Pope Francis is catching flak for this but he's right
September 21, 2024
Well, Pope Francis has done it again. He has spoken a generous truth that is getting him in trouble with those who have a much narrower view of things than he does.
On his recent trip to Asia, he said this while in Singapore, a place whose citizens pledge allegiance to a wide variety of faith traditions: “If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t’, where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sheik, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].”
And after the pontiff returned to the Vatican, he spoke a few days ago to an interreligious youth conference and said this: “Unity is not uniformity, and the diversity of our cultural and religious identities is a gift from God.”
What? There's not just one really true, failsafe, God-approved narrow road to the divine, making all others the broad road to perdition?
I can take you to some Christian churches (and to some branches of other faith traditions) where you can hear that no-shades-of-gray theology. It's based on false certitude, a point I tried to make in my book, The Value of Doubt: Why Unanswered Questions, Not Unquestioned Answers, Build Faith.
The argument I make in the book is not that truth doesn't exist. But in Christianity, truth is not fully contained in any doctrine or dogma. That means the complete truth can't be found in a set of words. Rather, in Christianity, truth is a person, Christ Jesus. And just to be clear, my argument is not that all propositions are of equal value. That's immoral relativism and leads to nothing but trouble.
The reality of our lives is that when it comes to the eternal questions -- ideas about the divine, about whether there's a heaven or a hell, about what we can know about such matters with certainty -- we are left to make our best guesses. But they are, in the end, guesses. From the inside, they often feel like irrefutable truth. And sometimes they can be so persuasive and generative that we stake our lives on them. But it should give us pause that not everyone sees things as we do on these subjects.
I have a friend who is a Catholic priest and Trappist monk. He says that when it comes to his commitment to his faith, he is simply making a "wager." He says he has wagered on the story of Christ because he wants it to be true and because he believes it really is true. But it's not a story or a proposition that lends itself to 21st Century scientific certainty. And such "certainty" itself often isn't very certain.
Partly that's because there is a monstrous gap in what we know and what, maybe, some day we might know. For instance, a majority of the Earth's surface remains unexplored, as does a vast majority of the 13.7-billion-year-old (give or take a few weeks) cosmos. And most of physical reality, including everything on our own planet, is hidden from view in the subatomic world that underlies what to us appears to be solid reality. In fact, the desk on which my computer sits is full of emptiness at its subatomic level. Some days I'm surprised it doesn't just collapse.
The stories that religion tells come to most of us through translations into whatever language we speak. The Bibles most often read by Americans, for instance, are translated into English from the original Hebrew, Greek and Aramaic. But the original manuscripts are almost all missing, though our collection of earlier and earlier manuscripts is much better today than it was 100 years ago. So if you read the Bible as literal history, you're not taking the Bible seriously. It is not written as literal history, even though it contains some historically verifiable accounts.
None of this is to say that all faith traditions are alike or of equal value or that any of them can scientifically prove you will or won't acquire an afterlife. As much as anything, religious stories are art. They are meant to give you visions of what a flourishing life might look like and how to live such a life. Because humanity was involved in how those religions got started, grew and changed, we have no guarantee that God, who, was motivated by love to create the cosmos (which I can't prove), agrees that this or that religion is the one God would pick if God were human and given a choice.
None of that creative uncertainty will matter to a lot of people who prefer to believe they have uncovered the only true religion and who are appalled that many other humans don't agree with them.
But Pope Francis is right to ask such people: "Where will that lead us?" The answer is pretty obvious. It will lead us to where we are today: People of faith often disrespecting other human beings because they haven't wagered on the same faith story that they have themselves have wagered on.
And that is no path either to peace or to insight. Oh, and by the way, no: The pope in this instance was not speaking infallibly.
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IN THE WAKE OF LIES, PEOPLE OF FAITH RESPOND
After all the recent turmoil in Springfield, Ohio, because of lies Republicans have told about Haitian immigrants there stealing and eating pets, congregations there have banded together in various ways to help. As this article from an agency of the Presbyterian Church (USA) reports, "'We didn’t know what was coming, but God did,' said the Rev. Jody Noble, pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Springfield, who has taken on, among other important tasks over the past few days, organizing and offering a press conference featuring her colleagues in ministry."
Help is arriving from around the country, too. Which, of course, is exactly what people of faith should be doing in such a situation. Also: I was glad to see that among those offering help was the Rev. Margaret Towner, the first female ordained (in 1956) as a pastor in this (my) denomination. I've written several times about Marg (as she likes to be called) over the years and find her an uplifting spirit and a self-effacing pioneer for women in ministry. There are links in the story to which I've linked you in case you want to help, too.
Beyond all that, the Rev. Elizabeth A. Eaton, presiding bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, just issued this statement about the Springfield, Ohio, situation. "Our church," she wrote, "teaches that immigrants are children of God, made in God's image and worthy of respect and lives of dignity. God calls us to witness boldly to this truth when people tell dehumanizing lies that perpetuate racist tropes and support white supremacist narratives."
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P.S.: In 2020, Mick Larson, a Kansas City documentary maker, produced a series called "What Would Jesus Do on Election Day?" You still can find that intriguing series here. In it, he interviewed and filmed quite a few folks, including me, who, he thought, would some kind of light to shed on his question.
More recently, Larson has produced a seven-part podcast series based in large part on the documentary series. You can find that here. But each part of the podcast series comes with an introduction and, with each main part, offers considerably more detail than the original documentary. The podcast is based on follow-up interviews with those of us who were filmed as part of the original.
As Larson told me, "The seven-episode documentary series was updated for the 2024 election. A podcast series was produced for the 2024 election. The podcast has a director's cut series featuring professors, authors, journalists and theologians who contributed to the documentary series. Those contributors break down each episode, expanding and analyzing the comments."
There's a lot of material here. But Larson's original question still is well worth some thought as we approach the soon-to-arrive 2024 presidential election (advance voting began in several states this weekend). The part that faith plays -- or can play -- in political matters is always a worthy subject, and I'm glad Larson has offered this new podcast series, in which some of us who are interviewed disagree -- civilly -- with others of us.
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