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Right Belief is the Heart of Christianity. My father died in a climbing accident when he was 59 and I was in my mid twenties. In one of our last deep conversations before his 1000 meter misstep, he expressed his … Continue reading
For years atheists, agnostics, and other freethinkers have been saying that you don’t need a god to be good. Recently, they even tried to say it on the side of an Indiana bus. More and more, they are finding ways to show it.
Kiva.org is a matchmaking service. It pairs up desperately poor people who need loans with folks who are willing to take a chance on them. With as little as $25 in your hand, you can go to Kiva and help a farmer in Pakistan who wants a pair of goats, or a single mom in Peru who wants to invest in a new sewing machine for her home embroidery business, or a vendor in Sudan who sells corn flour and wants to increase her inventory. The borrowers request a specific amount through a local microcredit agency, often with a small group of community members who guarantee each others’ loans. When enough lenders choose them, meaning the full amount is available, they get the loan, invest it in their venture, and begin making payments on an eight month schedule.
On Monday, my 13-year-old daughter Marley bounced in the door from school and said, “Are you ready to go to Kiva?” She and her older sister Brynn had emptied their banks—literally– and bought me a Kiva gift certificate for Mother’s Day. Marley inserted herself between me and my computer. She pulled up the site and began explaining her investment criteria: female (because females more often reinvest earnings in the family) no more than two kids (because they have a better chance to get ahead), and no beauty parlors (because that’s just dumb). She showed me a cooperative in Tajikistan and a grandmother in Mexico. But when I kept returning to Pakistan she assured me that I really could make my own choice. Except—was I going to put the whole $50 into one person?!!! She’d forgotten her final criterion: spread the wealth.
Last but not least, Marley proudly showed me how to credit my gift to a Kiva lending team: Atheists, Agnostics, Skeptics, Freethinkers, Secular Humanists and the Non-Religious. Does my daughter know me or what?
In an article I wrote a couple of months ago, Atheist Arrogance, I encouraged non-believers to counter stereotypes simply by being who they are. “Be out, be yourself.” In example, I mentioned a Seattle Atheists blood drive. So imagine my delight to find that the AASFSHN team –yes, the acronym is pathetic—topped Kiva’s list, with over 16,000 loans made. Not to be outdone, a group called Kiva Christians is hot on their heels. Is it a competition? Sure looks like it. But can you imagine something better to compete over?
Religious communities perform a valuable organizing function. True, it can be used for harm—to organize a “Bibles for Afghanistan” crusade, or worse, a literal crusade. But religious communities also activate people to feed the hungry or protest against nuclear weapons. As nonbelievers are becoming more open, they too are beginning to coalesce into moral communities that talk openly about deep values. My hope is that, freed from the constraints of dogma or the need to proselytize, these communities will be able to invest themselves in the simple process of doing good for goodness sake.
What does that mean? Primum non nocere (First, do no harm). The simple principle of harm avoidance is at the heart of humanity’s shared moral core. But so is proactively nurturing wellbeing. Healing harm. Creating delight and beauty and wonder. Loving. Truth-seeking. Practicing random acts of kindness. Our ancient traditions, both religious and secular converge on a shared set of virtues and moral principles that are probably built into our bodies by our ancestral history. There is a lot we can learn from those traditions about how to be good with or without gods. But, as Marley just reminded me, there is also a lot we can learn from our children. We offer them the insights of our ancestors, and our own, but they are the ones who, as Gibran put it, dwell in the house of tomorrow.
Evangelism in the halls of the Pentagon. Personalized Bible studies for foreign diplomats. Passion of the Christ advertisers next to plates in the Air Force Academy mess hall. Officers Christian Fellowship buses from military bases to revival meetings. A Southern Baptist fundamentalist at the head of the Chaplain Corps.
Through Christian Embassy and similar organizations, millions of dollars annually are dedicated to insuring that our military leadership is steeped in born-again Christianity. The investment has paid off. Mikey Weinstein at the Military Religious Freedom Foundation receives letters daily from service men and women who have been ostracized or pressured because they aren’t born again. Ironically, most of those who complain are Christians — just not the right kind.
