Most of my books are still in transit from Lithuania, so I am hard pressed for scholarship right now. Fortunately, I had ordered two books by Mary Douglas, which were waiting for me when I returned to the US. As you can see from the sidebar, I am currently reading In the Wilderness: The Doctrine of Defilement in the Book of Numbers. It has a blurb by Tyler Williams on the back cover, so I knew it would be good.

Douglas, an anthropologist, approaches the text through sociological models. I am not far enough into her work to comment on how it applies to Numbers, but I did want to discuss one of the models that she is proposing.

Douglas talks about religious groups (both those as small as congregations and those as large as nations) and places them on a graph with two axes. One axis represents how structured a given group is, while the other represents how concerned they are with group boundaries. This gives four quadrants:

  • Hierarchical groups are well structured and very concerned with the boundaries of the group.
  • Enclaves are egalitarian with little leadership, but are still very concerned with boundaries.
  • Individualists groups are egalitarian and have open boundaries.
  • Insolates, the least common type, have a hierarchical structure but little concerns for boundaries.

One of the characteristics of the enclave is that it has a hard time maintaining cohesion. Due to a lack of central leadership (because it is anathema to an egalitarian system), there is no ability to discipline. Enclaves depend on a sense of ‘rightness’ to keep the group together, i.e., the idea that the enclave has the correct theology is what keeps people on the inside. One of the problems, however, is that differences in theology tend to lead to to fragmentation of the group, since each side is convinced that they have the correct theology.

I think her scheme can be applied to modern Christianity as well. Evangelicals certainly qualify as an enclave group, while mainstream Protestants are probably individualists. Roman Catholics are hierarchical, while different Episcopal groups span the gap between hierarchical and individualists, although certain groups within the Episcopal church qualify as enclave groups. I think this is one of the things that is causing problems within the Episcopal church right now.

Douglas seems to be setting a situation where she can present the book of Numbers as having been edited by a hierarchical group in the midst of an enclave community. It will be interesting to see how she proceeds. Her model seems to be a helpful one, especially since it avoids the tendency to places groups on a two dimensional spectrum. This should lead to a more nuanced reading of Numbers.

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