It is tempting at about this point in almost any national political campaign to give up on religion altogether. When such pillars of the right wing pundit corps as William Safire and Cal Thomas plead for a religious cease fire before both of their party's candidates get permanently scarred by the spiritual cross fire, it is easy to imagine how the rest of us may feel. "People who are supposed to serve a higher kingdom," Mr. Thomas complains, "have shown that they can get down and dirty with the best of the pagans." From Pat Robertson's calumny of Senator Warren Rudman, a conservative Jew, as an unconscionable bigot because of his pro-choice stand to the McCain forces using Governor Bush's ill-considered appearance at Bob Jones University to accuse him of Catholic bashing, we have had a steady diet for weeks now of what Mr. Safire aptly calls "religio-political sleaze." Such vitriol feeds on itself. It is hard to posture as justly inflamed if you too are caught with a flame-thrower in your hands. To change the metaphor slightly, moralists who live in glass houses shouldn't throw orgies.
No fires burn with more incendiary passion than do religious fires. The most intractable divisions in the world today are sponsored by competing Gods, even sometimes competing Christian Gods. When our nation's forbears in their wisdom established a separation of church and state, they were trying to protect religion from being compromised by political agendas as much as they were attempting to protect religious minorities from dogmatic tyranny should a religious party ever assume power.
Though it is less blatant, I am almost as concerned by political attempts to cozy up to Jesus in cozenly attempts to sway Christian voters. The leading democratic candidate wears a bracelet that reads, "What would Jesus do?" His still likely opponent in the Fall says that Jesus is his favorite philosopher.
I'm sorry. When it comes to the shaping of our national domestic and foreign agenda, I don't want my president asking what Jesus would do? Oh, I might be a little tempted, but only if he let me choose the right passages. For instance, in Matthew 25, when Jesus' followers ask him how to get to heaven, he says that when you die there is a quiz. As it turns out the questions have nothing to do with denying a woman the right to choose, opposing federal gun control, or protecting the sanctity of the confederate flag. They are "Did you feed the hungry, shelter the homeless, clothe the naked, heal the sick, and visit those in prison?" Nonetheless, the Bible can be adduced in support of almost any political position. For or against capital punishment. Even for or against Gay rights, at least if the spirit of the finest scriptures are weighed against the letter of conflicting testimony in the smallest of small print. Remember, the Bible lended moral (or immoral) support both to those who supported and those who opposed slavery in the years leading up to the Civil War. In its pages, if you choose the wrong ones, the Bible has nasty things to say about everything from women to shellfish. It is for this reason that Shakespeare said, "The devil can quote scripture for his purposes."
For this reason I have as much trouble with the Bible haters as I do with the Bible bangers. From one such Bible-hater, I received a curious e-mail attack on my own theology this week. It reveals less about my actual theological views than about the starkly literalistic anti-religious attitudes of the writer, but that is the nature of such attacks. They say more about their author than their target. For instance, whatever you may think of George W. Bush, he is certainly not anti-Catholic. His own brother is a Catholic. And do a majority of political reporters actually worship Zeus as one religious zealot from the past weeks salvos creatively exclaimed. Please! In any event, for the sake of balance, let's not to forget the fundamentalists of the left. Here is the e-mail I received.
Greetings.
The will of God, revealed in the Scriptures, included genocide.
Witness the Israelites slaughtering their enemies. Not a woman
or child is permitted to survive in some cases. It fosters a
Godhead that knows the outcome of His creation, separating
the saved from the damned before those souls had a chance to
choose, compelling them to accept his Grace and those whose fate
is outside the drawing power of the Holy Spirit, the ostensible
blame rests solely on the transgressor, justifying the wrath of God.
If you want citings of scripture, I'll provide! If you read the
Bible, you know what I say is true. Why do you worship this Deity?
How can you bend your natural sense of what is just?
Not only am I tired of the bigotry sponsored by religion, I have just as little use for anti-religious bigotry. It is just as literal-minded, mean-spirited and incendiary. For every instigator of genocide who uses scripture to launch a secular Jihad, there are always religious martyrs who, powered by their faith, give their lives in witness against these same atrocities. In fact, the four greatest genocides of the last century, in Europe, Russia, China, and Cambodia, were sponsored either by Nazis or Marxists, certainly not by Christians and Jews.
I started writing a new book last week, my own take on a twenty-first century theology. Two primary tests my theology must pass are these. First, does it enhance my own reverence for the creation, that is to say, does it invoke in my heart and mind a sense of awe and thereby promote deep humility in face of life's wonder and mystery. The second test is this: does it at the same time enhance my respect for those who may have different beliefs concerning the cosmic mysteries than I do; does it lead me to recognize my own tears in their eyes; does it inspire me to a realization that, for all our differences, we are truly one. Remember, as I said earlier this month, there are 25 stars in this galaxy for every person alive today on earth. In the cosmos itself, the star to human ratio is 2.5 trillion to one. This alone should inspire awe and humility; it should also remind us, that when it comes to decoding the cosmic mysteries, we are much more alike in our ignorance than we differ in our knowledge. I have long since concluded that with most theology, the devil is in the details, in competing answers to the unanswerable questions. And the devil is in us when we damn one another for beliefs that don't perfectly accord with our own.