You can’t have this kind of conversion activity going on inside the military without it spilling over to the outside. One missionary boasts that he sent 1.3 million tracts to Iraq. Claiming to be humanitarian aid workers, others go bearing Bibles and video tapes or coins with Bible verses for Iraqi children. But much of the public didn’t get the pattern until Al Jazeera this week ran footage of soldiers unwrapping Bibles in Afghanistan and a chaplain urging them to "hunt people" for Christ.
From a moral standpoint, the behavior of missionary soldiers is akin to missionaries who pretend to be aid workers. Soldiers handing out tracts or Bibles are violating an explicit military rule while deceptive aid workers violate an implicit ethical rule, but the reason those rules exist is the same — to prevent harm. How much effort and tax money has gone into convincing the Arab world that our presence among them is not a religious crusade? How much lethal hatred have our soldiers absorbed because Muslims believe that it is?
Even when conversion activities don’t cause soldiers to get physically hurt or genuine aid workers to be driven off, they do cause harm. A conversion agenda undermines the slow painstaking work of laying down trust, the foundation material that lets us bridge our cultural and religious differences and see our shared humanity.
So why would soldiers put their fellows at risk? Why would those who seek to serve the God of Truth lie about their objectives? Why can we count on these problems continuing? Because evangelical Christianity is about evangelizing. Evangelicals believe that they have a moral mandate to win converts, one that trumps other moral priorities.
Don’t get too superior. The fact is, we all weigh moral priorities against each other constantly, violating some in the service of others. Constantly. The problem isn’t that evangelicals are doing this. The problem is what they believe.
From its beginnings, Christianity has been a proselytizing religion, one that seeks to convert others to orthodoxy, meaning right belief. The writer of Mark didn’t say, "If you’re finding this way of life rich and full you might want to share it with a friend." No, he said, "Go ye into all the world and preach the gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the father, the son, and the Holy Ghost." (Mk 16:15) Christians call this the Great Commission, and it appears in various forms in our Bible. "Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men." (Mt 4:19) Some religions are about tending the gods. Some are about living well or attaining insight. Traditional Christianity is about believing well and attaining salvation and persuading others to do the same. Believe in the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved — from eternal torture.
If you truly believed that this is how things work, wouldn’t winning converts take priority over a slightly increased risk to your buddies? Wouldn’t it take priority over some peacekeeping mission? Wouldn’t it take priority over being up front with immigration officials and people you befriend?
When the Asian Tsunami happened a few years back, a local mega-church suggested how members could respond . (I’m paraphrasing): 1. Pray for the people who were affected. 2. Give to Mars Hill Church. 3. Give to our Church building missions in India. From the outside it is appalling that an institution would seek to divert the compassionate impulse into conversion activities or filling their own coffers. But if you genuinely believe, as they do, that belief is the toggle that sends people to heaven or hell for eternity, what higher good could there be?
I get frustrated sometimes with well-intentioned tripe about respecting all beliefs, as if, in order to respect each other as human beings we must subjugate reason and evidence to the higher priority of making nice. Beliefs matter. They shape behavior, and when they are powerful enough, they control it. If you walk in my front door and I believe that you are in my house to kill my daughter, that belief dictates my every move. If my husband believes I am wrong, he has a moral imperative to argue me down. And fast.
True believers of all stripes take belief too seriously. They mistake the feeling of certainty for external reality, and they underestimate the vast human capacity to err. But I think that many of the rest of us don’t take belief seriously enough. We think beliefs can somehow exist in isolation from social and personal priorities. We talk about people setting aside their religion in the voting booth, as if they could or should pull their deepest values on and off like a sweatshirt.
Does everybody have the right to believe whatever they want? Yes.
But that doesn’t mean we must give religious belief a free pass. We don’t have to treat "I just know" as if it meant something about anything other than the speaker’s mental state. Nor should belief be treated as a valid excuse for bad behavior, the way that intoxication used to be. Harm done in the names of gods is still harm. A chaplain or soldier who doesn’t understand this doesn’t belong on the government payroll.
