Spiritual But Not Religious

I just received a notice from our Conference Minister Mike Denton that Immanuel Presbyterian Church in Tacoma, WA, is doing a series with the title "I am Spiritual but not Religious."  It is, as the notice says, something that we hear a lot around here.  Our region here in western Washington is famously un-churched, with the percentage of our people who regularly attend religious services among the lowest for any region of the country.  Yet many people here identify themselves as spiritual not secular.  We often hear people say that they find their connection with God, or with Spirit, in nature, among the mighty peaks, towering cedars, and sparkling waters of this beautiful corner of God's creation.  These people do not find any connection with God in and through any specific religious tradition.  They do not attend church.  They do not practice the rites of any organized religion.  Indeed, for the most part they reject all organized religion, seeing nothing of value in it (or at least not enough of value to induce them to participate in it).  This position on matters spiritual and religious of so many of the people of this area raises a number of questions of vital import.  Those of us who find our connection to God within a religious tradition are well advised seriously to consider those questions.

Any inquiry into those questions must begin, as all serious inquiries begin, with definitions.  The statement that a person is spiritual but not religious requires first of all that we understand what we mean by the words "spiritual" and "religious."  I deal with the meaning of those terms some in Chapter 6 of my book Liberating Christianity: Overcoming Obstacles to Faith in the New Millennium.  There I define spirituality as "the way we live our relationship with the spiritual."  p. 60  By "the spiritual" I mean the spiritual dimension of reality to which the symbol "God" points.  The spiritual is "a reality beyond the reality that we humans perceive with our ordinary senses."  Liberating Christianity, p. 18  Using terms from Paul Tillich I call the spiritual the depth dimension of reality and the more in everything that is.  It is impossible to be more specific than that about what the spiritual is.  We experience it; but our words cannot grasp it, for our words come from the realm of ordinary sense perception and experience, and the spiritual infinitely transcends that ordinary realm while nonetheless being immanent in it.  

When we define spirituality as our lived relationship with the spiritual it becomes clear that everyone has a spirituality, for everyone has a lived relationship with the spiritual.  That relationship may be positive, an affirmation of the spiritual and an intentional way of making it part of our lives.  It may be negative, a denial of the reality of the spiritual, that denial being negative but nonetheless a lived relationship with the spiritual.  

If spirituality is our lived relationship with the spiritual, what then is religion?  A religion is a specific tradition that contains myths, symbols, and rituals the legitimate function and purpose of which is connect people with the spiritual.  Any religion is true to the extent that it fulfills that function and purpose.  That is, any religion is true to the extent that it connects people with the spiritual and that with which it connects people is really the spiritual.  Any religion is false to the extent that it does not connect people with the spiritual or to the extent that it connects people with something that is not really the spiritual, usually to itself or some artifact that it uses, in Protestant Christianity usually the Bible and in Roman Catholic Christianity usually the Church.  

If then a religion is a tradition that contains myths, symbols, and rituals the legitimate function and purpose of which is to connect people with the spiritual, and if spirituality is our lived relationship with the spiritual, it is clear that religions are precisely specific types of spirituality.  One can be religious without being spiritual if one's religion functions in an idolatrous way to connect one to something that is not truly the spiritual; but one cannot be authentically religious without being spiritual.  Religion is not something other than spirituality.  Properly understood and practiced, religion is precisely a type of spirituality.

The question remains, however:  Why do so many people draw a sharp distinction between spirituality and religion, as they do when they claim that they are spiritual but not religious?  It seems clear that to these people religion in general and Christianity in particular do not function as a spirituality.  A great many people do not see religion as a useful way to connect with the spiritual; so if the legitimate function and purpose of religion is to connect people with the spiritual, what explains the disconnect between religion and spirituality in the minds of so many people?

