Are you a religious man, professor? – Part I

It was Good Friday when my student asked me this question on the way out the door of class: “So, professor, are you a religious man ?” I remember sputtering out some response to the effect that while I think most who know me would describe me as a deeply spiritual man, my ties to institutional religion are strained on a good day. I envision myself as inhabiting the orbital ring as far removed from the planet of western Christian institutional religion as one can get and still remain within telemetry.

Of course, that’s an explanation most college undergraduates readily understand as they wrestle with their belief systems, putting their parents’ religion and politics on trial in the crucible of dorm room bull sessions and classroom discussions. But this is a response from a man on the other side of many years of seminary education and a doctorate in religious studies, a man ordained by a venerable religious tradition as a priest with a number of years of practice of that priesthood. That rather unexpected stumbling response has caused me a good deal of rethinking of what I believe and why over this first week of Easter.

While I have historically found the Unitarian-Universalist approach of negative self-definition (I don’t believe this, I’m not that) a bit off-putting and less than intellectually – not to mention spiritually - rigorous, I found my thoughts focusing on a couple of points that continue to surface in my teaching and study of world religions. While the Easter season focuses on resurrection and the hope of life after death, I find myself back at Good Friday looking at sins, sins that gave rise to the crucifixion of the Christ in the various theologically interpretative constructions of Jesus’ execution which see that event as somehow an atonement for human sin generally.

What are the sins of the institution to which I maintain only loose connections after years of engaging its seminary educational process and enduring its control issue-driven process to become ordained? And upon what basis would I judge the institution?

Increasingly, the answer to the second question is less a judgment than a resignation to the reality that human institutions will inevitably bear all the human warts of its individuals writ large. The church is what it is. I accept that even as I continue to participate peripherally in efforts to move the church into a more humane presence in the world. Clearly, the church rarely lives into the potential overarching principles of the Great Commandments (Love God, love your neighbor as yourself) would suggest possible. But the question for me is not whether the church is right or wrong so much as whether I feel compelled to continue to engage that church with my remaining and increasingly scarce life energies, i.e., to be a religious man, in my student’s query. And this is where I return to Good Friday and what I see as the two besetting sins of this stream of tradition I cannot seem to get past.

The first besetting sin of western Christianity as I see it is its self-focus. So many of my students make remarks in class discussions and in their papers to the effect that their adherence to the Christian tradition has everything to do with assuring themselves of a favorable afterlife. In its usual form, it is constructed as such: unless I believe in the church’s teachings about Jesus as the Christ who died for my sins, I won’t get to go to heaven.

Now, this is somewhat expectable from college undergrads whose brains have not reached full developmental and physiological maturity and who thus tend to think in self-focused terms. That was certainly a description of my own mind at age 20. But to the degree it reflects their parents’ thinking, from whom most of us inherit our religion and politics, it’s troubling. As I often say to my students when we discuss Kohlberg’s stages of moral reasoning, Stage 2 (of 6) “What’s in it for me?” moral reasoning is somehow charming in 8 year olds. It’s less than charming in the same child at 18.

But where this line of argument becomes untenable is when we hear it from the pulpit professed by educated clergy who ultimately know better than this underdeveloped self-focused thinking would suggest. I once heard a priest (who is also a medical doctor with a distinguished career in health care) remark in a Christmas Eve service that the baby Jesus had to be born because he had to die for our sins. I nearly lost the contents of my stomach (which admittedly contained no small amount of alcohol that night) right there in the middle of midnight mass. Another Christmas Eve in Tallahassee a priest compared Jesus’ birth to a famous alka-seltzer commercial: “When Jesus is born, the world says, ‘Oh, what a relief it is!’” Oh, what a relief getting out the door of that service proved to be!

