The Questioning Christian

Religious people make better citizens, says new study

From The Christian Century:

The scholars say their studies found that religious Americans are three to four times more likely to be involved in their community than nonreligious Americans. They are more apt to work on community projects, belong to voluntary associations, attend public meetings, vote in local elections, attend protest demonstrations and political rallies and donate time and money to causes—including secular ones.

At the same time, Putnam and Campbell say, their data show that religious people are "nicer": they carry packages for people, don't mind folks cutting ahead in lines and give money to panhandlers.

The scholars say the link between religion and civic activism is causal, since they observed that people who hadn't attended church became more engaged after they did. "These are huge effects," Putnam said.

The reason for the increased civic engagement may come as a surprise to religious leaders. It has nothing to do with ideas of divine judgment or with trying to secure a seat in heaven. Rather, it's the relationships that people make in their churches, mosques, synagogues and temples that draw them into community activism.

Putnam calls them "supercharged friends," and the more such friends people have, the more likely they are to participate in civic events, he says. The theory is that if someone from your "moral community" asks you to volunteer for a cause, it's really hard to say no. "Being asked to do something by a member of your congregation is different from being asked to do something by a member of your bowling league," Putnam said.

The effect of these friendships is so strong, the scholars found, that people who attend religious services regularly but don't have any friends there look more like secularists than like fellow believers when it comes to civic participation.

"It's not faith that accounts for this," Putnam said. "It's faith communities."

Daniel Burke, Congregants make better citizens, says new study, The Christian Century, June 16, 2009, p. 16 (bold-faced emphasis added).

Love God, love your neighbor: two hinges on a door

An semi-anonymous commenter at TitusOneNine who goes by "mig+" (the plus sign usually signifies that s/he is a priest) offers a thought-provoking metaphor for the Summary of the Law, about which I've written here before:

Since Jesus says there are two commandments from which the divine guidance hangs, I suppose Jesus imagined the Law and the Prophets as a door pivoting on two hinges.

Formerly I was a cabinetmaker and I can tell you it doesn’t make much difference whether a top or bottom hinge is broken. Either way the door won’t work (show the way).

I think the point Jesus was making is that love of God and love of neighbor are inseparable.

(Extra paragraphing added.)

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Related posts:

• It's time to ditch the traditional Christian story: Another way for followers of Jesus to look at history
• A response to an inquiring non-believer

The Resurrection was probably a misunderstanding, but even so we have ample reason to celebrate Easter

Each of us has to make a bet on whether the Resurrection actually happened the way the church claims, as celebrated by billions this morning. What we’re betting is our lives, and the way we live them.

In essence, the church asks us to go “all in” on the proposition that Jesus was actually raised bodily from the dead. That bet has always been way too rich for my blood; I think there are more plausible explanations for the fact that Jesus’ followers found ‘his’ tomb to be empty on the morning after the Sabbath, and that later on some of those followers decided that they had encountered him — as recorded in questionable stories written down decades later in a different language.

Nor is it persuasive, at least to me, that some of Jesus’ friends and their later colleagues, by no means all of them, claimed —

• that Jesus had been the long-awaited Anointed One;
• that he was the ’Lord,’ who Any Day Now would return from heaven to make everything right — which didn’t happen, of course;
• that he was (so they said eventually) the Creator of the universe in the flesh.

In my judgment — and ultimately each of us has to make our own judgment about this bet — these claims are grounded, at best, in a misunderstanding that took on a life of its own; and at worst, in wishful thinking aggravated by a you’re-either-with-us-or-against-us obstinacy.

But that’s not the end of the inquiry. The Resurrection misunderstanding catalyzed both a belief system and a social organization. For nearly two millennia, that belief system and that organization have provided inspiration and assistance to billions of people in helping with the continuing creation of the universe. 

Not all of that assistance and inspiration have been positive by any means. But we do seem to do our best work in that area when we try to follow the Summary of the Law that was at the heart of Jesus’ teaching.  The Summary’s simple rules of thumb seem to capture something fundamental about the universe. Their utility gives us plenty of reason to try to follow Jesus simply because of what he taught, and because of his extreme faithfulness to what he saw as his call from the Creator.

(Although extreme faithfulness is not necessarily a good thing always, as seen in the example provided by Muslim suicide bombers.)

if we were so inclined, we could conjecture that somehow, directly or indirectly, the hand of God might have been at work back then — just not quite in the exact way the church claims.

