It's In the Code Ep. 79: "Everyone Has An Ultimate Authority II"
“Everyone has an ultimate authority.” Last episode considered the intellectual merits of this claim. In this episode, Dan considers the emotional appeal of this claim and the work that claims like this do within high-control religious contexts. How do claims to ultimate authority provide us with a sense of control over, or assurance about, our lives? And how do they serve the interests of those who would claim to speak on behalf of that “authority”? Check out the episode to find out!
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Axis Mundi Hello and welcome to It's in the Code, a series that's part of the podcast Straight White American Jesus.
My name is Dan Miller.
I'm professor of religion and social thought at Landmark College, and I am your host.
Glad, as always, to be with you.
As always, I want to start just by thanking so many of you for the support, the insights, the feedback, the ways that you support this series and the podcast in so many ways.
Always value your insights.
Daniel Miller Swag, DanielMillerSWAJ at gmail.com.
I have, I guess we're not in the new year yet, but it's a quasi New Year's resolution that I'm going to catch up on the emails as soon as I am able, now that we are through the academic semester and I've got a little time, so I really look forward to getting to respond.
To some of you, I haven't been able to respond to.
I've seen lots of emails and comments and things like that.
I don't always get to respond to them when I want to, but I will be doing that.
So, I'm sure that that's something that everybody will be waiting for just with bated breath in the new year.
At any rate, picking back up with today's episode, Really, it's a sort of a part two last episode, we looked at this, this line of reasoning that people will have, and that some of you will have encountered, as I said, in that episode, a lot of you won't.
But people who have have been kind of thrown by it.
And it's it's the the claim we looked at that everyone has an ultimate authority.
And last episode, I situated it specifically in the context of claims to religious authority, that there's an ultimate authority in terms of like sort of religious truth or religious matters, I think, closely related to that in issues of ethics or morality or whatever.
And specifically then within the kinds of communities we're typically talking about, biblical authority.
And I've said a lot about the Bible in the past.
I'm going to be doing some more episodes on what the Bible is and how it works and how we can sort of decode that language.
We're going to be revisiting some of that in upcoming episodes.
We'll say more about that as we come along.
But last episode in talking about that, so that's some of the background of it, kind of focused on what I saw as the philosophical and kind of practical flaws in that reasoning.
If you've encountered this, and this is what I talked about last time, that some folks are sort of thrown by this, it sounds kind of sophisticated.
Everybody has some ultimate authority, ours is the Bible, you know, who are you to say that that's not, you can't prove an ultimate authority, etc, etc, etc.
And I think it has what I call the veneer of philosophical complexity.
But if you're familiar with things with a veneer, stick with this metaphor for a minute, you know that a veneer is just on the surface.
Once upon a time, I built a really nice dining room table, And I got some nice furniture-grade plywood.
For those who don't know, plywood is wood that's made of, like, layers of different woods.
But it had this nice, beautiful top layer that was really nice and finished and so forth, but it's really thin.
It's a veneer.
If you were to sand through it or finish through it too much, you'll, like, wear through the veneer and find the less nice-looking wood underneath.
So, what I talked about last time is there's a veneer of philosophical complexity, but I think if you press down at all, we find that it's just surface-deep.
And I suggested that philosophically, that notion that we all have an ultimate authority is actually fairly naive, philosophically speaking.
And maybe at the level that more of us exist, since most of us don't sit around reading philosophy, it doesn't line up with our actual practices and our actual experiences and the way that we live our life.
So that was sort of last episode, but I kind of posed a question toward the end of that episode that I want to get into in this one.
Continuing with this idea, this claim that we all have an ultimate authority, and it was this.
So it was basically, what is the draw of this understanding of religious or ethical authority?
In other words, if the rationale behind it We're going to really probe the philosophy, if you like, or the theology behind it.
If that rationale is pretty flimsy, if it doesn't capture how really any of us, religious or otherwise, actually live on a day-to-day basis, Why does it have the appeal that it does?
And as always, if you listen to me, if you're listening to me now, you've probably been listening to the series for a while, you know that this is one of my points of interest is why people say the things that they say or do the things that they do or hold the beliefs that they do.
