I’ve written often on the subject of the Hegemon, my collective word for religious and cultural hegemonies that appropriate and contort religions and their sacred texts for the purposes of power and manipulation, but it’s largely been in the abstract. Today I’ll take a look at a real-world, concrete example.
I listen to a fair amount of Christian media because it gives me a window into traditional Christian thought and, sometimes, ideas for episodes. To that end, I recently listened to an episode of Joel Osteen’s podcast. Joel Osteen is the senior pastor of the Lakewood Church in Houston, a megachurch with a local congregation of over 52,000 (according to Wikipedia) and a broader, international audience in the millions. It is the largest megachurch in the United States. Osteen is, as well, a televangelist and an author, and sales of his books have made him a multimillionaire. Laudably, according to an interview with Forbes Magazine, he draws no salary from his position at church. And he has a podcast. I’ve just heard the one episode, but it seems to be, at least in part, a medium for rebroadcasting his sermons.
I didn’t write this to single out Osteen as exemplifying the worst of Christianity, because, first of all, I don’t think that he does. In my criticism of religion, I try to take Daniel Dennett’s corollary to Sturgeon’s Law to heart. Sturgeon’s Law, attributed to science-fiction author Ted Sturgeon, is: ninety percent of everything is crap. Dennett’s corollary, quoting here from his 2013 book Intuition Pumps, is: “…when you want to criticize a field, a genre, a discipline, an art form,… don’t waste your time and ours hooting at the crap! Go after the good stuff, or leave it alone.” While I’d hesitate to call Osteen’s work “the good stuff,” I’d say at least that it represents the best of what televangelists and megachurches have to offer, and I’ll be describing here why even that remains problematic. Joel Osteen’s message denigrates critical thinking and self-reflection, and promotes passive acceptance of one’s circumstances. If Osteen wasn’t a mark above his peers, I wouldn’t even bother, but his refusal of a salary from the church and his refusal to preach against the LGBTQIA community despite his personal objections mark him as someone with at least a modicum of scruples. Regardless, he preaches an explicit religious nihilism, a rejection of this life and this world in favor of some other life and some other world.
The episode I listened to is called “Unclutter Your Mind” and was published on August 25th of this year. It begins with a recitation shared by Osteen and his congregation: “This is my Bible. I am what it says I am, I have what it says I have, I can do what it says I can do. Today I will be taught the Word of God. I boldly confess. My mind is alert. My heart is receptive. I will never be the same, in Jesus’ name.” I think it’s pretty clear that “I have what it says I have” refers to personal attributes rather than possessions, but I’m not sure whether “I can do what it says I can do” is to be interpreted as “I am capable of doing” or “I am allowed to do” or both. But my first problem here is the notion of a book whose final chapters were written about 2000 years ago, telling me who I am, or who anyone is for that matter, and telling me what I have and what I can do, whether by ability or permission. This is not to say that the Bible isn’t at all relevant to my identity; quite the contrary: its cultural influence has shaped my identity as I have grown up in the Christocentric Western civilization and it was written by people who understood something of the human condition in the most general terms. But I don’t see this statement being interpreted in those terms. Absent context, and given the disproportionate authority placed in this one particular book, I think the more dangerous interpretation is the more likely one, that this book describes the totality of my identity.
And what does the Bible say of who we are? Osteen himself quotes one passage later on in his sermon, Psalm 139, verse 14, “I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made” (NRSV). “Wonderfully” is translated from the word פלה, palah, which is translated elsewhere in the Bible as “distinct” or “set apart,” so perhaps “distinctly made” would be a more apt translation, but my concern is more with the word “fearfully.” Most translations use “fearfully”, though there are a few deviations, and indeed the Hebrew here is ירא, yare’, which is indeed translated elsewhere (including elsewhere in the Psalms) as “to fear” or “to be fearful.” If we take a look back at my recent episodes on the Book of Job, where God is depicted as a malicious being who seeks to inspire fear, it makes sense that They would have created us so as to be properly fearful. The way Osteen presents this verse, and the way the audience reacts to it, it sounds like it must be a truly wonderful thing, which is bizarre given what he’s actually saying.
