Yours, Mine, and Ours
The 1956 swords-and-sandals
epic The Ten Commandments has long since turned into a pillar of kitsch,
but certain moments in the movie remain improbably vivid. One is the sneering
query put by the slave master Edward G. Robinson to the humbled Israelite
leader Charlton Heston: "Where is your God now, Moses?" Back then, the use of a
personal pronoun before "God" signaled a clash of civilizations: The outlook of
the whole Nilotic world was being contrasted with that of the whole Chosen
People. Similarly, the our in Martin Luther's stirring anthem "A Mighty
Fortress Is Our God" takes for granted the cultural cohesiveness of the
God concept. Today, the personal pronouns my , his , her ,
their , and our are being deployed before "God" as never before:
Such locutions have become a pervasive social trope. But it's hard to pin down
just what they now signify. A new polytheism? A divinely sanctioned
solipsism?
The most
prominent recent example comes from Bill Clinton's Aug. 17 speech to the
nation: "Now this matter is between me and the two people I love most--my wife
and our daughter--and our God." Clinton, of course, broke no new rhetorical
ground here. Commentators routinely describe abortion as a matter "between a
woman, her physician, and her God" (although former Sen. Steve Symms, R-Idaho,
in a novel twist, once called abortion a decision between "a man and his God").
An article in the Washington Post last year about charitable giving
contained the sentence "What goes on in this room is strictly between you, your
God, and the Internal Revenue Service." I have seen references to issues that
lie "between me, my scale, and our God" (an article about dieting); "me, my
stylist, and our God" (an article about hair care); and "me and the officer
with the radar trap and our God" (an article about highway speeding). The
attorney Alan Dershowitz has stated that a lawyer should not have a position
about a client's guilt: "His guilt is a matter for him and his God." Echoing
Dershowitz, an August article in the Los Angeles Times , appearing days
after the Clinton speech, contained the words "between him, his toad, and their
God." The article was not about Clinton but about the subject of a tabloid
Weekly World News report titled "Teen Hacks Mom to Death With Hatchet
Because She Killed the Toad He Licked to Get High."
The legend on American coins proclaims, "In God We Trust."
The president taking the oath of office has historically spoken the words "so
help me God." But if the evidence of common speech is any guide, the idea of
God has been rapidly devolving from the generalized to the particular, from the
awesomely abstract to the intensely (even idiosyncratically) personal.
There has
always been a tension between these two concepts of God. I brought the matter
up with Jack Miles, whose book, God: A Biography , won the 1996 Pulitzer
Prize for nonfiction. Miles sets the situation into historical context: "What
made the fortune, so to speak, of the God of Israel," he observes, "was that he
combined two functions previously separate: on the one hand, the function of
the Mesopotamian personal God, a kind of guardian angel whose responsibilities
were concentrated on one man or woman but whose powers were also limited; on
the other, the function of the Canaanite/Mesopotamian high God, El, whose
attention to any individual man or woman was slight or unpredictable but whose
powers were universal. Before this historic synthesis, you got either one or
the other. After it, you had the electrifying possibility that the top
God was also our God and even my personal God. After it, of
course, you also had the whole range of unanswerable questions of the sort 'How
could a good God--and El was an essentially benign, judgelike figure--permit X
to happen to us, or to me?' "
Is the "top God"-"my God" synthesis coming
undone? Even as a great deal of the "top God" discussion drifts into remote
realms of cosmology, much of the "my God" discussion becomes ever more
individualized. Evangelical Protestantism has especially cherished the notion
of a personal God, and this continues to be reflected in the heartfelt speech
of ordinary people and even of nonbelievers. (Recall the reaction of Lt.
Scheisskopf's wife, in Catch 22 , to Yossarian's famous tirade against
God. Yossarian asks why she is so upset, since she doesn't believe in God to
begin with. She replies, "But the God I don't believe in is a good God, a just
God, a merciful God.")
The
personal God of the sincerely born-again Christian bears little resemblance to
a different sort of personalized God, the customized kind that one acquires as
one might a personal trainer, though the workouts often are not as strenuous.
This latter sort of personalized God may amount at best to a synonym for
"conscience" or "serenity." The dark analogs of the personalized God are one's
personal demons--which represent the individually customized version of what
used to go by the nontechnical terms Bad Behavior or Guilt or simply Evil.
(Those malevolent imps are tenacious and bothersome: Robert S. McNamara, the
former secretary of defense, was once seen by the Washington Post trying
to "wriggle loose from his personal demons." The Chicago Tribune once
witnessed the tennis player John McEnroe "swearing at personal demons.")
Another form the personal God may take involves a
fragmentation of the concept of divinity itself. Thus, writing in The New
Yorker in December 1996, Louis Menand posited the breakdown of traditional
monotheism into "genetic polytheism," in which personal behavior is
attributable to an individualized genetic pantheon. Where once there was a God
of Anger, now there is a gene of aggression. Where once there was a God of
Wine, now there is a gene of alcoholism. In ancient Greece, Phobos was the God
of Fear. Today he is gene SLC6A4, whose specific Olympian dwelling place is
chromosome 17q12.
And then there is the God
module, which is not so much polytheistic as polymorphous. According to
researchers at the University of California at San Diego, there is a region of
the temporal lobe the stimulation of which, sometimes manifested in the form of
seizures, can now be correlated with certain intangible mental experiences. One
of the California researchers, Vilayanur S. Ramachandran, making public his
team's findings late last year at the annual meeting of the Society of
Neuroscience, stated, "We like to suggest there may be neural circuits in the
temporal lobe that may be part of the machinery of the brain that is involved
in mystical experiences and God." The researchers have christened these neural
circuits the "God module." "Now this is a matter between me, the two people I
love most ... and our god modules." We have not heard these words yet, the Lord
be praised.
