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I have had a long time love and hate relationship with religion,
and, it must be said, the stronger of those feelings these
days is hate.
Or maybe hate is not quite right - it assumes
a personal objective, a solid object, like lima beans. Perhaps
what that strong feeling
is that rises up in me these days is fear, mixed with anxiety.
Many years ago, 50 years ago to be exact, a Presbyterian ethicist
and writer, William Lee Miller, wrote a short piece for a magazine
he helped edit, “The Reporter.” It was called “Piety
Along the Potomac”, and when he was in our home four or
five years ago, I surprised him by pulling his article from my
files.
I had kept it long before I had met Bill Miller or read
his several books on American history, because it seemed to me
to clearly
describe a dangerous situation, the overuse of religious terminology
in our
political life, a substitution of piety for thought. I am not
such a fierce church-state separationist that I object to our
President urging God to
continue to bless America, however silly I deem such a proclamation to
be, however child—like is this conception of deity.
Religion as indoctrination
offends me, as does religion as kindergarten-type answers to the great
questions of human existence. Religion as an aid to
character-building, as a source of humane values, is why I chose the
Unitarian Universalist ministry as a career. I think I was drawn
to a career in the
religiously liberal world in part because I was troubled by the public
religiosity of those years when I was choosing a profession.
At that point,
half a century ago, I could not have imagined how religiosity,
public piety, and
religious terrorism would come to dominate the late 200th century
and early 21st century world. In the ideal picture, religion preaches
tolerance and peace; yet in the modern world, its image is that
of violence and malice and intolerance
and hypocrisy. The bloodiest film of our generation has been breaking
box-office records of late, causing audiences to weep at Mel Gibson’s
selective depiction of the last hours of Jesus’ life. “Did
you see the movie?” my postman asked. “No,” I said, “I
don’t
go in for religious films.” “It’s the way it was,” he
replied as he drove away.
I should have said, “You know, those scenes
from the various gospels, weren’t set down in written form until
40 or 50 years after the crucifixion was supposed to have taken place.” But
no, I should have let the matter drop, as I did.
It is a fantasy world,
this religious world of his, a world that seems real to him, but
which
is, in reality, a fantasy. Just as the world of those Islamic radicals
who believe they are doing Allah’s
will by blowing themselves up — assuring themselves of a glorious
place in the Islamic heaven — is a fantasy.
Tolerant folks like
ourselves don’t know how to deal with religious
fantasy, for something in us tells us that all religions are to
be accepted as legitimate and honorable. Like those selective readers
of the Bible
who can find a scriptural verse to prove just about anything, we
religious liberals don’t want to condemn even radical Islam
today because of those pleasant-sounding verses we have found in
the Koran. We would
like
to believe that an Islamic text that speaks of peace and tolerance
is more vital than those texts that speak of the necessary violence
against
non-believers.
We have in recent weeks been overwhelmed by religious
zealots who attack gay marriage because
of some obscure biblical texts, even as they manage to overlook
some other texts giving support to slavery, to the murder of
those who violate the rules of the tribe. The world wide web
is a great place to find
sarcastic and humorous and pointed critiques of what I learned
in seminary to call “proof-texting,” choosing the
biblical line to prove your point, while ignoring other lines.
A fictional question to Dr. Laura, the television advice-giver,
asks: “I would like to sell my daughter into slavery as
sanctioned in Exodus 21:7. In this day and age what do you think
would be a fair price for her.”
Just remember how the Bible was used to justify slavery and to
oppose freedom for women, and just remember how our own forebears
in Puritan New England barred the celebration of Christmas because
of the belief that God opposed such a celebration. And think
of how many people hear the “voice of God” telling
them that gay marriage is wrong, or, in the case of our President,
that God wants him to be President of the United States or in
the case of Pat Robertson who has heard from God, just recently,
that George W. Bush will be reelected this year.
Politics aside
(as if that were possible) does it not give one pause to read
Bob Woodward’s observations after interviewing
the President for four hours, and as recorded in his book, BUSH
AT WAR, that “the president was casting his mission and
that of the country in the grand vision of God’s master
plan.”
Some people, to be sure, hear God’s voice telling them
to feed the poor and to do other good works; it is not irreligious
to state that what they really hear is the voice of conscience,
the voice of that moral tradition that tells each of us from
time to time what is required of us if we are to live decent
lives, if we are to be fully human.
