This is a letter I wrote recently to Gary Stockdale, one of the genius forces behind Bukowsical! The Musical.
We got in a (drunken?) discussion, as one is wont to do at the Reptilian Lounge, on the merits of Christ and Chistianity on humanist grounds. We got cut short, and he told me to send him my thoughts. Little did he know how too-seriously I take myself, and how I’ve been down this road before.
In defense of Christ on Humanist grounds
First off, there are two basic assumptions I’m making. One, Jesus existed. By any measure of historical study we have to conclude that there was a teacher named Jesus who lived, taught and died in and around Galilee and Jerusalem. Two, we have a pretty good record of some of those things that Jesus said and did – filtered albeit through whatever communities of faith recorded them. If you can’t get on board with those assumptions, the rest of this is going to be pure drivel, and we may as well stick sauerkraut up our noses and dance the hoky-poky.As for the question of whether or not there is a God, well. The question is complex, and life is short. Anyway, it’s hardly important to a defense of Christ on humanist grounds.
My point, simply: Jesus rapped for the ones that Johnny Cash wore the black for.
And behind the curtain: my agenda is not to convert you to Christianity. Ecgh. Disgusting. I’m trying to reconfigure some of the assumptions you (seem to) have about Christ and Christians. I think that’s important, partly because we will never have meaningful change in this country until we have a reevaluation of christ, and how the secular left treats christians has a lot to do with whether or not that reevaluation is possible. I’ll get back to that.
Witchy Shit
For God so loved us, that he sent
his only sona really great guy, that whoeverbelieved in himput their faith in his ways might notperishsuffer so badly, buthave eternal lifeenter that quality of life that Jesus called the Kingdom of God.
That’s something like what I think John 3:16 might look like if it made any goddamn sense. Which is to say, if we took it seriously and not literally.
Which is to say nothing at all about how people take it these days. These days the question of faith often becomes like credentials for the entrance to a club. If you Believe the right things then you are Saved. If you don’t, then you aren’t, and too fucking bad for you, it’s your own fault. Here: recite the sinner’s prayer along with me, and everything will be o-kay. Now drink some blood.
Witchy.
A good friend of mine, and a pretty hardcore atheist, once asked me, point blank and pointdly, whether or not I believed in Jesus Christ.
In what sense? In the sense that he existed? Clearly. But you don’t say that you believe in Ghengis Khan. But you do tell your four year old daughter that you believe in her. So you believe she exists? I should well and fucking hope so. No. You believe that she is of value, that she can and will live a fulfilling life, and on and on.
So the question of belief in Jesus, and ultimately, of membership in a church, had ought to be about whether or not you’re choosing to make a commitment to living according to the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth.
Is that the main question for mainstream American protestant Christians? Probably not. Which brings us to
Bad Shit “the Church” Has Done
Under this category fall such exciting blunders as the Spanish Inquisition, the Crusades, Latin American Missions, abetting Mussolini and Hitler, lynchings, and so on. Bad, bad shit que no sirve por nada.
But the broad themes of the good book and especially the gospels are basically some of the most revolutionarily wonderful ideas ever proposed. They aren’t, however, unique to that source. Secular Humanists, for example, often ascribe to the same basic ideals: help the poor, love each other, money is less important than people, forgive others, evolve beyond violence, all people have value, forgive yourself for being human…
So naturally we ought to cut welfare, torture prisoners of war, ignore exploitive sweatshop labor, enforce the death penalty, bomb the evildoers, and refuse homosexuals basic human rights, and teach abstinence only! All high points on the Christian Coalition agenda, yeah?
This is, how you say, crap – of the highest possible insanity. We Christians got another word for that shit, and it’s called heresy.
Can we quote scripture to say that gays are evil? Sure we can. But if you’re interested in Leviticus 18:23 then take a look at leviticus 19:19. Cotton poly blend t-shirt, mothafucka? Abomination!
Again. Seriously, not literally.
It’s easy to write off all Christians by lumping them all together under the same category. And if you do that, their actions speak so loud, you can’t hear a word they’re saying.
But look: there are a lot of Churches. That there is a mistake that a lot of atheists make: assuming that Christians of all stripes are of one indistinguishable mob. It’s actually pretty meaningless to lump the Quakers, the Greek Orthodox, fundamentalist African Anglicans, and Liberation Theologists in the same category.
Which brings us back to Oz.
Pay attention to the man behind the curtain.
