What Is a "Christian"?

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Religion and Me

I liked some things about being a fundamentalist Christian.  I liked, probably most of all, the camaraderie that you get when you are a member of a close-knit group of fellow travelers, like how you might feel toward other Americans when you're in some remote location abroad.  "You're from the States?  Where?"  "Texas."  "Texas!  I'm from Wyoming!"  "Wyoming!  Alright!"  Like that makes you practically cousins.  That's how it is, sometimes, when you are among fellow believers, in a world hostile to the Gospel.  And then, being a Bible-believing Christian as the end of the world nears, and thinking about what's going to happen when all the believers are raptured.  That was pretty exciting stuff.  And the hymns at Christmas, and the feeling that I had a Friend, and the special meanings in everything.  There were a lot of things to like.

On the other hand, I disliked some things about being a fundamentalist Christian.  I disliked the feeling of obligation to save souls - to harass people about Jesus, in effect, when I knew they had absolutely no interest in hearing it.  I disliked the confusion that I experienced, and that I certainly saw in the lives of others around me, as we tried to reconcile our hope that God was on our side with the reality that, too often, things were just not working out as advertised.  After all the allowances for God's superior wisdom and so forth, the uncomfortable fact remained that we were forever inventing ad hoc justifications on his behalf, as if he were an abusive father for whom we needed to make excuses, lest the outside world find out what a cluster our family life actually was.

I especially disliked the dishonesty of trying to portray the Bible as being consistent when it was weaving around like a drunk sailor, and as being a source of guidance when it was obviously wrong and even dangerous.  I disliked that my religion seemed, historically, to have been on the negative side of everything, as if God wanted us to be dragging our feet and giving people a hard time whenever they wanted to dance, drink, and play bingo.  It was as if God did not want us to acknowledge equal rights for women, or to reject slavery even if St. Paul did condone it, or to understand dinosaur bones, or to inform kids about sex - and so on, ad nauseum.  I disliked the fact that Christians of the sixth century cut off the ears of Christians who disagreed with them, and that Christians of the twelfth century found it important to take Jerusalem from the people who lived there, and that Christian faith seemed to provide an important fault line underlying innumerable other wars and atrocities - dividing Byzantine from Roman Christendom, and Roman Catholics from Protestants, and Presbyterian Protestants from Lutheran Protestants, and Missouri Synod Lutheran Protestants from Wisconsin Synod Lutheran Protestants, and so forth.  I definitely disliked seeing how Christians avoided taking responsibility for the assumption of superiority that keeps being used to justify such behavior, century after century.

Lots of Christians would tell me, right off, that their religious practices and beliefs are not like that.  And that's the nature of religion:  keep moving.  Keep 'em guessing.  If something has been publicly rejected as one of the worst aspects of your faith, make sure that you join everyone else in condemning it, and redefine your religion as something that would never behave in such a way.  It's just commonsense marketing.

Liberal Christianity was my case in point:  it freed me from much of the heavy baggage of my fundamentalism.  As a liberal Christian, I could have a much more educated sense of superiority, there in my nice clean clothes on Sunday morning, surrounded by all those other nice-smelling middle-class suburban white people.  It wasn't about the Bible anymore, per se; it was about the undeniable importance of compassion and giving.  These, I think, were the kinds of Christians to whom Bertrand Russell would have been referring, in Britain in 1927, when he wrote these words:

There is another point which I consider excellent.  You will remember that Christ said, "Judge not lest ye be judged."  That principle I do not think you would find was popular in the law courts of Christian countries. I have known in my time quite a number of judges who were very earnest Christians and none of them felt that they were acting contrary to Christian principles in what they did.

Liberal Christian belief and Unitarianism, with which I flirted after some years away from religion altogether, gave me company in my mild, patronizing scorn for the fundamentalists among whom I had counted myself previously.  Actually, it gave me company, period, as I socialized with other religiously indifferent but socially concerned individuals.  But then, alas, the socializing gave way to subgrouping, gossip, and misunderstanding, and I understood that his would probably always be one of the defining features of the Body of Christ.

