THE END OF THE WORLD
by Forrest Church
October 23, 2005
These are strange times. Tsunamis. Hurricanes. Floods. Earthquakes. And now, with ominous stealth, the advance of avian flu, awaiting only an opportunistic mutation to trigger an international plague. The fury of nature is unleashed throughout the world in Biblical proportion, leading once again to an equal plague of prophets, eagerly announcing that "The end of the world is at hand." I heard it from Jerry Fallwell just the other day, right on my television. He wouldn't give the date. He says that would be presumptuous, and he is right, it would. But he knew it in his Bible and his bones. These hurricanes and floods and earthquakes were somehow different. Almighty God, who never misses a trick and does nothing without good reason is hitting us over the head with a sledghammer. "A wake up call," according to Rev. Fallwell. The penultimate trump sounds and we awaken—not from but to a cosmically bad dream, the nightmare of Apocalypse.
Why the same people who are so sure that the world is about to end are working overtime to elect creationists to local school boards I have not the faintest notion. But the last folks I would wish to place in charge of shaping our children's future are the growing legion of our fellow citizens who are praying for the world to end as soon as is heavenly possible.
I look at this from the outside in, of course. The end of the world is bad news only to those who are not "saved." For everyone else, it's an eternal picnic. For God's chosen ones, this catena of catastrophe leads straight to the long awaited, long-postponed moment of cosmic reckoning, when Jesus returns on a heavenly charger leading the angelic host on the mother of all crusades, a divine scourge of religious cleansing, Sodom, Gomorrah and New York City incinerated in the promised bonfire of retribution, the saints uplifted straight to heaven on clouds of Rapture.
Here for me are the signs of the times. Twice as many Americans believe in the Virgin Birth than credit the theory of evolution. The Book of Revelation has proved itself more enduringly persuasive than the Book of Nature. And the End of the World, which has been at hand for two mellennia now, is today handier than ever. When the Secretary of State bears witness in a Mississippi church following Katrina that what we all must do now is patiently await Jesus' return, we are thrown back a century to Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan. The Scopes trial hasn't happened. The tide of modernism that (even in the mainline churches and major seminaries) submerged the bastions of Biblical literalism has retreated to the point that the skyline of fundamentalism seemingly knows no limits, its spires pointing to an all-knowing, all-powerful and, yes, all-vengeful Lord and King laying waste the dens of inequity along Bourbon Street and flooding the Blue States of New England as the first course in a feast of destruction. "An exciting time to be alive?" Not hardly. To hear the Bible bangers tell it, it's instead an exciting time to be about to die.
Judging from sales, one thing it is not particularly exciting to be right now is a Unitarian minister. After nearly three decades espousing deeds not creeds from this very pulpit and witnessing to the saving power of the open heart, hand, and mind, I find myself farther than ever from where the religious action seems to be. The church militant. The church triumphant. The welling vanguard of Christian soldiers marching relentlessly toward Armageddon, winning all the elections they can along the way. Yet on they march and on they triumph, one soul at a time, these pompadoured Pied pipers with their magnetic resolve and captivating confidence. Apart from shaking one's head and crying like Chicken Little that the Sky of Reason is falling, what is one to do? All Souls may be the strongest, most visible Unitarian Universalist congregation in the country, but that's a little bit like being the best bowler in Dixville Notch, New Hampshire. Odds are when tournament time comes around, that particular distinction won't win us a national seed.
Our numerical irrelevance aside, it is tempting—especially to a Unitarian minister, whose idol is knowledge and instrument science—to venture diffusing this toxic mist with a quick application of cool-eyed, hard-headed rational logic. It is equally tempting to feel superior while so doing. In fact, if the polls are right, with every passing year we children of the Enlightenment can feel superior to a larger number of our fellow citizens than we did the year before. I sometimes yield to the temptation, shaking my head, wondering how, in this day and age, people can be so credulous. You can overhear me even now succumbing to this very temptation, engaging ridicule to unmask the ridiculous. But then I catch myself. Maybe I too am open to the wake-up call Jerry Fallwell is speaking about. Maybe something is happening here that we ought to wake up and pay attention to.
