This is an article by Jim Wallis, who is the editor of Sojourners, a Christian magazine.
(Stay with me though.)
Here’s a sample, that may give you an idea of the flavor of this article:
In Christian theology, it is not nations that rid the world of evil?they are too often caught up in complicated webs of political power, economic interests, cultural clashes, and nationalist dreams. The confrontation with evil is a role reserved for God, and for the people of God when they faithfully exercise moral conscience. But God has not given the responsibility for overcoming evil to a nation-state, much less to a superpower with enormous wealth and particular national interests. To confuse the role of God with that of the American nation, as George Bush seems to do, is a serious theological error that some might say borders on idolatry or blasphemy.
To understand where this President is coming from–to transcend over-simplistic whatsits–I think that it’s useful to attempt to interpret (as one would faithfully interpret a text) the language coming out of the White House. It seems to me that Jim Wallis does a pretty good job here.
(I had noticed the “wonder-working” phrase and had understood the reference, but had been pretty confused by its usage in the phrase: “The need is great. Yet there’s power, wonder-working power, in the goodness and idealism and faith of the American people.” Rhetorical excess, or dangerously unhinged theology?)
Good points he makes; I’m a little weirded out from where he’s coming from, though. Not sure I should be, but I am.
He says:
“But the answer to bad theology is not secularism; it is, rather, good theology. It is not always wrong to invoke the name of God and the claims of religion in the public life of a nation, as some secularists say. Where would we be without the prophetic moral leadership of Martin Luther King Jr., Desmond Tutu, and Oscar Romero?”
I’m left wondering why “we” have to invoke god at all; moral leadership doesn’t need to involve god.
Well, excepting, how do you have a conversation with someone who doesn’t agree with your basic premise at all:
“I’m left wondering why “we” have to invoke god at all; moral leadership doesn’t need to involve god.”
Someone who doesn’t (can’t even!) understand how someone could possibly arrive at aforementioned premise. It seems easier to me (perhaps I am wrong?) to conceive of this religious mindset from an agnostic/atheistical/humanist standpoint than vice-versa, if you see what I mean. And then, why not use that language and that mindset to communicate with that group of people?
The question, to my mind, is not Does the religious viewpoint have value? but How do you tap into that value which the religious viewpoint expresses? (eg, social justice, etc.)
I mostly just found it interesting that a Christian (theologian?) writer came up with a theory to describe the prez’s behavior which is far more compelling and convincing than the “Bush is a dummy” meme.
To extremify the example: if I’m having a debate with someone who is speaking in Latin, what would it profit me to attempt to answer them in English? Of couse I would reply in Latin, IF I COULD. I would suggest that the language of the religious and the language of the secular are two completely different languages.
Could this be why you’re weirded out by it?
I think you’ve pegged it there, because there was a bit of a dropping-in-my-stomach feeling when I got to the end of what you wrote. At first I wasn’t clear what you were saying, but when you added that example at the end there was a sort of shock of recognition. Maybe I hadn’t thought of it clearly in that way before, maybe it’s just morning. But it’s beyond frightening to me to realize that we ARE speaking two different languages, those of us in the agnostic/atheist/logic camp and the others.
There may be more to my unease with that article than exactly that, though. I’m thinking two, possibly contradictory, things:
1) I’m picturing one heroin addict telling another that he (the other) is shooting up wrong, while I’m standing beside them both asking, “but shouldn’t you just not shoot up at all?” Obviously I have a pretty effed-up view of religion because I see it as being at best a set of random filters on morality. Morality is complicated enough if it’s just a question of, “Will these actions hurt anyone?” or even, “Which of these actions will hurt the least people or cause the least hurt?” When you add codified moral rules that don’t have anything to do with who’ll be hurt by our actions, and which are in fact not grounded in anything other than the rules themselves, you’re just asking for trouble. When it’s okay to answer, “Why can’t I do this?” with “Because God says you can’t,” you’re creating a fucked up system that by-passes rational thought.