If oftentimes it doesn't seem very reasonable to do so.
And as with so many other things, I think that this appeal to authority, this claim that we all have an ultimate authority, has a lot more to do with emotions than it does with sort of intellectual reasoning or rationality.
And this also won't surprise anyone who listens to this series for any period of time, but I also think that the function of this way of talking, the purpose behind it, the task that it accomplishes, I don't think that it's primarily about intellectual or philosophical or theological debate.
Like so many of the themes we tackle in this series, I think it has a lot more to do with issues of control.
And that shouldn't be surprising by now.
A consistent focus in this series is what I, following Laura Anderson at the Center for Trauma Resolution and Recovery, define so clearly as high control religious context.
That's our focus.
So the idea that it comes down to control is probably not surprising.
I think it has to do with controlling others.
But I also think it has to do with creating a sense of control for our own lives.
I think it provides a measure of comfort.
So let's dive in.
And what I want to do, I guess, if we want to think about it this way, is sort of cracking the code of assurance.
What do I mean by that?
Well, let's start by thinking about it this way.
You know, I know, we all know that if there's somebody who constantly tells us how confident they are, how secure they are, how smart they are, how successful they are, how good they are at something, the more they verbalize how good or successful or smart or whatever they are,
I think for everybody watching that, the more we know how insecure they are, the more we know that the more they talk about not being insecure, basically, it's the biggest sign of insecurity.
We all know this.
So, I take that, and if I project it into the religious world, when someone assures us, not only that they have a single highest authority, going back to last episode, you know, you might not, and I might not, but they do.
They have a single highest authority.
And again, we're thinking of traditions primarily that associate this with the Bible, but it could take other forms.
But then they go on to defend that by saying that everyone operates under such an authority.
That doesn't sound like confidence to me.
To me, it smacks of insecurity.
When somebody says, yes, I claim this as my highest authority, and you kind of look at them sideways or you roll your eyes or whatever, and they say, yeah, but everybody has a highest authority.
You have one too.
You just don't know it or you don't acknowledge it or whatever.
That doesn't sound like theological religious assurance.
It sounds like insecurity.
Okay?
But insecurity about what?
And if we were to state this differently, this is what I think is at work here.
And I think that this is a useful question to ask.
For those who make this claim, everyone has an ultimate authority as a way of sort of legitimating their own claims to having some ultimate authority.
What do those who make this claim get from it?
How does it mitigate an insecurity or what is it that they're insecure or anxious about that is somehow remedied or aided by this claim, this assurance to ultimate authority?
Okay?
And I said a few minutes ago that I think this kind of claim has more to do with emotion than, you know, philosophical or intellectual aims.
And again, the reason I keep hanging up on the philosophy side of this is that so often, if you encounter this phrase, it is by somebody who has some philosophical knowledge, or as I said before, that they've been reading some theology, they've been reading some apologetics, they've been reading literature from people who have some philosophical background, and so they're kind of leaning into that.
Okay?
What I said is that I think that these, despite that appearance of sort of philosophical or theological sophistication, I think it has more to do with the emotion than it does rationality.
And I want to sharpen this up.
And what I think is that knowledge and assurance feel good.
All right, we can bring these things together.
I talk about, you know, reason or rationality versus emotions.
I actually don't like that contrast.
I think our rationality and our emotions are deeply intertwined with each other.
I don't think they separate the way that we often think that they do.
And so I think that knowledge and assurance feel good.
It feels good to be sure about something.
It feels good to have knowledge about something.
And I think a great deal of what we do, all of us, I'm not talking about just people and some political, you know, orientation or religious view, I think all of us, I think a lot of what we do is shaped by habit and emotion and deep feeling rather than things like, you know, deliberation or argument.
I don't think we, I don't think that we think about what we do very often, we just do it.
And our reasons are often different than what we might think that they are.
But we also live in a culture that at least operates on the pretense of valuing reason and expertise.
And somebody, I know, I can hear the emails now, what about all the people who deny, you know, climate change or the people who are anti-vaxxers or anti-science or whatever?
You're really going to say that they value reason?
