The Moses Option
Is Christianity to blame for modern society? Antonio Martinez thought so, prompting his conversion to Judaism, but is he right? Stephen Watt looks into it.
In this week’s Coracle I have asked Stephen Watt to review an article by Antonio Garcia Martinez who decided to convert to Judaism. What was interesting about this conversion was how he claimed the ‘secularized sequel to Christianity’ secular liberalism had driven him to it and also away from Catholicism. I felt that his points were genuine questions to reflect on and ponder for though you can see the idea’s of the victim and the apocalypse within liberalism (for him it is best seen in woke culture); only Catholicism can bring hope, and forgiveness, not the nihilism and desperation that underlines so much our societies thinking. Below is the link to Garcia’s original article, which Stephen predominantly reviewed.
The article, ‘The Moses Option’, can be found here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/the-moses-option (All quotes are from this unless otherwise indicated.) Earlier articles on the theme can be found on his website.
Antonio García Martínez is a victim of the modern sport of ‘cancellation’, having been sacked from Apple as a result of writing a book, Chaos Monkeys, which was held to have violated the firm’s claim to have ‘always strived to create an inclusive, welcoming workplace’.
It’s perhaps hardly surprising that his justification for his recent religious conversion seems to be to flee the chaos that many feel underlies such cancellations:
Public life in the West these days is a feverish cycle of figuring out which divine victim to elevate, and which world-saving millenarian “current thing” to embrace this week. It’s the secularized sequel to Christianity with all of the grace, chastity, and virtue stripped out leaving only the faith in a victim-prophet and in an imminent apocalypse that will right all wrongs and initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth.
What perhaps is more surprising is that this conversion has taken the form of a conversion from some sort of Catholicism (‘raised as I was inside the Cuban Catholic world of Miami’) to Judaism. I’m going to concentrate on one of his published pieces (‘The Moses Option’) detailing this change, although he has published others which I will refer to at times.
Although García Martínez doesn’t go into much detail on this so far as I can find, I get the impression of a lightly held Hispanic cultural Catholicism, quickly abandoned in adulthood in favour of a secular liberalism. That’s probably the biographical story, but there’s also a story about ideas and their failure: a secular liberalism that fails to deliver a viable account of human flourishing; and a Christianity that fails in at least two ways as a real alternative: firstly, by Christianity’s always containing within itself the virus of ‘the faith in a victim-prophet and in an imminent apocalypse that will right all wrongs and initiate the Kingdom of God on Earth’ which has led to the current crisis of modernity; and finally, a sort of ‘hyper-agnosticism’ which he characterises thus:
I hate the term ‘agnostic,’ as it seems a kind of half-assed skepticism that doesn’t want to go all the way to nihilist atheism. My position is more of a I don’t think the question [‘Do you believe in God?’] is even answerable, so why bother asking? [From ‘Why Judaism -part II]
Most Catholics are probably not going to disagree with him on the vices of secular liberalism. But then it gets really interesting for me at least: why not Catholicism? At one point, he describes traditional Christianity and secular liberalism as being much of a muchness:
But the trad Christians and woke progressives don’t actually disagree on the dominant moral narrative for our lives, they simply disagree on who to cast in the starring role.
I take this as meaning that Christianity and liberalism put victimhood centre stage: either in the form of Christ and the martyrs (trad) or sexual or racial minorities (lib). And it’s this aspect of Christianity that does seem central to his avoidance of a return to Catholicism: that modernity simply reveals a fundamental problem within Christianity which is that of asserting victimhood and an excitable apocalypticism as the centre of a religious (or post Christian secularised) life. The other central reason for his avoidance of Christianity seems to be connected with naturalism: that the vibrantly supernatural and personal God of traditional Christianity simply isn’t tenable as a serious belief in modernity. Instead, Judaism as a religion which focuses on practice rather than belief provides a better alternative.