A 21st century theology based on awe and humility offers to its adherents both breadth and focus. Honoring many different religious approaches, it only excludes the truth-claims of absolutists. Recalling my metaphor of the cathedral of the world, this is because fundamentalists-whether on the right or the left-claim that the light shines through their window only. Skeptics draw the opposite conclusion. Seeing the bewildering variety of windows and observing the folly of the worshipers, they conclude that there is no light. But the windows are not the light, only where the light Truth, God, Creative power, call it what you will shines through.
One reason I celebrate my ignorance of Holy secrets is that religion can be dangerous, especially on a shrinking globe where, with discrete back yards a thing of the past, conflicting faith positions contest one another in almost every human precinct. The greatest challenge to a 21st century theology is the reactionary retrenchment of competing theologies and ideologies with mutually exclusive truth-claims. The danger true-believers (or true-disbelievers) present is today compounded by the spread of religious or ideological terrorism throughout the world. But every generation has had its holy warriors, hard-bitten zealots for whom the world is large enough for only one true faith. Taught to worship at a single window, they have also been incited to demonstrate their faith by throwing rocks through other peoples' windows. Tightly drawn, their logic makes a demonic kind of sense: (1) religious answers respond to life and death questions, which happen to be the most important questions of all; (2) you and I may come up with different answers; (3) if you are right, I must be wrong; (4) but I can't be wrong, because my salvation hinges on being right; therefore, (5) short of abandoning my own faith and embracing yours, in order to secure my salvation I am driven either to ignore, convert, or destroy you.
One presumably impartial response to this war of conflicting theological passions not only at this point in a political campaign but any time at all -- is to reject religion entirely, to distance ourselves from those who attempt-always imperfectly -to interpret the cosmic runes. There are two problems with this approach. First, such a rejection deprives us of a potentially deep encounter with the mysterious forces that impel our being, thereby limiting our ability to invent and discover meaning. Second, none of us is actually able to resist interpreting the cosmic runes. Not only the world's religions, but every ideology, scientific worldview, and aesthetic school has its windows in the cathedral of the world. In each, the light and darkness mingle more or less persuasively for those whose angle of vision is tilted in that particular direction. Attracted to certain patterns of refracted light, with its partial clarification of reality, these people are also worshipers. Their windows too become shrines.
None of us is able fully to comprehend the truth that shines through another's window, nor apprehend the falsehood that we ourselves may perceive as truth. We therefore easily mistake another's good for evil, and our own evil for good. A true-appropriately humble- 21st century theology tempers the consequences of inevitable ignorance, while addressing the overarching crisis of our times: dogmatic division in an ever more intimate, fractious, and yet interdependent world. It posits the following fundamental principles:
1. There is one Reality, one Truth, one God.
2. This Reality shines through every window in the cathedral.
3. No one can perceive it directly, the mystery being forever veiled.
4. Yet, on the cathedral floor and in the eyes of each beholder, refracted and reflected through different windows in different ways, it plays in patterns that suggest meanings, challenging us to interpret and live by these meanings as best we can.
5. Each window illumines Truth (with a large T) in a unique way, leading to various truths (with a small t), and these in differing measure according to the insight, receptivity and behavior of the beholder.
One additional word here for rationalists, especially hard-bitten rationalists, fundamentalists of the left. Aristotle coined something called the Law of the Excluded Middle. As a logical certainty, he asserted that "A" and "not-A" cannot both be true at one and the same time. By the lights of my cathedral metaphor, Aristotle is wrong, at least with respect to theology. His logical certitude oversteps the law of experience. Contrast one stained-glass window (its dark center bordered by more translucent panes) with another (configured in the opposite fashion). Though the same light shines through both, it will cast diametrically opposite shadow images on the cathedral floor ("A" and "not-A," if you will). Even as we cannot gaze directly at the sun, we cannot stare directly into the light of God. All the great world scriptures make this point. No one can look God in the eye. Truth emerges only indirectly, as refracted through the windows of tradition and experience. For a 21st century theology, what the cathedral metaphor suggests is that, since the same light can be refracted in many different ways (even "A" and "not-A"), the only religious truth claims that can be discounted are those that dismiss all other claims simply for being different from their own.
One more saving bit of evidence, though the light of God is refracted through our windows in many distinctive ways, when the time comes for us to die, the same sun sets on each of our horizons. This we should be able to perceive. Rather than continuing to enlist yet another generation of terrorists for truth and God, the principle challenge of theology today is to provide symbols and metaphors that will bring us, in all our glorious diversity, into closer kinship with one another as equal sons and daughters of life and death.
Earlier this month I spoke of the Angel and the Deep Blue Sea, but don't need an ocean view to feel this. The tiniest piece of life is so grand as to outstrip all our imagining. As for our essential oneness, every one of you who comes in for pastoral counseling teaches me as powerful a lesson. As an aside, please remember, it takes more courage to ask for help than it does to help yourself. The courage of those of you who come in and share your deepest pains amazes me. And you always teach me something. When I see my tears in your eyes, I remember that truly we are one.
So I am not going to give up on religion, however many temptations this political season and unfolding world conflicts offer. In fact, even they inspire me to go in precisely the opposite direction. They inspire me to fashion a theology big enough both to encompass our many difference and to expand our hearts.
The dual reality of being alive and having to die demands a human response, often a religious response. Let's be sure that our own is worthy of the life and death we so mysteriously have inherited. Copyright AllSouls 2000.
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