The Triumph of Jewish Comedy Over Monotheistic Brands
Making sense of the multiplicity of religions and their absurd histories
Is God too big to fit into one creed or religion? That’s the question taken up and badly fumbled by Tom Gilson, an evangelical Christian writer and activist.
Gilson concedes that words are inadequate to contain the entirety of God’s nature, but he maintains that we can know enough about God for our purposes. We can know enough to be saved from God’s wrath, for example, not because we’re so clever but because an all-powerful deity would be able to reveal enough of himself to us. Otherwise, what would be the benefit of omnipotence and omniscience if such perfections meant God would forever be a secret known only to himself?
Yet this Christian boilerplate is beside the point of the question. The question is about the multiplicity of religions. If God exists, should we expect that only one religion would have anything truthful to say about him, or would many religious interpretations be needed to capture different aspects of this deity? Would God be like the elephant that’s perceived by blind people who touch different parts of the animal and mistake each for the whole?
In other words, could just one religion be expected to report the sufficient truth about God, or would there have to be multiple and even incommensurable sufficient truths since God would transcend our comprehension?
This question isn’t academic because there are exclusive religions such as Christianity and Islam (and their incompatible sects) which maintain that all other religions are misleading and that only they contain knowledge revealed by God that we need for our spiritual welfare.
Ethnic brands and cultural imperialism
Of course, the gambit of social exclusion is familiar from tribal practices that are exacerbated by competition. In advertising, for example, you see slick spokespeople talking up their product, exaggerating its benefits with grandiose claims mainly to capture the attention of strangers, to stand out in a crowd of rival messages.
Each tribe needs to feel proud of its ethos, and in a peaceful, egalitarian environment, each could do so while maintaining the validity of the alternative value systems. Indeed, in the history of religion this corresponded to the state of henotheism, in which different tribes worshipped their respective gods without denying the existence of foreign ones.
But because ancient societies tended not to be so encouraging to outsiders and fell into master or slave roles, either as imperial dominators or as annexed provinces of the colonizers, the claims made for the local mythos became loftier, more exclusive and monotheistic.
Then we were obliged to think, “There must be only one deity and just one correct religious interpretation because that’s the deity of my culture which deserves to rule over the societies we recently captured. If there were no such exclusive religious truth or mythos, we might have been in the wrong for subsuming those weaker societies which would have had equal rights to exist, given the existence of many gods.”
So you see that the gambit of proclaiming an exclusive religious truth goes hand in hand with the rise of tyranny. The palpable injustice of dominating societies that have alternative religions is explained away by dismissing the validity of those cultures and by exaggerating the merits of the more aggressive society. Should one civilization have designs on ruling the entire planet, its culture had better be puffed up with grandiose claims about its supreme majesty; otherwise, its imperial enterprise could hardly get off the ground.
On a relativistic view of religious truth, no culture would deserve to rule over another since each religion would be subjectively important to its practitioners. Only if some people feel justified in ruling over everyone else would it make sense for the aggressors to boast that their religion alone is absolute, all other religions being erroneous and not worth preserving.
We can go further and suggest that, properly (sociologically) speaking, a mythos is just a brand to express a society’s cultural character, ethnicity, or ethos. Thus, the question of whether God is too great to fit into just one creed is like asking whether there should be only one brand of wine. Different car companies make types of cars for classes of customers. It’s the same with all businesses that aren’t dominated by monopolies that artificially prevent competition by absorbing potential competitors.
Likewise, people are attracted to different religions because that’s how we express our tastes and honour the themes of our experience. Ancient religions were like corporate brands. To say that only one God is real would have been like saying that one company should manufacture everything. Even if such a monopoly were theoretically possible, we could imagine alternative ways of doing business, and that’s all it takes to form a subculture, an independent collective character that would naturally have a rival brand identity.
The denial of that possibility of even imagining an alternative culture is precisely the essence of a true dystopia. Thus, even despite their imperialism, ancient polytheistic empires would have frowned on the arrogance of pure monotheists just as we’d scoff at the attempt to sell sheer dystopia as an ideal.
Satirical monotheism and the rise of dystopian monopolies
Jewish monotheism arose as a form of slave morality, as Friedrich Nietzsche explained. Judaism was an implicit satire on theocracy (theistic imperialism). After the fall of their kingdoms, Jews were routinely conquered and they came to resent the impudence of the tyrants that would come and go, each boasting of its invincibility and of its exclusive rights to rule until that empire would be conquered by the next one.
Thus, Jews imagined a genuinely invincible sovereign, an immaterial one who stands for ideals of justice and mercy. Monotheistic Jews don’t conquer in that God’s name but maintain that our true sovereign master stands apart from the world he created and thus from all mere ethnic brands. The Jewish brand was therefore paradoxical: Jews had no totems or mascots, declining even to utter the name of their deity to avoid the sin of blasphemy or idolatry.
In short, the God of Judaism ruled only in the Jewish imagination, which was the same imagination that resented Jewish servitude. Implicitly, at least, Judaism became a comedic venture, a parody of the series of triumphal master religions. Through Judaism the god of slaves rules over all human tyrants and their mythoi. Judaism was a religion for outsiders who see through the ruse of religious imperialism; thus, the absoluteness of Jewish pretentions was only a comedic imperative. Jews fancied that their God rules over the universe just as the comedian hopes his joke will slay all crowds.
