The Moral Dilemma Created by a Religious Canon: Reflections on How to Read, Teach, and Live

With the intensification of approaches in cultural studies that call into question the morality of social developments–everything from feminism to colonialism to contemporary takes on Marxist theory—engagement with a religious canon raises all sorts of questions that challenge a person’s and a community’s ethical values. How should we read misogynistic or racist passages? How should we teach texts that assume a class system most today would find undesirable? How can we base our lives on texts whose ethical sensibilities regarding fairness and justice are radically at odds with out own? By limiting a community’s modes of self-expression to a canon religious authorities sought to sustain the power interests of those already in control. Canons whose fundamental purpose is exclusionary are designed to influence the formation of values with a religious community. We who inherit a canon can only alter those values through interpretation. But is this enough? Doesn’t the very existence of a canon limit the degree to which a community’s values can be updated? Every time we insist on starting with a document of the canon are we not handing a posthumous victory to the previous generations who did everything in their power to control the varieties of discourse possible within the religious community? Or is canon always surmountable and nothing more than a formalism incapable of exerting significant control over the evolution of a religious community?

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