So while, in all likelihood, the Resurrection didn’t happen the way the church says, that doesn’t mean we should belittle the Resurrection claim as false.

Instead, we should commemorate what likely did happen on that first Easter and in its aftermath. We can celebrate, with gratitude but also with open eyes, the immeasurable (if not unalloyed) good that has evolved from it.

* * *

This essay was inspired by a sermon posted by the Rev. Michael Hopkins on his blog (hat tip: Susan Russell).

The decline of Protestantism: You can't end a drought with renewed dedication to the old rain dances

It continually amazes me how conservative Christians bury their heads in the sand about the gradual decline of Protestant Christianity. These folks refuse even to consider, let alone acknowledge, an obvious possibility:  That the tenets of ‘orthodox’ Christianity are failing to persuade increasing numbers of people, at least in the so-called first world, because those tenets just don't fit with everything else humanity knows about the Creation.

(FOOTNOTE: I suspect that much of the growth that we see in the prosperity-gospel megachurches is due to entertainment value, and that the growth in some of the evangelical- and Pentecostal churches arises in part from crowd-pleasing factors such as fervor, certitude, and exclusivism.)

The topic came into focus this week with a recent survey indicating that "none" is the only religious category that appears to be growing in every state of the Union.  The survey's press release quotes one observer as saying:

"It looks like the two-party system of American Protestantism—mainline versus evangelical—is collapsing," said Mark Silk, director of the Public Values Program. "A generic form of evangelicalism is emerging as the normative form of non-Catholic Christianity in the United States." [Emphasis added.]

So mainline Protestantism is dying (it's thought), and evangelical Michael Spencer predicts, in the Christian Science Monitor, that evangelicalism will soon follow:

We are on the verge – within 10 years – of a major collapse of evangelical Christianity. This breakdown will follow the deterioration of the mainline Protestant world and it will fundamentally alter the religious and cultural environment in the West.

Some of my traditionalist friends at TitusOneNine offer their usual rejoinder: This decline could be reversed if the church would just get back to right thinking and -preaching. In his CSM comment, Michael Spencer argues that:

2. We Evangelicals have failed to pass on to our young people an orthodox form of faith that can take root and survive the secular onslaught. ... Coming generations of Christians are going to be monumentally ignorant and unprepared for culture-wide pressures. [¶]

4. Despite some very successful developments in the past 25 years, Christian education has not produced a product that can withstand the rising tide of secularism. Evangelicalism has used its educational system primarily to staff its own needs and talk to itself. [¶]

6. Even in areas where Evangelicals imagine themselves strong (like the Bible Belt), we will find a great inability to pass on to our children a vital evangelical confidence in the Bible and the importance of the faith.

[Emphasis added]

These folks are like the Indian, er, Native American, rain dancers who insisted that the relentless drought was due to their failure to perform their rain dances properly, and not to any inefficacy on the part of rain dancing itself.

Or in business terms:  Consider what happens when a sales force consistently fails to make its numbers, quarter after quarter, even after the sales VP and many managers are replaced. Almost invariably, the product designers will still claim that the problem just has to be with the incompetence of the sales people. In the designers' minds, it simply isn’t possible that people are not buying their product because they can’t tell whether the product actually does anything for them. 

It’s sad that Jesus’ example is in danger of being increasingly forgotten or ignored, thanks to his ancient- and modern successors who mulishly insist on preaching their dogmas, instead of his simple restatement of the Summary of the Law and his New Commandment.

Repentance and self-flagellation are not the same thing

(From Kimberlee Conway Ireton, Season of darkness [Why Lent?], The Christian Century, March 10, 2009, at 10-11:)

Unfortunately, the word repentance often leaves a bad taste in people's mouths and conjures up images of self-flagellation, both literal and figurative. I used to think of repentance this way.

As an adolescent, I thought it meant reciting unhealthy mantras to convince myself of my own unworthiness (as if I needed to be convinced).  As a young adult, I rejected repentance altogether, thinking it damaging to my fragile sense of self-worth.

And then, the summer I turned 30, I had my first experience of true repentance.

Every day for an entire month, as I journaled, prayed and read the lectionary, God peeled away layers of myself. For the first time, I saw envy, despair and self-pity not as personality quirks, but as sins.

