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Hail and welcome to A Satanist Reads the Bible: exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself. I hope all of my readers and listeners are managing amidst the chaos and changing landscape of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Over the coming weeks and months, I’m going to be shifting the focus of my work towards more political matters, applying the way I approach problems in general to the historical and contemporary political situations in the United States, and the mythology that surrounds them. Shortly, I’m going to put that in the context of what I’m already doing with the Satanist Reads the Bible project, but before I get to any of that I want to state my own political position so that it’s clear where I’m coming from.
I don’t want to think of myself in terms of Left and Right, in terms of being purely a Democrat or liberal or purely a Republican or conservative. Such thinking is reductionist and overly simplistic. I want to evaluate each position in itself, independent from party positions, and come to my own conclusions. But if you look at my voting record or list my stances on various issues, most of the time I’m going to land somewhere in the neighborhood of American progressivism and left-libertarianism. This means that, if you’re a more conservative-thinking person, then we’re going to disagree on many things, and I think that most of those are things that intelligent, rational people can reasonably disagree on. But I also think that all intelligent, rational people repudiate this presidency. In fact, if you’re a more conservative thinker, I would expect you to be even more angry about it than I am, because the Trump Administration represents the worst, weakest, most cowardly, and most indefensible forms of conservative positions. You can go down the list of the thinkers who have formed the basis for American political thought, many of whom I’ll be covering in the coming episodes: John Locke, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, Benjamin Franklin… not one of them would have stood behind President Trump as he uses his presidency for personal enrichment, as he allows and encourages foreign interference in our sovereign affairs, as he makes the nation look pathetic, stupid, and weak.
I think it’s part of the job of a philosopher to try to see where society might be going wrong or where it has already gone wrong, because it’s something that needs to be done and is at the same time the unique purview of philosophy. Art can depict our experiential relationship to the situation. Science can quantify it and give us descriptive and predictive models about it. Philosophy makes value judgments. This has been the situation at many times throughout history: before, during, and after the Pelopponesian war in Ancient Greece, the American and French Revolutions, the advent of industrialized warfare in the First World War, the global catastrophe of the Second World War. And I certainly think that, at the moment, things are going very wrong for a number of reasons, the greater contexts of modernism and advanced capitalism among them, but also the specific political situation that we have with people like Donald Trump and Mitch McConnell in power and seemingly nothing to be done about it. And my expectation right now is that we’re headed into four more years of exactly that, although, with the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, we may see some political upheaval as well. To put it mildly, things have gotten really weird in the American political sphere, in a way that seems entirely dissonant with the political reality that I came to believe in as I was growing up. My peers seem as incredulous about things as I am. I meet them for dinner and they ask the same kinds of questions: What the fuck is happening? How did we get here? These are the questions I want to start examining.
But I actually don’t think that what I’m going to be doing in this and in the coming essays is really any different than what I’ve already been doing with the Satanist Reads the Bible project. You might have noticed that I deleted a word from the tagline. I’m pretty sure I’ve been using the same tagline the entire time I’ve been doing this podcast, but I’m making a tweak. Let me say it again: “Exploring the Bible, Christianity, and other religions and sacred texts through the lens of Satanism in order to reinvent religion for myself.” It used to be “other religions and their sacred texts,” which implies that sacred texts always belong to a religion. I no longer believe that that’s the case. The title of this show is “A Satanist Reads the Bible.” I’ve obviously expanded well beyond just the Bible of the Abrahamic religions, but I think that the ethos of the show remains embedded within the title and reflected in every episode. It’s not just the Bible, the collection of books relevant to the Abrahamic religious tradition, but anything at all that people might call a Bible in terms of it being a profound, important, and sacred document; and it’s not just Christianity but anything that serves the function of religion in human life.
