My Faith in America
Now we see a new brou-ha-ha in Dorothy and Toto's home state as the Board of Education down there is deciding whether or not to introduce the concept of "intelligent design" or creationism into public school cirriculuum. As a person of faith who was raised in the Southern Baptist Church, I know this debate rather well. I remember it from when I was starting public school. One thing that confused me then was why such a big deal was made out of what was taught in high school, since I was told that the teachings of the church superceded that anyway.
Since that time, I've become more educated and I have a much fuller understanding of the separation of church and state. What I still find confusing is why the Religious Right feels the need to impose their faith on public institutions. This issue was brought to a head last year when a religious justice in Alabama put up a monument of the Ten Commandments. Personally, that didn't offend me. I doubt if it really and truly caused anyone grief. But that is not the point.
Our Founding Fathers sought to make sure that even though we were a country founded by mostly Christians, we could not form a Union that established one religion for all to follow. But again, that is not what the issue is about for me. As I see it, the Radical Religious Right is full of insecurities. The extremely extreme extremists like James Dobson are seemingly so ungrounded in their faith that they feel the need to infiltrate our political system in order to bolster their positions. Now, as I was taught in the Peabody Baptist Church of Memphis, TN, God is bigger than America. God does not, as I understand it, need to have a society based on Biblical law in order to be God.
I am one of the minority of Americans who believes that science and religion can co-exist. Surely no one in this day and age can honestly refute the veracity of evolution, or the principle that life adapts to its environment over time. I am also of the opinion that the Big Bang could have been generated by "intelligent design". But the heart of the matter is that creationism is a matter of faith that cannot be proven in a classroom. The earth and its inhabitants are most assuredly a result of complex design. But none of this implies that science and God are mutually exclusive.
My personal faith has taught me that the world is far too big a place for only one group to have the right of way towards righteousness. Too bad that the RadCons are so beholden to the suspect whims of the Radical Religious Right that they are willing to alter our Republic in order to satisfy them and somehow claim that they alone have all the answers.
I cannot prove that God created the world. No one can. Therefore, it should not be taught to public schoolchildren who may not share my particular faith. Unlike James Dobson and his ilk, I am secure enough in my faith to know that I do not need the federal government to legislate the tenets of it.
Let me just clarify something...
People are quick to label me an anti-Christian, which tells me they aren't really reading. I certainly do not approve of the Radical Right's attempt to eliminate church and state, but I'm not anti-Christian. I am a Christian.
What I am against is any religious information being taught in public institutions. We are required to keep our religious beleifs separate from our government and our government-funded institutions. We are free to practice any faith we choose, and some are free to attend private schools which are church-sponsered. But Christianity is not a state religion.
America is populated with atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, Protestants, Jews and Muslims, and all of us have a right to live as Americans. God does not need to government to teach the Bible. It existed and thrived long before 1776, so I think it can exist and thrive long after.
This is what I've decided works for me and me alone in terms of living as a person of faith.
I have struggled with my faith for years. Being raised Christian, especially in the Southern Baptist Church makes one think that any questioning whatsoever is tantamount to blasphemy. That brand of Christianity is absolute. It is based on one interpretation of the Bible and it's essential to accept that interpretation as an infallible document that leaves little if any room for interpretation. Wordy, ain't I? Of course, that same interpretation has justified racism, slavery and countless other human evils that have eventually fallen out of favor in the mainstream. We've got a long way to go on race in America, but at least a candidate can no longer be considered viable if he or she is a blatant segregationist. Trent Lott would likely disagree, but still...
From the amount of study I've done, I know that the Bible is the work of men. And it's a work that has been changed, edited, added to and subtracted from by some very, very fallible men.
I have come to the slightly New-Agey conclusion that things are not as absolute as all the various religions tell us they are. I do believe in God. But in my opinion, God is bigger than any one religion. In fact, I think God's test for humanity is to see if we can find a way to live together without killing each other in His name. So far, we've failed. Ann Coulter would have us believe that the solution is to invade the offending countries, kill their leaders and convert their population to Christianity. Yeah. Cause the Crusades really turned out well, didn't they?
I do not believe that there is one true shining path to Heaven, and most Christians will use that belief to say that I am not a real Christian. So be it. I think that the basic tenets of all the big religions are fundamentally the same, and we fight wars over the details. To choose Christianity, for me, is to just choose to live by the teachings of Jesus. Now, I've broken any number of the Ten Commandments, and in no way does my life live up to the account of Christ's life in the Bible. I'm certainly not aspiring to be a master proselytizer. I think you can lead by example. I try to be nice. That's basically the root of my life. I fail all the time. I try to be honest, nice, helpful and generous. If I can work from that premise, things will be cool.