I couldn't have said for sure what I was supposed to be believing during this phase.  I do remember that, during a visit to a Unity church, I was struck by the many references to "the Christ in you."  Those references reminded me of the advertisement I was hearing on the radio at about the same time:  "I like the Sprite in you."  Neither, I surmise, was intended on a literal level; but in what figurative sense I should construe such sentiments, I cannot say.  In any event, I sensed that my days as a liberal Christian were numbered when I found myself thinking, during a visit to a new church, that it was a pretty cool place, except for all the talk about Jesus and such.

I never got around to becoming Jewish, except to the extent of being married to a Jewish person whose religion consisted of lighting the candles and singing the prayer, and then dissolving into laughter halfway through because that was all she remembered.  But I picked up a fair amount during my dozen years in New York, half of which I spent at a school where, it was said, the three major religions were equally represented:  Orthodox, Conservative, and Reformed.

As far as I can tell, Judaism is more or less like Christianity, on a smaller scale.  You have your extreme fundamentalist conservatives, who make things miserable for themselves and everyone else.  You have your totally assimilated liberals, who don't much know or care what their putative religion is about.  In the middle, you have people who occasionally become overbearingly self-righteous about some particular issue, or who otherwise have a somewhat identifiable culture of their own, but who generally seem like they get along better and are happier to the extent that they can control their religion, rather than having it control them.

Other religions seem, to me, to follow relatively similar lines of thinking.  There are the Brahmins at the top in India, and the upper-class Muslims in various nations, and I imagine I would find, if I looked into it, that there were social classes among the Incas as well; and in all cases, no doubt, the lower-income people are expected to fight and die to defend the upper-income people of their religion - even if they actually have more in common with the lower-income infidels they're shooting at.

Nowadays, I've begun to think that may be the nature of the difference between religion and spirituality.  If you're religious, you'll pick up that gun and shoot that person - your former neighbor, perhaps - because of the religion s/he belongs to.  Or, to put it differently, you probably wouldn't be shooting him/her if s/he were of your own religion.  You may think you would never do that, but then the social pressure and the law and the fear kick in, and after a couple of months of military training, you become like all the others, before you, who said and then did exactly the same things.

It's somewhat different with atheists, who never seem to have armies of their own.  For them, the righteous zeal tends to come out in other ways - in, for instance, the racist e-mails I get from some atheist intellectuals, educating me about the stupidity of Bible-belt rednecks.  This literature is ironically reminiscent of the sacred spam I get from my few remaining Bible-thumper friends.

Spirituality, I think, is not a matter of imagining that your elevated feelings of a "higher" reality are anything more than funky chemicals in your skull.  It's also not a question of whether God exists.  His existence or nonexistence does not make anyone spiritual.  I think, much to the contrary, that it may be more spiritual to simply admit that you don't have privileged knowledge about Truth.  Spirituality, in my working hypothesis, begins with daily renunciation of transcendentalist hubris - with, if you will, the recognition that, if the gods had wanted us to know more, they would not have played games with us; they would have told us plainly.