What then is a Catholic to make of these twin repulsive forces from Catholicism: firstly, a diagnosis that Christianity as a religion of ‘impossible moral demands’ which will always, ultimately, collapse itself (and is doing so in secular liberalism); and secondly, that it is a metaphysically false religion which is better replaced by a more epistemically modest emphasis on practice rather than dogmatic assertion? The first thing to say, I think, is that in modernity all religious belief looks a little improbable and all conversions a little arbitrary. I have written previously about the ‘buffered self’, Charles Taylor’s idea that the self of modernity is always peering out beyond its walls and trying to assess the beyond. In the context of morality and religion, we are always trying to find a personal finality on an understanding of the world that is essentially incomplete and veiled to our subjectivity: whatever we finally decide for ourselves, we know that such decisions could have gone otherwise and have done so for other people as wise or wiser than ourselves. Finally, I think there is a particular responsibility of being careful when dealing with relations between Judaism and Christianity. Vatican II has done much to heal the bloody history between Judaism and Catholicism, but the tensions remain and it’s important for Catholics to exercise particular care when dealing with them.
Bearing all that in mind, I’m glad that García Martínez is now worshipping our shared God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob rather than secular nothing. But I’m sorry he has rejected Catholicism because I think it’s a better choice and I hope he comes back to it. I find his attack on the centrality of the weak and the victim in Christianity ill-founded and hard to reconcile with the similar ethical drive of Judaism: isn’t it central to both Catholicism and Judaism to ‘[g]ive justice to the weak and the fatherless;/maintain the right of the afflicted and the destitute’ (Psalm 81(82):3)? Many of our current problems are the result of the abandonment of forgiveness for past wrongs and a failure to see this world as a vale of tears. Secular liberalism may have emerged from Christianity, but because it is not Christianity it has abandoned those central Christian insights which allow wise use of such Christian principles that do remain. Moreover, if emphasis on victimhood gives Christianity a tendency to produce evil in the way of secular liberalism, an emphasis on power and vengeance produces obvious problems of its own. There is no quick route for escaping the power of demons: fresh ones are always waiting to move in.
Turning to what I have styled García Martínez’s ‘hyper-agnosticism’ about the existence of God (‘why bother asking?’) and emphasis on the practice of Judaism rather than belief, although this sort of claim about Judaism’s orthopraxis rather than orthodoxy is often made, it does seem to be one that’s particularly applicable to some forms of Judaism rather than others. My knowledge of Conservative Judaism (Masorti Judaism outwith North America) is admittedly heavily dependent on the Rabbi Small detective stories of Harry Kemelman, but this emphasis on practice rather than belief is a constant theme in them: it seems rather less characteristic of what you’ll find elsewhere in, say, Maimonides or Nachman of Breslov. Unless orthopraxis is backed up by some account as to why this or that burdensome practice is rooted in truth, it will fail to retain or attract. Perhaps as a result, even within Judaism, Conservative Judaism is a dwindling minority: the third largest denomination in the US and ‘[b]eyond North America, the movement has little presence’.
In short, García Martínez’s flight from secular liberalism is understandable and one with which many Catholics will sympathise. His adoption of Conservative Judaism rather than a return to Catholicism strikes me (what a surprise!) as less convincing. But in general, it’s hard to avoid that baffling opacity of religious conversions in modernity: at any conversion’s heart lies both an element of subjectivity and an element of grace that’s hard for an observer to do justice to.
Stephen Watt
Further reading and references:
García Martínez’s Wikipedia entry is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antonio_Garc%C3%ADa_Mart%C3%ADnez_(author)
The article, ‘The Moses Option’, can be found here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/community/articles/the-moses-option (All quotes are from this unless otherwise indicated.) Earlier articles on the theme can be found on his website:
and
I mention the Rabbi Small mysteries as an introduction to Conservative Judaism. I’d particularly recommend Conversations with Rabbi Small (1981) which, unlike the rest of the series, is intended more as a dialogue about the nature of Judaism rather than a novel. The quote and statistics about Conservative Judaism are from the Wikipedia article which can be found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conservative_Judaism .
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