Interestingly enough, there is a bit of a reformation happening in the Anglican Communion – more specifically, the Episcopal church of the USA. These questions are probably going to split the church. I won’t get into that, but my Pa’s got the goods. (Here’s the sermon he gave on that lately.) It’s precisely this kind of reformation that secular humanists can’t afford to ignore or belittle.
My attitudes help to enable a system of churches which is generally antithetical to the good principles Jesus actually taught in that it is oligarchic, oppressive, and reactionary rather than progressive. Yes?
Your attitudes force reasonable people to do one of two things: swallow the red pill and go along for the ride, or take the blue pill and stop believing in imaginary friends.
Now that might not sound so bad to you. But hang up a minute.
A lot of people are going to take the red pill no matter what. Too much for too many rides on the idea of a God to let it go, and if the only option readily available once you’ve swallowed God is a witchy equation towards salvation, a superstitious John 3:16, then we’re fucked. But if we could listen to what the guy actually said, then we might start to make a move to set a few things right.
Which is why I say that meaningful change in American politics is impossible with a reevaluation of Christ.
And if people are attacked by progressives solely for being christian, they choose one or the other: Progressive or Christian, Sanity or Christianity. And if they aren’t both, we’ll never get a progressive reevaluation of Christ. It’s like blowing up buildings, see: it creates a kind of Christian nationalism and defense mechanism. Presto-chango, Allaka-JOHN ASHCROFT! Oh, shit!
So you, as a secular culture figure in Lalaland, gotta be concerned for what kinds of adventures are available to people who take the red pill.
Now go listen to Johnny Cash, and keep writing brilliant musicals about forgiving yourself for being human.
The bit with the Bishop, by the way, was hands-down my favorite part.
-Samuel
p.s.
Once more,
with feeling:
seriously,
not literally.
March 17, 2007 at 9:56 pm
So – and this is NOT criticism; only a question – the reevaluation of Jesus pertains to his teachings and his words and would not consider him the resurrected Son of God with whom we can live in relationship? I mention that this is not a criticism because in too many blogs where I – as a follower of the resurrected Jesus – attempt to understand what someone is writing, I get attacked for simply asking a question that really is trying to understand!
March 17, 2007 at 10:18 pm
frankly, i don’t know how you have a relationship to the guy unless it’s in working for what he worked for. it ain’t the resuscitation of a corpse, but the continued dedication to those principles he taught – beyond tragedy and suffering.
as for what kind of reevaluation of christ we need in order to get johnny into a rainbow, i’ll bet you that it will be complex and different people will consider jesus differently,
as they always have.
and rest easy. i won’t bite you.
March 17, 2007 at 11:16 pm
Good stuff man.
I’m curious what kinds of attacks and belittling progressives throw at you. As someone who works a similar angle from a different side of the line — basically I agree with everything you say, but as someone raised outside any formal religious structure I identify with the agnostic/atheistic minority — I know a lot of non-believers have a tendency to go overboard or off the rails with this.
It seems to me that one way to try and build better ties is to deal with the kinds of flack you get directly. Like, I’d love to put together a little document explaining “why you shouldn’t write off religion for reasons XYZ” or something.
March 18, 2007 at 2:06 am
I don’t ever really feel attacked or belittled. Certainly Gary never attacked me. He’s a cool cat.
But we cool kids at the front of the progressive millenial generation ,the cultural end ofa political identity, we just get a little leery when we find out you’re a Christian. And I can understand that response.
but there’s something non-working about the relationship we got going.
for instance: can you imagine a church that included gays? maybe christians would stop being scared of them, and the cooties argument would stop working if, say, your bishop was gay. or your priest. and then maybe progressives wouldn’t be so scared of christians.
i can’t stress enough how i think the shit going down in the ECUSA is a good thing.
March 18, 2007 at 5:45 pm
There’s a really nice piece of reader mail over at sullivan (http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/02/a_humanist_jesu.html) that sounds pretty in line w some of what yr saying about “serious” vs. “literal”.
Specifically:
Heaven is not some place where we will go when our body dies. It is the world that we all yearn for and that each man of faith and good helps to realize in his small way through the march of human history. Hell is not some burning pit for the doomed and unsaved. Rather, it’s a metaphor for the eternal separation from this community of the saints that the wicked are doomed never to realize by their rejection of what is good and beautiful. What are miracles? They are not supernatural gifts from an all-knowing God. Rather, they are what men of faith and good appreciate in this universe, despite all that is broken, evil and ugly.
The letter gets even better after that.
March 19, 2007 at 1:51 pm
jpb,
Sounds much like the Christian assertion (which has been largely high jacked) that what Jesus is working toward and will bring with Him when he returns is not “heaven” but a recreated and new earth.
