The Contradictions of Reza Aslan's "Believer"

[trotsky]

http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/the-contradictions-of-reza-aslans-believer

...The first episode examines the Aghori sect of Hinduism, some of whose adherents deploy spectacular practices, like eating human remains and lying on corpses, in order to combat traditional Hindu notions of purity and pollution. In one scene, Aslan is chased by an Aghori nomad who, after feeding him a piece of human brain, tries to urinate on him. The episode’s dénouement, in which Aslan tours a modern Aghori orphanage, elementary school, and leper clinic, and finds, as he puts it, “the Hinduism I was looking for,” did little to assuage Hindu activists protesting outside CNN offices, who felt that the show was sensationalist and short on substance.

After watching the first couple of episodes, I was inclined to agree. Each begins in the realm of benightedness—doomsday prophets rolling around on the floor; gurus eating honey out of skulls—and moves toward enlightenment. By the end of the hour, Aslan has laid bare what is beautiful about the religion and what it offers to its adherents. The answer is the same for Hindus and ark-builders. “Religion isn’t about scripture or temples or priests or rules or regulations,” Aslan says, standing in a circle at twilight with the followers of JeZus, the prophet of the Rainbow Village doomsday cult. “It’s about the individual, and the quest for meaning, the idea that there is something more to life than just what we see with our eyes, what we feel with our hands.” It’s an attractively cosmopolitan, à-la-carte approach to faith, and yet merely stating that scriptures, temples, priests, and rules are insignificant does not make it true for countless believers. As a scholar of religion, Aslan surely knows this, which is why “Believer” amounts to a canny sort of evangelism—not for any one religion in particular, but for Aslan’s own brand of universal spirituality, which regards religions as nothing more than different languages for expressing the same meanings.

...

The season finale goes further still, offering the viewer a glimpse of the series that “Believers” could have been—one that wrestles with the agonistic dimensions of religious identity instead of trying to assimilate them into a beatific meta-faith. In it, Aslan examines a group of ultra-Orthodox Israeli Jews known as the Haredim, whose numbers and influence have in recent years grown dramatically, triggering a debate in Israeli society about the relation of religion to democratic politics. As the Rabbi Yaakov Litzman, Israel’s Minister of Health and a member of the Haredi community, tells Aslan, “The land of Israel is because of the Torah. . . . The Torah has never changed, and we will never change.” The changes the Haredim have opposed include demands by women’s groups to dismantle gender-segregation protocols at the Wailing Wall, and civil rights for same-sex couples. Aslan is disturbed by the intransigence of the Haredim, whose political ascendance he likens to the Islamic Revolution, which led his family to flee Iran, in 1979, and the secular Jews he speaks to evince a similar frustration. This change in tone threatens to undermine the cheeky ecumenism of Aslan’s larger method. Why do renegade Scientologists get the benefit of the doubt, while ultra-Orthodox Jews do not? Perhaps there is a limit to universalist tolerance, after all.