Now, don’t get me wrong. I see nothing wrong with hoping for a life after death. In a Eucharistic liturgy which we use at Integrity gatherings adapted from a number of sources by my dear friend and fellow Episcopal priest, Warren Thompson, the affirmation of faith concludes with this statement: And, I believe that I may hope for a life with God that is not terminated by death. AMEN. In all honesty, I think most of us would admit that we share such a hope. Indeed, truth be told, I am deeply hoping my dear mother, Saint Marge, will meet me at the end of the tunnel in the great white light when I die.

But I don’t know that will happen. And neither does anyone else, regardless of how they express their hopes. Where I begin to lose respect for institutional religion is when its members deliberately confuse verbs like “hope” or “believe” for those of knowledge, verbs which suggest the mere recognition of established fact. We don’t know. And we lie when we say we do, first to ourselves and then to others, the practice of “bad faith” that Sartre warned us against.

Certainly I recognize the desperate existential anxiety such statements reflect. At some level, a truthful statement would be “Because I am terrified by the prospect of annihilation of my individual existence at the time of physical death, I feel compelled to believe that life after death is a fact and thus I must buy into an atonement theology construct to assure myself of that.” Of course, the fear in such a statement would be palpable, which is precisely why most people cannot be honest with themselves in such a brutal manner.

But even a compassionate understanding of the existential anxiety which compels professions of faith about the afterlife and how to attain it does not make such professions factual. It makes them earnestly held beliefs. And at the heart of such beliefs is a bottom line, non-negotiable concern: individual self-preservation. Little wonder that much of institutional religion as I have experienced it in the west is marked by intellectual dishonesty driven by self-focus.

Admittedly, this tendency is greater in Protestant traditions focused on believing than in Catholic bodies whose emphasis has long been more on belonging. David Tracey’s excellent analysis of dialectical (G-d is radically absent from the world, individuals reflect depravity) Augustinian imaginations as opposed to the analogical (G-d is radically present in the world, individuals reflect the image of G-d) Thomist/Franciscan imagination has long noted these differences. But, in an American culture which has been both strongly shaped by the Protestant dialectical imagination which in part has given birth to a hyperindividualist culture which both shapes its newly arriving members and affirms those already present in their self-pursuit, all of us are, to varying degrees, informed by an ethos of self. As my Orthodox Catholic director in Clinical Pastoral Education at Stanford observed, “In America we breathe Protestant air.”

Where I see this self-focused approach to religion as most egregious is in the constructions of most atonement theologies. Frankly, I don’t think I’ve ever really believed that G-d was unable to forgive sins without a human sacrifice. What kind of G-d cannot forgive his human creations when they live into their imperfections? Even worse, what kind of G-d demands human sacrifice as a condition of forgiveness? Perhaps the bloodthirsty god of Aztecs (if we can rely on the self-serving reporting of Spanish conquistadors here) or the bloodthirsty god of Southern Baptists who demand an eye for an eye, extracted in the state killing chambers they run in the states of the Bible/Death Belt.

Finally, what kind of G-d sires a single child only for the purpose of slaughtering him to take care of other people’s sins as the midnight mass sermons suggested? Perhaps the “cosmic child abuser” is a bit too harsh (and simplistic) of an accusation against such a construction of deity, particularly in light of Trinitarian theology which speaks to G-d in three persons which ultimately means G-d himself is consenting to be killed so he can forgive human sins. But, this is a convoluted theology on a good day. And it remains bloodthirsty no matter how mystified these understandings become through the vagaries of abstract theology. What kind of model is such a god for human behavior?

A religion which requires people to believe that their individual salvation is their ultimate (if not singular) concern, to paraphrase Paul Tillich, is a religion which infantilizes its adult believers. It at least encourages them – if not requires them – to continue to look through lenses of pre-adolescent preconventional moral reasoning – “It’s all about me.” It requires the construction and ongoing affirmation of theologies of the death of another as a means of vicariously pursuing self-interest. And it is heedless to its means of doing so.

