“Mere Morality” by Dan Barker (Part 5): God, Morality, Ethnic Cleansing?

We now come to the point of Dan Barker’s book, Mere Morality, where it essentially devolves into an exercise in over the top condemnations of the Bible and Christianity based on really bad biblical reading and interpretation. It certainly feeds into the common narrative and stereotype many people have regarding the Bible and Christianity, but that doesn’t make it true. It does, though, make it an example of pandering to the ignorant masses to perpetuate further ignorance. If that sounds harsh, I’m sorry. But the truth hurts sometimes.

The God Book/Idolatry
Given the fact that Dan Barker used to be a minister, it utterly shocks me to find just how little he understands about the Bible itself. One of the things he constantly mentions is that the Bible doesn’t actually mention morality or ethics all that much—hardly ever. Obviously, Barker finds this problematic, for one of his complaints is that if there really was a God who inspired the Bible, then He obviously would have given us clear moral rules to live by.

But that very sentiment, quite frankly, betrays a very childish and immature understanding of God as “the great nanny in the sky.” The Apostle Paul himself addresses this very mindset in many of his letters, particularly Galatians and Romans, where he rails against the “Judaizers” who were insisting that righteousness was to be found by keeping all the rules in the Torah. Paul said that the person who holds that kind of mindset is a child in his/her thinking, and is, in effect, a slave to the very rules/regulations of the old age that is passing away. By contrast, Paul emphasized that the person who is born of the Holy Spirit has “grown up” in Christ and being renewed in God’s image—the adult doesn’t need a rule book to tell him what is right and wrong. The adult loves God and loves his neighbor as himself, and because of that, he does no harm to his neighbor (Romans 13:10). Love, Paul says, fulfills the Law.

Biblically, it is mature image-bearers of God that God wants, not immature children who tireless obsess over keeping the rules. So the natural question thus becomes, “How does someone do that? How does one grow from being childish in one’s thinking to being a mature and loving image-bearer of God?” The answer lies in one of the most fundamental themes throughout the Bible: You become like what you worship. And, ironically, that is a theme that Barker completely doesn’t get.

I know he doesn’t get it by reading quotes like this: “The biggest sin in the bible is idolatry. This is because the worship of other gods draws attention away from Yahweh, who, like a possessive husband, becomes murderously jealous when his lover looks at a rival” (72). And again, “The Ten Commandments—which are supposedly God’s ultimate rules for living—begin with ‘I am the Lord thy God. You shall have no other gods before me.’” (73).

To be clear, Barker essentially is saying, “Why doesn’t the Bible outline good moral rules to follow? Instead, God simply commands us to praise him all the time! Worshipping other gods gets him angry—what a possessive jerk!” This is something that Barker focuses on, not just this book, but his others as well. In fact, he often calls YHWH “Lord Jealous.” What Barker doesn’t get though is you become like what you worship. Idols are of false gods that don’t exist. They are carved and shaped by human hands and yet are held up as the lords over the people who made them. The idols might have eyes and ears, but they can’t really see and they can’t really hear. They are blind, deaf, and mute…and they don’t have brain in their head to think. Furthermore, they are often is the shape of beast-like creatures. The result of idolatry, therefore, is that idol worshippers become like those idols: spiritually blind and deaf, dumb and a doornail, and often beast-like, completely enslaved to their passions and lusts. The reason, therefore, YHWH wants His people to worship only Him is because human being are made in His image, and when they worship Him, they become full, mature human beings, and thus become more like Him.

That’s why idolatry is such a big deal to God. It’s not that He’s a “petty and jealous husband.” It’s that He wants human beings to be mature and loving image-bearers, not idiotic and childish slaves. Yet Barker cannot see this—he wants clear, moral rules to follow.

Another thing Barker gets wrong is his take on the Israelite “conquest” of Canaan. Barker’s take is this: “The Israelites were the invaders, supposedly called by God to steal the territory as a love nest for his bride. God’s chosen people were the outsiders where were mercilessly conquering the indigenous people. The conquest of the so-called ‘holy land’ was nothing more than expansionist imperialistic genocide. To make annihilation complete, all images of the indigenous gods had to be destroyed” (77).

And then, in an attempt to make the Book of Joshua sound more like a chapter of Nazi Germany or the Trail of Tears, Barker refers to Deuteronomy 7:1-6 and says this:  “‘For you are a people holy to the Lord your God; the Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.’ The last verse in that passage is clearly racist. Can anyone find anything moral in these words of ethnic cleansing?” (78).

I’ve written about Joshua’s “conquest” in a blog series that covered John Walton’s most recent book, The Lost World of the Israelite Conquest (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6. The long and short of it is this: It wasn’t some kind of Blitzkrieg conquest of a nation state and there wasn’t ethnic cleansing. Yes, what is being described is wars and battles, but to portray it as something akin to Hitler’s invasion of Poland not only wrong, it is laughable.

And while we’re at it, who in their right mind interprets YHWH’s choosing of Israel as “racist”? Does Barker even know the purpose of YHWH’s choosing of Israel? Clearly, he doesn’t. YHWH chose Israel to be the people through whom He would eventually bring blessing to all nations, just as He promised Abraham when He made His covenant with Abraham. So, if one takes the minimal time to understand context, one will see that the purpose of YHWH’s choosing of Israel is completely opposite of what Barker is ignorantly claiming.

