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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