Closed Circles

Thomas M. King's Enchantments: Religion and the Power of the Word

In his book Enchantments, which I continue to pore over, Rev. Thomas M. King, S. J., speaks of how a verbal enchantment can make of those who are entranced by it a "closed circle" that excludes all who are not caught up in the enchantment. Such was the case with the words of the prophets in the Old Testament. When the Jews were in exile, they were sustained as a people by the likes of Isaiah, who wrote: "O my people, who dwell in Zion, be not afraid of the Assyrians" (10:24).

The prophets had foretold what actually happened: the destruction of Jerusalem by the Jews' pagan enemies. Yet, King writes (pp. 103-104):

If the prophetic words [had once] disheartened the nation, they sustained it when fortifications and arms were not to be had. In the Babylonian exile the captive Jews would have lost their hope, if they had not been supported by the prophetic word. And they would have lost their identity if their words had not made of them a "closed circle" ... with its familiar clichés. The words had a power to hold the community together and bring courage into being.

Words, even familiar clichés, can speak to us with power when

... all we see before us is "a grayish sea of ambiguity." We seem to be looking for something else — someone who will speak to us so that we will pass out of ourselves into the other. If that happens, everything is changed. At such a moment, the words spoken may be few, but they can change the direction of our life. (p. 105)

This, I think, is exactly what evangelicals experience when they say they have been "born again."


A new documentary, Friends of God: A Road Trip with Alexandra Pelosi, premiered last night on HBO. It depicts the lives and beliefs of the estimated 50 to 80 million evangelical Christians living in America today. Pelosi is an Emmy-wining filmmaker and the daughter of new Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi. As I watched her interviews with leading evangelicals such as ...

Pastor Ted Haggard, who recently stepped down as president of the 30-million strong National Association of Evangelicals — the largest evangelical group in the U.S. — following allegations that he had sex with a male prostitute and bought illegal drugs (see the synopsis of the documentary here)

... I was struck by the way many of the interviewees talked as if they had been programmed by a cult. A very large cult. There was a notable absence of independent thought.

For example, when several interviewees were asked whether they believed in the theory of evolution, all responded to the effect that, no, they believed in the Bible and creation, and that it was evolutionists who could be accused of parroting a pre-programmed package of thought. Yet Pelosi's footage shows anti-evolutionist preachers and lecturers in action, feeding anti-evolution notions into the heads of Christian adults, teens, and pre-teens, in what I found to be a scary, chilling litany of vibrant, well-honed rhetoric and potent musical singalong.

In other words, the documentary showed me that if you're born again, you're apt to be subjected to religious and quasi-religious enchantments that serve to make all who are like you into a proverbial "closed circle," staunchly defending a party line on what is and is not true.


The born-again Christians in the documentary are not unlike the Jews held in captivity in Babylon, in the following sense. They feel they are a put-upon minority, strangers in a strange, secular land. Mouthing things like "America was founded by Christians" and "This is a Christian country," they feel they ought to be — and someday soon will be — the majority voice in the land.

According to my history books, the Founding Fathers indeed were mostly Christians of various stripes. But many of them were, as was Thomas Jefferson, deists who held that the Creator is no longer involved in human affairs. Some were of Puritan stock; it is not clear to me that the Puritans should be counted among the ranks of born-again evangelicals. Many were Anglicans, or what we now call Episcopalians. Quite a few were Lutherans or Catholics, neither denomination being particularly evangelical. There were Quakers and Methodists, Baptists and Anabaptists, Presbyterians and Calvinists ... but I am not aware of any signers of the Declaration of Independence who claimed to be born again.

Yet today's evangelicals are convinced we are on the threshold of a new Jerusalem.

This can take the form of expecting Jesus's imminent Second Coming. Different evangelicals have different notions of how the world's "End Days" are to play out, but there seems to be a general tendency to champion the cause of Israel's Jews, in furtherance of the prophecy in the Book of Revelation concerning their putatively necessary role in it all. If the Jews aren't living in Palestine, the thinking goes, it can't happen. But it has to happen, so we Christians need to do our part by making sure the Palestinians don't expel Jews from the Holy Land.

In other words, Israeli Jews have lately become members emeritus of an American evangelical "closed circle."


Looked at abstractly, evangelical belief seems to hold that the history of the confusing, chaotic, material world is about to be subsumed into that of the ideal world, directly under the will of God. Very soon now, those pesky differences between what is and what ought to be — the condition which I generally term worldly "injustice" — are going to go away. If we all hope real hard for this to happen, it will happen, and sooner rather than later.