Surely at least a part of the answer to that question is that the religions, in our culture Christianity in particular, have strayed from their legitimate function and purpose.  For the most part the Christian churches in our culture do not present themselves as a way for people to connect with the spiritual.  They present themselves as repositories of the one eternal truth through which, and only through which, a person can find salvation.  They present themselves not as systems of myth, symbol, and ritual but as holders of divinely revealed factual truth.  They present themselves not as places where a person can freely explore her relationship with the spiritual through the church's myths, symbols, and rituals but as places where a person is given the truth, indeed where a person is given not only the only correct answers but the only correct questions as well.  They present themselves not as places where a person can truly be who he is, where he can find wholeness and abundant life, but as places of narrowly dogmatic teaching and narrowly judgmental morality.  Given that reality of most of the churches among us it is not surprising that so many people seek their connection with the spiritual elsewhere.  It is not surprising that so many people describe themselves as spiritual but not religious.  

Surely a person can find her connection with the spiritual outside of the churches.  Most of us, I suspect, have felt the reality of God, of the spiritual, in the beauty of nature, in the power of great art, in the love of family, in the laughter of a child.  So if we can find an authentic connection with the spiritual outside of religion, is there any legitimate function of religion left?  Yes, I think there is.  When religion is properly understood as a system of myths, symbols, and rituals the purpose and function of which is to connect a person with the spiritual, religion becomes a deeper, more substantial, more solid form of spirituality than any spirituality that lacks meaningful myth, symbol, and ritual.  We see that depth, that substance, of a religious type of spirituality in the extreme events of life.  If I were given a terminal cancer diagnosis, for example, I know that I would find little comfort, little hope, little solace in nature.  I know that I would find those priceless things in the myths, symbols, and rituals of Christianity.  Christianity gives me the myth of resurrection and eternal life.  Christianity gives me the symbol of the cross, to which I can cling as the sign and seal of God's unshakable solidarity with me in my time of pain and distress.  Christianity gives me the holy sacrament of the Eucharist, in which I enact my solidarity with Christ and Christ's solidarity with me.  Christianity gives me holy scripture that speaks of God's steadfast mercy and love.  Christianity gives me pastors with whom to share my fear and who assure me of God's unfailing grace.  In the extreme times of life, religion properly understood becomes a spirituality with the power to save, in this life and beyond this life.

Spiritual not religious?  Yes, it is possible to be spiritual without being religious; but spirituality and religion are not opposed to one another.  They are not contradictory ways of living one's relationship with the spiritual.  Rather, religion properly understood is a spirituality, a spirituality with power proven over the centuries in the lives of real people.  In true religion we find our connection with the spiritual, a connection with depth and substance that can help us through life come what may.  

The Limits of Inclusiveness

All of us in the United Church of Christ know the mantra:  "No matter who you are or where you are on life's journey, you are welcome here."  Some of our congregations absolutely insist that the pastor include this statement in her opening remarks each Sunday.  The UCC seems to be building an identity of being the church where everyone is welcome.  The denomination is about to launch a new web ad campaign stressing our extravagant welcome.  Rare is the UCC church that doesn't proclaim "All are welcome."  On occasion someone will say "Oh, really?"  And they will ask us to think about who isn't welcome in our church.  The thrust of this question usually is that we may proclaim a universal welcome but we don't actually extend a universal welcome, that there are people whom we should welcome but do not welcome.  The thrust of the question usually is, in my experience at least, that we should be doing more to live up to the universal welcome that we proclaim, not that there is some good reason to question the proclamation itself.

Now, I don't mean to say that there aren't people whom we should welcome but do not welcome.  There certainly are, but I want to ask the question of our supposedly universal welcome from a different perspective.  I ask:  Are there people whom we should not welcome?  Are there people who are in such a place on life's journey that we should not welcome them into our local UCC congregations?  I answer the question yes, there are people whom we should not welcome into our UCC congregations.  I don't mean people who are unsafe around other people.  I take it for granted that someone who is an uncontrollable threat to the congregation's children, for example, is not welcome in our congregations, but I have something else in mind when I say yes, there are people whom we should not welcome into our UCC congregations.  We should not welcome into our congregations people who reject the identity that a congregation has established for itself, whose presence will detract from that identity, and who will not speak and act in a way that at least does not contradict that identity.  Let me use my UCC church in Monroe as an example.