I think that they do because what they'll always do, the people who deny, you know, vaccine efficacy or deny the human impact on the global warming or whatever it is, They will always say that they're rejecting those claims based on some higher knowledge or some truer knowledge.
It's why the climate skeptics are always trying to tell us that they're the ones who are really following the scientific method or, you know, if it's just a theory it needs to be tested more or whatever.
Our culture at least has the pretense of valuing reason and expertise.
And we also live in a culture that comes from a long, I'm talking hundreds of years, tradition of drawing a distinction between religion or faith on one side and reason on the other.
And in an increasingly secular society, there's increasing prestige that comes to that side of reason or rationality.
So if you're a religious person, especially a religious person of a particular persuasion, I think there is tremendous emotional appeal to the idea that your religion is in fact reasonable.
That it is rational, that having an ultimate authority is somehow a kind of rational claim.
It's the most reasonable, rational thing to hold to.
I think it feels good, then, to claim knowledge, to claim assurance.
It serves a deep emotional need.
I also think that uncertainty can be scary.
We talk about this a lot.
I think we all experience this.
Everybody has experienced the fear.
It can even be a sort of vertiginous fear, just sort of pulling the world out from under our feet of uncertainty, whether this is on a
a kind of micro scale of being confronted with a decision they're just we don't know what we should do or a medical diagnosis that we're waiting for or waiting to hear news about something and we don't know how it's going to turn out all the way up to to big stuff uncertainty about uh let's say the 2024 election something that literally keeps me up at night we spend a lot of time talking about on and on and on uncertainty can be scary So if we're talking emotions, oftentimes having knowledge or certitude makes us feel good and being uncertain doesn't.
It's that simple.
So when somebody can say, There's an ultimate authority that I have.
Everyone has an ultimate authority.
I think part of what that does sort of emotionally and why people hold on to that idea is it gives us a sense that our lives are controlled.
Even if we don't fully understand it, even if there are things beyond our control, we have assurance that there's a reason.
We have assurance that God is in control.
I've talked about this before in the series as well.
Go back and check those episodes out.
But it's the idea that there's a highest authority in a Biblicist religious tradition.
That if I go to the Bible and I dig around in there and I really trust it, I can find the answers.
They are there.
I know that they are there.
I have that assurance.
If I feel like the world is out of control or I don't know what to do, it's sort of my own fault.
I'm not availing myself of the resources of my religion.
It feels good.
So in a world that can be incredibly uncertain, In a world where we are all confronted with, you know, competing claims to authority, competing claims to knowledge, competing claims to truth.
In a world where we routinely have to make really difficult and significant decisions, it feels good to hold on to the idea of the assurance and simplicity of a single ultimate authority.
And that is why I think that the kinds of philosophical points I very briefly made last episode, you could go a lot more deeply into all of those.
But that's why I think that oftentimes if you're in a discussion with somebody and this language comes out, that's why I think that language isn't going to get you very far.
Because I think that these claims to ultimate authority, they're not really intended as factual or philosophical or logical claims.
They are intended to provide assurance.
And I think that they are intended to provide assurance, or they are efficacious, if I'm going to use that word.
They effectively provide assurance for people who already live a certain kind of religious life.
And that's why this kind of discourse we call apologetics, defending the faith, it's typically about shoring up someone's faith, not creating it.
I think apologetics, and most apologists would acknowledge, doesn't make Christians out of very many people.
It's intended to help people who already identify as Christian feel confident in their faith.
And evangelical theology is a very apologetic endeavor.
That's the aim.
So I think that the issue isn't really intellectual.
I think it's more emotional.
I think that it's more sort of visceral.
I think it operates on a different register than philosophy or reasoned arguments and what have you.
And if you ever want to play around with this, if you're ever in this kind of discussion, and again,
I keep thinking of these discussions maybe because we're coming into the holiday season and I anticipate people being around each other and you know maybe you have a couple drinks and you loosen up and you start talking about stuff and things get real deep real fast whatever maybe that's why I'm thinking about this but if you ever find yourself in a discussion with somebody who who plays this card or similar ones especially if they know that you don't believe about say the bible or even the concept of ultimate authority what they believe
Here's a question you can ask that I think can actually get at the real issues, much better than philosophical argument.
