CT Blue

My professorial son gave me a book for Christmas: Anna Della Subin’s Accidental Gods. His book choices tend to seem a bit like reading assignments, but they’re usually interesting, and this book certainly is that. It is an examination of the tendency of some humans to bestow godhood, or to worship as gods, ordinary humans. Haile Selassie, for instance, is the god of the Rastafarians. In fact, Rasta Farian was his original name, before he became the Ethiopian emperor. Oddly enough, even the rather bland Prince Philip had a cult, which may or may not still be operating, now that he has shuffled off this mortal coil. Other gods, who have since faded into obscurity, were themselves obscure people of whom you have surely never heard. At least so far in my reading, with the exception of the Rastafarians, the god-makers have tended to belong to cultures that Westerners considered backward, but in many cases that was unfair. For instance, cults arose under the British Empire among the Indian people centered around British officers or officials who often were also their oppressors. The British may have considered the Indian culture to be backward, but it was, in reality, hardly that.

The book makes me squirm a bit, as she relates some of the claimed miracles performed by these deities as if they really happened, but more fundamentally I don’t think there’s enough emphasis, in fact there’s none, on the fact that these were cults and the majority of people in the relevant areas were not members. Not everyone in Jamaica, for instance, believes that Haile Selassie is or was a god. Of course one could argue that the majority of people in this and other countries believe in the godhood of Jesus Christ, for which there is as little evidence as there is for the godhood of Prince Philip, but that would require too much time to fully discuss.

Anyway, the book has gotten me thinking about whether there is a similar phenomenon going on here in the USA. Given that a claimed Christianity is so deeply embedded in the whackjob culture, explicit deification of anyone other than Jesus is out of the question, but an analog to deification is certainly on the table.You can see where this is leading, right? One pattern that comes through in Subin’s book is that once deified, it is almost impossible for the believers to shed their belief, even when the deity in question disclaims his (she points out that the god is always a male) own divinity, or, in at least one case, where he literally whips his followers for deifying him.

We can certainly see this sort of thing happening, absent the explicit deification, with a certain very stable genius, whose adherents will almost univerally (there are always a few heretics) continue to adore him no matter what he says or does, including demonstrable lies that are apparent to anyone with a brain, total hypocrisy (vaccines for me but not for thee) and a total disregard for the interests of the true believers. In the orange man’s case, he not only encourages the pseudo-deification, he may believe it himself, which sets him apart from the likes of Prince Philip.

So, our culture is not so far removed from those in which godhood is bestowed on mortal man. As in those cultures, our deifiers seem to have the same bad taste in deities as those discussed in Subin’s book, for at least so far in my reading, good Prince Philip seems to be the most praiseworthy of the deified, and that’s not saying much.