Monroe Congregational United Church of Christ is a small congregation, but we are a growing and vital congregation at least in large part because of a specific identity that we have created for ourselves in the communities which we serve.  We are the only theologically progressive, non-literal, Open and Affirming Christian church in Monroe and its surrounding communities.  We proclaim on our weekly worship bulletin and on our web site that "we take the Bible seriously not literally."  We welcome gay and lesbian folk into the full life and leadership of the church on fully equally terms with anyone else.  We have created a safe place for gays and lesbians in an area where there are precious few such safe places for them.  This is our identity.  This is who we are.  This is who we want to be and who we intend to be in the future.

From time to time people come to worship with us who are unaware that we have named and claimed this alternative Christian identity, an identity sharply at odds with the conservative, evangelical, popular Christianity by which we are surrounded and among which we are such a minority voice.  Sometimes they just don't come back.  Once one of them stood up in the middle of my sermon, shouted "you're wrong!" and stormed out.  Once we had a visiting couple who said they liked my sermon and liked the fact that we use piano and organ and sing traditional hymns (or as traditional as they get in the New Century Hymnal) but who also insisted that the do take the Bible literally and that they "have a problem with the homosexual lifestyle," whatever the homosexual lifestyle is supposed to be.  These and other visitors to our church raise for me the question of whether they would indeed be welcome as members of the church.  I answer that they would not.  They would not because where they are on life's journey is inconsistent with where the church is on life's journey.  There are, it seems, indeed limits to inclusiveness, limits set by our claimed identity.  Yes, there may be people who struggle with our identity but are willing to listen, willing to learn, willing to be transformed.  They may be welcome.  Those who simply reject our identity or who just want to change it are not.

There are limits to our inclusiveness.  There must be limits to our inclusiveness.  It is a fundamental fact of organizations  that an organization must have a boundary.  Without a boundary an organization has no shape, no form, no identity.  I suppose the identity of an organization could be that it consists of whoever happens to show up, but even there there is a boundary.  Some people show up, some don't.  Some are in, some are out.  That's not much of an identity, but I suppose it is an identity of sorts.  Most organizations, however, have a more specific identity than that.  Churches certainly do.  Every organization is organized for some purpose.  It may be the local garden club, or the local chapter of the ACLU, or the local chapter of the National Rifle Association.  Whatever the organization is, it has some identity:  local folks who love flowers, or civil rights, or guns.  People come to organizations because of that identity, because they share that identity or at least want to learn more about it.  The people of the local garden club presumably would not welcome people who wanted to turn it into a group of developers intent on paving over as much of the community as possible.  The people of the local chapter of the ACLU would not welcome people who wanted to require Christian prayer in the public schools.  The people of the local NRA chapter would not welcome people who wanted it to endorse repeal of the Second Amendment.  Organizations have boundaries.  Identity establishes boundaries, and boundaries mean that some are welcome and some are not.

The same is true of our UCC churches.  They--we--have an identity.  That identity is first of all as a Christian church.  It is appropriate, indeed it is necessary, that a person at least self-identify as Christian in order to be a member.  Beyond that many of our local churches have established a more specific identity, as we have in Monroe.  It is appropriate, indeed it is necessary, that a person accept that more specific identity in order to be a member, or at least be open to it.  To use the Monroe Church as an example again, I would not, and I am convinced my church would not, welcome an individual or a group that wanted to join us for the purpose of repealing our Open and Affirming commitment.  I would not and my church would not welcome anyone who by word or deed in any way detracted from the welcome and acceptance our gay and lesbian members find with us.  (Indeed, I am uneasy referring to "gay and lesbian members" and "us," for they are us, they are a valued and much loved part of us," of the church and its identity. We would not be the same us without them. We would be a poorer "us" without them.)  A Biblical literalist whose contribution to discussions at the church consisted only of citing isolated passages from the Bible as ending discussion on any topic would not be a constructive addition to our community and would not be welcome, or at least would not be welcome for long.  We have an identity, and that identity creates boundaries.  Those boundaries create necessary limits on our inclusiveness.