If you look at the various sacred texts of the various religions of the world, you’ll find almost nothing that they all have in common, excepting the role that they play in human life, and that means that essentially secular texts like the United States Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution can be analyzed as sacred texts, regardless of whether it can be said that that’s what they actually are. We certainly treat them that way already. Both documents have their own holidays (a word which comes from the Old English for “holy day”) and monumental shrines, and, as the Bible is for Christians, they’re definitive of who Americans are as a people. The United States Constitution even has explicit status as a sacred text in the Mormon religion (Doctrine and Covenants 101:77 and 80). And, as professor of history and religion Grant Hardy, from whose Great Courses lecture on sacred texts I got much of the preceding information, has suggested, the Founding Fathers may have been inspired to create a government based on a single authoritative text, as such was the basis for their own Christian religion.
For my non-American listeners, I want to emphasize that everything I have to say here can be applied in a general sense to all liberal republics. We are facing the circumstances of the world in parallel with each other and our responses to those circumstances are not isolated from the responses of other nations. Often the circumstances are similar and we can learn from how other nations have responded. But also, I believe in a kind of American exceptionalism. The United States Constitution is the oldest constitution still in current effect in any nation. In a very literal sense, America is leading the way in terms of demonstrating both the potential and the problems of a constitution-based liberal republic with a free market economic system.
In order to ground my work in this area in its historical context, the specific matter I’ll be discussing today will be the conquest and colonization of the Americas by Europeans, which began in the late 15th century. I’ll be discussing the specific relevance of this matter to my work a little bit further on. The primary sources I’ve used for my research include a Great Courses lecture on the history of the United States, various videos on Khan Academy, various Wikipedia articles (mostly to confirm dates and simple facts), and the infamous People’s History of the United States by Howard Zinn.
I want to address that last one in particular before continuing, because using Zinn’s book as a historical reference is problematic. A People’s History of the United States, first published in 1980 with many subsequent revisions and expansions, is aimed at a popular audience and so prioritizes readability and accessibility over what would have needed to be extensive citations in order to make all the references clear. It is entirely successful in that regard, but I’m often left wondering exactly where I would need to look in order to confirm what Zinn is saying. He provides extensive references, but has, for at least a few of them, left it up to the reader to figure out what comes from where. And he’s explicit about this: in an introduction to the book’s bibliography, Zinn writes: “Where you cannot tell the source of a quotation right from the text, you can probably figure it out by looking at the asterisked books for that chapter” (p. 689). Well, there are six of those just for the first chapter, and I don’t have the time or the money to pursue every one of them. The best I can do is to do a quick background check on all the references just to see if there are any obvious contradictions to what Zinn is saying about the texts. I’ve found nothing of the sort, and I’ve looked for contrary sources but haven’t found any indication that Zinn has ever been dishonest or even that he’s ever just been completely mistaken; nevertheless, without clearer references, I can’t trust what he’s saying as much as I would like. And that’s unfortunate because what he’s saying is really interesting and, if it’s true—which I think it most likely is—highly significant in terms of gaining a robust understanding of American history. I’ll be clear about what I’ve gotten from Zinn so you can make your own judgements.
I also want to be clear at the outset that there is a central matter on which I strongly disagree with Zinn. Zinn is explicitly anti-nationalist, stating,
The pretense is that there really is such a thing as “the United States,” subject to occasional conflicts and quarrels, but fundamentally a community of people with common interests. It is as if there really is a “national interest” represented in the Constitution, in territorial expansion, in the laws passed by Congress, the decisions of the courts, the development of capitalism, the culture of education and the mass media.
Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 9
While I am certainly opposed to some particularly virulent and toxic forms of nationalism, I am not, in principle, anti-nationalist. Following political analyst John Judis in The Nationalist Revival from 2018, I believe that, while it’s important that American society be understood as pluralistically as possible, it does exist as well (though perhaps not “fundamentally”) as a community of people with some common interests. I think that that’s true just by virtue of the United States being a nation in the first place. As I’ve tried to make explicitly clear throughout this project, I, as a Satanist, am not anti-Christian; what I am opposed to is Christian dogma and hegemony. Similarly, I am not anti-nationalist, anti-American, or anti-capitalist; I am, rather, opposed to nationalist, American, and capitalist dogma and hegemony. I mean to be a Satanist not just with regards to religion but with regards to politics as well… really with regards to everything I can get my hands on. My objective here is not to dismantle or devalue the American nation but simply to understand the circumstances which have led us to the present situation, and to demonstrate that what is said of history and what actually occurred are often two very different things.
