The Slavery of Death: Part 20, The Devil's Work

Critical post in this series. Having taken a tour through psychology we are, finally, going to close the circle and converge back upon Christus Victor theology.

Let me first summarize the takeaway from the last post, our review of Ernest Becker's book The Denial of Death.

A key point in The Denial of Death is that self-esteem is involved in managing death anxiety. Living with the specter of death humans seek to live lives that might have some permanence and durability in the face of death. Our cultural worldviews aid in this quest by providing us with cultural goods and values that seem to transcend death. In pursuing these goods and values we follow a path toward meaning and significance. Self-esteem, how we compare to the cultural values, helps us monitor our progress. We participate in what Becker calls "cultural heroics."

While there are psychological and cultural benefits to be had in all this, in the end this is a precarious and fragile business. Our day to day lives often don't feel very heroic. Consequently, we feel that meaning and significance is fragile and shallow. We can come to doubt that our culture telling us the truth. We wonder if working for "the man" is really admirable and worthwhile. The gold watch at the end of a career can seem perfunctory and pointless. We wonder if there is something more to life. But to even ask that question brings on the threat of an existential crisis. To ask those sorts of questions, questions about the validity of the hero system, can bring you to the brink of despair. It's easier to just keep your head down, existentially speaking. It's easier to remain oblivious, to keep punching the time clock and watching American Idol or football games.

And here is where we can see why the bible describes our lives as a "slavery to the fear of death." We're not really paying attention to what is going on. Our cultural hero system and the self-esteem it produces keeps us distracted and oblivious. Sort of like being plugged into the Matrix. This makes life within the hero system feel, in reflective moments, artificial, empty, contrived, and arbitrary. To use a term from the theologian James Alison, we feel we are pursuing ersatz meaning.

And this dynamic leads us to an even darker outcome. If Becker's The Denial of Death helps us understand the biblical claim that our lives are enslaved to the fear of death how might this fear be the work of the Devil? Again, as it says in Hebrews 2.14-15 the Devil is the one controlling this fear. Christ comes to set us free from this fear, to "destroy the devil's works" (1 John 3.8). And while we have come to see how a slavery to the fear of death might make us existentially oblivious and cause us to pursue ersatz meaning and self-esteem, it's not yet clear how this is "the devil's work." What is the connection between the fear of death and the satanic?

This theme is explored by Becker in Escape from Evil, the sequel to The Denial of Death.

According to Becker, the great tragedy of human existence is this. As noted above, our lives are experienced as "significant" because we create cultural hero systems. And yet, our hero system isn't the only one on offer. Every culture has its own values and goods, is its own hero system, that help define what a "meaningful" life looks like. This poses a problem. Our hero systems only "work" if we experience them as immune to death, as something eternal and timeless. In this, our hero systems are religious in nature. In fact, for most of us our hero system is our religion.

So when hero systems and the gods supporting them come into contact we experience an existential threat. The existence of other ways of life, other values, and other gods threatens to relativize our own values and god. That is, our "way of life" is found to be just one option among other options in the marketplace of worldviews. This shakes our confidence that our particular worldview is both true and eternal. If there are many gods how can I be sure my god is the one true god? Pressed further, how can I be sure that all of these gods aren't just figments of our imaginations to help us cope with our death anxiety? Suddenly we feel the existential floor open up beneath us.

In short, alternative hero systems--other values, gods, and ways of life--threaten to undo everything that has made our life feel significant, meaningful, and secure. The ideological Other, in posing an implicit critique of my hero system, threatens me to the core, attacks the very source of my self-esteem. And here's the deal. The ideological Other doesn't really have to do anything to us directly. Their mere existence is enough to threaten us. They represent, on the edges of our awareness, a dissenting voice. A group who doesn't bow to our god and, thus, calls all we hold dear into question.

So what do we do in the face of that threat? It's pretty simple. We demonize the Other. Rather than endure the existential discomfort it's easier to double-down on our worldview and to see the Others as malevolent agents. We aggress against the Other. In mild forms, we see the Other as confused or mistaken, a target for evangelism. More strongly, the Other is an enemy we have to forcibly eliminate.

Here is Becker describing this dynamic:

The thing that feeds the great destructiveness of history is that men give their entire allegiance to their own group; and each group is a codified hero system. Which is another way of saying that societies are standardized systems of death denial; they give structure to the formulas for heroic transcendence....

[Given that] cultures are fundamentally and basically styles of heroic death denial, [w]e can then ask empirically, it seems to me, what are the costs of such denials of death, because we know how these denials are structured into styles of life. These costs can be tallied roughly in two ways: in terms of the tyranny practiced within the society, and in terms of the victimage practiced against aliens or “enemies” outside it...

And with this conclusion we have reached the climax of our psychological analysis. Here is how the "slavery to the fear of death" produces the "works of the devil." Fearing death we seek solace, comfort, and immorality from our cultural worldviews. But these worldviews can only assuage our fear if they appear to us as eternal and timeless, as something immune to death. But when worldviews collide, as they do in pluralistic societies, our hero systems are relativized and called into question. This undermines the existential armor we need to achieve a workaday equanimity in the face of death. And rather than endure this anxiety we opt for violence, lashing out at ideological Others.

According to Ernest Becker this, then, is the great tragedy of human existence: That which makes life worth living--our cultural hero system and the self-esteem it provides--is the very source of evil.

Thus we converge, from a psychological vantage-point, on a core teaching of Christus Victor theology: The fear of death keeps us bound to both sin and the devil. And we've come to see how this fear is a slavery. It is a fear that has captured everything around me and everything within me. Death soaks into everything. It soaks the cultural hero system that gives my life meaning. Thus enslaving me to the Principalities and Powers. It soaks my self-esteem, an armor of ersatz meaning and pseudo-significance. And all of it--described by the bible as a slavery to the fear of death--pushes me to become a creature of violence and sin.

And so we cry out with Paul:

"Wretched man that I am! Who will rescue me from this body that is subject to death?"