Palin, Scandal, and Moral Superiority

I don't get it. Republicans spent eight years dragging the U.S. through the mud, in the name of getting to the bottom of whatever Bill Clinton had done and whoever he had done it with. Parents were furious that they had to answer their little children's questions about what a blow job was, and all the other stuff they were seeing on TV. The president, and the presidency, took virtually the entire rap for that goofy binge of prurient curiosity. Nobody was excusing Clinton's marital infidelity. But the Republican Party spent years on that and on every other mud-dredging scandal they could find, in the Clintons' personal and professional matters, going back years before they came to Washington, or even before Bill became Arkansas governor. Has anyone forgotten the huge flap over whether Bill had smoked marijuana, and his bizarre claim that he had not inhaled? Throughout recent decades, a huge chunk of America has smoked dope. Who in the world cared about that, other than the moral police of the right wing? So now we have suddenly come into a new age in Washington politics. It did not arrive in time to prevent the right from harping on Obama's fist-bump or his choice of church or his alleged connections with student protesters in the 1960s, when he was eight years old. But suddenly, lo and behold, we have what could be a trashy woman on the right, in the form of Sarah Palin and family, and all at once people are thinking that it's really not right to invade the private life of a candidate for public office. And I agree with that, with a caveat. The caveat is, don't lecture other people about proper morality or the superiority of your religious faith. Don't cover up the bare-breasted statue of Justice, John Ashcroft, when meanwhile your party's future vice-presidential nominee is baring hers premaritally. Don't suddenly discover that it is OK and wonderful for a child to have her own child, after all these years of complaining about single black mothers. Yes, definitely, let us do focus on the real issues in American governance. Let us, indeed, go back and reconsider the 1990s, give Bill and Hillary Clinton a clean slate, and properly excoriate those who made such political hay out of their self-destructive failings, so that our nation will learn something at last, and will not repeat the same mistakes a few years hence. Let's all finally recognize, for God's sake, that those moralistic conceits gave us George W. Bush; let us have a national retrospective soul-searching for the silliness that brought him instead of Al Gore into the White House. Let us hear people on the right -- especially those of the religious right who have long flaunted a most un-Christlike pride in their godliness -- finally confess their sin and seek to make amends for the terrible wrongs they have perpetrated throughout this country and abroad, in the name of a morality that they, themselves, do not necessarily observe. Let us take, together, kindly but seriously, that step toward a new and long-overdue age of rational politics. Until that happens, I say it's smoke. It's the same political fraud in a new guise: morality as defense, rather than morality as offense -- still used, that is, in a fighting mode, not humbly and self-critically. Yes, let us look carefully at the issues. Let us take a running start at them, beginning with 1992. When we see that kind of soul-searching among the so-called godly folk, then I will believe that enough has been said about the contrasts between Sarah Palin's alleged faith and her actual circumstances.

