Zeal for my Cult will Consume You

A mixed metaphor: we have to thread the needle in order to separate the baby from the bathwater while not losing sight of the forest for the trees.

Let me explain.

Here's St. Paul writing to the Galatians ...

Those people are zealous for you, but not in a good way. Instead, they want to isolate you from us, so that you may be zealous for them.  Nevertheless, it is good to be zealous if it serves a noble purpose—at any time, and not only when I am with you. (Gal. 4:17-18)

He's warning the Galatians about cults, in a way.  

Cults (like the Revivalist cult in the Catholic Church) isolate you.  They limit your access to information that's outside the magic circle.  They try to make you dependent on them, so that all of your friends, time, money and mojo are attached to the cult.

And why do "they want to isolate you from us," in Paul's words ("us" being the whole and healthy Body of Christ)?   "So that you may be zealous for them."  So that you give them everything, so that you give them your very best.

Cults take advantage of our zeal.  Is our zeal a bad thing?  St. Paul himself went from zeal for God as a Pharisee to zeal for Christ as a Christian (see Acts 22:3, for instance).  So, to repeat, is zeal a bad thing?  Paul answers, "Nevertheless, it is good to be zealous if it serves a noble purpose."

But when you are deconstructing, escaping a cult - when you wake up to the fact that your zeal was serving an ignoble purpose literally for decades - when your free labor, sacrifice and creative output was being taken advantage of for the group that "isolated" you so that you would be "zealous" for them and so that they could use you; and when the masks come down and they finally reveal who they really are and what god it is they really follow ... well, then what?  In other words, is it possible to "deconstruct" from a cult, or from a false version of a religion, without tossing the baby out with the bathwater? If your misplaced zeal was serving an ignoble end for decades, is it even advisable to redirect it toward something that appears to be noble?  What if you get fooled again, taken advantage of again, abused again?

Me as St. Paul

In a similar way, I am wondering about the various TikTok scripture scholars I come upon.  They seem to be of two groups.

The first save the baby with the bathwater, though the bathwater is toxic and spreading cholera.  They reject any scriptural studies that challenge their agenda and that upset their sometimes literal reading of the Bible.

The second toss out the baby and the bathwater both, pointing to the patchwork quality of the scriptural writings, as revealed by archeology and textual criticism, and claim that this is proof that the Bible is not "univocal", that it does not (although very imperfectly and with many corrupt and reworked elements) tell "one story" - when obviously it does.  The many sources that make up the Bible somehow convey man's encounter, in history, with "the Divine Ground of our being".  That's the story it tells.  To refuse to see that story is to throw the baby out with the bathwater while refusing to see the forest for the trees ... to mix metaphors once again.

Eric Voegelin gets this.  He understands the story that is being told in the odd compendium of sources that make up Sacred Scripture.  Voegelin writes ...

For the story told from Genesis to
the end of 2 Kings is not a critical history of pragmatic events—not
even where the reference to pragmatic events has a solid basis in
contemporary historiography and court annals, as for the period of
the kingdom—but an account of Israel’s relation with God.  ... the events
are not experienced in a pragmatic context of means and ends, as
actions leading to results in the intramundane realm of political
power, but as acts of obedience to, or defection from, a revealed
will of God. They are experienced by souls who struggle for their
attunement with transcendent being, who find the meaning of individual and social actions in their transfusion with the plans of God
for man. When experienced in this manner, the course of events
becomes sacred history, while the single events become paradigms
of God’s way with man in this world.

To review:  One the one hand we suffer the corruption of the Faith as sold by the Religious Right, who, in their lust for power and tyranny, seek to isolate us and appropriate our zeal; but in escaping this trap, we must avoid the pitfall of writing off all causes as "ignoble" and all zeal as misplaced.  

And, on the other hand, we have the temptation to misread the Bible either in a sloppy way from the point of view of the cult; or to misread it carefully, critically and scientifically - while missing the entire point.

(By the way, the solution of most of the members of the Revivalist Catholic cult, from what I can tell, is not to read the Bible at all, which is certainly true for the Super Catholic families and their children that I teach.)

In other words, to thread the needle between the forest and the trees and to save the drowning baby from its toxic bathwater, we need to steer between Scylla and Charybdis as we plot our course between the devil and the deep blue sea.