The church has always served as not only a place of spiritual worship, but also as a means of reinforcing social norms and punishing deviant behavior. According to to Foucault’s essay Discipline and Punishment, “Foucault suggests that citizens of the Western democracies act as their jail-keepers. They internalize the social control that monitors society and maintains the disciplined efficiency of the social system” (559). Although in might be offensive to many people to view the church as a prison, in many ways the church/temple is like a panopticon. The Priest, Pastor, Rabbi, Guru ...etc serve as ever watchful prison guards over their congregation whose eternal soul hangs over the balance between heaven (reward) and hell (punishment).
Foucault says, “In England, it was private religious groups that carried out, for a long time, the functions of social discipline” (559). Even within early American society until our present day churches have enforced laws that forbid drinking, gambling, abortion, birth control, and homosexual marriages. The goal of the church for many years has been to sift out the wicked and uplift the righteous. Foucault says, “The constant division between the normal and the abnormal, to which every individual is subjected, brings us back to our own time, by applying the binary branding and the exile of the leper to quite different objects […] All the mechanisms of the power which, even today, are disposed around the abnormal individual, to brand him and to alter him” (554).
According to the Bible, God is the supreme watchman. He is the unseen guard at the center tower of the panopticon that surveys all. Proverbs 15:3 says: the eyes of the LORD are in every place, beholding the evil and the good. If heaven symbolizes the watchtower and earth symbolizes the prison cell, than are we not all prisoners who live in fear of God. No matter where we go, the Bible reminds us that God is watching! “For what matters is that he knows himself to be observed [he] must never know whether he is being looked at at any moment; but he must be sure that he may always be so” (555).
Within a religious congregation the members are fully aware of the gaze not only of God but of the priest/pastor as well. Numbers 32:23 says: be sure your sins will find you out. The Bible serves as a guidebook for obedience and discipline. This helps to maintain the power and order in society. “By means of wise police, the sovereign accustoms the people to order and obedience” (Foucault 560). Believers are taught that sins and deviances will be punished in he afterlife. As a result believers strive to live moral lives for fear of “discipline” in the afterlife. “Generally speaking, it might be said that disciplines are techniques for assuring the ordering of human multiplicities” (Foucault 562).
Works Cited
Foucault, Michel. "Discipline and Punish".Rivkin, Julie. Literary Theory: An Anthology. Blackwell publishing; United Kingdom, 2004.
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