And the question is this, if you say to somebody, cool, I hear everything that you're saying, I'd like to know more about that.
And here's a question I have a real question.
What would it mean for you if there wasn't the kind of ultimate authority you're describing?
What would that mean for you?
And the reason I say this is if you're in a discussion with somebody, it's a real good faith discussion, somebody that you know, somebody who's really having this conversation, when they trot out the line about ultimate authority, they're not doing it just to be provocative or judgmental, they really mean it.
I think if they answer that question, and if you take the time to listen to their answer to that question, the answers you get We'll highlight those concerns, those insecurities, those anxieties.
Oh, well, if we don't have an ultimate authority, we can't know what truth is.
We can't know right from wrong.
We can't live an ethical life.
I think you will hear those anxieties.
And I think that that kind of question can bring what's really going on To light.
And don't get me wrong, when I talk about what's really going on, this kind of emotional level, I'm not saying that people are lying when they insist that their claims are reasonable or rational.
I don't think that most people are aware that the things that they're holding up, they're holding up for those kind of emotional reasons.
I don't think that they think that's what's going on.
I think that they think this is reasonable and rational, and that's why they hold it.
And the reason they think that is because it feels reasonable to them.
It feels so good, so necessary, that there must be some sort of ultimate authority, that it seems these claims have to be true.
We are drawn to these kinds of claims.
And I want to note here, I say we are drawn to these, I'm not talking about something that's limited to religious conservatives or people on the right or anything else.
You can find this desire, this draw to something firm and final and immutable In lots of people across the political perspective, spectrum rather, across the ideological spectrum, you can find it.
There are people who, you know, some kind of political practice is their answer.
Some sort of, you know, model of economics is their answer.
A certain kind of faith in scientific progress is their answer.
So this isn't limited to this group of people.
This is something I think is hardwired into us.
It is part of our code, okay?
So all of that is what makes me think that I think this kind of assurance about ultimate authority, it gives a sense of individual control, or at least understanding of the world, certitude about the world, and that I think is a kind of control, right?
A feeling that we can at least explain what's going on around us, how we should respond to it, and so forth.
Okay?
So that's one dimension of this.
One thing that I think is at work when somebody says, we all have an ultimate authority.
I think there's a lot going on there.
And that might be fine if that's all we meant by control.
If these claims are only about individuals coping and managing with a complex world, that would be one thing.
I think it would still be a problem.
I think it's a problematic way to think about the world.
I think, I think it creates more problems than it solves.
I think we need to sort of face up to the fact that we don't have that kind of assurance.
It's just not part of the human condition, whatever.
But if that was all we're talking about, fine, to each their own.
If that's what people need to cope and get through the day, great, good for them.
But that's not all we're talking about.
We know that there's more to it than that.
Because those kinds of claims to having ultimate authority, they are at the heart of high control religion.
And within a particularly a Protestant Christian kind of high control religion, they are the basis of that control.
Within traditional Catholicism, I think that they are as well, except there instead of being based strictly in the Bible, you get notions of the magisterium and tradition and Catholic doctrine and so forth, which relates to the Bible in complex ways, but they're different than within Protestantism, but it's a similar structure.
You're talking about high control religion, those claims to an ultimate authority are the basis of that control.
And here the assurance of authority fundamentally serves the purpose of legitimating control over others, of telling other people that they need to do certain things or be in certain ways or exist in certain ways, because an ultimate authority tells them that they have to.
And I've talked about this a lot in the past.
It's one of the most common themes I have.
I'm going to continue to explore other dimensions of this in the future.
And the functioning of this is straightforward enough.
The claim to have an ultimate authority is presented as a message of comfort.
It's presented as a message of solace.
And we just saw for a lot of people, it is.
And if we put it in a religious context, it's this notion that in people's encounter with God, they can experience comfort and solace.
But here's the issue, folks, and I talk about this a lot.
I would love to hear more about what people think about this.
Individuals don't encounter God directly.
Certainly not as understood within these religious contexts.
For all of the talk about having a relationship with Jesus or knowing God as an individual or whatever it is, within these religious contexts, We are not encouraged to directly encounter God.