But those details...whew...once you get into those it's a slippery slope. It's the inconsistencies that kill me. People will rage vitriolically when someone breaks the Levitical law prohibiting gay sex, but those same loudmouths will totally ignore all the other laws like touching pigs and sitting near a menstrual wife. Now, my wife may be grumpy once a month, but that's no need for me to avoid sitting with her, is it?
DW, I appreciated your post because it revealed the honest effort any person of faith goes through in reconciling their religious beliefs and their political beliefs; especially in the face of others' condemnation.
Like you I was raised in the Baptist church, albeit as a Northern Baptist. I feel that I was taught that, as a Baptist, each of us must struggle to reach our own understanding of Christ and His message. That as Baptists, we would not be walking on the easy path of Doctrine and Dogma; but instead would be facing a difficult, and at times confusing journey with nothing but our own intellect and Bible.
From my own journey I've come to realize that the morally absolute in any religion are driven by two distinct ideas. First, and foremost, is the Sin of Pride...or at least the all too human tendancy to engage in anthropomorphism.
The Bible says God made Man in His image. Too many people invert that, I think, to read Man made God in Their image. They somehow take it upon themselves to understand what God would condem, to know with certainty the mind and will of God. That my friend is Hubris. And it is a hubris that allows them to pass moral judgement on anyone else.
The second distinct idea they embrace, especially in the Abrahamic faiths, is the idea of salvation and damnation. Their God is one who punishes transgressors. It is an idea of a God who kills the first born son, who floods the Earth to kill all but the select; a God who destroys cities and allows the Hebrew armies to slaughter their enemies. This God is to be feared, and the words used to describe the relationship between man and god are ones of subservience and fear.
From this idea flows the concept that moral transgression must always be punished. That man's laws must enforce God's law. Therefore, abortion must be illegal because it thwarts His retribution for sexual activity. There must not be any welfare because that thwarts His punishment for those who are lazy or morally corrupted with drink and drugs. Homosexuality can never be tolerated because it is a sin. And a nation that turns its back on God's strict ordering, or enforcing His rule, risks His destructive wrath.
In short their's is a religion of hubris and fear.
The enlightenment, the rise of modernity, the progressive movement reject those two ideas. Instead of basing law and government on a single religion, indeed even to the point of believing that the ruler is divinely appointed, human reason and thought shall be used. Laws and government earn the right to exist by how effective they are at solving Human problems; and not by enforcing God's will.
And that's where progressives run into a problem. Modernity is based on the idea that politics is based on rational thought. We argue that our side has the better logic, the better evidence. We fail to realize that the other side doesn't care about logic or evidence. They have rightous certainty and that is all they need. As I often tell my wife, we've brought a basketball team to football game.
Our problem is that we thought the Middle ages were over. But they're not.
June 3, 2005 12:01 PM | Reply | Permalink
DW, I made a similar comment to yours about Leviticus on my own page last night. Like the Bush administration, the so-called Christian Right gets a total pass from the so-called liberal media. Neither is ever forced to confront the contradictions, falseness, absurity, and oftentimes patent hypocracy of their unerring "truth."
I am an educator, and I blame much of that on the educational establishment. The system is rigged to support the status quo, and to ignore the Kansan behind the curtain (I couldn't resist that) in favor of our national myths. Let's see, for over a hundred years now, concentration of power has brought us big government, law (as profession), medicine, business, and now media, among others. And yet, more than ever, we are supposed to be rugged individuals in charge of our own destiny. At a time when more and more corporations are being allowed to ditch their pension plans and insurance coverage for workers both retired and current, and the rich get fabuslously richer every year while the rest of us have to work harder to stem the slide of falling standard of living, George Bush thinks the answer to ensuring our retirement rests with each and every one of us, and good luck.
Jesus talked a lot more about the sick, the powerless, the widows and orphans than he did about homosexuals and adulterers. (I guess he would have to be considered soft on adulterers, wouldn't he, by their current standards?) Even without bringing in the Enlightenment, its seems to me that today's religious right forgot the law of love in their zeal to punish those who break certain other laws.
Will anything short of the apocalypse itself force them to confront this?
Given their free ride in the media, will anyone ever call them on bringing a football team (juiced up steriods) to the basketball game?
June 5, 2005 10:03 AM | Reply | Permalink