Anatomy of a Christian Hate Letter Part VI

Posted on June 16, 2008 by Valerie Tarico

 
This post is part of a dialogue, In Two Minds: The Anatomy of a Christian Hate Letter, between former minister Brian Worley and psychologist Valerie Tarico .
In the series, Brian Worley, an ordained Baptist, describes some of his
encounters with Christian friends and family since he deconverted and
Valerie Tarico responds.  In Letter 3 Brian talks about what attracted
him to the Christian faith and he puzzles over why Christianity
provokes such intense and even violent reactions toward apostates and
outsiders. 

Dear
Brian,

 
As a former minister, you find
yourself searching for the best way to talk with friends and relatives
about your Christian deconversion. You look back at interactions with
your friends and brother and wonder if you should have done something
differently. And you ask: “If someone’s faith is working for them
and others without showing toxic results, should skeptics then just
avoid the religious subject altogether?”

 (As
an aside, you also expressed disappointment that your new Christian
neighbor lost interest in friendship once he realized that you weren’t
a possible convert.  If you don’t mind, I will address this
experience with the “friendship missionary” in another letter. 
For now, let’s focus on your question about yourself, what you might
have done differently, and how to approach these conversations in the
future.)  

 

In
our culture, perhaps in most cultures, religious faith is guarded by a
powerful set of taboos. Primary among these is a taboo against
questioning assertions that are based on religion.  If someone
makes a statement about the efficacy of Prozac or the best route to
peace in the Middle East, or the competence of the local school board,
any of us feels like we can respond with assertions of our own.  In
fact, we often feel free to put forth opinions even when we know very
little about the matter at hand.  But if someone makes a religious
assertion, the rule is:  If you think what they’ve said is
mistaken or even harmful, keep it to yourself.
 

Many former believers respond
to this taboo instinctively.  It seems that you prefer to take a
public stance and hit Christianity hard by writing articles for your
website. Personal acquaintances know that generally you will keep a low
profile with them about their Christianity otherwise, unless they decide
to push the issue. For years after my Evangelical beliefs crumbled, I
practiced a form of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” But, for two
reasons, I no longer think that this is the solution.

 

First,
“faith” when it is a euphemism for beliefs without evidentiary
basis, is not inherently benign.  I am reminded of the quote from
Voltaire, “Those who can get you to believe absurdities, can get you
to commit atrocities.”  Time and again, history has documented
benign, peaceful forms of Christianity flaring into outright
violence.  But even in between these dark ages, dogmas can have a
corrosive effect on the moral priorities of believers.  As Sam
Harris has said, dogma separates questions of morality from real
questions of suffering.  It distracts genuinely decent people from
the real world contingencies that govern our well-being and that of the
web of life around us.

 

Second,
our silence creates a tremendous imbalance.  Traditional
Christians, particularly Evangelicals, believe they have a divine
mandate to speak openly and frequently about their beliefs.  Their
highest moral imperative is to save others from hell by convincing them
(kindly and graciously, perhaps) that their beliefs about what is real
and right are lethally mistaken.  This means that if the rest of us
honor a taboo against religious critique and dialogue while Christian
missionaries follow a higher calling, we end up with a public monologue
on matters of morality and meaning.

 

But,
you might ask, isn’t it possible that some forms of Christianity in
some people are beneficial?  Mightn’t they provide a sense of
internal purpose and peace that leads believers not only to feel good
but to do good in the world, more than they would do otherwise? This is
not only possible, but seems to me to be true–of both Christianity and
most other religions.

 

So,
shouldn’t we leave this kind of Christianity unchallenged? 
No.   I would argue that the kinds of Christianity that lead
to personal and community benefit without the risk of Voltaire’s “atrocity”
often are based in large measure on faith rather than belief. 
They have at their core the essence of things hoped for, a humble
awareness that all theological understandings are provisional.
Consequently, they tend to center themselves in a set of values and
practices, rather than a set of exclusive truth claims.  This kind
of religion doesn’t need to be sheltered by taboos. It participates in
our collective struggle to understand the Reality that some of us call
God and some of us don’t.  Approached with genuine warmth,
adherents of this kind of Christianity often are able to see their moral
and spiritual kinship with outsiders and to take part in learning that
is genuinely reciprocal.

 

What,
then, is the right role for you and me and others like us?   I
think the solution is neither bold confrontation nor silence.  Like
you, I’ve tried both.  And in my experience, like yours,
confrontation and arguments simply don’t work, even when we former
believers are trying to be calm and rational.  In past letters, you
and I have talked about how brittle belief can be and why believers need
to slam doors.  But sometimes the fault is ours. 