But on to the matter at hand.
By the end of the 5th century, the Western Roman Empire had fallen to Germanic tribes. Over the next several centuries, Christianity was adopted in the various kingdoms and territories of these tribes, and in the year 800, much of the territory was reunited as what would come to be known as the Holy Roman Empire, a complex association of states allied (at least nominally) under the banner of Catholicism. At this time, territory considered sacred to the Catholics—Jerusalem and the Holy Land of Palestine—was controlled by the Muslim Abbasid Caliphate, whom the Catholics considered to be infidels. Starting in the late 11th century, various crusades were launched against the Abbasids, and the Europeans were consequently exposed to Islamic civilization, which was, at the time, considerably more advanced than European civilization.
In the late 13th century, the explorer Marco Polo traveled to and returned from the prosperous Song dynasty China. These glimpses of the world outside Europe inspired trade, which expanded and enriched Europe. This contributed as well to the spread of the catastrophic pandemic of the Black Death, which may have killed as much as 60% of the European population at the time. Prior to the Black Death, European society was built on the model of the Three Estates, under which people lived in one of three social classes—those who fight, those who pray, and those who work—with extremely limited mobility between them. The pandemic obliterated this social order, and new commercial enterprises rose in its wake.
The Mediterranean territories, such as Italy, were, initially, as a result of geographical circumstances, the most successful: they had easy access both to North Africa and the Middle East. Seeking to emulate Italian success, the Portuguese created trade routes along and around Africa, which ended up being highly lucrative as well and left the rest of Europe struggling to catch up. The Spanish thought they might do well by finding a Western route to China, and in the year 1492, the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus successfully lobbied Queen Isabella I and King Ferdinand II of Spain to finance just such an exploratory journey.
From this point forward, history, and what I was taught of history as a child in grade school in the 1980’s, diverge markedly. I was taught, for example, that Columbus faced opposition to his plans due to widespread belief at the time that the world was flat and that those who sail too far west would sail right off the edge of the Earth. Indeed, I was taught that the very inspiration for Columbus’s voyage was to prove that the Earth was round. This account is entirely mythical; that the world is round was common knowledge in the 15th century; it was simply unknown to Europeans at the time how far they would have to sail West in order to reach Asia, or what might be in the way.
But consider what this myth signifies. In the mythical account, Columbus was a bold visionary, an independent thinker who defied the mistaken common wisdom of his day and bravely risked his life in order to explore the world. This is a myth that very strongly accords with the American ethos of bold independence. The actual historical account, which I was not taught until much later, even then glossing over many of the key details, paints him in a far different light.
I was taught that when Columbus made landfall on the island now known as San Salvador, first contact with the indigenous people of the island—the Lucayans, a branch of the Taíno people, who were in turn a branch of the various Arawakan-language-speaking peoples of the region—was cautious but essentially cordial. But according to Howard Zinn, Columbus and his party immediately captured, enslaved, exploited, and brutalized the indigenous peoples he encountered in order to find gold and exploit the natural resources of the land. Zinn quotes Columbus directly from his log: “As soon as I arrived in the Indies, on the first Island which I found, I took some of the natives by force in order that they might learn and might give me information of whatever there is in these parts” (Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 2).
I was also taught that the discovery of the so-called New World was immediately a ray of hope for oppressed religious minorities in Europe, but in fact, the discovery of the Americas was initially ignored by Europe. The objective, remember, was to find a western route to Asia for purposes of trade, and with the Americas in the way, that was seen as futile and Western Europe turned to infighting over the more limited wealth available to them relative to the more successful Italy and Portugal. Those who initially capitalized on the discovery were not bold, visionary explorers, but rather pirates, who realized that, in the absence of European social and legal norms, they could get away with anything (Guelzo et al., n.d.), and very quickly, several genocides were underway. The party of Hernando Cortés decimated the Aztec civilization and the party of Francisco Pizarro did the same to the Inca. As to Hispaniola, another island discovered and occupied by the party of Christopher Columbus and which is today the island of Haiti and the Dominican Republic, its indigenous population in 1496 stood at about 1.1 million. Less than fifty years later there were only 200 left alive. This was primarily the result of disease—as was the case with the Aztec and the Inca, as the indigenous peoples of the Americas lacked resistance to European diseases—but also the result of brutal treatment of the Indians by the Europeans (Guelzo et al., n.d.). The wealth gained in these conquests was substantial, and inspired further exploration and conquest among the continental Europeans.
