When I returned to college some years ago to complete my interdisciplinary bachelor’s degree, I had the great good fortune to take a religion course titled “Jewish Myth, Mysticism and Magic,” taught by a local spiritual leader, Rabbi Geoffrey Dennis. Author of the first comprehensive encyclopedia on the topic, Rabbi Dennis taught us a lot about Judaism, and about how many of its beliefs and practices have shaped Western civilization.
Beyond Judaism’s rich and vivid mystic traditions, the topic of “performative utterance” most captured my imagination. In less scholarly language, this means bringing thought into reality using spoken words. From a magical perspective, it means “casting spells.”
Abracadabra clipart
For example, most of us are familiar with the stage magician’s magic word, “Abracadabra!” that typically produces some surprising result, like a rabbit out of a hat. What most of us don’t know is that “abracadabra” roots in the Aramaic language that Jesus spoke, in a phrase that means “I create what I speak.” Ironically, the dreaded Killing Curse from the Harry Potter series, “Avada Kedavra,” could be a derivation meaning “I destroy what I speak.”
Lest we think “performative utterance” confined to esoteric realms of myth and magic, we Christians use it every time we baptize someone or invoke the Holy Spirit’s Presence in the Eucharist. We use words to call the divine into our human actions for a specific purpose. We simply don’t recognize our words as performative utterance, which this amateur liturgical scholar finds disheartening; such lack of understanding undercuts our growth as disciples of Christ.
I contend that ignorance of the meaning and practices of performative utterance have infected both the religious and political realms of human endeavor today. It’s called by an earthier, even vulgar term: bullshit.
“Bullshit” isn’t merely lying. “Bullshit” means outright assertions contrary to provable facts, as philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt wrote in his seminal 1986 book, “On Bullshit.” Today the practice has become so prevalent that there’s even an academic course that teaches the meaning of “bullshit” and how to counteract it (see “Why Bullshit Hurts Democracy More than Lying”).
Counteracting “bullshit” requires more energy by an order of magnitude than producing it, according to Brandolini’s Bullshit Asymmetry Principle. It’s why facts that seem so self-evident to many people – such as women’s equality, for instance – are so hard to enact as public policy. It takes twice as much effort to convince people of the validity of women’s equality in the face of long-held myths of male superiority, such as those that restrict the image and identity of God despite biblical evidence to the contrary.
Like American democracy now, The United Methodist Church is awash in bullshit, and refuses to “call BS” on it. Although they rarely admit it publicly, United Methodist leaders hesitate to call BS on most of the nonsense running around the church because the BS in question has been linked to the morality or identity of those who espouse it. As a result, to call BS on some specious concept is received as impugning the morality and integrity of the person who speaks it. This is no prescription for unity.
As part of our training as community organizers for Faith in Texas, we’re taught that we must constantly “subvert the dominant narrative” when educating our neighbors about the chasm between our commonly held values and our public policies. “Subverting the dominant narrative” is a nice way of saying, “I call bullshit.” In the wake of the defeat of two constitutional amendments on women’s equality, it has become apparent that there needs to be a lot of “subverting the dominant narrative” as The United Methodist Church moves toward its fateful 2019 Special General Conference on unity.
There can be no unity as long as we’re refusing to see and talk about the bullshit in our church. It’s more than speaking truth to power in the prophetic tradition. It’s about acknowledging our own propensities toward bullshit as well as our neighbors’, and coming to some common agreement on how we move forward from here.
Will our choice be an “abracadabra” moment of creation, or an “Avada Kedavra” spell of destruction?
Cynthia B. Astle serves as Editor of United Methodist Insight, which she founded in 2011.