 

When
any of us decide to break old taboos we tend to do so
dramatically.  Think about early feminism.  Think about young
teenagers.  Think about the civil rights movement.  The first
phase of breaking free is often empowered by an intense defiance.
Otherwise it just wouldn’t happen. I’m reminded of the comic book
hero, the Hulk, who must sense mortal danger before he can transform
into a great green monster.  Then he can break through handcuffs
and prison doors and stop all manner of evil, but he also smashes
through a lot of ordinary buildings and offices and cars, and he
frightens people as he goes. 

 

We
former Christians are like good kids who turn into fifteen-year-old rule
breakers.  We break the rules dramatically because that’s the
only way we can know we’ve really done it.  Often we’re angry
at the harm done to us, the unnecessary control, our own compliance with
it – and even when we try to be calm and polite, the anger comes
through.  In the otherwise benign invitation you sent to friends
and family, most readers probably never got past the title of the
article you alluded to, “The God of the Bible is a Sheep Beater.” 
Similarly, my own family members can’t get past the title of my book, The
Dark Side. I’ll never forget a comment by my dear Christian
friend, Katherine, who read an early draft of my book cover to
cover:  “Just because something is true, doesn’t mean you have
to say it.” 

 

One
of the great things about the community at ExChristian.net is that
people can be as mad and defiant as they need to be for as long as they
need to be.  But what works for venting isn’t the same as what
works for communication.  When we are far enough along in our
healing and growth that we want to participate in healing and growing
the world around us, then a different approach is needed. 

 

Fortunately,
when you are breaking a taboo, it doesn’t take much of a break to
rattle the status quo.  Sometimes all you have to do is to have
your face uncovered and refuse to sit in the back of the bus.  Just
being willing to identify yourself as a former Christian  – and
then to continue being the decent person that you are messes with people’s
categories.    Just being willing to say quietly and
respectfully, “I don’t believe in gods” or “Actually, I do
believe in coincidences” can give people food for though.  Just
being willing to say, “Hmm, that doesn’t seem moral to me.” Or “I
think that the universe is so wonderful it doesn’t need supernatural
explanations” –simple statements like these may be enough. 

 

The
goal is not to change someone’s mind but simply to let them know that
within their community there are alternatives. The most important thing
is to ask yourself is whether your words sound like an invitation or an
argument.  What kind of words create an invitation depends on your
relationship with the other person and the context.
 

Christians
will give you the openings by saying things like, “I’ll pray for
you.”  Or “Praise the Lord.”  Or “God bless you.” 
The presumption always is that your silence means what they’ve said is
ok, that the rules stand.  Taking that opening as an opportunity to
say anything that offers an alternate view, however mild, is radical.

 

Warmly,

 

Valerie

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For Those Who are Pained by My Changes

Posted on February 27, 2008 by Valerie Tarico

Recently a fellow traveler asked me how he could explain to his children the changes that he is going through.  I realized, as I wrote out some thoughts for him, that I had never shared these same thoughts with my own family members who have grieved and feared for my soul. If they could understand the following, perhaps they might worry less:

 

One of the most central themes of Judaism and then Christianity is an ongoing hunger, a quest to understand God more deeply and completely. For over 3000 years, our spiritual ancestors have been working hard to figure out answers to life’s most important questions:  What is good?  What is real (often framed as what is God)?  And how can we live in moral community with each other? 

 

Each generation of our ancestors received a package of handed down answers to these questions. This package contained the very best answers their ancestors had to these questions.  But those answers were always imperfect.  They had bits of timeless wisdom and insights, but they also had bits of culture and superstition that had somehow gotten God’s name on them.  In order to grow, our ancestors took these received traditions and asked:  What here is mere human construction, what is superstition, and what are my very best judgments about the divine realities that lie beyond the human piece? 

 

The first Hebrew scholars, the writers of the Torah or Pentateuch did this.  They sifted through the earlier religions of the Akkadians and Sumerians.  They kept parts (some of which are in the Bible to this day), and other parts they discarded as mere culture, superstition or even idolatry. 

 

In the New Testament, the same thing happened.  In the gospels, Jesus says that the Law has become an idol in itself.   What is an idol?  An idol is a something man-made, something that seeks to represent or articulate god-ness and thus to provide a glimpse of that Ultimate Reality.  But then, the object itself gets given the attributes of divinity: perfection and completeness, and it becomes the object of absolute devotion.

 

Instead of simply accepting the old package of answers, the writers of the gospels offered a new understanding of God and goodness.  They didn’t throw away everything;  in fact they kept quite a bit from the earlier Hebrew religion and from the religions that surrounded them.  But they took responsibility  to sort through it.  They gathered the pieces that that seemed truly wise and sacred to them, and they told a new story about our relationship to God and to each other. 