Maureen Dowd begins a recent
column in the New York Times, about a message found on a wall in
Washington, “Dear God, save
us from the people who believe in you.”
If I were a praying person, that would be my
regular evening prayer.
Americans are the most “religious” people
in the western world, or at least the most gullible about theological
beliefs that are deemed to be religious in nature. A German writer
had a piece in the NY Times a few weeks ago about the great divide
between Europe and the United States. First among those divisions
is religion. In Europe, fewer people believe in God or attend
church. He writes:
In the U.S. a majority of respondents in
recent years told pollsters that they
believed in angels, while in Europe the
issue was apparently considered so preposterous that no one even asked
the question. (NY Times, 3-13—04 —“Across A Great Divide” by
Peter Schneider)
There was quite a bit of religious posturing during the recent
run for the Democratic presidential nomination. It was almost
as some of the would-be presidents had to outdo the regular pieties
of the Administration. General Clark declared himself a Roman
Catholic who attended a Presbyterian Church. Howard Dean, told
an Iowa gathering that he prayed every day and we learned that
he was once an Episcopalian who argued with the church about
a bike path and left to become a Congregationalist, while his
wife was Jewish and his children attended a temple or synagogue.
And then he said that his favorite New Testament book was Job,
which is not a New Testament book. In many ways,
I thought all of this was highly beneficial - that, perhaps we would have
a presidential nominee who, when it came right down to it, was not a fervent
religious person, and did not credit God with his success.
Abraham Lincoln
is my hero in this area. During the Civil War a group of prominent
Protestant ministers proposed a constitutional amendment that
would have undermined our nation’s secular foundation, by replacing “We,
the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union
. . .” with a preamble stating:
“
Recognizing Almighty God as the source of all authority and power
in civil government, and acknowledging the Lord Jesus Christ
as the Governor among the nations, His revealed will as the supreme
law of the land, in order to constitute a Christian government
. . . .”
Lincoln was not about to support such a divisive amendment and
neither he nor the Congress took any action at all.
Lincoln was never one to take refuge in religion, but he was
often pressured by religious folks to follow what they were determined
to be God’s will.
When he was deliberating about issuing the Emancipation Proclamation
he was visited by a delegation of ministers in 1862 and he said
to them:
I am approached with the most opposite opinions and advice,
and that by religious men, who are equally certain that they
represent the divine will. I hope it will not be irreverent for
me to say that if it is probable that God would reveal his will
to others, on a point so connected with my duty, it might be
supposed that he would reveal it directly to me . . These are
not, however, the days of miracles.... I must study the plain,
physical facts, ascertain what is possible, and learn what appears
to be wise and right.
Lincoln’s approach is sadly missing today, and what we
have instead is the “deadly earnestness” of religious
zealots, Sunni against Shias in the Iraq, Catholics against Protestants
in Northern Ireland, Christian against Moslem in Kosovo, Islamic
radicals against Islamic moderates throughout the ancient world.
The world cries out, or ought to be crying out, for secularism.
Secularism
is the bete noir, the black beast, of religious fundamentalism.
It is thought of as a form of evil. But, of course, most of us
live our lives as secularists; it informs our daily lives, is
the basis for our understanding of our world. And to treat the
subject lightly for a moment, God, noting that his creatures
are everywhere fighting over religion, must surely be in favor
of secularism.
The word “Secular” should carry no
negative overtones from its Latin roots, coming as it does from
the Latin “saeculum”,
meaning a very long time. Early in the Christian era people began
to use the word as
meaning “this—world” as opposed to some other
or future world. Later the word “secular” came to
mean those institutions and activities that fell outside the
control of ecclesiastical bodies, outside the reach of churches
and clergy.
Underlying the opposition to secularism is the
idea of “other worldliness”, which holds that somewhere
there is another world which is higher, holier, more sacred,
than the everyday
world in which we live. This idea, as Harvey Cox has written in his book
THE SECULAR CITY, finds little support in Hebrew scriptures which assert,
by and large, that this world is the world that God created and that it
is this world that is holy and sacred.
For liberal Christians such as Harvey
Cox secularization is a great step forward. An alternative
to other worldliness and the reduction of the power
of religious organizations are, for him and others like him, great achievements.
For Cox and the whole liberal
Christian movement, it is this world, and not some future world that
is the world of God.
