Halloween Series -- Superstition and Religion -- Part Two

So in Part One, I shared a personal experience about the way we make meaning out of the events of our lives and even ascribe "divine guidance" abilties to them. You may think I'm crazy. But I'm not the only one.

Once I had that experience, I started noticing it everywhere.

I'm guessing everyone reading this has, at least once, been in a situation where someone (you or someone else) does that thing where, when looking into scripture for guidance, you open the book to "wherever" it opens and look for the message you're supposed to receive on that page.

My spiritual director has done this with me. I know it's a common practice. But I don't see how it qualifies as anything other than Bible-related superstition. There is no tenet of Christianity that suggests that the Holy Spirit controls our fingers and gravity and the paper and glue of the book's binding in such a way that the message we need to receive at any particular moment will be on the page that naturally is revealed. That's crazy. Yet people do it all the time.

Closely related to what we commonly call superstition is ancestor worship. Most Christians, in this country at least, would insist that they do not engage in ancestor worship. But if you look at what happens in countless congregations, you will see that this is not exactly true.

A colleague recently had a deacon leave the church because he thought the pastor had said the King James Bible wasn't true. What my friend in actuality said, in a sermon about women in leadership, was that the KJV had turned Junia into Junio. That was it. But you know how people are about the King James Bible.

What's funny about so much of the idolatry around the KJV is that it's Baptists (and other free church traditions) doing it, about an Anglican translation. But even that more recent history (as compared the more ancient texts that have been discovered since the KJV was completed) is not as recent as these people insist on elevating. They want to use the KJV because it is the book of their ancestors, their recent ancestors, the ones they remember.

This seems like a form of ancestor worship to me. The thing that is elevated, the thing that is held up as important and definitive, is the practice of the recent blood-line, the tribalism, rather than the universalism of the actual biblical witness. "This is how my daddy did it, and how my daddy's daddy did it, and dadgum, I'm going to do it that way too!"

One might also look at the practice of affixing little brass plaques as a symptom of ancestor worship too.