyal. Loyalty is an idol if nothing can be challenged. If you’re not allowed to have your view, you live within a toxic system.
Authoritarians are loyalists and they commonly place themselves or the one above them on such a ‘God’ impenetrable pedestal that nobody can challenge them. There’s no love in that, because nobody is beyond respectful challenge. Truth must reign; not the leader’s truth. Not the truth of the one who has the power to call their reality ‘the truth’.
You can tell when loyalty has been made into an idol when a person or a role is paid blind allegiance without recourse to their behaviour, alleged or confirmed.
TRADITION as an IDOL
In taking tradition too far, we often canonise what we human beings have created, and that, over and above what God has ordained. Think of the environment as a good example.
What do we do when someone flouts tradition? If our responses are punitive, if we punish without endeavouring to understand why they did what they did, without trying to engage them to help them reform, we lose them.
So many of the patriarchal systems are steeped in tradition and it becomes a safe fallback for the powerful, usually men. The top-down ‘strong father’ parenting (a.k.a. authoritarianism) manages the family by strict adherence to rules... and it damages everyone along the way. Where tradition isn’t utilised as a teaching opportunity — for what to understand and respect — tradition becomes a shrine. We want those in our care to learn WHY tradition is important. We don’t want them to fear it or resent it. Tradition isn’t an end in itself.
Authoritarians uphold tradition (their idol) above love and the flow-on effect is abuse.
HOPE from JESUS
Brian McLaren states that Jesus uses parables to teach — stories of narrative that transcend black-and-white thinking. Jesus deliberately mystifies his followers to challenge their thinking. Interestingly, Rohr says that God needed Jesus to be a man to show MEN how to be true men — strong but not macho; if one desires to be first they must be servant to all (yep, overturning power structures!). While not all authoritarians are men, most of them are. It’s not men’s fault. It’s our global culture.
Hope from Jesus pertaining to love over abuse is centralised in truth. The truth will set us free, but not only that; ONLY the truth will set us free. Fascinatingly, love will guide us to truth every single time.
More about this theme from the Center of Action and Contemplation.
Photo by Siavash Ghanbari on Unsplash
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