I am not committed to a corpse. I am committed to the living Jesus AND the things that he taught and the things that he is doing in the world today!
May 7, 2007 at 4:45 pm
[...] I think this reformation and split is unimaginably good, because (as I’ve said before) I believe that lasting meaningful political change in this country is probably not possible without a reevaluation of Christ, and that non-christians can play a role in that. (That is, that we christians must reevaluate Christ, and the heathens can help. Not that the heathens have to at all accept Lord Jesus as personal savior.) I’ll spare you that argument here, but for you extra credit kids, go here, or here. [...]
May 8, 2007 at 11:38 am
But look: there are a lot of Churches. That there is a mistake that a lot of atheists make: assuming that Christians of all stripes are of one indistinguishable mob. It’s actually pretty meaningless to lump the Quakers, the Greek Orthodox, fundamentalist African Anglicans, and Liberation Theologists in the same category.
No atheist makes that mistake. You’re confusing two different things — every atheist knows that the social consequences of Quaker belief and that of Fundagelical belief are completely different. Where atheists lump is at a different level, the one of understanding — the intellectual bankruptcy of either of those beliefs are identical, and it is impossible to defend one without either defending the other, or else having no intellectual integrity at all.
Just had an argument with a friend the other day, who was dissing a local politician for believing in a transparent fraud whose proof of the supernatural was Photoshopped pictures of him performing miracles. Said friend being a liberal Christian, I pointed out to him that his belief was just as much based on fraud, since of course the only documents in the New Testament that bear the name of their probable author are the half dozen authentic letters of Paul, and all of them are written with conventional elements of Hellenistic Romantic fiction and epistolary fiction. The only difference between the two frauds is that the Christian one has social and political sanction, but the New Age one does not.
You can see the problem. You guys point to social consequences and say “see how different we are?” and that looks disingenuous to us, because you refuse to see how you legitimate the Fundagelical nutjobs with every word that you speak, both by believing in the supernatural, and in calling yourselves Christians (thus legitimating a structure that has consequences that go beyond your laudable individual beliefs), and, by nuturing Belief, providing a pool of potential converts to the Fundagelical side (they ain’t comin’ from the atheists!). You keep creating these people and then disowning them, like a person who farts in a crowd and then looks around saying “Wasn’t me that cut the cheese!”
I can’t ask you to stop believing, but I can ask you to stop pretending that your grounds for belief are somehow better than a Fundagelical’s. They are not.
Speaking of structural features, consider this one:
And behind the curtain: my agenda is not to convert you to Christianity. Ecgh.
Right. And since decent Christians like you don’t prosyletize, you leave the field to the Fundagelical shits. That’s a structural feature of Humanist belief that you stick our society and your non-believing secular humanists with. Simple math: if one side evangelizes and the other does not, then the side that evangelizes will win in the long run. Always, because sooner or later they will get their hands on the levers of power and engage in forcible conversion. I’m still working on getting my atheist friends to get off their butts and evangelize among the Fundagelical crowd, though. Sometimes good manners are a case of cutting the nose to spite the face. *sigh*
If you are going to call yourself Christian and legitimate that belief, then for fuck’s sake your team needs to get serious about evangelizing among the Fundagelical heathen. We atheists can’t do it alone, and you are in part responsible for their behavior.
Michael
May 9, 2007 at 1:48 am
I can see where you’re coming from, but I don’t actually buy it.
the basic fallacy that you’re working with is this:
you’re assuming that all christians base their faith in the supernatural, that we all draw different conclusions from the basic “fact” of the resurrection and the “miracles” that supposedly happened. that’s just not true. miracle is for many people not necessary to understanding what is most profoundly human and good about jesus.
this is a scriptural tradition largely unknown to the heathen masses, but which is actually quite widespread. many people assume that if we are not literalists about the bible, do not fundamentally believe in a virgin birth and the literal, impossible multiplication of fish, then we cannot properly be called christians; we’re just kidding. if we don’t take the whole thing, as written, lock stock and barrel as the literal word of god, then we’re actually just intellectually dishonest and frightened of admitting that there is no god.
not so at all.
you mention that the only authentically ascribed passages in the bible are some letters of paul. bollocks! ascribed by who? not me! when people tell me the bible is the word of god, i ask them which translation of the bible, from which original source.
somebody or some group of somebodies clearly wrote the gospel of mark; it was written. best historical analysis that we have suggests that it was written some 60 years after jesus’ death. those people clearly understood jesus in a profoundly different way than did the person or people that wrote the gospel of john, probably written some forty years later.