 

During the Protestant Reformation this process happened again in a very big way.  Even thought Martin Luther and John Calvin had some horrible bigoted and violent ideas, in their own context, they genuinely were trying to cleanse Christianity of what they saw as accumulated superstitions, things like worshiping saints and relics, paying indulgences, the absolute authority of the Pope, and the church putting God’s name on the political structure that kept kings and nobles at the top with other people serving them.  They scraped away these superstitions, until they got back to a set of religious agreements that had been made a long time before, in the 4th Century when the church decided what writings would go in the Bible and what the creeds would be.  Then they stopped there, thinking they had found the most true understanding of God. 

 

But inquiry continued both outside of Christianity and inside.  During the 18th and 19th Centuries,  scientific learning mushroomed with discoveries  in fields as diverse as linguistics, anthropology, psychiatry, physics, and biology.  By the beginning of the 20th century, with all this new information about ourselves and the world around us, many Christian theologians said, “We need to rethink our understanding of the Bible, Jesus, and the Christian faith.”   A new phase of Reformation was born.  This generation decided that they should examine every bit of Christianity for signs of human fingerprints. They went way back and opened up even the agreements that had been made by those Church councils of the 4th century. the ones who decided what would be in the Bible.  They even began looking at other religions with new eyes and seeing bits of wisdom there.

 

When this happened, some people fought back in defense of the fundamental doctrines that had dominated Christianity for almost 1500 years, the doctrines that are laid out in the creeds:  one god in three persons, original sin and universal sin, the virgin birth, the unique divinity of Jesus, cleansing of sin through blood sacrifice, salvation through right belief, a literal resurrection, a literal heaven and hell.  A series of pamphlets entitled "The Fundamentals" said that these beliefs were absolute and  off limits to questions.  From the title of these pamphlets we get the word "fundamentalism." The fundamentalists said, “If you don’t believe these things, then you can’t call yourself a Christian and besides you are going to hell.”  They said that their kind of Christianity was the most true because it was the closest to the religion of our ancestors.

 

I used to think that, too.   But now I think I was mistaken.  By trying to keep the same beliefs as our ancestors, fundamentalism forced me to betray the very heart of Christianity:  the quest to better know and serve a God who is Love and Truth.  To keep the traditional beliefs of our ancestors we have to abandon their tradition of spiritual inquiry, of “wrestling with God.” We can accept their answers or we can accept their quest, but we cannot accept both 

 

Now I affirm that the best way to honor the Christian tradition, to honor the writers of the Pentateuch, and the writers of the gospels and the reformers—and ultimately to honor the Ground of Love and Truth– is to do as they have done.  We need to take the set of teachings they handed down to us, their very best efforts to answer life’s most important questions.  Then, just like them, we need to continue examining those answers in light of what we know about ourselves and the world around us.  For each of us this is a sacred responsibility and a sacred gift, the gift and responsibility of spiritual growth. 

 

It might seem like I have abandoned the path I was on, to love and serve God.  But I haven’t.  I am still on that very same path, only my understanding of God has grown deeper and wider.  That is why the songs and preaching and churches that used to fit for me don’t fit any more.  And, in fact, even the word “God” seems terribly humanoid and limiting as a term for the astounding Reality that spiritual and scientific inquiry allow us to glimpse.

 

I am sorry that my changes have been hurtful and confusing.  For a long time,  I have known that the answers I had were not quite right.  But I  didn’t really know how to explain this whole process or how to articulate a better set of answers, so mostly what I talked about was the flaws in the old way of thinking.  Now that I have a little better understanding of the journey, I wanted to express that understanding to you who have been upset or worried for me.

Posted in Musings & Rants: Christianity | 4 Comments

Anatomy of a Christian Hate Letter, Part IV

Posted on February 27, 2008 by Valerie Tarico
This post is part of a dialogue, In Two Minds: The Anatomy of a Christian Hate Letter, between former minister Brian Worley and psychologist Valerie Tarico . In the series, Brian Worley, an ordained Baptist, describes some of his encounters with Christian friends and family since he deconverted and Valerie Tarico responds.  In Letter 3 Brian talks about what attracted him to the Christian faith and he puzzles over why Christianity provokes such intense and even violent reactions toward apostates and outsiders. 
 