This is not to say that the identity of a local UCC church can never change.  It can, but that change must arise out of the people who have claimed the original identity that the church may, from time to time, need to change.  That indeed is how the Monroe church's Open and Affirming identity came about, but a church that has claimed a specific identity has the right to defend that identity from those who would come in from the outside solely or primarily for the purpose of changing that identity.  When that identity includes being a safe place for people for whom most churches are not safe places, as it does at our church in Monroe, the church has the right, indeed the duty, to protect the safety of the church for all its members.  Exercising those rights and fulfilling that duty may require saying to some no, you are not welcome.  Organizational identity creates limits on inclusiveness.

Most UCC people don't like to hear that there are limits on our inclusiveness, but I am convinced that there are such limits and that there must be such limits.  Total inclusiveness is inconsistent with identity, indeed, it is inconsistent with a church's nature as an organization.  It is inconsistent with the UCC's self-identity as a Protestant Christian church.  It is inconsistent with the identity of an Open and Affirming church.  It is inconsistent with any other identity a church may have claimed.  A "just peace church" is not an appropriate place for a military hawk.  A "green church" is not a place for a global warming denier.  A church with a rich music ministry is not a place for one who objects to the use of musical instruments in worship.  The examples could go on and on.

The UCC's emphasis on extravagant welcome for all people is largely a reaction against the excessive narrowness of so many churches and especially against the exclusion from so many Christian churches of gay and lesbian people, divorced people, and others to whom those churches object on narrow moralistic grounds.  As such it is a welcome and necessary corrective.  Yet just as we take the Bible seriously not literally, so we must take the UCC's claim that all are welcome seriously not literally.  Extravagant welcome, especially of those whom other churches reject?  Yes.  Limitless welcome?  No.  Limits are necessary.  Limits are healthy.  As I have said many times to many people, let's change "We welcome all" to "We welcome all who welcome all."  That at least is a start to our establishing those necessary, healthy limits that we in the UCC so often deny.

A Day at Gettysburg

PBS is reshowing Ken Burns' great documentary The Civil War.  As I write this they are showing the episode on Gettysburg, and I am reminded of the day I went to the Gettysburg National Military Park.  It was a February day in about 1991.  It was clear, cold, and still.  I was on a business trip in central Pennsylvania, and I had an afternoon free.  I drove my rental car to the battlefield monument not knowing at all what to expect.  I found that on that cold winter weekday I almost had the entire site to myself.  I went through the exhibition spaces and learned the facts of the 1863 battle.  Then I walked out through the park on the top of Cemetery Ridge.  Past the place where Lincoln gave the Gettysburg Address, which I had memorized as a young schoolboy so many years before.  To the viewpoint on top of the hill where Pickett had led his famous and disastrous charge.  I was alone, except for the ghosts.  It was still, so peaceful, as I contemplated the carnage that had taken place there not one hundred thirty years before, the mere blink of an eye in historical time.  I thought of all the Americans who died there, for everyone who died there was an American.  Yes, one side was fighting to preserve the diabolical institution of slavery, but every one of them was a man.  Every one of them was an American.  And there they died.  They died in their thousands, almost eight thousand of them, nearly twice the number of American deaths in the entire Iraq war in one three day battle.  Over twenty-seven thousand of them were wounded.  Every one of them a man.  Every one of them an American.

