The Big Other

If God existed only in the minds of people, religion loses nothing. Believers might not like to hear this because they think it diminishes God to think of him as a construct — but this isn’t true. God as a construct (social, psychic or both) expands God, even beyond the confines of religion (and, as we shall see, that is exactly what religion is… confinement. Carl Jung said as much when he called organised religion ‘protection’ from the direct experience of God). This idea of God as a construct should not be seen as a diminishment, but in the sense that Emily Dickinson suggests when she says that the brain is ‘wider than the sky’, ‘deeper than the ocean’, and ‘just the weight of God’.

I thought about this God-construct while reading Lacan discuss his concept of the ‘Big Other’ — which is a sort of hypothetical observer for whom we perform, even when we are alone. The ‘Big Other’ is not, however, another word for God, but rather, God (and I’m thinking specifically about the Abrahamic) is a personification of the ‘Big Other’. The latter can be conceptualised as God, but it works as well without religion. In an animal as social as us, the ‘Big Other’ functions as a necessary norm-enforcer. We could conceivably live without it, but societies could not.

This sort of functionalisation of God has, according to some, stripped religion of its glamour. Eric Bain-Selbo, for instance, argues that the…