Organizations like the Military Religious Freedom Foundation and Americans United are fighting to re-establish the legal separation between church and state, but some religious beliefs obligate practitioners not to honor this separation. The only solution I can see is to address the beliefs themselves — to stop exempting them from the normal rules of discourse. Any beliefs that insert themselves into the public square must be subject to rigorous public scrutiny and debate. We owe it to ourselves and each other to take belief more seriously.
The circles I run in include a fair number of recovering fundies—people who were raised on the notion that morality comes from Jesus. In fact, the former Calvinists among us were taught that anyone who is not "washed in the blood" is utterly depraved. For real. A Seattle Calvinist mega-minister, Mark Driscoll, had this to say to his flock: "If the resurrection didn’t literally happen, there’s no reason for us to be here. If the resurrection didn’t literally happen, there are parties to be had, there are women to be had, there are guns to shoot, there are people to shoot." (Have you heard that Calvinism is all the rage?)
Children are hard-wired to be credulous, to accept what they are told—which means that this shit gets inside people at a gut level—which means it takes a lot of work to get it back out. Recovering fundies spend a fair bit of time reminding each other that just because something got wired into your brain before your critical faculties developed doesn’t mean it’s true. So of course last week’s Pew report about churchgoing and torture approval made the rounds.
In case you missed it, Pew released survey data showing that the more frequently someone went to church, the more likely they were to approve of torture. (So much for total depravity on the outside.) Church attendance in this case may be a proxy for conservative religious belief. Of the groups surveyed, Evangelical Christians were most likely to think that torture is often or sometimes ok (62%), followed by Catholics (51%), followed by mainline Protestants (46%). Nonbelievers were least likely to agree (40%).
What’s the deal? Over at the Washington Post religion blog, On Faith, modernist theologian Susan Brooks Thistlewaite, suggested that maybe the problem is rooted in theology, what is called the "penal theory of atonement." Jesus gets torture and death because the rest of us deserve it. So through the twists and turns of theo-logic, Jesus getting tortured to death turns out to be the best thing that ever happened to the human race. It’s the way believers escape the fate that awaits the rest of us—and is a part of God’s perfect, loving plan.
"For Christian conservatives," Thistlewaite says, "severe pain and suffering are central to their theology." In evidence, she points to Evangelical enthusiasm for Mel Gibson’s movie, a theologically justified orgy of Hollywood torture. She has a point. Convinced of the film’s salvific merit, my mother’s church bussed in teens and made special arrangement for wheelchair-bound elderly. Wouldn’t want them to miss that half-hour beating scene.
Does penal atonement theology lead to torture approval? Could be. A host of other hypotheses were suggested in response to Thistlewaite’s article, most of them none too flattering in their assessment of those Evangelical churchgoers:
After spending 10 years watching my tired father twitch in church, I’ll confess to my personal favorite: "Sometimes sermons are such that congregants who cannot fall asleep feel that torture is part of God’s plan; this does not imply that they like it."
But one comment actually made me think. It was from a nonbeliever who expressed her dismay, not that so many Christians were willing to condone torture, but that so many nonbelievers did too. Christian fundamentalism may increase tolerance of torture, but if so, it is part of a broader problem.
Scholar Riane Eisler (The Chalice and the Blade,The Real Wealth of Nations) offers a framework that may lend some relevant insights. Eisler proposes that all institutions, ideologies, and relationships can be thought of on a continuum from domination orientation to partnership orientation. In a domination orientation, people are caught up in the business of competing for control. You either eat or are eaten, and given the option, most people would rather be at the top of the food chain. Underlings use what power they do have: manipulation, deceit, passive resistance, even suicide. Those in power do harm, often because they perceive that the alternative is "being done to." Being the torturer is better than having your hands tied behind your back and a hood over your head.
Evangelical Christianity has a strong dominance orientation. The metaphor of "spiritual warfare" is ubiquitous. Onward Christian Soldiers. Dominionists seek to take control of the reins of power to rule the rest of us according to Biblical principles. In the church I grew up in, women were taught to submit, even to abuse. My pastor gave a full sermon on breaking the will of his two year old. Spare the rod . . .