And I was overwhelmed.  Not by the bravery, though surely there was bravery.  Not by the heroism, though surely there was heroism.  Not by the nobility of it, for there is no nobility in slaughter.  By none of that, but by the unspeakable horror of it all.  And by the incomprehensible insanity of it all.  By the incomprehensible insanity of war.  All war.  Every war.  There in the beautiful silence of that cold, clear February day I could only stand in numb horror at the willingness of human beings to massacre each other.  At our willingness to do on a massive scale in an organized military what we consider the gravest crime, the gravest sin, when otherwise done by one person to another person.  The word that kept occurring to me over and over again was madness.  Gettysburg was madness.  All war is madness.  Every war is madness.  In the words of the great Pete Seeger, when will they ever learn.  More to the point, when will we ever learn.

Budget Hypocrisy

There is much wailing and gnashing of teeth these days about the federal budget deficit and the climbing national debt.  I'm no economist.  I know that some economists worry a lot about the national debt and others worry about it not at all.  I have no idea who is right, and I don't think they do either; but I do know this.  Politicians of both major political parties are appalling hypocrites when they complain about the deficit and the national debt and when they make their insignificant proposals for dealing with it.  The reason that they are hypocrites is that none of them, not one that I know of, mentions the role the US military budget plays in creating the deficit and the debt.  Unless the military budget is considered, no proposal to reduce the deficit and the debt can possibly do anything significantly to reduce either.

According to the web site warresisters.org, spending for our current military and expenditures for retired military plus interest on the military's portion of the national debt account for 54% of total federal expenditures.  That spending amounted to almost 700 billion dollars in 2009 and is going up from there.  The US military budget makes up 46.5% of all global military spending, according to the web site globalissues.org.  The country with the next largest percentage of global military spending is China with 6.6% of total spending.  We thus spend seven times as much on our military as the next largest military spender, and we spend almost as much as the rest of the world combined.

Yet for politicians of both political parties, and for most of the American public, this massive expenditure on our military is a sacred cow.  No politician can really do more than propose eliminating "waste" as a way to reduce it.  Certainly no politician can propose the only sane thing, namely, the withdrawal of our military from the parts of the world for which there is no reasonable justification for having them there (Germany, Japan, Iraq, Afghanistan, and many others) and transforming it into a truly defensive force rather than the instrument for projecting American imperial power around the world that it is today.

So the next time you hear a politician wailing about the deficit and the national debt but not proposing significantly to pare down our military spending, be suspicious.  Be very suspicious.  That politician, be he Democrat, Republican, or something else, is a hypocrite.  She is playing to your emotions but is not being serious about truly reducing government spending.

Is God Necessary?

The great British physicist Stephen Hawking has gotten a lot of press recently for making the provocative statement that while science cannot disprove the reality of God, "science makes God unnecessary."  Because Hawking is so brilliant, because his statement has gotten so much coverage, because his statement sounds so outrageous to some, and because there is both a limited way in which the statement may be true and a vitally important way in which it is not true, we need to consider it very carefully.

When we do, the first thing that appears is that Hawking is talking only about God as Creator.  Whether or not Hawking knows that the great religions see God as Creator but also as much more than Creator I do not know. Yet the only way in which science could ever make God unnecessary even in theory is to make God unnecessary precisely as Creator.  Science could to that, in theory, by demonstrating how the universe came into existence through its own processes.  How it could explain where those cosmic processes came from without a Creator God I do not understand, but for the sake of argument I will posit that it is possible, at least in theory, for science to explain the existence of the universe without an appeal to a Creator God.  I am no Stephen Hawking.  Indeed I am no kind of scientist at all; but if science has actually succeeded in doing that, I haven't heard about it.

