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In-Depth Information
Religious narratives
Starting with perhaps the most complex kind of story, I want to look at reli-
gious narratives. They are of great value to believers. They provide guidance
and the comfort of faith. Religious narratives may also bring believers to face
very difficult decisions as dictated by the ethics and morality of their faith. Re-
ligious stories are often deployed by priests, leaders, or believers in strategic
and relational ways. Storytelling relationships are formed when people read
scripture to address particular life issues for the hearer, deploying sacred text
as a
story
, to be connected by the hearer to his or her life through narrative
intelligence. But a demonstration of the trouble that can be caused by religious
narratives seems always to be at hand, and none is more immediate than the
current conflict in the Middle East.
By religious narratives, I mean canonical holy topics or stories. In the big
three patriarchal monotheistic religions - Islam, Judaism, and Christianity -
the canonical narratives are easily identifiable, although each has been through
centuries of reworking, intentional or otherwise. There are two ways that the
faithful look at these texts. Those who look at them through the exercise of
narrative intelligence will find story, history, metaphor, and other devices em-
ployed to make certain ethical and moral points clear. Those who look at them
literally - fundamentalist believers - see them as having a truth value that is
higher than all other stories. So, for example, the religious guarantees made
by canonical narratives regarding the “ownership” of land claimed by both
Palestinians and Jews have a higher truth value for the faithful than human
narratives of suffering, historical narratives of occupation, or scientific narra-
tives of genetic identity. Young people need to be challenged to question the
literal truth of religious narrative and to explore how they might be applied in
nuanced and open-ended ways.
How religious narratives rank on the four axes we've identified depends
almost entirely on how the reader approaches the text. For the fundamental-
ist, we get one set of evaluations; we get a very different set for those who are
believers but do not take the scriptures literally. Indeed, because of fundamen-
talism, religious stories tend to displace or forbid other forms of narrative from
coming into play. Interestingly, the Catholic church stashes its non-canonical
narratives in the lives of saints. This and its rituals hint at the pagan context
in which the Church was born and established itself in medieval European and
other pagan cultures.
In terms of relationship, both fundamentalists and the more open-minded
faithful find high relationship value in religious stories - relationship with God,