I've been devoting my sabbatical to a book on religion and the early presidents. Last week I finished my chapter on Thomas Jefferson, who predicted near the end of his life that every young American of his day would die a Unitarian. Why? Because the rising sun of the Enlightenment would soon shine so high in the firmament that all the shadows of superstition would be banished forever from the human mind. Education and science would march in lockstep towards a kind of secular millennium; Reason would strip priestcraft of its allure; the inductive, rational logic of modern thought would dash the graven idols of religious superstition from every altar. The guiding light of Nature and nature's God, whose bequest of liberty and equality is our most precious inheritance, will illumine a glorious tomorrow. Even those of you with no interest in history will not be surprised to hear me tell you that Mr. Jefferson was wrong.
During Jefferson's presidency there began, in fact, a nationwide religious revival, the Second Great Awakening. As Jefferson was studying the heavens through his telescope, his countrymen and women by the thousands were being transported to a new, heaven-charged existence at camp-meetings all across the American frontier, answering the call of salvation pronounced with liberating power by half-educated itinerant evangelists and blessed perhaps for the first time in their lives with a sense of possessing the very liberty and equality in Christ that Jefferson no less passionately abstracted from the law of Nature and Nature's God. Like today's dark prophets, these preachers believed that the promised Millennium was at hand. Yet, unlike the necromancers of Rapture, they looked not to Armageddon and the end of the world but to a thousand year reign of love and peace, beginning right here in America—the land of sacred liberty—the New Jerusalem. Soon these Jesus children, nurtured on love and mutual respect, made up the vanguard of a democratic army that cast down the old religious establishment as Jefferson's Enlightened circle never would or could. Set free from religious tyranny and oppression they became apostles of freedom, insisting on the separation of church and state. Rather than manning the barricades against the anti-Christ, they fostered a community of free souls loving God and their neighbors as themselves. I exaggerate, of course. Some of the Born-again were born-again bigots. Some banded together on moral crusades to turn the nation into a church and the government into its vestry. But with a few prominent exceptions, the religious revival that began two centuries ago dedicated its energies to building the Kingdom here on earth—a democracy of the faithful—not to dividing the saved from the damned in panting anticipation of an Apocalypse designed to destroy the earth and all the earth's creatures in punishment for Adam's sin.
I love Thomas Jefferson by the way. I find it easy to forgive his all-too-human flaws. But I get a wake up call when I gaze at myself in his mirror. Jefferson was a fundamentalist of the Left. He couldn't have been surer that, once everyone got the rudiments of a good education they would see the world through beveled Enlightenment lenses precisely the same way he did. In fact he did a very Unitarian thing. He cut up the gospels until all that was left were the things he agreed with. His search was not so much for the historical as for the intelligible Jesus. He created Jesus in his own image and worshiped him.
Jefferson and his host of born-again neighbors had some very fine things in common; they alike believed in sacred liberty and therefore fought side by side for the separation of church and state. They alike believed in the Second Great Commandment: to love thy neighbor as thyself. And they alike believed in a better future, ideally to be shared by all and not in some nihilistic conflagration hosted by the few at the eternal expense of the many.
A spate of new books have appeared lately that ridicule Christianity for being ridiculous. The time has come (these well-educated critics write) to name modern religion for what it is: a permanently outdated form of superstitious dementia that has no place in the modern world save as a pacifier for the hopelessly credulous and weak. Most of these books will flatter your elevated prejudices. They will make you feel superior. Read enough of them and before long you will feel just as superior as your born-again Christian neighbors have been trained to feel toward you. It's one and the same game. Sheep and goats. Children of light and children of darkness. The saved and the damned.
Here's what I am waking up to. I am increasingly less interested in learning more about what is wrong with my neighbor than I am in making things right between us. I am not nor will I ever be a born-again Christian. I don't believe that Jesus was born of a Virgin or resurrected on the third day. But his teachings are filled with saving wisdom, wisdom that would make the world a finer place if practiced by Christian and non-Christian alike, rather than conveniently neglected by both. Love your enemy. Love your neighbor as yourself. God is love. Feed the hungry, house the homeless, cloth the naked, heal the sick, visit those in prison. Empty yourself and be filled. Lose yourself and be found.