I see this sort of thinking as a way to stave off the Second Baptism which King speaks of, the one that inaugurates in us a true spirituality of humanity and compassion. It staves it off by obviating the Dark Night of the Soul — the descent into a whirligig of confusion, doubt, and temptation — which necessarily precedes the Baptism of Fire and Spirit.

Not that evangelicals aren't compassionate. Toward others in their closed circle they are most caring indeed. As Ted Haggard pointed out in the documentary, when a member of his 14,000-member New Life Church phones 911 in a medical emergency, someone from the church community is likely to get there before the ambulance does. A megachurch, he says, is very much like an old-time village or township, providing all the fellowship and brotherhood those vanished institutions once did.

The problem, as I see it, is that the compassion is not universal. It does not extend much beyond the church community, or the larger community of American evangelicals ... with notable exceptions being made for members emeritus such as Israeli Jews and for those who are being evangelized in hopes that they will become initiates to the cult.

Those who clearly are not about to join the cult are in a different category. A personal anecdote: When I was about 16, I spent a summer with my cousin Susan's family in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. I was taken to Sunday School at their Southern Baptist church. With other kids my age I sat in, yes, a closed circle and heard the teacher/leader put the following question up for discussion: Now that we were reaching an age in which we would be going out on dates, was it a good idea to date people who did not share our religion?

I put up my hand and, as the guest, was called on first. I said it was fine to go out on dates with non-Christians such as Jews, as well as Christians of other denominations such as Catholics, because meeting them and their families would broaden our understanding of other types of people.

That turned out to be the wrong answer. The right answer was that dating non-Baptists could lead to knotty problems if marriage and children ensued, such as in what church to have the wedding and how to raise the offspring.


Extrapolating from that, I assume that in this view non-Baptists (or, at least, non-evangelicals) are to be evangelized, or, failing that, pitied. But pity is not the same as compassion. Pity is suffering for or about the woes of others. Compassion is suffering with others. Jesus did not teach pity. Jesus taught compassion.

His teaching of compassion, furthermore, went beyond the closed circle of his Jewish ancestry by virtue of the cross. King writes (p. 143):

The Gospels proclaim the Good News. Yet the good news is paradoxical, for the Gospels tell of God's chosen One going to a shameful death. In [the Gospel of] John the paradox is even more striking [in that it is] a stunning revelation of divine Glory. A contemporary exegete has explained the Jewish background of the term: "In the [Old Testament] the glory of God implies a visible and powerful manifestation of God to men" ... . For John the Glory of God was fully manifest only in the passion when Jesus was raised on the cross.

Late in his public ministry Jesus was told that some Greeks wanted to see him. This interest — from non-Jews, from those outside the closed circle — indicated to Jesus that his time of preaching was over. He responded, "The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified" (12:23). That is, his preaching was for a "closed circle" of listeners, those who shared a common book; hearing of the interest of the Gentiles he knew that his time of preaching was over; it was time for crucifixion and silence. Raised on the cross he would be present in the full absurdity of the human scene, but then his message would become universal; he continued, "I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all men to myself" (12:23). The power of the crucifixion would extend beyond the "closed circle."

It would do so in a way beyond words and sense, beyond the clichés of the book faithful Jews held in common, beyond preaching and verbal enchantments. It would pose a riddle for one all to contemplate in the depths of the spirit: how could one so high be glorified by being brought so low as to be executed like an ordinary criminal? What does this paradox say to us?

Moreover, how does it say it to us? Not with words alone. King says (pp. 143-144):

As the passion began Jesus again spoke of it as his time of glory ("Now is the Son of Man glorified"). By his passion he would become a "visible and powerful manifestation of God" to all the world. His glory would be manifest on the cross where all power, all sense and meaning were defeated.

... Zen [Buddhist] masters ... lead their disciples to the point of illumination by proposing koans for their consideration. These koans [are] paradoxes which ... take the disciple beyond words. The most famous koan asks, "What is the sound of one hand clapping?" One is not able to conceive of one hand clapping, yet one meditated on this or other koans until one "saw" apart from meaning; phenomena apart from meaning was the illumination. The Jews lived in a world of meaning, for, having received the heavenly word, everything was meaningful. But by their book they also formed a "closed circle with their own clichés. During the days of his ministry Jesus was drawing those within the circle — the Gentiles would be drawn a different way. ... The phenomena itself would be the revelation, his time of Glory.

Think of it: according to John, the final glory of the Word of God, Jesus Christ, comes to all of us alike in beholding a phenomenon without words. A riddle, a paradox, a koan, an incomprehensible cross is needed to take us out of our hitherto closed circles and into an attitude of universal community and compassion. Here, then, is a crucial part of the Christian message which evangelicals seem to have forgotten!