I knew, more deeply than I'd ever known, that I had failed — failed to love my friends, my husband, my son, myself; failed to pray when I had said I would; failed to notice the good gift that was my life. Instead, I had complained and whined and been ungrateful and ungracious. I felt deeply convicted of my sin.

But I did not feel despair. In fact, I felt freedom — and joy. I cried a lot, but they were tears of sorrow and gratitude. ...

(Paragraphing edited, emphasis in original.)

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Related post:

• Repentance Without Guilt?

Resolved: Most of the church is not Christian

In a discussion at TitusOneNine, I'm being politely asked, between the lines:  If I don't believe the church's teachings about the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, etc., why am I intruding into the private club of those who do?  In response, I posed this proposition for debate, Oxford Union-style (I've edited it slightly here): 

RESOLVED:  No one may call himself a Christian if he demands more, as a condition of church membership, than doing one’s best to follow the Summary of the Law — Jesus (reportedly) said in Luke 10.25-37, do this and you will live, so to presume to require more than this would be to set one’s self above the Lord.

Another commenter responded: 

Disputed. ... Christianity is based on accepting Jesus as Lord and Savior and belonging to the community of faith—which includes belief in certain key precepts ....

Those who have come to believe those "key precepts" cannot be faulted for where their faculties and their consciences have led them. But I would disavow membership in any “community of faith” that went beyond this, insisting that its answers are the final ones and that those who don’t agree with the party line must either assent anyway or leave. Folks like that are like idolators, pridefully setting up their own conceptions above the reality that God has wrought.  (Hard experience has taught us that we don’t know everything about that reality, and that what we do “know” is necessarily provisional.) Fortunately, most of the Episcopal Church isn’t like that.

Jesus' mission was a bust - at least if that mission was what the church has long claimed

Over at TitusOneNine, commenter Jody+ asked me "what [my] understanding of soteriology is if it doesn’t include Jesus’ victory through the Cross and resurrection.  And Tory asked whether I believed that Jesus’ mission was a failure, "since Romans continued to run roughshod over Israel and other occupied peoples?  What kind of salvation did Jesus accomplish, if at all, for it certainly was not geo-political?”

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If Jesus thought of his mission as that of liberating Israel from worldly oppression and ushering in God’s reign:  then yes, that mission was an utter, abject, desperate, and miserable failure. To refuse to face that fact is to live in a fantasy world.

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If Jesus thought of his mission as that of winning victory over sin and death, and bringing eternal life to all who believed in him:  we have just about as much reliable evidence that he succeeded, even partially, as we do that the Heaven’s Gates suicides succeeded in joining the hidden spaceship that they believed was coming for them. 

Intellectual honesty requires us to admit that while we can hope, we simply don’t know, what happens after we die.  To claim otherwise is, again, to live in a fantasy world.

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What we can say with some confidence is that what Jesus characterized as the way to eternal life — the Summary of the Law — seems to touch on something fundamental in the fabric of the universe:

• The evidence for the existence of a Creator is pretty compelling, certainly more so than the evidence against;

• History suggests that, in the words of Lutheran theologian Philip Hefner, we seem to be “created co-creators,” participating unwittingly in a titanic process that has been gradually, and often painfully, creating order out of the chaos of the Big Bang;

• On balance, over the long term, those who seem to contribute the most to this process of creation — and who seem most likely to survive, reproduce, and pass their genes and memes on, not just to their children but to their grandchildren — are those who face the facts of the reality wrought by the Creator, including the fact of our human fallibility.  Who don’t insist that the world must be a certain way merely because they imagine it to be so.  Who seek the best for others as they do for themselves.  In short, who seek (whether they know it or not) to follow the Summary of the Law.

For all we know, when we die, the Creator will simply discard us his tools, the way we would throw away a worn-out drill bit. But it’s not totally implausible to conjecture that it won’t happen that way.  It’s not irrational to hope, and trust, that we’ll get to share, somehow, in the end result of whatever unimaginably-wonderful project the Creator has been up to.

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Returning again to whether Jesus’ mission was a failure:  If Jesus thought of his mission as being to inspire all people to organize their lives around the Summary of the Law, he didn’t completely succeed on his own.  But the church he catalyzed hasn’t done an altogether terrible job of continuing the mission.