Humans across the cultures and across the millenia have posited the reality of a Creator God to explain why anything at all exists instead of nothing at all; yet religion, or if you prefer the spiritual life, has purposes that go far beyond the explanation of why anything at all exists.  Religion functions in human culture to give life meaning and to give people solace in the face of the seeming meaninglessness of the universe and the pain of life as much as to explain why the universe exists in the first place.  Physical reality is the subject matter of science.  The meaning of physical reality is the subject of religion.  Science has much to say about the reality of the physical world.  It has and can have nothing to say about that world's meaning.  Physical reality is the subject matter of science.  The despair and pain that humans universally feel in their lives as part of physical reality are the subject matter of religion.  Science has much to say about the matters that are properly within its purview.  When science is properly understood, it has and can have nothing to say about those matters, like meaning and solace, that are outside its proper purview.  Stephen Jay Gould, the late American evolutionary biologist who called himself an "atheistically inclined agnostic," taught that science and religion are "non-overlapping magisteria," that is, they are separate areas of human inquiry that deal with different types of truth.  Neither has anything to say about the truth that is the province of the other.  Meaning and solace are within the magisterium of religion, and science has nothing to say about them.  Science therefore cannot, even in theory, prove that God is not necessary for those areas of inquiry and belief.

So is God necessary?  As Creator perhaps not (but only perhaps not, not definitely not), although that has yet to be established as far as I am aware.  For all of the other roles that God plays in the lives of people of faith yes.  Yes, God is necessary; and science cannot even in theory prove otherwise.

There is at least one other way in which God is necessary that I haven't mentioned here.  God is necessary as the ground of the good.  Without God morality has no ground on which to stand.  For a fuller discussion of that issue see my sermon "The Ground of the Good" dated August 29, 2010, and available in the Sermon Archive section of my church's web site, monroeucc.org.

What is Truth Part 2

In Part 1 of this post titled What is Truth, which you will find immediately after this post and that you should read before you read this one, we saw that there must be more than one kind of truth if religion is to be in any sense true.  The Bible is not factually true in significant respects.  The claims of religion to be true cannot be understood in a narrow, factual sense.  As fact religion makes no sense.  As fact religion cannot in the long run be sustained. What other type of truth might there be that can sustain religion in the long run?  To answer that question we must ask the question:  How do human beings know that anything is true?  How indeed do human beings know anything?  These are complex questions, and for a more thorough (although hardly exhaustive) discussion of them please see my book Liberating Christianity, especially the Philosophical Appendix in that book.  Here I can only give a brief recap of what I say there.

All human knowledge, and therefore all human truth, is grounded in human perception and experience.  It cannot be otherwise.  We are created as centered beings.  From the center of our selves we perceive a world that appears to us to be a reality outside of ourselves.  All we truly know is what we perceive, what we experience, what comes to us through our senses, what we feel or sense in our minds in response to what we perceive with our senses.  We cannot get outside of ourselves to perceive any reality as objective.  We can perceive reality only as subjective, that is, from inside ourselves as perceiving subjects perceiving a world that appears to be outside of ourselves.

So what does that mean about the nature of truth?  It means that all truth is necessarily grounded in human perception, in human experience because human perception and human experience are all we have.  That is true which we perceive as true, which we experience as true.  The first step in discerning the nature of truth is to realize that that which we perceive or experience is true for us.  But we need a qualification here.  Sometimes people perceive things in ways that are not confirmed by the perception or experience of other people and that function in the person's life in a destructive way.  The most obvious example is mental illness, in which people can hear or see things that no one else hears or sees or perceive the world, or themselves, in ways that no one else shares.  Those perceptions often cause a person with mental illness to act in ways that are destructive to the person or to others.  The qualification that we need to the statement that that is true which we perceive or experience as true is that for the perception or experience to be true it must not function in a harmful way and it should be shared by other humans, indeed it should be the experience of humanity generally or at least of a significant part of humanity generally.  We say then that that is true which we perceive or experience when that perception is not idiosyncratic and does not function in a harmful way.

All truth is therefore subjective.  People today generally believe that scientific truth is objective, absolutely verifiable truth.  It is not.  It is not because it too is grounded in human perception.  The human mind constructs a world on the basis of what it perceives and experiences, as Hume and Kant so powerfully explained; and science is a powerful tool for manipulating that world.  But it too is solidly grounded in human perception.  That perception may be aided by various technologies, but in the end science, like every other human mental activity, is a human mind acting on the data of perception and experience.