In any case, Barker ends his rant about idolatry and so-called ethnic cleansing with the following claim: “Evil is reserved for those people who choose to think for themselves, to allow religious diversity, and to refuse to endorse violence in defense of the fragile and jealous ego of a racist dictator who demands to be loved at all costs” (81). In other words, Barker is saying, “The God of the Bible is bad because he doesn’t give good moral rules. Instead, he demands to be worshipped and loved, and he orders the ethnic cleansing of anyone who ‘worships different’ (i.e. those idolatrous Canaanites).”

But there was no “ethnic cleansing.” In addition, it is simply laughable that Barker is equating idolatrous practices that included forcing women into temple prostitution and engaging in child sacrifice with basically nothing more than a different denomination. It is wholly ignorant and downright silly.

The Sabbath, Interracial Marriage, and Rebellion
While we’re on the topic of being silly, let’s knock a few more preposterous statements by Barker out of the way. Take, for example the Sabbath. Barker says that it may seem like a harmless ritual “to honor the holiness of God…by setting aside time to praise him and ponder his commandments” (83), but in reality it is horrific—(never mind the fact that the purpose of the Sabbath was simply a day of rest: to take a break and live in faith that God can keep the world going without your help; nowhere in the Bible does it say the Sabbath was to be a time “to ponder his commandments”).

But how is it horrific? Allow Barker to explain: “If you fail to go to church or synagogue on the weekend—especially if you do any work on the ‘day of rest’—you are a profane and evil person who should be executed” (85). Let’s be clear: silliness and stupidity. What else is there to say? “Oh,” Barker will say, “then what about that story in Numbers where the man was stoned for picking up sticks on the Sabbath?” Honestly, that is something scholars aren’t sure of—the cultural and historical distance makes some things in the Bible hard to understand. But let’s be honest, to take one passing reference to something that no one is sure is about, and to then claim that means that the Bible wants everyone who doesn’t go to church on the weekend to be executed is…well…silly and stupid. What makes this even more laughable is that Barker confidently claims that the man who was killed for picking up sticks was doing it just “to make a fire to feed his family.” How Barker knows this is beyond me.

What about interracial marriage? Well, Barker refers to the books of Ezra/Nehemiah and equates them with, that’s right, Nazi Germany! Well, he doesn’t actually say, “Nazis!” but the implication is clear. For context, what Ezra/Nehemiah is set in the time after the Jews returned from exile. Basically, Ezra and Nehemiah wanted the returned exiles to stay faithful to the Torah—after all, they had gone into exile precisely because they broke the covenant and failed to live by the Torah.

One of the commandments was that the Israelites not intermarry with pagans, because pagans were idol-worshippers and idol-worship essentially dehumanizes people and leads people into sin. Some of the returned exiles, though, had intermarried with the Samaritans in the land, and so Ezra and Nehemiah (shockingly) forced them to divorce their non-Jewish wives and kick both the wives and children of those marriages out of the post-exilic community.

Now, the thing is, though, is that at the same time, there were prophetic writings (in the later part of Isaiah, in Zechariah, and the story of Jonah) in which it was declared that after the exile, God was “re-creating” His people and that somehow God was going to incorporate Gentiles into His people. And so what we have in the post-exilic period is a question: “What will the re-created people of God look like?” Ezra/Nehemiah wanted a community focused solely on the Torah, with no Gentiles at all. And yet there was the prophetic declaration that Gentiles were to get in somehow. Essentially, it was a time of uncertainty and flux.

Barker, though, just focuses on Ezra/Nehemiah, zeros in on the word “cleanse” (as in cleanse the people from idolatrous foreign influence) and immediately jumps to this: “History is filled with examples of ethnic purges to protect the ‘purity’ of the ‘master race,’ even in the twenty-first century. Many countries are still struggling with how to treat aliens, outsiders, immigrants, and foreigners. Xenophobia is an unfortunate inheritance of our tribal ancestry and our ‘sacred texts,’ but that doesn’t make it right. The human race is a single species on a single globe. Why should there be any ‘outsiders’? I hope you agree with me that fighting these intolerant notions, not embracing them, is part of what it means to be moral. Denouncing the evil of the ‘Good Book’ is a good thing to do” (89).

He fails to point out that within that very sacred text he claims is xenophobic are prophetic declarations is that Gentiles would become part of God’s people and promises that God would bless all nations. The Bible is blatantly realistic—it acknowledges the sins and struggles of fallen people who easily fall into xenophobia, and it works with them to bring them into a deeper understanding of a God who longs to make one people, comprised of both Jews and Gentiles, for His Name.

But nuance and complexity is lost on Barker. He just focuses on decontextualized, cherry-picked verses and passages and twists them to fit his particular agenda. It might fool people who are ignorant of biblical history and the Bible as a whole, but it is rather pathetic to anyone who knows anything about the Bible. I’m sorry if that sounds harsh, but the truth is the truth.