If we would stop insisting that everyone believe traditionalist soteriology, christology, and theology, and return to simply preaching the Summary of the Law, we likely would have much more success in reaching nonbelievers and doubters with Jesus’ message.

Irish Catholics should remember potato-famine relief efforts by U.S. Protestants - WSJ article

From an article by Peter Duffy in today's Wall Street Journal:

Perhaps then, on this day of all days, the Irish Catholics of New York should do something that would've been unthinkable even a few years ago: raise a toast to the Protestants.

I am referring to the Protestants of New York City and their actions during the winter of 1847, an unjustly forgotten episode in the Irish history of this city.

* * *

... the pulpit was opened to speakers. Rev. Jonathan Wainwright of St. John's Episcopal Chapel, a future bishop, read several passages from foreign newspapers describing the sufferings in Skibbereen, County Cork, which had become infamous for the plight of its poor. He insisted that he did not attend the meeting to "speak of modes of faith," but to urge his fellow citizens to "share our loaf" and "contribute liberally from our ample store."

* * *

It appears that every minister in town sought donations from the pulpit. The list of churches that gave is impressive: Norfolk Street Methodist, the Reformed Dutch Church at the corner of Greene and Houston, the Church of the Ascension on Fifth Avenue, Trinity Episcopal, the Second Wesleyan Chapel on Mulberry Street, Duane Street Presbyterian, St. Matthew's Episcopal Church on Christopher Street, Mercer Street Presbyterian, Grace Church, and on and on.

A response to an inquiring non-believer

Commenter Jason, who seems to be related to ee cummings <g>, asks some good questions this morning about a posting I did a few years ago: 

... as a non-believer (some call me atheist), this has been an intriguing article to stumble upon. frankly, i am at a loss as to understand how you can display such sound logic and skepticism, yet at the same time maintain a claim to be christian, or even religious at all. ...

... you say you are christian, which is to say that you do in fact have faith about certain metaphysical matters. how can you believe in a heaven or hell if the very source and support for that idea is something that you admit is not reliable? 

... please contact me. your position is very interesting and new to me, as such i believe i can learn quite a bit from you.

Jason, I'm very glad you wrote. I'll try to respond succinctly, and I'm grateful to you for providing the impetus to do so. 

Christian is as Christian does

I don't agree that, to call yourself a Christian, you have to "have faith about certain metaphysical matters."  That puts me at odds with a large number of people who think that, to be a Christian, you have to believe in, for example, original sin and salvation through Jesus' atoning death.  Personally, I'm not persuaded about these things (except to the extent that original sin is a metaphor for our inherent imperfection).  I reject the idea that this disqualifies me from being a Christian, or from being 'saved,' whatever that means.

I think the Jesus described in the New Testament had a very different view than do these latter-day Christians. Jesus the Jewish reformer seemed to want people simply to serve God and one another.  He stressed, correctly in my judgment (more about which below), the importance of the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law, which I would paraphrase along the following lines: 

Acknowledge the Creator and commit your whole being to serving 'his' purposes. In particular, seek the best for your neighbor just as you do for yourself; and keep in mind that 'your neighbor' is not just your kinsman or countryman, but anyone who crosses your path, even your people's hereditary enemy. 

In response to a question from an expert in Torah, Jesus is reported to have said, "do this and you will live [eternally]."  (Luke 10.25-37.) 

If we're to believe Jesus, it would seem that anyone who does these things may claim the title of "Christian," no matter what particular theological doctrines they happen to believe to be true.   

FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends will scoff that the preceding paragraph smacks of salvation by good works, which is anathema to many Protestants, instead of by faith. They argue that you cannot be 'saved' unless your faith is such that you truly "love the Lord."  My response is that people usually can't control whether they "love" someone as we understand the term, so Jesus must have meant that we should <em>serve</em> God and our neighbor.  Moreover, serving God and others by doing good works can cause a change of mind and heart — Greek: metanoia, usually translated as "repentance" — which can lead to precisely the faith that some Christians insist is a prerequisite to salvation. 

FOOTNOTE:  It's hard to believe (and we have no evidence) that God would punish someone for failing to believe the "right" things: so far as I can tell, what we happen to believe is something over which we have little or no volitional control.  Of course, we can indeed sometimes talk ourselves into believing that which we really want to believe, regardless whether it's true.

