Why People Fight About Religion
The Warrior Worldview
Growing Up in the Jesus Path Series – Part Two
Stages are the general levels of development we see in history and every human life. We have learned to identify historical periods such as the Stone Age, the Enlightenment, and the Industrial Revolution in terms of human cultural development. We regularly speak of stages that we call infancy, childhood, adolescence, young adulthood, middle age, senior living, and old age. These are developmental classifications that center on age. Researchers have identified various stages of cultural and personal evolution in our lives.
I am using the writings of Ken Wilber, who sees stages of development, and Jean Gebser, who sees structures of consciousness. Here is a map to introduce the Warrior Stage if you are not already familiar with it in the context of the other levels of development. I love this artist’s creativity in pointing out a significant theme or two in each structure stage.
GROWING UP — from Spiral Dynamics by David Goebal
Warrior Consciousness
The warrior stage of culture began to develop between 15,000 and 10,000 years ago when the tribal level grew in wealth and power, and conflicts erupted between neighboring tribes. As the figure in red with a crown and fist out indicates, warrior consciousness is passion for dominating and conquering for the right to rule. The world is about me and my gang being the most powerful. No one thought of using power for the good of all as in later stages. Aggression, impulsive behavior, pleasure, and violence rule. We fight to be in control. The world is like a jungle where the strong win and the weak lose. The leader calls all the shots for the tribe. There are magical-mythical spirits, dragons, wild animals, and powerful people.
There is an absolute authority outside of me, such as a parent, a teacher, a boss, a minister, or a God who makes the rules that I follow without question. “My teacher says . . .” “The Bible says . . . ” “The government says . . .” The world is black and white, good or evil, with no need to reflect on the nuances in between.
Warrior consciousness is not an abstract theoretical construct. It is a reality today. Americans watched in horror as the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, left nearly 3,000 people dead. It was warrior consciousness that conceived, planned, and launched those attacks. We must expose terrorism for what it is and protect ourselves against it. But in doing so, we must operate from a much higher level than the terrorists. This involves much more than a military response. The military cannot by itself protect us from terrorism. It ultimately must involve political, social, and, above all, spiritual solutions that invite the world to grow beyond warrior consciousness.
Individually, we can feel this part of our consciousness come forth in our “fight” response when we feel threatened. This is a bodily response that comes from a deeply embedded survival instinct in connection with our tribal consciousness. Even if our actual life isn’t in danger, we can still respond with this energy of attack.
There are also positive elements to integrate, such as healthy boundaries, passionate striving for restorative justice, standing up against violence and abuse, and more.
An estimated 15% to 20% of the world’s population is at the warrior stage.
Warrior Church
It was warrior church that killed Jesus. That was the mentality of the leaders of Jesus’ religion who plotted to have him killed. Those religious leaders then invited the collaboration of the warrior society of Rome that carried out the execution. Therefore, it is reasonable to say that the warrior “church” of Jesus’ day crucified him. Historically, the warrior church can be seen in holy wars, the Crusades, and the Inquisition. The warrior mentality is the desire to dominate the world. It is the crusade mentality of “convert or destroy.”
Today the warrior level church is commonly referred to as a fundamentalist church. As someone put it, the difference between an angry terrorist and a traditional fundamentalist is that you can reason with a terrorist. However, they both come from a nonrational mindset.
Fundamentalism is a significant religious movement in Protestant Christianity that came into prominence in the early 1900s. The term “fundamentalist” refers to the five fundamentals: The Bible contains God’s literal words without error. The virgin birth and the deity of Jesus. The doctrine of substitutionary atonement. The bodily resurrection of Jesus. The authenticity of Christ’s miracles (or his pre-millennial second coming).
In addition to these doctrines, the word “fundamentalism” also refers to a mindset that warns others who do not agree with them of the danger of their wrong beliefs. Many Christians believe some or all of these five “fundamentals.”
However, warrior Christians are angry about it all, especially at those Christians who do not share their beliefs. I remember 40 years ago when a visitor spoke to me at the door after church service. She said sternly, “Pastor, you are leading these people straight to hell, and you are going there for sure.” Her comment stirred up some of my terminal niceness, and I wanted to assure her I was really a nice guy. Beyond that, I felt strangely sad. She didn’t see what I saw, and I was sorry. I felt liberated, while she was angry, both of us affected in different ways by our worldviews.
Contemporary representatives of this mode of consciousness are the terrible twos, grade school and high school bullying, street gangs, wild rock stars, prison culture, comic book superheroes, sword and sorcery stories, warrior tribes such as in Afghanistan, athletic teams, aggressive unethical corporations, and the rise of terrorism and religious fundamentalism around the world.
The Bible
The warrior Bible is without error, and everything written there is taken as historically and scientifically accurate. The Bible is often used as a weapon. The remark “They beat me over the head with the Bible” reflects this sentiment. Warrior/egocentric-type churches tend to find justification for their violent “righteous” actions in the Bible. They usually favor the death penalty because the God of the Bible killed the wicked.
Certain biblical passages play an important role in their beliefs, such as, “Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord” (Rom 12:19). This is a glorious promise for the warrior church that those who do not agree with them will eventually get the punishment they deserve from God. These churches are greatly concerned with doctrinal purity and resist any effort to cooperate with other Christian groups who do not hold to their same beliefs. Not too long ago, a teacher in a fundamentalist school was fired for participating in a prayer service with Christians of a different denomination. It would be even more unthinkable to meet to worship, pray, or enjoy fellowship with others, such as Muslims or Hindus, except for the purpose of evangelism.