The guy who wrote the article seems to be pretty rational. There are religious persons all over who are very rational; what I end up not understanding about them is how they function under purely rational systems while still claiming to be part of some religious group. I can’t understand the point of staying affiliated with a religion if you’re admitting that the tenants of the religion are faulty. And I -think- that every rational person I’ve dealt with who’s also been affiliated with some organized religion has had to admit to the religion’s shortcomings.
This gets pretty complicated, which is what always happens when I get off on this. Let me try to get to where I was going with that, though. To me, based on my reading of the bible, Bush is the one out of those two guys (the article writer being the 2nd) who’s acting like a Christian. To me “evangelical christian” is a redundant term. The bible is full of references to spreading the word of God. Ultimately I don’t understand why, if a person is going to take the bible as a pretty much entirely metaphorical/not-literal text, that person continues to align himself with Christians.
You can throw out the literal interpretation of the book and pick and choose the good moral messages, but you can do that with a lot of books. It seems to me that where that path is leading is right past the organized-religion thing altogether. Make your own morality based on logical thinking about right and wrong. If you do that, why align yourself with a huge, scary cult?
2) (Yeah, I said there were two things I was thinking) Maybe religious thought CAN be harmless and helpful. Maybe I’m the one who’s wrong. Maybe our rational thought is too easily overpowered by our self-interest, and so we need some irrational, animal-brain fear/guilt thing going on to be able to operate in a truly moral way. That’s a pretty frightening thought, too, because it’s hard for me to figure out how a person like me could get to that point.
Okay. I’m supposed to be working here. Man.
hey i,
before i try to piece together a reply: i really appreciate your thoughts on this.
thanks!
i think your analogy comparing religion to drug-use is perhaps overly-simplified. to explain, i will attempt to expand that heroin metaphor. initially, heroin was developed in order to combat actual illnesses, to enable wartime amputations, other surgical necessities, chronic pain and the like. it wasn’t initially an illicit “war on drugs” drug, if you know what i mean. in the current world of heroin, it seems there are three camps of people: 1) the drug-user (in various stages of addiction) and 2) the anti-drug person, who has never tried the drug, cannot conceive of any GOOD reason why someone would ever use heroin, believes all heroin users should be tossed in the clink, etc. and 3) the difficult to cubbyhole person who does their damndest to try and piece together the complicated threads to form some other kind of picture.
(bear with me, i, i know that i’m oversimplifying!)
so, okay. compare to religion. perhaps religion is more than just simply a framework of morality (or a set of random filters on morality, as you say) but supplies something beyond that. perhaps this “something beyond” is really difficult for the agnostic/atheist/otherly inclined to understand, because it seems like the ravings of madness, totally unnecessary, a luxury rather than a need. but perhaps this agnostic/atheistic pointofview towards religion ignores a crucial possibility: that religion functions to help people survive IN THE PLACE WHERE THEY ARE. and THIS PLACE is most emphatically NOT an agnostic/atheistical one.
i tend to think that people do what they do in order to get through life. whatever that happens to be (and sometimes unwisely). there are a lot of people out there dealing with some serious emotional/psychic trauma (whether other- or self-inflicted).
and i’m not talking about people who use religion as a tool to manipulate the gullible or those who desperately need to believe in something. i’m talking about those people who use religion to keep the pain away, just as a person would use painkillers to keep away the pain. sure people abuse painkillers, but does this make painkillers bad? i think the question becomes more complicated than a question of good/bad.
having been raised in a pretty religious environment, then sort of outgrowing it (the shoes didn’t fit anymore), i’m aware that i might have some severe biases here. but, i guess my basic point is this: there are a lot of good (read: moral) people on both sides of the religion divide and i really feel that is deeply saddening that those people feel alienated from one another. i don’t think that divide is unbridgeable. and i don’t think that bridging that divide need necessarily compromise the moral underpinnings beneath either the religious or irreligious.
i hopt that i haven’t buried myself in meaingless verbiage. but thanks!
Looks like I’m going to respond some more. If I’m coherent, which I’m not feeling very (see!), then I’ll clear up some things to make sure I balance some of the attitude I emit, as well as maybe clear up some background, and maybe (maybe!) try to bring some of this back to the original post. (though that last is probably secondary to what we’re talking about here, in a way.)