Despite being well-positioned geographically to join their continental neighbors in exploiting the newly discovered territory, England was, at the time, focusing on its battles between the Catholics and the Protestants. As England turned more Protestant, these conflicts escalated, in the late 16th century, into an unofficial war with Catholic Spain. Queen Elizabeth I authorized privateering against the Spanish, and as the Spanish were now more involved with the Americas, this meant that English exploration and settlement of the land were strategically valuable. While such endeavors were risky and expensive, the English were able to take advantage of new commercial arrangements—specifically, the joint stock company, an early form of corporation—which mitigated the risk, to some degree.
All of the early English settlements were catastrophic failures. The English had made assumptions about the climate that proved badly mistaken, and as well, they had, to some degree, counted on good relations and trade with the indigenous peoples, the Powhatans, whom I’ve seen called the Wampanoags in other sources. While I haven’t been able to confirm this, it seems likely that word would have made its way to the Powhatans over the prior century of the brutal treatment of the Arawak peoples by the Europeans, and this may explain why the Powhatans were initially hostile. This is, again, in stark contrast to what I was taught of history as a child. That narrative focused on the colony established in 1620 by the English Puritans at what is now Plymouth, Massachusetts. As the story goes, the Puritans, also called the Pilgrims—and I’ll be getting into the religious significance of all of this shortly—arrived and settled in Plymouth but found themselves starving during an unexpectedly harsh winter, and were saved by the intervention of the local indigenous population (who were never identified by tribe), who shared food with them and, when the spring came, taught them how to grow crops. This is the alleged origin of the American holiday of Thanksgiving, and by way of celebration in my early childhood education, we would draw the outlines of our hands and turn those into drawings of turkeys, and make feather headdresses out of paper in imitation of the indigenous Americans.
Whether or not anything like the Thanksgiving narrative actually occurred—and I haven’t been able to confirm either way—the focus on that narrative over others in the educational discourse is a clear ideological choice which frames the early history of the United States in a very particular way.
One of Howard Zinn’s sources is the 1954 book Christopher Columbus, Mariner by historian Samuel Eliot Morison, who, in the book, states that “The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide.” However, the book overall is, according to Zinn, quite praising of Columbus’s achievements and character. Zinn writes of this apparent dichotomy:
One can lie outright about the past. Or one can omit facts which might lead to unacceptable conclusions. Morison does neither. He refuses to lie about Columbus. He does not omit the story of mass murder; indeed he describes it with the harshest word one can use: genocide.
But he does something else—he mentions the truth quickly and goes on to other things more important to him. Outright lying or quiet omission takes the risk of discovery which, when made, might arouse the reader to rebel against the writer. To state the facts, however, and then to bury them in a mass of other information is to say to the reader with a certain infectious calm: yes, mass murder took place, but it’s not that important—it should weigh very little in our final judgments; it should affect very little what we do in the world.
Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 8
Here’s the thing; here’s what it all comes down to for me. You want to make America great? I’m all for it. Sign me up. I’ll put my life on the line for it. I’ve done it before, wrong as I was at the time about what it is, exactly, that can make America great. I still think that the aspiration to be a part of a great nation is a noble one, and an achievable one for Americans. But I’m not of the opinion that greatness arises from lies and deception. America is certainly not alone in having a problematic history, and I don’t think we do any better for ourselves by ignoring that history. I think we do the best for ourselves by struggling with it as a living reality, fully present in every moment of our lives.