Face detail of God from Creation of the Sun and Moon by Michelangelo
God
Take Jesus’ loving Abba, run him through the warrior consciousness, and you get an angry, avenging God. There is strong biblical justification for this view, with over four hundred passages in the Bible that speak of the wrath of God. If one adds up the actual named figures of how many people God is reported to have killed in the Old Testament, it will range well over 300,000. This does not include entire cities, communities, and, in one instance, the entire population of the Earth except for Noah and his family. To those who take all the Bible literally, these powerful biblical images provide a firm foundation for the wrathful God of the warrior stage.
Jesus
Take Jesus and pass him through the warrior structure, and you get the mighty agent of the wrath of God in the book of Revelation. He makes war against sin, death, and the devil and conquers them, “inflicting vengeance on those who do not know God and on those who do not obey the gospel of our Lord Jesus” (2 Thess 1:8). A personal relationship with Jesus within a fundamentalist belief system tends to be more legal than caring and more dependent on rule-keeping than on relating. Those who do not know Jesus are doomed.
Prayer
Warrior prayer may contain spiritual curses upon enemies, conversations with the avenging God about battle stuff, and asking for help in converting or destroying all other groups. Prayer may also be fighting evil in the form of sickness and doing battle with the illness by rebuking the devil or the sickness itself.
Sin and Salvation
Sin is offending God by going against his rules, often about sexual “purity.” Like the tribal level, salvation from our sins comes from violent atonement theory: Jesus came to die for our sins to appease the wrath of God.
Heaven and Hell
Heaven is the place one goes at death if they have been saved from the wrath of the warrior God by believing in Jesus. Hell is where God gets the ultimate revenge against evil people. The wicked finally get what they deserve—eternal suffering.
The Kingdom of Heaven
The Kingdom of Heaven is another way of talking about heaven “up there.” It is where God’s will is done perfectly. In order to bring the Kingdom of Heaven down to earth as much as possible, these “Christian warriors” wage war against sin, immorality, abortion, the theory of evolution, other religions, and, in general, all who differ from their beliefs. They fight against homosexuality, and one group has been nationally known to picket churches (including my former church a number of times) and funerals with signs that say, “God hates gays.”
The Mystical Magical in the Warrior Stage Structure
Demons are thought of as real and can possess a person. Exorcism is a battle with Satan where the demons are authoritatively commanded to leave a person’s physical body. Rituals like baptism and communion are weapons at the ethnocentric warrior level. They are used as a way to control what members believe and practice. You might not be able to receive baptism or take communion unless you adhere to certain policies and even political viewpoints such as supporting the criminalization of abortion. This can be quite distressing for those who believe baptism and/or communion have to do with their eternal destiny after death.
More on Enchanted Mystical Consciousness
Mystical consciousness is so critical I want to comment further. Gebser sees “magic,” or what I also call the “mystical,” as one of the essential structures of consciousness which exists in us all our lives. Gebser lists five prominent tribal/warrior mysticism characteristics from 50,000 years ago, calling it “unconscious” magic or mysticism. It is egolessness, unconsciously seeing the world as one, spacelessness and timelessness, and merging with nature that unconsciously gives a person a kind of power that allows them to be a “Maker.”
These qualities are some of the very ones sought in spiritual awakening today and the enlightenment found in the conscious mystical paths of the world’s great religions. We value these qualities in the meditative prayer practice of Whole-Body Mystical Awakening.
However, we must not romanticize early unconscious mysticism because it still has serious dangers today. Unintegrated magic today often comes in unhealthy fantasy and magical thinking. At worst, it turns into sorcery, domination, and evil in warrior energy. Gebser points out that this dangerous mysticism occurs in zealous political parties and overwhelming emotionalism. He says, “Only magic knows fanaticism.”
What makes magical mysticism safe? Mysticism becomes safe when we bring the values of the later structures of consciousness to it. The earlier stages were not evolved enough to have these values. Only later structures would remedy these deficiencies.
Limitations and Strengths
The limitation of the warrior church is its fighting mentality. This leads to always being at war with something or someone and believing that only you and your group have the truth. This, in turn, can manifest various forms of discrimination, oppression, and even warfare. Fear is also present as a carryover from the tribal stage. Karen Armstrong says, “Every single fundamentalist movement that I have studied in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam is rooted in profound fear.”
You can have a warrior mentality at any stage, which still puts at least part of you in the warrior stage. This means you are angry with anyone at any other stage but yours. However, even with its limitations, every person has a right to be at any stage of unfolding because all stations in life are expressions of God’s work in taking us along one step at a time.
The strength and dignity of this worldview is passion—the ability to be dedicated to what matters to you. Other strengths are the value of belonging, the inspiration of their heroic myths, the healthy use of power to restrain violence, encouraging individual initiative, and passionate action to liberate the oppressed of the world. Jesus was fervent about God and God’s will. We can be, too.
Tibetan Buddhism speaks of the “spiritual warrior” as one who combats the universal enemy of self-ignorance. A conscious spiritual warrior, enlightenment hero, or heroic being stands their ground and is lovingly passionate about spiritual evolution, justice, and healing the Earth.