We might take a leaf from the book of the Universalists of old—not the Universalist sect, but the universalist-minded Christians of the Second Great Awakening, who believed that God is good; and God is love; and we are born to be free and born to be saved—not from this earth, but on this earth and for this earth.
In every way imaginable we are more alike than we differ. Certainly we are more alike in our cosmic ignorance than we differ in our cosmic knowledge. We are all mysteriously born, fated to die, and blessed (or doomed) to travel the path from birth to death together. And who does the blessing and the dooming? We ourselves do. In God's holy name or in the name of nation or sect, race or tribe, we bless or doom one another. Doomsayers have forgotten how to bless. They damn the creation in the name of the creator and pray for speedy deliverance. But they are not alone. In damning demons we too become demonic. The work of division is the work of the devil, even if the devil doesn't exist. Diabolic, literally, means "thrust or rent apart." How easily our chosen enemies beguile us into the ranks of the destroyers, bound together only in our shared despite, as co-apostles of brotherly and sisterly hate.
Does that mean we should go out and stand in the public square with a rose between our teeth and let the tanks of Christian militants run over us on their way to Armageddon. Of course not. Without forgoing an aspiration to love our enemy as ourselves, we can continue to insist that putting handmaidens of the Apocalypse in charge of planet earth is a hope-defying act. We should band together with loving Christians and non-Christians alike to refuse the world-deniers power over the world we share. But as we do so, we must never forget the first law of history: "Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them."
In this spirit, let me leave you with a practical suggestion. With respect to the schools, we mustn't permit ourselves reflexively to turn science into the religion of modernism. Science is not true and religion false. Science is an ongoing stream of working hypothoses and theories that changes its course over time. There is no place for religion in a scientific curriculum not because religion is myth and science fact, but because religion is faith and science theory, which must remain radically open to doubt and is betrayed by true believers who are unwilling to cast their theories from the altar when new information conspires to displace them. Whether we look back on Compte's positivistic gospel of modernism or that of Jefferson, we will see that fundamentalism of the Left is as sure to fail the test of changing truth and time as is fundamentalism of the Right.
Scientism is no less presumptuous than Biblical literalism. Scientific high priests can be as dogmatic and utimately will appear as hidebound and foolish as religious high priests. In short, if we turn this contest into a battle of competing dogmas, whatever happens, the dogmatists will win.
So why not reframe the discussion. To protect good science from false religion and good religion from false science, the two realms must be kept separate. I don't want religion taught in science classes for the same reason I don't want religion taken under the wing of government—because under the wing of government or science, religion will be crushed. "Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." So it is written in the Book of Hebrews. No living faith should be subjected to taxidermy any more than it should be manipulated for political gain. In today's America, a battle between science and religion will wound both. Especially given the political climate, the most persuasive way to advocate the separation of church and school is to do so not in the name of science, but in the name of religion.
One final thought. About that wake-up call. Jerry Fallwell is right. The end of the world is at hand. It always has been and it always will be. We know not the day nor the season, but each of us has a ticket if not for Armageddon, certainly for our own final reckoning. Religion is our human response to the dual reality of being alive and having to die. Whether a series of natural disasters awakens us to our mortality or a midnight call, we awaken to life's preciousness and fragility every time that death pays us a visit. At such moments, I dearly pray, we will feel closer to those who share our lot and fate, not more estranged from them. We are one, not two people. Not sheep and goats, saved and damned, enlightened and benighted, but mysteriously born and fated to die, traveling together on a winding mountain path through mist and fog, safest when we remember to hold hands, most fully awake when we perceive our tears in each other's eyes, most blessed when we pause to stand together or kneel together and sigh at the wonder and the beauty and the terror of it all.
Amen. I love you. And may God bless us, each and every one.