Immanuel Kant’s restatement of the Golden Rule has always struck me as the heart of any sound ethics worthy of thoughtful adults. “Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end and never merely as a means to an end" Clearly, any atonement theology which would assert that Jesus had to die so human beings, whether collectively or individually, could go to heaven is a violation of this categorical imperative. And I find no small amount of irony in the fact that these theological constructions which would interpret the death of Jesus in their very essence violate the ultimate principle that Jesus himself taught: Love your neighbor as yourself – i.e., Do not treat them as a means to an end.

So, if religion is not all about me, ultimately, then what should it be about? In my estimation, a religion worthy of thoughtful adult believers would include the following:


* A focus on relationship of the individual to


     - one’s own inner depths, to all other living beings,


     - to the created world in which we live


     - and to the creator which lies beyond all of this and yet in whose very being all creation
        exists, the ultimate connection of all that is.

* Seeing sin as the violation of relationships and forgiveness as the means of repairing and restoring them, including relationship to G-d

    
* A focus on moral principles – as opposed to the moralistic rules imposed on everyone by the most powerful tribe – which guide and evaluate all relationships. Such broad principles would include

    - a value of life in its fullest for all living beings,


    - the willingness to seek out and respect the image of G-d on the face of every living being,


    - the willingness to admit imperfection from which flows wrongdoing and the courage and    
       strength to recognize the harm of one’s thoughts, words and deeds, to admit the need for
       change and to engage the struggle to do so,

    - an ultimate existential trust that the universe is a good place and that our lives will not be
       lived in vain.

An adult religion constructed in terms of relationship does not infantilize its members by conditionalizing human desires (and thus behaviors) for constructs of existential security. Rather, it focuses on responsibilities which flow from relationship. The Hebrew prophet Micah stated this well in answering the question “[W]hat does the Lord require of you?” with this recognition of religion as relationships and the responsibilities which flow from them: “[D]o justice, and love kindness, and walk humbly with God…”

A religion which cannot escape the focus of self and the existential anxieties of death is not a religion worth practicing. A religion which is so concerned with individual salvation or tribal confessional boundaries - both speculative focuses on the next world (if any exists) - that it cannot be fully present in the present world in any effectual manner is not a religion worthy of thoughtful adult adherents. And a religion which has nothing to say to this world worth hearing is ultimately bound for the dustbin of history.

I think it is worth noting that the sayings which the Jesus Seminar have voted to be most likely authentic sayings of Jesus are statements of relationship and gratitude for the graciousness of creation and the responsibilities which flow from them. They are also, almost to the saying, statements which reflect a post-conventional moral reasoning (Stages 5 to 6), reasoning which transcends tribal and nationalist boundaries and reflects moral obligations to all other living beings in spite of any socially constructed expectations. They are focused on this world, its inhabitants and the creator G-d who lies within as well as beyond that creation. They reflect existential trust in G-d and the other, a far cry from the fear-driven constructs of atonement.

This is a religion which reflects compassion at its core and justice defined by right relations, just as the prophet Micah prescribed. And thus it is at least in its potential a religion with something to say to the world worth hearing. Jesus taught a religion worth practicing. And he articulates a way worthy of thoughtful adult followers. How very far from this religion of Jesus are the religions about Jesus - though only loosely - which have come to bear the name Christianities.

I have more to say including my thoughts on the second besetting sin of western Christianity – projection – but that must await another post.

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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.

Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)

Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)

Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law

University of Central Florida, Orlando

http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/

frharry@cfl.rr.com

If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.

Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.


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The Rev. Harry Scott Coverston, J.D., Ph.D.
Member, Florida Bar (inactive status)
Priest, Episcopal Church (Dio. of El Camino Real, CA)
Instructor: Humanities, Religion, Philosophy of Law
University of Central Florida, Orlando
http://pegasus.cc.ucf.edu/~ncoverst/
frharry@cfl.rr.com


If the unexamined life is not worth living, surely an unexamined belief system, be it religious or political, is not worth holding.


Most things of value do not lend themselves to production in sound bytes.
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