But actually, quotes and lessons from the Bible are surprisingly rare in this sermon, which focuses on dispensing with negative thinking so as to live a more present and spiritual life. It seems more like freely-inspired motivational speaking with a few Bible quotes than it does a sermon. I haven’t encountered anything in the Bible from which this sermon might be directly drawn. Osteen certainly uses the Bible to support his message, but I wouldn’t say that the message itself is a Biblical one, though I’m not aware of anything in the Bible that might contradict it. This subject is, however, something that the Buddhist philosophers commented on extensively. I’m not at all surprised that a Christian pastor wouldn’t allude to the texts of other religions in a sermon, even if they might be more suited for the occasion, but it seems like a missed opportunity. I often find myself tripping over myself trying to speak of so many different things that different peoples have said about God; limiting oneself to a single source seems so very wrongheaded. And not much context is given, either. Wouldn’t it help to know who wrote these texts and for what reasons? Do we know that David’s psalms were meant to be liturgy? If they were divinely inspired, does God no longer inspire?
There’s a layer to this message that I can certainly get on board with; I think that positive thinking is good for good mental health and that, this being the only life we can be sure of, we should be as present as we can be within it, for as much of the time as possible. He states that being at peace is a position of power, which I certainly agree with. But Osteen goes beyond that and promotes a message that I think is more problematic. While I agree that there’s no benefit to negative self-thinking and that it should be dispensed with, I think that there’s great benefit to critical self-reflection, but this is not something that Osteen mentions at all. So in that context, the message suggests that we need not focus at all on self-improvement, as God has already made us exactly as They intended us to be.
And as well, Joel Osteen eschews pettiness and yet openly revels in it. At one point in the show, he makes only the most proprietary show of humility before openly admitting that he’s gloating about having triumphed over another in a business deal (which, in itself, I wouldn’t fault him for; it’s only the hypocrisy of it that bothers me). He quotes again from the psalms:
You prepare a table before me
Psalms 23:5)
in the presence of my enemies;
you anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
Osteen’s theology is pettiness by proxy: you need not dirty yourself, God will carry out whatever petty vengeance in your stead. We all have first-order desires, which are just the things we desire, and second-order desires, which are things we want with regards to the things that we desire. For example, there are certain foods that I want to eat at every meal, as a first-order desire, but which would cause problems for me if I did, either to my waistline or wallet or both. So as a second-order desire, I want to eat more moderately. Along those lines, if someone is unkind or cruel to us we might want some sort of vengeance as a first-order desire, but such might not be worth the effort or the risk, so our second-order desires are to want any sort of retribution visited on them, or, even better, to somehow correct the wrongdoing but in a non-retributive way. Maybe that’s just the best course of action; we need to be better than every little thing that we might perceive as a slight, so sometimes it might make the most sense to follow our second-order desires and not the relevant first-order ones. And if we can just simply fix the problem and move on, so much the better. For that reason, indulging in the first-order desire anyway might be considered petty. But we still have that first-order desire, to see bad things happen to the people who have wronged us, whether by our own cause or by some other cause. What if we could satisfy both? What if the retribution were to be handled by some other entity, thus keeping us from getting our hands dirty while still allowing that sense of satisfying justice? Osteen’s interpretation here is that, in some future world, God will deign to set a meal before one who is persecuted, spurning those who persecuted them. Let’s be clear about what is being said here: God will be a servant to the persecuted. Those who are persecuted will see the greatest of all possible beings serving at their feet. Does this not warrant the patient endurance of persecution? I don’t think that that interpretation follows necessarily from the text but I do think that that’s what Osteen is saying. He quotes from the Psalms again, “Be still, and know that [He is] God!” (46:10). And later, Osteen says, “We have God to fight our battles for us.”
I’m reminded of Kim Davis, the Kentucky county clerk who, in defiance of her publicly-appointed job responsibilities, refused to issue marriage licenses to gay couples. Kim Davis is no Christian. Kim Davis is a small, petty coward who takes refuge in her hatred with the most absurd possible interpretations of the Word of God, and, being an evangelical Christian, I wonder if she was inspired in her actions by verses and teachings such as this. In 2015, when her despicable behavior came to light, she was supported by her bigoted church but assailed by harassment that she must have seen, given these kinds of teachings, as a justification for her behavior. What might Osteen himself have to say about that, I wonder?