Summary: The piece diagnoses a structural problem in how the Abrahamic covenant is communicated today. Historically, knowledge operated on a two-tier model: the illiterate masses received simplified, “spiritually”-oriented explanations designed to maintain social order, while an educated elite received the full rational, constitutional, and purposive framework of the covenantal code. Both tiers functioned appropriately within their context. Yet mass literacy has collapsed that distinction. Most people today have the cognitive capacity that once defined the elite, yet the tradition continues to deliver the medieval commoner narrative almost exclusively — superstition-adjacent, arbitrary-seeming, and stripped of rational purpose. The elite framework, though it always existed, remained niche by design and never scaled. The result is the peculiar spectacle of highly trained professionals — barristers, surgeons, consultants, teachers — who reason rigorously in their working lives but revert to an irrational register the moment “religion” is invoked. The author’s argument is that this isn’t an intelligence failure but a conditioning failure: people were simply never given the other narrative.
The practical stakes are twofold: the commoner narrative is losing people who find it intellectually unsatisfying, and it is failing to attract others who might otherwise engage seriously with the covenantal framework. Making the historically elite mode of understanding the mainstream default is therefore not elitism — it is catching up with a world that changed while the communication strategy didn’t.
For over a decade, I’ve grappled with widespread religious narratives feeling like I’m in an alternate reality. For yonks I’ve been trying to understand how people have translated God’s final Proclamation and the Prophetic tradition into something so uninspiring, problematic, irrational, anxiety-inducing, and destructive. But as time has gone on, it’s becoming quite clear.
We live in times where things have changed but methods related to a bygone era haven’t. In old times and an age of mass illiteracy scholars traditionally had two audiences to whom they’d provide explanations and engage:
- the common folk who were very simple-minded – medieval village folk, and
- intellectuals, usually leaders, noblemen and other scholars.
It all made sense back then. The illiterate masses weren’t able to reason well nor understand complex systems of thinking. On the other hand, the elite weren’t sufficed with simplistic explanations nor would accept them, especially if they occupied positions of authority which required them to understand the functional purpose behind laws or doctrines. In the end, the simple folk were understandably instructed to focus on ‘spirituality’ and simply pay their taxes (zakāt) which helped to avoid the employment of severely limited reasoning skills that’d lead them to incorrect conclusions and both social and political chaos, whilst the elite were deeply informed of the constitutional law and divine guidance with functional knowledge that would allow them to operationalise every aspect of God’s revelations. To them, God’s law was wholly rational, comprehendible to human minds, full of purpose, meaning and public benefit. There was nothing arbitrary about it nor superstitious or irrational. This wasn’t about existential value. The righteous didn’t look down on the common folk with hubris but they did recognise a hierarchy in which the elite with aptitude not only led, but that if they didn’t society would crumble into disorder and chaos. To leave the land to village folk religion would permit superstition and irrationality to run riot, and the downfall of an enlightened monotheistic civilisation. The common folk also recognised the aptitude of the elite and were content with the hierarchy out of self interest. This very rudimentary characterisation was the case for a thousand years.
Times changed. Mass illiteracy turned into mass literacy. Generations became increasingly informed about the world, yet the nature of the two modes of explanation didn’t change. Today, due to mass literacy, many people fall into yesterday’s category of the elite, yet the covenantal narrative is delivered to the masses as if the vast majority are medieval village folk.
Let me draw on a near-recent campaign around reading the Qur’an in a language the reader understands. For the elite (who all did so), they would’ve found the humming of phonemes quite bizarre. They would’ve said: “Poor commoners bizarrely have no idea what they’re saying, but given they’re illiterate and have nothing else, let them continue to venerate scriptures so that they don’t rebel against the covenantal law which they don’t get, but at least they’ll consider it holy and conform for the benefit of society.”
Now every time I explain things to people, I’m usually met with surprise because they’d never heard it. They’re even more surprised when I point to the ancient heritage of covenantal thinking and literally show them pages where scholarly thinking was always as what I’m saying.
The common response I get is either “How comes we’ve never heard this?!” or “How are you the only one saying this?!” On the first, it’s because medieval explanations given to the elite have remained niche rather than widespread today, and what remains widespread today, although the context has changed, is the narrative that was articulated to medieval common folk living mostly in agrarian communities. On the second, I’m not the only one to say it as there are quite a few educated folk who are informed of God’s law and re-educate their people, but the sheer numbers advocating folk religion drown out the minority to maintain the status quo.
It’s how you have the most bizarre situation where a high level barrister or surgeon who employs reason and the science of assiduous deduction in their professional lives turn into superstitious and irrational agents the minute they switch on the “religious” button. It’s not that they’re inherently dim – they’re usually very intelligent, but they’ve been conditioned through childhood or socialised by others into irrational thinking.
Much of what we say has little to do with tone. Some people are committed to a narrative that was shaped for illiterate medieval common folk, and it’s what they find familiar and thus comforting. Others understandably find the narrative reserved for the medieval elite captivating and aren’t willing to settle for anything less. We need to make the narrative of the medieval elite mainstream for a few important reasons, and amongst them is that we’ll see more people enter the Code as well as prevent the disenchantment of future generations for whom medieval commoner explanations simply won’t do. That’s just not the world anymore.
