Image description: A hand is holding a tarot card, The Empress by Pamela Colman Smith from the Rider-Waite-Smith deck. In the image, a person is sitting on a throne of cushions wearing a gown with pomegranates on it and a crown with thirteen stars. There is wheat, a flowing river and lots of trees. The sky is yellow and the roman numeral III is up top. Behind the card is a shelf with plants on it, and a window through which green grass is visible.
I’ve gotten really into true crime documentaries. I recently watched The Staircase, a series about a person who was tried and convicted for killing his wife, served eight years in prison and then was released on the grounds that he hadn’t received a fair trial. I was compelled enough by the story to spend what little free time I had in otherwise busy days listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos, and reading Reddit threads about the case.
Around the time I started watching the show I also started reading Grace Jantzen’s Becoming Divine: Toward A Feminist Philosophy of Religion. Through Jantzen’s book, which challenges the centrality of belief in religious philosophy, I became especially interested in the emphasis on evidence in the judicial system (which I’m not disputing the need for, just wondering about), and how what’s so compelling about these true crime stories is that the evidence so often feels inadequate to the many questions that come up as you witness the stories.
I doubt I would have questioned the emphasis on evidence at all if I hadn't been reading Jantzen’s book. In the early pages, she points out that "correct beliefs about God, and about other religious questions such as life and death, miracles and revelation, is taken as crucial.” The assumption, she says, is that religion is in essence about belief.
Jantzen spends some time arguing that this emphasis on beliefs coincides with the “grand myth of rationality” of the post-Enlightenment west. She points to religious philosophers who rely on scientific methods to prove the existence of God. She also notes that “what is taken as scientific knowledge is itself based on socially constructed paradigms.” Paradigms which can and do “undergo shifts so drastic that the assured knowledge of one era becomes the fable of the next.”
She is saying, I think, that knowledge is socially constructed, and can therefore be deconstructed and remade to serve particular interests. Her interest is in undermining some of the central assumptions of religious philosophy which has historically been dominated by men. She takes aim specifically at the assumption that religion is essentially about belief. She draws on the work of philosopher Luce Irigaray who argues that religion is not about belief, but about becoming.
So I'm watching this show about a murder trial and I’m becoming obsessed with seeking the truth of the matter. And I’m doing so from the inside of a construct that’s already told me there are two options for what truth will look like: It will either appear as guilt or not guilt. The construct I'm in has also told me that this truth revelation of guilt or not guilt will be reached through an examination of evidence.
And I’m getting mixed up. Because there are multiple stories happening at once in the documentary. And while I don't dispute the fact that this person either killed his wife or didn’t, I’m also wracked by an understanding that there's a lot more to it than simple guilt or not guilt.
I get that inside the justice system, which is there to decide whether or not this person should or should not be incarcerated, those are the criteria for making that decision. But what if there were different criteria, or prisons didn't exist and the stakes were something else entirely?
So I have this realization which is I'm sure obvious to anyone who’s interacted in any sort of depth with the judicial system, that not unlike the way religious philosophy takes as central this question of belief / unbelief, the judicial system is also centered around several significant assumptions.
In the case of a trial around harm, a person can be found one of two things, guilty or not guilty. Through an objective examination of evidence (which is itself presumed to be objective, despite the fact that it’s presented subjectively through story) a judge and jury can know which of the two this person is. There’s an assumption, too, that a judge and jury are capable of objectivity and impartiality.
I hesitate even to name these things because I’m so far out of my wheelhouse. My aim isn’t to name facts about how the judicial system works but to illustrate what it looks like to expose assumptions and begin to wonder: Where do they come from, who benefits or suffers as a result of their being accepted unquestioned, and what else might be possible?
Jantzen writes that “a critique can be counter-productive…a consequence of remaining at the level of critique means that effectively we stay at the same old level as those whom we critique: we do not change the ground. But if we do not change the ground, then in fact, though we may not intend it, we are reinforcing it…” This changing of the ground is, in my understanding, what deconstructive work is all about.
Coming back to the centrality of belief in religious philosophy and the notion that religion might actually be more about becoming, I’ll say that for me, becoming is—simply put—a more enticing idea than believing.
But what interests me most about the idea that becoming divine could be the project of religion instead of belief, and deconstructive work in general, is that it shows meaning as constructed, and it shows the ways a constructed meaning yields a set of assumptions. Those assumptions give us something to work with, material to question and unpack, and ultimately to remake differently if we choose to serve different ends than they currently do. I think it’s exciting and hopeful.
When I get really into more heady ideas like this I try to spend at least some time contemplating why it even feels relevant and what about these ideas resonates with my practical, daily struggles. In this case, it doesn’t take long for me to call to mind situations that I’m thinking about inside certain unquestioned assumptions.
To listen to me read this Offering aloud, click here.