When religion pretends to know all the answers, watch out
May 03, 2023
Each person, of course, must decide which, if any, religion to follow. The choices sometimes seem overwhelming and endless, not unlike the god(s) many of those religions worship.
Sometimes it eventually becomes clear to some people that they have made the wrong choice. That seems increasingly to be the case with young people who grew up in a pretty rigid Christian evangelical tradition that was, in many way, suspicious of science, certain about just about everything -- including what makes God angry -- and terribly uncomfortable with any faith tradition but their own.
That is what is described in this article by Jon Ward, chief national correspondent for Yahoo News. It's an excerpt from his new memoir, Testimony: Inside the Evangelical Movement That Failed a Generation, a book I haven't read in its entirety. But Ward's story is engaging and helps us understand what it is about fundamentalist-leaning religion of any type that so often drives adherents out.
"I’d been raised the son of a pastor in an influential megachurch in the D.C. suburbs," Ward writes, "and I wouldn’t fully embrace my faith until college." But as part of a mission trip as a teenager, he went to to South America. The trip, he says, "was memorable in part because of the way it transported me physically to another continent, while keeping me locked tight inside the cultural bubble of conservative evangelicalism. It was a closed system that it would later take me years to emerge from and understand."
Ward describes his connection with a man named Ron Luce, about whom he writes, "whose most distinguishing characteristic was his aggressive mullet. Luce was a thirty-year-old hype man who had founded an organization named Teen Mania. He would travel the country, holding events called Acquire the Fire, at which he told teens that they could join the epic battle against evil by traveling to foreign countries to spread the Christian faith. Luce talked a lot about Christians’ call to wage war against the enemy. Maybe he meant demons. Maybe he meant real people. It was never quite clear."
Some branches of Christianity seem to be hyper-focused on a wrathful god who wants to destroy not just evil but also the people who commit evil by sending them to eternal damnation. (The book to read is That All Shall Be Saved, by Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart.) Such an approach is easy to abuse because it's based much less on love than it is on fear. And fear can move people to do self-destructive things.
Ward says that "Luce’s worldview centered on the idea that America had been a Christian nation and could be once again." Where have we heard that pro-Christian nationalist position before? So the trips Ward and other young people took to other countries "weren’t intended for learning about other cultures or for gaining understanding about the world," he writes. "They were intended to export our particular brand of American Christianity."
Beyond that, he says, "critical thought, to these charismatic leaders, was an unhealthy questioning of God, and that got in the way of impact. So they sometimes implied that too many questions were a sinful reflex, or Satan’s handiwork, which could keep a Christian from claiming their rightful place in God’s army."
It was, in part, to counter that approach to faith that a few years ago I wrote the book The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith.
Ward's experience, sorry to say, isn't unique: "Growing up," he writes, "I was so ensconced in my church bubble that I didn’t see the connections between our private beliefs and the real-world impacts that resulted from them. I was actively, aggressively encouraged to stay in my bubble and not to question anything about it."
Any faith tradition that discourages people from asking questions is not healthy. Fair warning.
(The illustration here today came from here.)
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A METHODIST SCHISM UPDATE
As the United Methodist Church continues to experience schism over LGBTQ+ issues, about 100 current and retired bishops have been meeting in Chicago this week to discuss where the church is and what to do next. So far about 2,400 congregations have left the UMC, and some 2,000 of them have joined the new Global Methodist Church, which stands against ordaining LGBTQ+ people as pastors and against same-sex marriage, thus joining it with other expressions of religion that treat some people as second-class humans. What a sad time in Christianity.
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P.S.: Several times in recent years I've shared with you some writing by Markandey Katju, a school mate and friend from the time I spent two years of my boyhood in India. He later became a justice on India's Supreme Court and then was chairman of the Press Council of India. He seems to spend 23 hours a day writing in various venues. (I have no idea when he sleeps.) And perhaps because he describes himself as a Hindu atheist, what he writes often deals with issues raised by religion. Those are the pieces I share here with my blog readers. So today you get links to three of Markandey's articles.
In this one, he talks about my position of being against the death penalty in all circumstances -- and explains why he disagrees with me. (See? Friends can disagree about important matters but still be friends.)
Next, this one is about how, when he was about 10, he learned a song about marching through Georgia and asked me my reaction to it. It was a chance for me to complicate his thinking about the American South and slavery.
And, finally, this one is about how well natives of India do in the U.S. when they move here permanently and how much they contribute to America's society, culture and economy. Markandey and his wife Rupa have a daughter who lives in California and a son in Canada, so the Katju family has made two excellent contributions to North America. Feel free to react to anything he's written by emailing him at [email protected]. Since he almost never sleeps, maybe he'll have time to respond.
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ANOTHER P.S.: My latest Flatland column -- about a new effort to stem the decline of Christianity in the U.S. -- is online here.
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