Let me go in a random order, forget what I’m trying to say, and leave everything unsaid. I don’t deny at all that there are very good people, with whom I have a lot in common, on the other side of this divide from me. I hate that I often come off sounding sort of down on all religious people, because I’m not. I have met some religious people who I’ve had a shocking (to me) amount of respect for. I don’t mean that as in, “Wow, I actually like a religious person?” I mean it as in, “Man, I don’t meet people often who I feel this much respect towards.”
I grew up Catholic. My mother’s strongly religious in a sense; but she’s part of the riddle for me, too. I have this problem: I feel like I can’t be myself around friends who are religious. It’s a serious problem with my mother, because she and I are very, very close. All my life we’ve talked a LOT, about everything; she’s one person I can just talk to for hours on end without running out of words, until my throat hurts. Yet I walk on eggs around my feelings about religion for two primary reasons:
1) (the easier one to understand, I think,) I know she’s disappointed in this aspect of me, I don’t want to further that.
2) (more complex and weird and key,) I feel like her faith has to be fragile.
Okay, so there’s the big thing, and it’s weird, and it honestly can’t hold water, except it’s pretty firmly-held here in my gut. This feeling that the faith of those close to me might shatter in the face of what to me is the obvious logical reaction to religion.
When I say it I honestly have trouble believing myself. More than a self-inflating feeling, though, it comes from this deep root in me that can’t understand faith. I don’t understand why some people have it and some people don’t. I don’t really remember a time when i did have it. (Granted another issue for me is that I have a lot of trouble remembering a lot of stuff about my childhood, even though it was average and, well, good.) All I remember is having this exact sense through all of my years learning about religion. I went to Catholic school from third grade on. I attended church every weekend, without fail, until I moved out of my parents’ home. But I had this sense all along that everyone just hadn’t quite gotten yet to where I was. That surely if any of these people would stop and ask the questions I had they’d come to the same conclusions: there’s nothing about THIS particular religion that makes it anymore “true” than any of the other countless religions and mystical whatsits and para-normal belief systems and everything else.
It doesn’t feel like an ego trip. It’s one of those things where I frustrate the hell out of myself by being unable to get on the other side of the argument.
So how DO we bridge the gap between those of us on my side of the fence and those on the other? The gap itself is what is unexplained. As far as I know the only explanations are biased — you’ve either got me, on this side, saying those on the other side of it have a flaw in their logic; or you’ve got whoever’s on the other side, saying… whatever bunches of things they say. (And I’ve tried to ingest as many of THOSE as I could… from philosophical arguments to scientific creationism books to discussions with acquaintences.) Nothing I’ve heard has ever explained that GAP, explained what’s DIFFERENT about those on either side of it.
It’s easy if you just look at extremists, like in all cases. I can argue against a bible-thumper without any thought in my head that they might actually have a point. People who have this UNMOVABLE view of how things are really don’t seem to respond at all to the logic of an argument.
But looking at the moderates on either side just points me to that gap, that question that has, to the best of my knowledge, no answer. Is there some fundamental piece of a person that this gap is an expression of? Is faith the expression of a gene?
This gap of course parellels, but isn’t the same as, the god question itself. My agnostic mind allows room for the possibility that the gap IS an expression of god’s revelation — god has shown himself to those on one side and not to those on the other. But excepting that, the existence or non-existence of god has no bearing on the gap itself. Whether or not god exists, FAITH that he exists isn’t based on logic, it’s… just faith.
So have I gone off the edge yet?
So here maybe we come full circle. That gap (yeah, I’ll kick me if I say the word one more time, too,) is an unknown factor, completely. So what scares me about mixing faith with policy is that unknown-ness. Is everyone with faith mad? Is everyone without faith mad? Why can’t anyone explain it satisfactorily?
Yet there ARE people on the faithful side who do act, to the best of my knowledge, based on a logical world view, not allowing any religious bias to make decisions for them. With those people I feel I can speak the same language. Maybe I’m closer to them than they are to the extremists on that side.
I’ll quit now. Thanks for the forum for this.
wow, i.
thanks for sharing.
i don’t have time to adequately reply to that today (going out of town in just a bit) but i will definitely when i get back home.
cheers.