Why We Separate Church and State

I originally posted this to my personal e-mail list in August 2004: * * * * * * * * * Just received this e-mail from a friend: "It is said that 86% of Americans believe in God. Therefore I have a very hard time understanding why there is such a mess about having "In God We Trust" on our money and having God in the Pledge of Allegiance. Why don't we just tell the 14% to Sit Down and SHUT UP!!! "If you agree, pass this on, if not simply delete..." No offense to the friend. She's a great one. But in the spirit of sharing ideas, and responding to ideas when others tell me their thoughts, here's what I say to that: * * * * * 1. Pardon my quoting from the old language of the King James Version, but here's how I learned the passage: "Go ye therefore and TEACH all nations ..." Ramming it down someone's throat is probably not the gentlest or most effective form of teaching. It's not the approach that Jesus took. If someone doesn't want to hear about God, well, you know, they've got a right to that. Just like you don't have to let some religious person -- some Jehovah's Witness, for example -- keep knocking on your door for hours on end. You can tell them to go away. They ought to do it anyway. It's just basic kindness and respect. But if they're too rude to leave you alone, you've got the law to shut them up. Nobody should be forced to listen to someone else's religious ideas, much less endorse them on the national currency. * * * * * 2. I'm not sure how the 86% statistic is calculated. It says 86% believe in God. Just one God. But I think that's got to be false. Consider, for example, Christians and Jews. The Jews don't believe in the Trinity. So ... are they talking about the same God? The Jews don't think Jesus is God; the Christians do. Sounds like a different God to me. Consider the Jehovah's Witnesses, the Unitarians, and others who believe in God, but don't believe in a Trinity. Consider the millions of liberal Christians who don't claim to believe in or care about the Trinity. Still talking about the same God? People familiar with questionnaires realize that you can get a lot of different results, depending on how you ask your questions. Consider, for instance, what would happen if an interviewer asked these questions of 1,000 different people: -- Do you believe that God exists? -- If so, do you believe that God is a divine being? -- Is there only one divine being? -- Would angels, or the Devil, be divine beings? -- Would it be all right if someone believed that each divine being is a god? -- Is there only one god? Saying that 86% of Americans believe in "God" is like saying that 99% of Americans don't believe in murder. Well, OK, but ... capital punishment? Is it ever murder, when a soldier kills a civilian during war? How about when police shoot to kill, when maybe they wouldn't have to? How about driving an SUV when you know it is quite likely to kill people in any Honda you happen to hit, and when you know that accidents do happen? Is that murder? Even if they don't prosecute, isn't it manslaughter? Reasonable minds are going to disagree. When I hear that 86% of Americans believe in God, that's like saying that 86% of Americans believe in sunshine. Sure they do: but what does it mean? * * * * * 3. Who is "God"? Conservative Christians believe he is a not a "he," but is rather a "they": three persons in one Godhead. Few Bible passages support the concept of the Trinity, and many oppose it. Example: Jesus, on the cross, cried out, "My God, My God, why hast thou forsaken me?" Was he talking to himself? This is all very old, very familiar material. People ignore it because it does not agree with what they want to hear. They claim to "believe" that God is a Trinity, no matter what. But it is a cheap, easy belief. Nobody is going to put them to death for believing in the Trinity. But if that threat did exist, you can be sure that people would be wanting to take a much closer look at the scriptural support for the trinitarian doctrine. Suddenly a lot more people would be honest about their real beliefs. Then we would see if so many people really "believe" in their present God. * * * * * 4. What does it mean for a nation to be "under" God? Are we pretending that he rules this country? I wouldn't think so. My impression, from the way conservative Christians talk, is that the country is going to the dogs. Hopefully they are not trying to stick God with the blame for this mess. I think they must mean that America is "under" God in the sense that we all *should* be following God's guidance in how we run the country. This gets pretty specific, as people are able to imagine God's role in endless detail. Example: "What kind of car would Jesus drive?" But there are no supportive Bible passages for such foolishness, and supportive Bible passages are what fundamentalist Christianity is all about. People who claim not to believe in big government thus sometimes give the impression that they would accept a massive bureaucracy, like the old Roman Catholic empire, if it existed for the purpose of whipping everyone into line. And what line would that be? I have yet to hear a consistent explanation, from fundamentalist Christians, as to whether we are supposed to observe or ignore Leviticus. I thought Jesus and Paul made pretty clear that the Law of Moses was a thing of the past, but that's hard to do when you're so excited about the Ten Commandments. (But see murder, above.) Fundamentalists seem pretty eager to hate homosexuals, but equally eager to ignore all those other laws of Moses. Why, for example, don't they observe the kosher dietary laws? The idea that America should be "under" God sounds a lot like the typical revolutionary attitude: "We don't know what our new world will look like, but we want to see it come -- and if it comes at the expense of blood and destruction, that's OK! That's what we believe! In God we trust!" It is a savage, evil attitude. In the 1700s, the writers of the Bill of Rights were closer to the Middle Ages. They remembered, more clearly than people nowadays, that Christians had tortured and killed Jews, and one another, in various religious wars, in the Inquisition, and in the Crusades -- and that they had blamed this goofiness and evil on God. Ah, but we are smarter now. We don't have to know anything about the history of Christian behavior. We are the first generation that has ever confronted any of these issues. Right? * * * * * 5. I appreciate the writer of the original message, above, for pointing out the similarity between having "under God" in the Pledge" and "In God We Trust" on the money. Neither of them belongs there. The New Testament says nothing about trusting God to lead America. The New Testament is about spiritual salvation. Jesus, Paul, and other New Testament writers and actors explicitly *declined* to become politically involved. When Jesus looked at the coin, he said, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's." He did not say, "Hey, this coin should say, 'In God We Trust.'" Once again, we have these supposedly spiritual people, dragging faith into the ugly world of politics, with all its lies and fantasies. Faith, as a result, takes a beating. Christian belief does not come out looking lovely and special. It comes out looking like a tool of force with which you can imprison and kill innocent people. Paul warned about wolves who would come among the sheep. We have wolves aplenty today: religious leaders who know they can whip up a lot of excitement with sordid tales about the latest evil things that some politician or other category of person (e.g., "liberals") are up to now. It's got nothing to do with the Bible, but that's not important. The important thing is to be mad as hell. Christians need to do a little more reading of their Bibles, before they go out preaching to everyone else about what the "true" faith is, or how their own scriptures intend that faith to be practiced or communicated to others. Fundamentalists, of all people, need to be able to point to the Bible passages that mandate inscriptions like "In God we trust" on governmental currency. And if they are honest enough to admit there are no such passages, then they should give it a rest.