But the rest of us are not immune from this mentality of domination either, which ultimately is a mentality of fear, the fear of exploitation or insufficiency. It’s so—primate. Unless the weaker monkey can sneak, the dominant monkey will eat all the grapes. Unless the weaker chimp can sneak, the dominant chimp will get to mate with all the best females. But even our primate cousins would have impossibly wretched lives without the rudiments of compassion and cooperation. Chimpanzees both seek help from one another and give it. Rhesus monkeys have been willing to starve for a week rather than shocking another monkey to get fed (Hauser, pp. 354-355). Their behavior reflects a complex blend of domination and partnership strategies dictated largely by instinct. But, our intelligence allows us more behavioral flexibility than any other species. We who call ourselves homo sapiens sapiens –wise, wise—have the power to understand fear and domination deeply and to orient our personal relationships and social institutions toward the other end of the continuum.
Even as old an institution as Christianity has the power to learn. That may be one of the most important take-aways from the Pew study. Yes, as many people pointed out, the Church has a history of embracing torture, sanctifying it theologically and using it to defend purity of belief. And yes, those Christians who are still stuck defending the "fundamental" belief agreements made in the Fourth Century may be stuck defending torture as well.
But Christians like Thistlewaite who have been willing to re-evaluate the old regula fidei or rules of faith have moved both theologically and morally. Many mainliners center their theology not in "penal atonement" but in radical hospitality. Call it the Great Commandment. Call it love. Like partnership-oriented Humanists, Buddhists and others, modernist Christians teach their children how to think rather than what to think. They model their values and share their theological hunches but don’t feel a need to "break" the kids at age two to control their spiritual quest. If that doesn’t help us to outgrow torture, I don’t know what will.
At the risk of becoming a pariah as a liberal blogger, I have to try again.
Last week, I wrote an article about anti-Semitism on the left side of the political spectrum. It was the most commented article I’ve ever posted but an abject failure at doing what I hoped for, which is to get some folks introspecting about their biases. I’ll own that failure. I was mad and reactive when I pounded it out, and people responded (surprise, surprise) by being mad and reactive. They provided lots of critical feedback, some about my character, intelligence and motives, but more about the article itself–often quite thoughtful and thought provoking. (DK, HP, MLW)
Ironically, commenters both demanded and provided documentary evidence of whatever-the-hell anti-Semitism I was talking about. People accused me of not being able to tell the difference between prejudice and legitimate criticism of Israel; I guess I was accusing them of the same. I’m hoping this time to move beyond accusations.
Among responses to the first article, here are some specific fragments that struck me as tapping something beyond the current situation.
· slavery and racism against Blacks went on for centuries from generation to generation of Blacks and it was institutionalized, not only in the Americas, but across the entire Western world. I am not sure you can say the same about anti-Semitism or the Holocaust.
· the astute and scheming forces of an illegitimate and aggressive nation pandering in social guilt for its own nefarious purposes.
· now try to get the oppressors in Israel to recognize that the right thing to do is take their hand off the squirming bug and maybe the bug will stop bitting it.
· Everybody knows that the Jews have been persecuted all thoughout history, for their religious beliefs and also for their practice of usury.
· . . . ( the Holocaust Industry ).
· . . . Jews were silent and passive (as were the Christians), and when the juggernaut came for them they did not resist.
· I do see a small minority of aggressive anti-Semitics, but I also see what appears to be a long standing, deeply ingrained mental illness which inflicts a huge proportion of the Israeli/Jewish community….a combination of fear, paranoia, persecution complex, vengence, racism, etc…which is nurtured in them and used to the advantage of Israeli leaders.
· If "the Israelis", who’s the top dog in this fight you know, started caring for anybody but themselves we would all come a long way
Phrases like these jar me, even when they are imbedded in otherwise thoughtful, well-intentioned discourse. Other comments were more ambiguous. Is it anti-Semitic to assume that AIPAC rather than American security and oil interests controls US Middle East policy? Is it anti-Semitic to characterize Jews as whiners because they still talk about the holocaust? I tend to think so, but either way, I realize that these rather out-there bits aren’t what bothers me the most. Let me see if I can articulate what does.
