One of the puzzles of the world is that religions often don’t resemble their founders.
Jesus
never mentioned gays or abortion but focused on the sick and the poor,
yet some Christian leaders have prospered by demonizing gays. Muhammad
raised the status of women in his time, yet today some Islamic clerics
bar women from driving, or cite religion as a reason to hack off the
genitals of young girls. Buddha presumably would be aghast at the apartheid imposed on the Rohingya minority by Buddhists in Myanmar.
“Our
religions often stand for the very opposite of what their founders
stood for,” notes Brian D. McLaren, a former pastor, in his book, “The Great Spiritual Migration.”
Founders
are typically bold and charismatic visionaries who inspire with their
moral imagination, while their teachings sometimes evolve into ingrown,
risk-averse bureaucracies obsessed with money and power. That tension is
especially pronounced with Christianity, because Jesus was a radical
who challenged the establishment, while Christianity has been so
successful that in much of the world it is the establishment.
“No
wonder more and more of us who are Christians by birth, by choice, or
both find ourselves shaking our heads and asking, ‘What happened to
Christianity?’” McLaren writes. “We feel as if our founder has been
kidnapped and held hostage by extremists. His captors parade him in
front of cameras to say, under duress, things he obviously doesn’t
believe. As their blank-faced puppet, he often comes across as
anti-poor, anti-environment, anti-gay, anti-intellectual, anti-immigrant
and anti-science. That’s not the Jesus we met in the Gospels!”
This
argument unfolds against a backdrop of religious ferment. The West has
rapidly become more secular, with the “nones” — the religiously
nonaffiliated, including atheists as well as those who feel spiritual
but don’t identify with a particular religion — accounting for almost one-fourth of Americans today. The share is rising quickly: Among millennials, more than one-third are nones.
The
rise of the nones seems to have been accompanied by a decline in public
interest in doctrine. “One of the most religious countries on earth,”
Stephen Prothero says in his book “Religious Literacy,” referring to the U.S., “is also a nation of religious illiterates.”
Only half
of American Christians can name the four Gospels, only 41 percent are
familiar with Job, and barely half of American Catholics understand
Catholic teaching about the Eucharist. Yet if Americans suspect that
Joan of Arc was Noah’s wife,
or wonder if the epistles were female apostles, then maybe the solution
is to fret less about doctrines and more about actions.
“What
would it mean for Christians to rediscover their faith not as a
problematic system of beliefs but as a just and generous way of life,
rooted in contemplation and expressed in compassion?” McLaren asks in
“The Great Spiritual Migration.” “Could Christians migrate from defining
their faith as a system of beliefs to expressing it as a loving way of
life?”
That
would be a migration away from religious bureaucracy and back to the
moral vision of the founder, and it would be an enormous challenge. But
religion can and does migrate.
“Because
I grew up in a very conservative Christian context, we were always
warned about changing the essential message,” McLaren told me. “But at
the same time, we often missed how much actually had changed over time.”
Christianity at times approved of burning witches and massacring
heretics; thank goodness it has evolved!
As
society has modernized and people have grown more skeptical of accounts
of virgin birth or resurrection, one response has been to retreat from
religion. Yet there’s also a deep impulse for spiritual connections.
McLaren
advises worrying less about whether biblical miracles are literally
true and thinking more about their meaning: If Jesus is said to have healed a leper, put aside the question of whether this actually happened and focus on his outreach to the most stigmatized of outcasts.
It
is not just Christianity, of course, that is grappling with these
questions. Rabbi Rick Jacobs, the president of the Union for Reform
Judaism, said that he sees a desire for a social justice mission
inspired and balanced by faith traditions.
“That’s
where I see our path,” Jacobs said. “People have seen ritual as an
obsession for the religious community, and they haven’t seen the courage
and commitment to shaping a more just and compassionate world.”
If
certain religious services were less about preening about one’s own
virtue or pointing fingers at somebody else’s iniquity and more about
tackling human needs around us, this would be a better world — and
surely Jesus would applaud as well.
This
may seem an unusual column for me to write, for I’m not a particularly
religious Christian. But I do see religious faith as one of the most
important forces, for good and ill, and I am inspired by the efforts of
the faithful who run soup kitchens and homeless shelters.
Perhaps
unfairly, the pompous hypocrites get the headlines and often shape
public attitudes about religion, but there’s more to the picture.
Remember that on average religious Americans donate far more to charity and volunteer more than secular Americans do.
It
is not the bureaucracy that inspires me, or doctrine, or ancient
rituals, or even the most glorious cathedral, temple or mosque, but
rather a Catholic missionary doctor in Sudan treating bomb victims, an evangelical physician achieving the impossible in rural Angola, a rabbi battling for Palestinians’ human rights — they fill me with an almost holy sense of awe. Now, that’s religion.
(NYT)