Motivation:  Reasons for doing what Jesus said to do

Of course we have to ask why we should seek to follow the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law. After all, as many have pointed out, these injunctions are by no means unique to Christianity; they come from Torah and are manifested in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. 

For many if not most Christians, the principal motivation is the claim that Jesus was God Incarnate, and therefore we should do what he said. I'm afraid that doesn't do it for me, nor has it ever for the majority of the world's population. Indeed, those of Jesus' followers who actually knew him in life didn't seem to think he was God.  So Jesus' alleged divinity would not appear to require that we follow his teachings.

My own motivation is largely pragmatic.  I've come to believe that, on the whole, following the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law is humanity's best bet for evolutionary success, and also for cosmic significance.  In particular:

1. To me the evidence makes it quite likely that there is a Creator; undoubtedly not precisely like the God described in the Bible (who really knows?), but probably not entirely unlike that.

2. At least locally, the universe hasn't devolved into chaos, but has evolved into the relatively highly organized form we have today. And there's not much doubt that this constitutes "progress" as we define it, because few if any people, at any time in history, would permanently trade places with a random  person who lived, say, 1,000 years previously.

3. The Great Commandment and Summary of the Law "just works."  People who stay real, who don't worship their own wishful thinking, but who instead live in the reality that the Creator wrought, are more likely to survive and reproduce.  And over the long term, altruistic cultures have proved more likely to survive and grow than narcissistic ones.

All this suggests that the Great Commandment and Summary of the Law summarize one of the fundamental mechanisms by which the Creator's universe is being caused to evolve.  They appear to be like laws of nature.  Doing the math, it seems entirely plausible that they were ordained by the Creator so that we would function as created co-creators in his continuing creation of the universe.

This possibility is supremely exciting to me.  It might be just a matter of egotism, of my personal liking to be "where the action is," perhaps like Jesus' disciples James and John (and their mother!) importuning him to name them his chief lieutenants . If that's the case, it is what it is.

I can't be sure I'm right about this, of course.  But every day we make bets, choosing particular ways to conduct our lives on the basis of uncertain information.  This particular bet seems like an eminently worthwhile one.

FOOTNOTE: For an account of how I arrived at the above beliefs, see this posting about Why I Still Call Myself a Christian, and an Episcopalian.

FOOTNOTE:  Some of my Christian friends criticize me for relying on "private judgment" in reaching the conclusions above. Ultimately, I believe, it's I who am responsible for use of whatever gifts of discernment and judgment have been entrusted to me.  (Cf. the Parable of the Talents.) Prudent stewardship of those gifts will often entail choosing to rely on the judgment of others smarter or more knowledgeable than I. But in the end, "the buck stops here"; I'm the one who is accountable for my stewardship.

Faithfulness

I also admire Jesus because he was faithful to his people and to God's calling as he understood it. 

True, some of his early followers believed he was the long-awaited Anointed One, a man designated by God to become the warrior-king who would soon return to rescue Israel from oppression and usher in the Kingdom of God. The New Testament claims that Jesus himself believed this (although personally I'm skeptical about that). None of this happened, of course.

But that error is pretty inconsequential, as long as we're willing to face the facts, and not insist on living in a fantasy world.  Jesus was human; being wrong on that point takes away nothing from his faithful pursuit of his duty as he saw it, even unto death.

* * *

Thanks again for writing, Jason, and please do so again. You might read some of the postings listed in the right-hand column, if you haven't done so already.

A Christian's creed should be about life commitment, not belief

The creed of a follower of Jesus should proclaim, not what we happen to believe to be true at the moment (which can and should be provisional, always subject to change as new evidence and insights are revealed to us), but how we commit to living our lives. Here's my attempt at such a creed, inspired by a similar effort by the MadPriest and by the Soldier's Creed. I merely paraphrase Jesus' core teachings, as indicated in the right-hand column below:

We are followers of Jesus. Always and everywhere, to the best of our ability:
we will put God first, and seek the best for others as we do for ourselves;	Love God with your whole heart, mind, soul, and strength, and your neighbor as yourself.
we will face up to our mistakes and our misdeeds;	Repent - when you see that you're going in the wrong direction, make a change (that's roughly the meaning of the Greek word metanoia, commonly translated as repentance). And when you sin against your neighbor, fix it.
we will live as if, in God's good time, all things will be well.	Don't fret about the future; instead, trust that things will turn out OK.