To me it seems that one of our strongest tendencies as humans is to draw tribal boundaries around who we think of as a “person”, who the Golden Rule applies to, and who merits our compassion. Most people are capable of being kind and loving and generous and fair and empathic – but they draw lines around who merits this kind of treatment. These tribal boundaries are what enables most human cruelty (as opposed to, say, flawed early attachment or brain anomalies which can inhibit a person’s capacity for empathy in all contexts.) In this line of reasoning, most harm is perpetrated not by bad amoral people but by people who, within their boundaries are quite decent and have intact moral reasoning and emotions. So I think that it is tremendously important for decent people to notice and question their tribal biases.
My experience in reading and hearing liberal discourse about Palestine is that many decent liberals have set the Israeli people outside their boundary or circle of compassion. For some this extends to any Jew who thinks Israel has a right to exist. When someone is outside your circle of compassion, you stop trying to see the world through their eyes. You also lose your ability to move them, except by force, which is how many Western liberals seek to move the people of Israel. (e.g. boycott them, cut off aid, burn Starbucks, ban Israeli academics. . . )
It is very difficult to be empathetic to both sides in a conflict. Research since the 1950s shows that humans tend to resolve this kind of dissonance by choosing one side. In my experience with divorcing families, if conflict between parents is high enough, a kid often will choose one parent and ditch the other, because the attempt to love two people who hate each other can feel unbearable. But if we can care about both parties in a conflict, we sometimes have the power to help them care about each other. In liberal blogs, the pain of Palestinians seems well voiced, and so the next two paragraphs are a one-sided attempt to offer some thoughts about the Jewish/Israeli experience.
I suspect that liberal distancing from Israelis occurs in part because, as a movement, liberals think of themselves as being on the side of underdogs, and they perceive Israelis as over-dogs. Part of who we are is the team that stands up for underdogs. But I don’t think that the Israelis and Jews I have met feel like over-dogs. And I don’t think that their failure to feel powerful and privileged is just whining, paranoia, or an inability to get over the past. Why have floods of Jewish immigrants moved to Israel from Russia (950K) and Ethiopia (22K) in recent decades? Because they continue to be persecuted as minorities in those other countries. They choose to live in a walled city surrounded by enemies—a place where it is virtually impossible to feel safe– in part because they don’t feel safe elsewhere either.
Tangentially, from ancient times, Jews were scattered about the Near East as well as Europe, but they have been “cleansed” from many countries where they lived in small communities because of the intermittent cycles of violence they have faced. It goes without saying that the regional tensions between Muslims and Jews over the State of Israel and the fate of Palestine have only serve to accelerate this process. All of which is to say, I guess, that we see the Israelis as needlessly vicious over-dogs vis a vis the Palestinians, but for them the Intifada is part of a broader dynamic in which many Jews feel like underdogs – and historically have been—and still are in many places–and would be in Israel/Palestine if people who despise them could get away with a little more.
A related factor that many Americans seem not to consider (or admit?) is that Israelis face a real existential threat. Without US aid, the state of Israel probably wouldn’t exist; there would have been a war or series of wars that went on until the Jews were driven out. The American left knows this – that Israel exists in part because of our aid and our kneejerk alliance with them in international forums. This one reason left wing Americans feel entitled to demand that Israel behave better.
But the Israelis know it too—they live with a sense of constant threat. American right wingers vomiting hate speech; synagogues burning in Europe; a Holocaust denial conference in Iran; the occasional rocket coming across their border; Palestinian maps on which Israel doesn’t exist – all serve to remind them that it’s not over yet. What would that feel like? Frustrated advocates for Palestine ridicule their sense of threat and treat it as if it were simply crass manipulation. But the Israelis feel threatened with reason. And unless we seek to understand and address why they feel threatened rather than simply scorning their fears, then the only tool we will have to move them is the one we lefties are trying to use now.
The problem is that our derision and the familiar stereotypes that comes out some on the left only increases their sense of threat and so increases the likelihood that they will seek to take care of themselves alone with preemptive violence– like the recent nightmare in Gaza which as far as I can tell served no one and left thousands dead or anguished. I fear that our boundless outrage feeds the problem it seeks to solve.
Psychologist. Author of Trusting Doubt: A Former Evangelical Looks at Old Beliefs in a New Light. and Deas and Other Imaginings. Youtube: AwayPoint
AwayPoint 