When I get discouraged by the religious piety that
seems to be all about us these days and when I begin to wonder
whether Christianity is about
to
choke on literalism and delusion, I turn to liberal Christians and
become more secure. Like Sam Keen, whose little book, TO A DANCING
GOD, long
ago reached out to me. He writes:
It was in Tennessee that I first learned about the history of
my native land, in partition-divided Sunday school rooms covered
with pictures and maps of the Holy Land. Before I was six I had
walked through Judea, Galilee, Capernaum, Bethlehem, Jerusalem,
sharing a dusty road with Jesus and the disciples, finding at
day’s end the comfort of a footbath, bread and olives in
a humble home.
And what a rich time and place it was to which I belonged! Over
these hills and desert places my forebears - Abraham, Isaac,
David, and Solomon -had roamed, killing the enemies of the Lord
and establishing a kingdom for the children of promise.
From paper-mache models I learned the architecture of the Holy
Land, and from bathrobe dramas its way of dress.... I learned
of Deborah’s heroism
(but not of Molly Pitcher’s) and of the judges and kings
the Lord raised to lead and chastise his people (but not of the
judges of Blount County who helped to keep whiskey illegal and
bootlegging profitable). I knew the topography of Judea before
I
could locate the Cumberland Plateau, as I knew
the road from Damascus to Jerusalem before I
could find my way from Maryville to Knoxville.
Secularization is the “defatalization of history.” If
one believed that everything that happened was foreordained, or
was the work of the
mysterious and unseen hands of the gods, it would be a rather hopeless
existence. In the secular world responsibility for what happens lies
in human hands. This belief is greatly different from the ancient
belief that
the gods are everywhere and cause everything. Our secular society has
gradually broken away from the belief that ancient customs were
magical or sacred
and that the institutions of this world were ordained by deity. To be
secularist is to see institutions, governments, churches, mosques,
temples as created
by human beings. It is to see ethics and
rules as human creations.
There is an openness in a secular society that
does not often occur in the religiously dominated
world, an openness to others, to different views, and with that
openness, which is the great strength of the secular western world,
comes the necessary
admission that the answers to humanity’s great and enduring questions
are not final answers, are incomplete, unfinished, in process.
Reviewing a book recently about science and religion, Jared Diamond wrote
this
Personally, I accept purely secular reasons to pay taxes and
to refrain from murder and theft, so that societies can promote
the happiness of their citizens. I deny a religious need to kill
members of out-groups, and I accept a secular need to do so under
extreme circumstances, where the alternative would be worse.
I remain uneasy about relying on religion to justify morality:
today, as in the past, it’s too small a step from there
to justifying the killing of adherents of other religions. I
accept the possibility of scientific explanations for almost
every mystery of the natural world - but not for the greatest
mystery of all. I still have no scientific answer, and expect
there never to be one, to that challenge which Paul Tillich posed
to
me and my skeptical classmates: “Why is there something,
when there could have been nothing?” Religion will thrive
as long as there are human beings alive to reflect on the mystery
of the First Cause.
(NY Review of Books 11/7/02)
The very foundation of our way of life rests upon a secular
foundation. On occasion, overwhelmed by a surge of piety, sometimes
by political motives, we try to insert religious beliefs into
our secular lives, such as we did in 1954 in adding the words “under
God” to our Pledge of Allegiance.” Or imprinting “In
God We Trust” on our coins. These are empty gestures, as
foreign to the secular world as they are to any depth of religious
thought.
The world exists and our task is to live in it, and to
do so openly and well; we are surrounded on all sides by the “profane”,
which by definition means that which is not holy; and our role
as religious liberals is to make the everyday holy, to sacralize
the secular, to invest the everyday with meaning and
significance. Someone once said that she went to church because
she had a little plant called reverence which needed watering
on a regular basis. Well, I am not so sure one needs to do that
watering in church, but I am reasonably sure that our reverence
plants need attention, watering perhaps, tender loving care,
perhaps, just visibility maybe. I would handle holy things with
feeling and would increase the territory of the holy and have
it include morning coffee and morning air, and Chopin Nocturnes
and the ever present human struggle to live well.
Secularization, Harvey Cox once wrote is the individual turning
his or her attention away from worlds beyond and towards this
world and this day. I take it that is one of the reasons we gather
together in places like this.
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