I’ve been reading religious tradcon stuff lately, and it’s been making me impossibly angry in a way that very little else does, and I think I’ve finally put my finger on why:

It’s the monstrous, self-aggrandizing impiety.

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I grew up as a Conservative Jew, on the observant/scholarly side of that movement.  Which is to say: I was raised to honor my creator.  Eventually I gave it up, through a process that basically amounted to tearing my heart out, because I could not reconcile my religion’s metaphysical assertions with the truth of the universe around me.  (And, contrary to what some people will tell you, metaphysical doctrine does matter – or should – even if you’re Jewish.)  But there were a number of years in there where I took it very, very seriously.

The thing that most people don’t realize about traditional Jewish observance is how impressively unrewarding it is.  Worship has neither the aesthetic grandeur of high-church rite nor the personal emotional intensity of low-church faith; it consists mostly of mumbling your way through long sections of formulaic Hebrew at a breakneck pace, much too fast for the meaning of the words to really register with you, let alone with anyone else.  The tunes, when there are tunes, are almost comically atonal and un-melodic, at least in old-timey Ashkenazi synagogues.  All the constant rituals are finicky and arbitrary and inconvenient, as though they were carefully engineered to make you roll your eyes in annoyance rather than falling to your knees in awe. And everything comes together in a religious worldview, a day-to-day theology and psychology, that is intensely unsympathetic to its adherents.  There’s no focus on heaven or on divine love or any of those warm-and-fuzzy things.  There’s no sense that anyone up there gives a shit about your fucking feelings.  The only outcome that you get promised for all your observance, apart from maybe some end-times messianic stuff, is that God will kick you around slightly more.

Of course, you learn to find glory and resonance in it anyway, if it’s what you grow up with and what you associate with the divine.

But that’s not the point.

The point is, inescapably and clearly: You are not doing this because you expect to get anything out of it.  You’re not going to get anything out of it, bucko, except possibly as a second-or-third-order knock-on effect.  It’s not going to make you happy, it’s not going to make you fulfilled, it’s not going to make your life easier.  You’re doing this because it is commanded.  You’re doing this to honor your creator.

He already fulfilled His end of the bargain: He created the world, and brought your ancestors out of Egypt.  Your turn.

You learn to take pride in this.  And justly so, I think.  It’s a healthy and a virtuous attitude, except insofar as it’s unmoored from actual metaphysical truth.  You don’t expect something out of your faith that it can’t provide.  You’re not arrogant enough to think that your desires represent the cosmic good, or that the ruler of the universe is primarily invested in your personal narrative.  You do the things because the things are good to do, because you’re committed to the proposition that they are the point. 

(This may help to explain some of the problems I have with atheistic Jews who remain observant because, uh, they think they’re getting something out of it.)

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What I see amongst the tradcons is mostly the opposite.

They’re not in it to honor their creator – at least, they never ever talk about that.  They’re mostly not even in it to achieve salvation.  There’s precious little discussion of Heaven in all their writings.

Mostly, as far as I can tell, they’re in it because they want things.  Worldly things.  Many of them seem to have come to their particular denominations specifically because they were hoping to find a vendor for certain worldly things.  They want the kind of family life, and the kind of society, that feels rightly ordered to them.  They want to feel as though their lives and their struggles are meaningful. 

And I sympathize with that.  I really do.  It’s OK to want things.  It’s especially OK, as far as I’m concerned, to want meaning in your life; I am all about finding ways for people to live meaningfully, in a fashion that is touched by numinous glory.  I’ll even go so far as to say that some of the tradcons’ object-level desires are widespread, and commendable, and that some of their ideas about how those desires might be fulfilled are more likely to do good in the world than not.

But – good God!  The sheer unmitigated gall that it takes to make God Almighty into the mascot for your own particular brand of joy and fulfillment!  The unfathomable hubris involved in saying that what He wants for the world is exactly the same as what you want for yourself!

I do not, and cannot, believe in the God of Abraham.  But if He does in fact exist…well, I would think that this should all be about Him, not about you.  Shut up and go pray.