I also think it’s important to consider how much everything I’ve said here today is connected to religion. Howard Zinn mentions two verses from the Bible that the English colonists in particular used to justify their treatment of the indigenous peoples they encountered. Psalms 2:8, from the King James Version, the version that the colonists would have been using: “Ask of me, and I shall give thee the heathen for thine inheritance, and the uttermost parts of the earth for thy possession.” And Romans 13:2: “Whosoever therefore resisteth the power, resisteth the ordinance of God: and they that resist shall receive to themselves damnation.”
That first one falls in the context of the second psalm. The author describes the kings of nations, who set themselves against God and God’s people. God laughs at them, having chosen Zion, the hill on which Jerusalem is built, as the seat of his earthly power, and proclaims to the author that, should it be asked of God, God will give his people the entire earth. Curiously, my translation, the New Revised Standard Version, reads a bit differently: “Ask of me, and I will make the nations your heritage…” The word translated as “heathen” in the King James Version and as “the nations” in the NRSV is goyim, the plural of goy, which is probably best translated as “nation” given that the word is used in the Hebrew Bible to refer to the nation of Israel as well as to other nations, such as they existed in biblical times. But clearly the author means here to refer to the non-Jewish nations, so the translation as “heathen,” while unnecessarily loaded, is not entirely inaccurate, and the text does indeed seem to endorse Jewish imperialism, and Christian imperialism as well since Christians also hold this text sacred and consider themselves to be God’s people.
But one must keep in mind that the Psalms are a collection of devotional poetry, often attributed to King David, but that authorship is uncertain. It seems very doubtful to me that the authors composed these texts intending for them to be accepted as doctrine, as literal documentation of the commands of God to his people.
The other verse, Romans 13:2, has been taken completely out of context. The Book of Romans is a letter written by Paul the Apostle to the Christian church in Rome, in order to address some congregational and doctrinal problems within the church that Paul had been informed about. The full context, from the New Revised Standard Version, is “Let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgement” (1-2). Paul continues a little further on,
Pay to all what is due them—taxes to whom taxes are due, revenue to whom revenue is due, respect to whom respect is due, honor to whom honor is due. Owe no one anything, except to love one another; for the one who loves another has fulfilled the law. The commandments, “You shall not commit adultery; You shall not murder; You shall not steal; You shall not covet”; and any other commandment, are summed up in this word,
7-10
“Love your neighbor as yourself.” Love does no wrong to a neighbor; therefore, love is the fulfilling of the law.”
First of all, Romans should be considered in much the same way as Psalms. It’s a letter by one early Christian thinker written to address specific problems and concerns, and likely not something that was ever intended to be doctrine. But even putting that aside, a faithful reading of this text seems to very much contradict the actions of the English colonists. Paul is telling the Roman church to obey the Roman government—which was, at the time, pagan—and to honor, respect, and love others.
Howard Zinn includes a passage from colonial governor William Bradford’s History of the Plymouth Plantation which describes a raid carried out by the colonial military commander John Mason against an indigenous village:
Those that scaped the fire were slaine with the sword; some hewed to peeces, others rune throw with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatchte, and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fyer, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stincke and sente there of, but the victory seemed a sweete sacrifice, and they gave the prayers therof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them, thus to inclose their enemise in their hands, and give them so speedy a victory over so proud and insulting an enimie.
Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 15
The Wikipedia article on John Mason prominently features several pictures of statues commemorating him.
The flagship of Christopher Columbus was named the Santa Maria after Mary, mother of Jesus. The first fort in the new world, built from the remains of the Santa Maria, was called the Navidad (Christmas in Spanish, revealing the etymology of the word in “nativity”). And the language that Columbus used in his missives to Spain, was, according to Zinn, often highly religious as well: “Thus the eternal God, our Lord, gives victory to those who follow His way over apparent impossibilities” and “Let us in the name of the Holy Trinity go on sending all the slaves that can be sold.”
What’s more, and this is a matter I’ll be exploring in a future essay, a great deal of the whole matter was rooted in a conception of property rights that was predicated on the assumption of natural rights, an account of human rights rooted in the religious account of our having been created by a creator god, most famously explicated by the 17th century English philosopher John Locke, who was not only a major influence on the Founding Fathers, but who actually had a hand in designing the government of Carolina, one of the many experimental systems of government explored in the Anglo-American colonies.
