The Psychology of Religion, Chapter 17: Shepherding

A related religious metaphor—gentler on its surface than sacrifice, but, as we will see, not unrelated to it—is shepherding. Jesus is called the “Good Shepherd,” and there are many other biblical passages that liken God to a shepherd. It is a beautiful image, and as a child I absorbed it in exactly that spirit: kindly pastoral artwork, a gentle man with a hooked staff, sunny hills, a flock of woolly friends, perhaps one little sheep who has wandered off and needs to be carried back to safety.

But it is worth pausing to remember what shepherding actually meant in that time and place. Sheep were not kept as pets. They were livestock: valued for wool and milk, yes, but also raised for meat—and sometimes for sacrifice. As we saw in the previous chapter, sacrifice was no tidy abstraction. In the rite set out in Leviticus and elaborated in the later rabbinic descriptions of the Temple, the animal was secured with rings before the altar, its throat was cut and its blood caught in a special container and dashed against the altar; the carcass was then hung from an iron hook, skinned, and its organs removed and burned.

A shepherd’s role was not only protection and guidance; it also involved ownership, control, and—eventually—decisions about which animals would be killed, sacrificed, or eaten. In that light, “being shepherded” contains an unsettling double meaning: you are kept from straying, guarded from wolves, and held within the safety of the flock—but you are also being managed toward ends that are not your own.

And if we push the image just one step closer to lived reality, it gets darker in a way the children’s illustrations never hinted at. Imagine being a sheep in the flock: every so often the younger males—your cousins, in a sense—are taken away. Perhaps they are led toward a little shed at the edge of the field, or down a path behind a stand of trees, and they are simply never seen again. The flock goes on grazing. The shepherd is still “protecting” the flock. But the protection is inseparable from a system in which some members are quietly designated for disappearance.

To be fair, the Christian image in particular tries to invert the usual arrangement: the “Good Shepherd” is portrayed as laying down his life for the sheep. That is morally striking. And the traditions are not naïve about bad shepherds, either: the prophets turn the very same metaphor into an indictment of corrupt leadership. Ezekiel devotes an entire chapter to denouncing the “shepherds of Israel” who feed themselves while the flock starves, who rule harshly and leave the weak uncared for, and Jeremiah does much the same—a reminder that the image was always double-edged, and could be turned against the powerful as readily as it sanctified them.

Still, the metaphor does something psychologically and socially important: it trains us to admire a certain kind of relationship—one in which docility is a virtue, “straying” is a moral failure, and the authority to define what counts as straying belongs to the shepherd. This intuition has a long intellectual lineage, and the vocabulary itself gives the game away: a “pastor” is literally a shepherd, “pastoral care” is the tending of a flock, and a “congregation” is, etymologically, a gathered herd. Friedrich Nietzsche gave the underlying suspicion its most savage form, attacking what he called “herd morality”—a value system he attributed above all to Christianity, which (in his reading) rebrands meekness, obedience, and self-suppression as virtues and treats the docile herd animal as the moral ideal. Michel Foucault, more coolly, gave the structure a name: “pastoral power,” a distinctively Western form of authority, inherited from the Church, that governs not a territory but souls—caring, all-seeing, devoted to your welfare, and expecting obedience in return—and that was later secularized into the modern state’s management of whole populations. Tellingly, even Foucault’s admirers note that his pastoral idyll leaves one thing out: the slaughter.

The phrase “sheep gone astray” appears repeatedly in scripture, usually as a metaphor for human misbehaviour. But actual sheep that never “go astray” do not graduate into freedom; they remain in the flock under management. As a child I never thought of this.

Now I think the metaphor is more revealing than its gentle surface suggests. Taken to its literal conclusion, it idealizes a passive, domesticated existence in which obedience is the highest virtue and “straying” the cardinal sin; in which the protection on offer is inseparable from ownership; and in which the reward for a lifetime of perfect docility is to remain in a flock whose ends are set entirely by someone else. The pastoral image comforts us, in part, precisely because it asks us not to look too closely at where the path behind the trees actually leads.

References

Foucault, M. (2007). Security, territory, population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978 (M. Senellart, Ed.; G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan. (Original lectures delivered 1978)

— Develops the concept of “pastoral power”: a distinctively Western mode of authority, inherited from the Christian Church, that governs individuals as a shepherd governs a flock—caring, individualizing, and totalizing at once, and oriented toward obedience and salvation. Foucault traces how this logic was later secularized into the modern state’s management of populations. Commentators have noted that his account conspicuously omits the slaughter that real shepherding entails

 

Nietzsche, F. (1967). On the genealogy of morals (W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale, Trans.). Vintage Books. (Original work published 1887)

—Nietzsche argues that a “slave morality,” which he attributes above all to Christianity, inverts aristocratic values so that meekness, obedience, and self-suppression are recast as virtues and the docile herd animal becomes the moral ideal. The companion argument appears in Beyond Good and Evil (1886).

 

The “Good Shepherd” passage is John 10:11–18; the Lord as shepherd, Psalm 23. The motif of straying sheep appears at Isaiah 53:6, Luke 15:3–7, and Matthew 18:12–14. The prophetic use of the shepherd metaphor to condemn exploitative leadership is found in Ezekiel 34 and Jeremiah 23:1–4. The burnt-offering rite is described in Leviticus 1; the Second Temple details—rings to secure the animal, iron hooks for flaying, and the blood caught in vessels and dashed against the altar—are preserved in the Mishnah (Tamid 3; Middot 3:5; Pesaḥim 5:9).

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