Dear Brian,
The things that attracted you to the Christian faith are the same that attract many people.  Recently I attended a meeting called “Vintage Jesus” held on the University of Washington campus. There were two to three hundred local students who had come to hear a charismatic mega-church minister tell them who Jesus was.  I watched with fascination as Pastor Mark Driscoll wove his story, subtly distorting, blurring ideas together, overstating agreement among Christians, and skirting biblical contradictions.  But he beautifully played the factors you mention:  earnestness, a single “truth” story, moral rigor, camaraderie, and a rock band that upheld their promise to “melt our faces off.”
When one is deeply immersed in fundamentalist Christianity, it feels beautiful.  It feels like the real deal. It rocks! It feels like being part of a loving community with a higher calling—because, in fact, it is—even if that higher calling is based on utter fabrication. 
To understand the intensity that gets triggered when outsiders question religious beliefs, it helps to understand how and why those beliefs get stuck in our brains.  For the moment, let’s borrow from Richard Dawkins and think of Christianity as a “meme complex”, meaning a set of viral ideas that get transmitted from person to person. 
 
Thousands, maybe even hundreds of thousands of religious ideas have evolved in human minds.  Some of them never make it outside a single mind.  Most of them simply die out within a generation or two.  But some capture the imagination.  They get passed on from person to person and generation to generation, even for thousands of years. 
These successful idea-organisms, things like Epicureanism, Hinduism, Tao, Marxism, or Christianity, basically get humans to serve them—to spend their life energy passing on the compelling “truth” that has been discovered.  “Compel” is the operative word here.  The impulse to pass on this truth needs to feel urgent, important.  The more like a compulsion it is, the more energy a person or group of people will devote to the ideology. 
To be powerful in this way, the meme complex has to fit the structure of the human mind—how we process information.  We have structures almost like templates in our minds; and information needs to fit these structures to get encoded and retained. (Pascal Boyer’s book, Religion Explained, does a beautiful job of outlining this.) 
But the meme complex also has to tap deep emotions.   Think about all of the forwarded email that comes across your desk.  What do people pass on?  Things that move them.  Things that make them laugh or get teary.  Things that make them get angry or scared or give them chills.  Christianity would be dead in the water if it didn’t trigger powerful emotions.  
How does it do this?  Answering this question would take a book, I’m afraid.  But the general gist is that it taps emotions that are wired into us for a variety of adaptive purposes: 
·        The social emotions of warmth and closeness, belonging, and love,
·        Our inclination to seek and defer to social hierarchy.
·        The moral emotions:  empathy, shame, and guilt. 
·        Our sense of the numinous—the intuitive perception of things beyond the reach of our senses or rational cortex.
·        Our capacity for pleasure, for joy, delight, peace.
·        Our self-preservation instincts:  fear, tribalism and wariness of outsiders, anxiety about death.

As I rattle through even this brief list, I find myself admiring the thoroughness with which the Christian belief system weaves itself into the depths of the human psyche.  One of the benefits of understanding this is that it gives us empathy for people who are still bound to the beliefs that once bound us—your brother, my brother, and the 45% of Americans who call themselves born-again.  It also gives us some empathy for ourselves, we who ask ourselves how could I have been so blind? ! How could I have spent 10 years or 20 or 30?  and who feel guilty about all the others that we brought into the web who are still caught there. 
I hope this helps.

Warmly,
Valerie
Want to review another letter in this series? Just click the link below.
 
Introduction Letter  Letter 1 Letter 2 Letter 3 Letter 5  Letter 6

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Reweaving our Wisdom Heritage

Posted on February 10, 2008 by Valerie Tarico

Back when moral insights and spiritual narratives were handed down by oral tradition, they could evolve with the culture in which they existed.  As a group of people gained more new technologies and social structures, a better understanding of the world around them or a higher moral consciousness, the oral tradition changed.  Some parts were emphasized and repeated often.  Others not.  Stories morphed into each other  or fell away.  New stories and precepts emerged, some that withered immediately and others that have been handed down in bits and fragments to the present.  

 

When humans beings acquired written language, we gained much, but we also lost something.  A book is outdated the  moment it is printed.  As religious scholar, Huston Smith, has said, “Exclusively oral cultures are unencumbered by dead knowledge, dead facts. Libraries, on the other hand, are full of them.”

Written language allowed our spiritual ancestors to record and pass on their best understanding of what was right and what was real and how to live in moral community with each other.  But it also allowed this understanding to become static, frozen in time, developmentally arrested.  The concepts and even the words themselves became holy.  When “canonization” of some texts happened, meaning when authorities designated some texts as official, the related religion became more text centered and therefore more static. 