Zinn raises the question of whether the whole project can, as I’ve seen claimed, be ultimately justified as having been necessary given that its ultimate result was the United States of America and a new hope of a better life for the people of the world. In order to even start to be able to answer that question, Zinn suggests, first, that we need an equally representative account of what actually occurred. My own experience as a student in the American public education system attests that that is not the case, and furthermore, Samuel Eliot Morison—the one who admitted that Columbus initiated a genocide and then went on to what he considered to be more important matters—is referenced as well in the Great Courses lectures that I watched. It seems that Morison, Pulitzer Prize winner, recipient of eleven honorary doctoral degrees, and a professor at the venerable Harvard University for forty years, is one of our main sources in our collective understanding of the life of Christopher Columbus, and despite the fact that this source fully admits that Christopher Columbus initiated a genocide, Columbus Day is still a national holiday in the United States of America. That could not be the case if the genocide narrative was being properly represented in the historical discourse.
Second, that we only accept justifications for which all Americans are beneficiaries. There’s certainly no doubt that the American system has been of great benefit to some and of at least some benefit to many more, but there are, incontrovertibly, some demographics for whom American hegemony has been catastrophic, or even genocidal. If certain elite groups benefit from a historical event, that does not justify the event as having been acceptable. People benefited from the Holocaust, after all. Third—and I disagree with Zinn on this point—should some sacrifice be necessary, only those who are to be sacrificed have the final say in the matter. But I think that Zinn’s argument holds up here perfectly well regardless. Taking into account as well that, according to Zinn—and this accords with everything else I’ve been able to find—many indigenous cultures were advanced civilizations who shared many of our values, such as individualism, egalitarianism, and representative democracy, who possessed legal systems, artistic cultures, histories, and complex languages equally worthy of respect to our own, it becomes very difficult to justify any of what occured on whatever basis.
Regardless, this is the history we’re stuck with. I think one of the reasons that people take issue with Howard Zinn’s account of American history might be that he always emphasizes how America has been the bad guy. If his history were taken in itself, one might be misled into thinking that America is, in fact, always the bad guy. But Zinn’s history exists in the context of a broader collection of narratives, one which includes—as Zinn himself says—Henry Kissinger’s assertion that “History is the memory of states” (Zinn & Arnove, 2015, p. 9), and it seems that the memory of the state is very different than what actually happened. Zinn’s exhortation is only that we not accept the memory of states as our own.
I hope you’ve found this piece interesting and informative. If you’ve enjoyed it, I encourage you to look at some of my other essays, and if you find my approach to philosophy and religion at all valuable, I hope that you’ll stop in at my Patreon page, which features bonus content for patrons, and that you’ll stop back by to check on my new content.
Works Cited or Referenced
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Corcoran, P. (2017). John Locke on the Possession of Land: Native Title vs. The ‘Principle’ of Vacuum domicilium. 21. https://doi.org/10.1080/10848770.2017.1416766
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Guelzo, A., Gallagher, G., & Allitt, P. (n.d.). A History of the United States, 2nd Edition. Retrieved March 24, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/a-history-of-the-united-states-2nd-edition
Hardy, G. (n.d.). Sacred Texts of the World. Retrieved March 11, 2020, from https://www.thegreatcoursesplus.com/sacred-texts-of-the-world
Hoppe, H.-H. (2004, October 15). The Ethics and Economics of Private Property | Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/ethics-and-economics-private-property
Huntington, S. P. (2011). The clash of civilizations and the remaking of world order (Simon & Schuster hardcover ed). Simon & Schuster.
Judis, J. B. (2018). The nationalist revival: Trade, immigration, and the revolt against globalization. Columbia Global Reports.
List of epidemics. (2020). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_epidemics&oldid=946207636Zinn, H., & Arnove, A. (2015). A people’s history of the United States (Thirty-fifth anniversary edition). HarperPerennial.