It’s no accident that so many Jews have gone into comedic professions. Great comedy comes from suffering, which is also why so few conservatives are funny. Comedy punches up not down, as the comedian makes light of suffering and of unfairness instead of justifying those conditions. Conservative comedy is a kind of bullying. Thus, authoritarians are best laughed at, not with, and that’s what Jews do, thanks to their infamous record of victimhood.
Alas, when the Romans destroyed Jerusalem in the first century CE, forcing Jews to rethink their religious identity or their satirical strategy, some Jews lost the plot and formed a Jewish-pagan hybrid called “Christianity” that would seek to rule the real world — not just our moral sensibilities — in the name of monotheism. Christian tyranny would become dystopian as the Church persecuted heretics for thought crimes and pretended to have the one and only absolute revealed Truth of the one and only God.
Again, the absoluteness of Judaism was meant as a joke on earthly tyrannies, the satirical force of which is unmistakable in Job and Ecclesiastes and in the ironic imperfections of the protagonists of Jewish scriptures, including Yahweh. Judaism isn’t supposed to rule the world, just as a comedian isn’t supposed to be funny every moment of the day. The comedian who’s “always on” doesn’t respect the difference between real life and the stage on which she tries out her comedic premises. Comedy is funny only because of that juxtaposition and because reality itself is deadly serious.
Tellingly, there’s no real humour in the New Testament, so Christians had the opposite problem: Jews were outsiders poking fun at the play of earthly tyrannies, at the competition between the boasts of ancient corporations (theocratic empires). The main implicit lesson of Judaism is thus contained in PB Shelley’s poem “Ozymandias”: all earthly tyrannies fall in time, so the moral, comedic hope for a happy ending must be sustained by faith in the arrival of an unearthly empire in which all debts will be fairly settled.
By contrast, the Church had no real humility because it was handed the keys to the Roman Empire, so like a spoiled child Christianity attempted to dominate everyone in sight until it, too, learned the hard way in the modern period, that nature doesn’t care who rules our measly planet. Jews understood the punchline, whereas Christians took over Jewish scriptures as part of a new religious brand that would have to be misunderstood as literally true and thus not as primarily satirical or self-effacing.
For Christians, which is to say for some heretical Jews or Judaized pagans, Jesus really came to earth to save his believers, Heaven and Hell are tangible realities in an afterlife, and the Bible is the sole Word of God. Hilariously, Islam would one-up Christians with the same schtick, with Muslims claiming with the same sanctimony that God had more to say after all, and that the Quran, not the Bible, is the perfect Word of God.
In any case, rather than being content to moralize from the comedic sidelines with the Jews, Christians and Muslims would seize military power and be responsible for theocratic empires. These weren’t henotheistic empires, but monotheistic and thus implicitly dystopian ones.
The unpardonable sin against comedy
Let’s return to the opening question, shifting it to this monotheistic context. Judaism entails that God is indeed too great to fit in any religion because God is otherworldly, and the presumption that God’s creation can encompass his transcendence is idolatrous and preposterous.
But Jews maintain they’re chosen by God to proclaim that paradoxical message. Jews are given the same social immunity that comedians or jesters are given, to walk on the stage and to make everyone laugh at themselves, including the mighty and the wise, by holding up the contrast between what is the case and what morally ought to be so. That gap will never be filled because our ideals are imaginary, and the real world is perfectly inhuman and indifferent to our preferences. Hence, what’s immortal in Judaism is only the tacit satire, not the mere literal meaning of any Jewish theological pronouncement.
As for Christians and Muslims, they must reject the implications of Jewish comedy, and affirm that God isn’t too big to fit into a single religion. Had history included only presumptuous theocracies, the seriousness of their dystopian rule would be convincing until time would corrupt their institutions and bring their empires low.
Yet the comedic insight of Judaism couldn’t be contained, based as it was on hard-won, indisputable experience, so Christianity had to be met with its antithesis to fulfill the higher law of poetic irony. The abyss between natural fact and moral ideal reappears as that between the irreconcilable pomposities of these two exclusive faiths, Christianity and Islam. Each says it has the divinely revealed truth, and the two theologies are in conflict.
Thus, the grandiosity of Christianity negates that of Islam, just as the latter’s negates the former’s. The attempt to ignore the satirical force of Judaism, to run a presumptuous theocracy is met with the re-emergence of that satirical condemnation, but now the joke is on the upstart monotheistic religions.
The legacy of Judaism isn’t just the existence of Christian and Muslim insolence; rather, it’s the comical annihilation of each deranged religion at the hands of its doppelganger. Comedy reigns in monotheism because the Jewish religion is based on an imaginary empire in which we’re free to envision the apocalyptic triumph of poetic justice.
By losing sight of that satirical standpoint and by losing themselves in paltry literalism, Christians and Muslims don’t just perpetrate idolatry. They commit the far worse sin of devising humourless, dystopian, not to mention doomed regimes. That’s a sin not against anything as small as a god or a religious brand; it’s a sin against a sense of humour.