 

This got worse with the advent of the printing press and widespread literacy.  These advances brought many advantages  but also had a downside.  In both Christianity and Islam, widespread literacy was accompanied by waves of fundamentalism.  Now American Evangelicalism, in particular the "Emergent Church" has mostly gotten rid of old theological and denominational structures altogether—allowing it to be more text centric  than ever.  Any ernest or charismatic man with an inerrant Bible can claim direct access to the mind of God.   In an age of reason,  what better golden calf than a book?

 

In the last five years, for the first time since the advent of writing, we now have the ability to create living texts, documents that evolve with us as we continue our quest for goodness and truth.  Social networking software and wiki platforms allow us to co-create these documents.  They allow us harness the wisdom of our ancestors and the wisdom of crowds in determining the answers to our most fundamental questions:  What is right?  What is real?  What is the meaning of life? How should we then live? Together, using these new tools of research and collaboration, we have the power  to sift through our received traditions, separating wheat from chaff or worse. 

 

Knowing that all of our theological understandings are provisional at best . . .  Knowing that our spiritual ancestors, like us, were blind men seeking to comprehend an elephant . . .   Knowing that a static body of knowledge is either small or stale and that the spiritual realm certainly is not small! . . .  Knowing all these things, we can once again set our spiritual understandings free to evolve with our communal needs and moral consciousness.

 

The Catholic council that canonized our modern Bible had few tools at their disposal as they tried to determine which of the many Christian writings were more sacred than others.   They had no linguists, no archeologists, no computer, not even a printing press —just collections of writings that had been gathered together into “books,” some of which had been assigned authorship by famous men of God.  They had little knowledge of prior religions or parallel religions.   They had no knowledge of biology and little of geography and astronomy.  They had little concept that human institutions are man-made or that they themselves were creating one such institution.

 

Today we have all of these and more. 

 

Each generation has both the privilege and responsibility to sift through its received tradition and to ask:   What of this is mere superstition?  What of this is human construction—man putting God’s name on bits of culture or our own base instincts? And which parts reflect divine realities that lay beyond?   The writers of the Torah accepted this privilege and responsibility as they selected among fragments of Sumerian and Akkadian religion, discarding some and reweaving others with new thread.  The writers of the New Testament accepted this privilege and responsibility, borrowing from the  Hebrew scriptures—Torah and Prophets and Midrash and from the surrounding mystery religions and that of the Greeks.  They accepted their part in history and shaped the course of the future.  Now comes our time to honor this heritage and do the same. 

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“God Hates Soft Men”

Posted on January 31, 2008 by Valerie Tarico

Rev. Ken Hutcherson, an African American minister in Redmond Washington, has been an outspoken opponent of equal rights for gays.  On Martin Luther King Day, he was asked to speak at a civil rights assembly held at Mt. Si High, a public high school near Seattle.  He was booed by a teacher, and controversy erupted resulting in the school apologizing to Mr. Hutcherson and considering sanctions for the teacher. 

 

Last spring I visited a series of mega-churches to better understand their appeal, how they are reaching out to young people and how they are serving the needs of their communities.  One of the churches was Antioch, Mr. Hutcherson’s congregation. 

 

While I was there, Mr. Hutcherson’s sermon was about gender roles, essentially sanctifying traditional stereotypes.  At various points he acted out a woman cooing over a poopy diaper and a man calling his child to jump off a table, then pulling his arms away and kicking at the child to get up.  The gist was, “What are you gonna do?  God just made us that way.”  He derided a biblical character for raising a weak soft son (who in the story died in her arms).  At one point he said, “God hates soft men.” and at another, “God hates effeminate men.”   But the quote of the day was this one: “If I was in a drug store and some guy opened the door for me, I’d rip his arm off and beat him with the wet end!” 

 

My companions and I squirmed.  Around us teens and adults and even small children, laughed at an image most would find shocking and ugly coming from a teacher or even a neighbor. But in this case, it slipped by the moral guard because it was coming from a messenger of God.

 

Civil rights are ideals, rooted in our shared humanity, our inborn sense of fair play and compassion.  If someone is an advocate for his own tribe, however oppressed, and yet he cannot see the basic humanity of others, then he is not an advocate for civil rights.  Human rights transcend tribalism, and Dr. Martin Luther King articulated this beautifully: “An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.”

 

If we are to teach our children to honor Dr. King, they need to understand the ideals for which Dr. Martin Luther King stood and died. They need to understand how these ideals apply equally to both Palestinian and Jew, to Christian and Buddhist and Atheist alike, to an Afghani woman or a gay parent, to the wealthiest aristocrat and the humblest beggar who walk this planet. 

 

 Valerie Tarico, Ph.D.

Valerie Tarico is a psychologist and writer in Seattle, Washington

 

"We are each other’s business; we are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” American poet Gwendolyn Brooks

 

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