We don't accept claims that somebody has simply directly encountered God.
Rather, our encounter with God, our encounter with what is supposed to be that ultimate authority, is always mediated.
And if you're a Protestant and that ultimate authority is in the Bible, no matter how much your church tells you you should read the Bible on your own and you should study it and so forth, your interpretations are always going to come up against the accepted interpretations of that congregation, that church, that pastor, that denomination, that theological tradition, and on and on and on.
It is always mediated by other people, families, pastors, congregations, what have you.
And the effect of this, for me, is that those claims to ultimate authority, they ultimately devolve always into claims about other people's authority.
And it's never just a claim about authority in some abstract or ultimate sense.
It's the claim about the pastor's authority.
It's a claim about the church's authority.
It's a claim about the husband's authority, the father's authority.
Right?
So whoever gets to be the spokesperson of ultimate authority, they're the ones who really benefit.
It's their authority that's effectively elevated beyond question.
As I say, we've talked about these dynamics a lot.
I don't want to rehash all of these here.
But that is where I think it's not just about, you know, an individual gaining control in their life and trying to cope.
It's about controlling others.
Alright, so we need to wrap this up.
I want to think about this.
People ask me a lot if I'm simply anti-religion, and for lots of reasons I say no.
Okay?
But I am opposed to high-control religion, and that's not just a matter of dogmatism or doctrine or whatever.
It's because it's out of a concern of what I think high-control religion does to those impacted by it.
I think it's a and within that I think it's a red flag for me.
It's a red flag Whenever a religious articulation takes shape around the language of authority And I think it's a red flag in other places when parents articulate their role as parents primarily in terms of authority certainly when partners Articulate their relationship in terms of authority.
I think even when bosses or you get a workplace culture that's articulated in terms of authority, I think all of these are signs of, you know, if we want to use the popular language, of toxic relationships, toxic structures.
And when religion is articulated in terms of authority, I think that there's a problem.
And authority is a code.
I'm not even sure if it's a code.
I mean, it's almost right on the surface.
Authority is, let's say, another name for control.
When people start invoking authority, they are invoking control.
And I don't care at what level that takes place, what level of relationship, what kind, whether we're talking individual or organizational, but certainly within high control religion, that's what I think claims to authority do.
So when someone insists that they have or that they speak for or that they speak from ultimate religious or ethical authority, I think those claims are about a lot more than philosophical arguments.
I think often at the individual level, it's a way of coping with a complex world.
But maybe more significantly, and certainly more problematically, I think it is often, maybe typically, about control.
It's about control.
It's about coercion.
And that is why claims to ultimate authority will lie at the center of high control religious environments.
And we could talk about high-control political environments.
We could talk about other contexts where those claims to authority, a centralized, unified authority, lead to coercion, abuse, and so forth.
It's not limited to religion, but that's what we talk about here.
Okay?
So I think that that language of authority when somebody says we all have an ultimate authority, I think that's language that is a signal for compassion on one hand.
I honestly do.
That question, what would it mean for you if there wasn't that kind of ultimate authority?
That's a question to ask folks and you will hear real anxiety and real concerns from people and it can open up pathways to communicating with them that arguing about philosophy just won't.
Okay?
So there's a signal for compassion, but it's also a signal for concern because it's about control.
And when somebody builds their life around structures of authority, they're invariably building their lives around structures of control.
When we build religion around structures of authority, we build religion around structures of control.
All right, gotta wrap this up.
As always, thank you so much for listening.
As always, please communicate with me, Daniel Miller Swag, danielmillerswaj at gmail.com.
As we've been saying in the Weekly Roundup and other contexts, we've got some cool stuff coming up related to this series, some cool stuff coming up related to what we do in the main podcast.
Cool things coming up in terms of, you know, what Brad does, posts on Mondays and the interviews and those kinds of things.
A lot of cool stuff coming up.
Please stay tuned for that.
Again, please reach out.
Let me know what you think.
DanielMillerSwag at gmail.com.
And again, my like early, like late 2023, early 2024 commitment is that I will once again catch up on those emails.