just because they were not written by guys named john and mark is of no importance whatsoever to me, though i do find that very important to know in order to intelligently understand the texts. i am interested in the fact that they have been translated from various languages, from various contradictory original texts, and from texts which oftentimes had no punctuation whatsoever, making meaning difficult to decipher. that certain communities gained influence and canonization in the fourth century, and that other understandings of jesus were systematically shunted aside. such as the gospel of mary, or thomas, and others.
lumping together not just the social consequences but intellectual similarity of all churches is equally misguided. i, for example, would never make it with pat robertson, or probably the pope, in either my politics or in the way that i understand a useful christian relationship to scripture. i understand the bible as a collection of writings – that is, as one understands any historical document: that it is certainly a record of what someone said, and that is all. on the other hand, i think that makes me a pretty typical (if academic) liberal episcopalian.
i’ll tell you what i’ve told others: what i see as the main problem with christianity, you see as its definition.
as for the intellectual bankruptcy of claiming that there is a god to begin with, you’re on your own. it’s not an argument i’m interested in. for me, believing that there is no such thing as god is a lot like believing that there is no such thing as love. to me, it’s an idea and a guiding force, not an interventionist grandfather.
just as the resurrection is not about the resuscitation of a corpse, but the continuance of radical kindness, even in the face of evil and apocalypse.
saying that we legitimate fungelicals is like saying that voting legitimizes everything a government has ever done, so you should be an anarchist.
i couldn’t agree more, michael.
with one caveat. evangelizing necessarily creates hard dogma. and hard dogma does not tolerate questions. and that which does not tolerate questions is intellectually and morally bankrupt. it’s a question of process dictating product.
May 9, 2007 at 5:30 am
Just dropped in to suggest that you bug your Dad to revise the All Angels website slightly to reflect that our CURRENT Presiding Bishop is a woman, namely Katherine Jefferts Schorri. (Just need to snatch a jpg image to replace Griswold and relabel it.
And I will put my hearty Amen to the previous post and you are doing a good job getting the word out that there is a way to be Christian without having to swallow the Bible scales and all.
May 9, 2007 at 2:43 pm
You can have a Christianity without a belief in the resurrection and it may well speak of doing perpetual acts of kindness, but it is not Biblical Christianity, as you have pointed out, because following Jesus, as we find it described in scripture, begins with an affirmation and profession of faith that Jesus Christ is Lord; that he was crucified and resurrected.
And, just for the record, my belief that Jesus Christ is the crucified and resurrected Lord of the Universe does not mean that I don’t ask questions or that I’m closed minded or that I want to see our government turned into a theocracy or that I have a great deal of interest in seeing Republicans elected to office.
It is a sham to say that the Gospels are fundamentally about “acts of kindness” and doing good. Indeed, the Gospels are full of such commands, but they are equally full of Jesus urging and encouraging people to make a decision about his identity. From this basic decision about his identity flows all of the acts of kindness and love that Jesus speaks about. Those who can make the claim that Jesus is Lord, but do not exercise kindness and love in their lives have begun a relationship with a doctrinal statement that they believe will save them from Hell. They have not entered into a relationship with Jesus, the resurrected God-man, the Lord of all.
Having said that, my relationship with Jesus changes so many aspects of my life and I find that I am much more interested and concerned about the people around me and I long for deeper relationships with them and that I am not afraid of their questions or doubts OR my questions or doubts.
I’ve rambled enough . . . go ahead and call me a fungelical or whatever else you would like . . . :-)
May 9, 2007 at 4:46 pm
jason, i disagree. the primacy of the resurrection didn’t arise until long after jesus’ death in the jesus moevement.
but hey. c’est la vie.
May 10, 2007 at 2:17 pm
One would then be positing that the bulk of the New Testament texts were written “long after” Jesus’ death. Even a more “liberal” dating of the texts of the New Testament would find that Revelation, most likely the last book written that is now included in the Canon, was written no later than 110 to 120 AD; only 80 to 90 years after Jesus’ death and resurrection. The Gospels, Acts, the Pauline writings and the pastoral writings are all firm in their insistence on death and resurrection and they are the texts that shaped the lives of the earliest Christian communities. Peter’s teaching in Acts 2, one of the earliest examples we have of a Christian sermon, affirmed that he was crucified and raised up. Indeed, the famous Christological hymn in Philippians 2, which probably predates the authorship of Philippians around 60AD by several years, affirms that Jesus was humbled to death and raised up. The resurrection is not a late edition to the core of Christian doctrine. It was there from the very beginning.