Since all human truth is subjective, it does not disprove the truth of religion to say that it is subjective.  It is, but that is not what distinguishes it from other kinds of truth.  What distinguishes religious truth from scientific truth is not that it is subjective but that it is formed by the human mind acting subjectively on different kinds of data, on different kinds of experience, than science does.  Religious truth is truth formed by the action of the human mind on spiritual experience rather than on the data of our usual sense perception.  Spiritual experience is a universal type of human experience.  Every human culture that we know of has included experiences of the spiritual dimension of reality.  We know that because every human culture that we know of has its religion, has its myths, its stories of the gods, or of God, such stories being how humans express and try to make sense of their experience of the spiritual.  The experience of the spiritual is real, but it is a different order of experience than our experience of what we perceive as an external physical world.  Those of us who have experienced the spiritual know how real that experience is, but we also know how difficult it is to put that experience into words.

So indeed there is a different kind of truth than factual truth.  There is the truth of spiritual experience, which is not factual but which is nonetheless true in the only way that anything can be true for human beings.  It is grounded in experience, it is universal, and it is, when understood and used properly, constructive and live giving not destructive and life destroying.  The militant atheists say the Bible is not factually true.  We say:  Yeah.  So what?  That doesn’t mean it isn’t true at all.  It doesn’t mean that religion isn’t true.  It doesn’t mean that Christianity is false.  It means that we need to understand truth in a better way, a way that is more grounded in what it is to be human than is the reduction of truth to supposedly objective fact.

So what do we make of Dawkins’ statement that the power of religion to provide solace does not prove that it is true?  We say that in a way it does prove that it is true.  Not that religion is objectively true.  There is no such thing as objective truth.  Rather, we say that the experience that human beings have of the power of religion to provide solace (or any of the other spiritual gifts that religion can bring) is a true experience.  We do indeed experience it.  Humans across the cultures and across the millennia have experienced it.  And it is life-giving.  It makes life better.  It helps us make it through the pain and sorrow that are an unavoidable part of human life.  In those ways the power of religion to provide solace does prove that it is true.  We just have to understand what “true” really means.

What is Truth Part 1

In his book The Devil's Delusion:  Atheism and Its Scientific Pretensions, David Berlinski quotes militant atheist Richard Dawkins as saying that religion's power to provide solace does not prove that it is true.  When I read that quote my immediate, visceral reaction was "oh yes it does!"  As I thought about that reaction I realized that the most fundamental difference between Dawkins and me on this point is probably not that we disagree about the truth of religion (although of course we do) but that we disagree about what it means to say that something is true.  At John 18:38 Pilate asks Jesus "What is truth?"  Pilate may not have been asking that question at a foundational philosophical level, but much disagreement in the world today, and much of the difficulty that many people have with religion, results from our unwillingness to consider the meaning of truth at that foundational philosophical level.  The question of what it means to say that something is true is one of the most important questions we can ask today, yet it is one that is rarely asked.  We tend to assume that we know what it means, and we assume that everyone means the same thing by it.  Yet it is of vital importance that we examine these assumptions more closely.  When we do, we might be surprised by what we find.

Almost everyone today understands the meaning of truth in a specific and very narrow way.  The common understanding of truth today is a product of the European Enlightenment and the scientific revolution of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.  Those sweeping and immensely powerful intellectual movements produced a major shift in the meaning of truth.  Before those movements truth tended to have several different layers of meaning.  We see these different meanings in the way the early theologians of Christianity understood the truth of the Bible.  Theologians such as Origen taught that there are different layers of truth in the Bible.  The first and most basic layer of truth was the factual layer.  The early Christians did understand the Bible as factually true.  Karen Armstrong gets this fact wrong in her book The Case; for God, where she tends to underestimate the extent to which pre-modern Christians understood the Bible factually.  They did, but they did not consider factual truth to be the only truth in the Bible, nor did they consider it to be the most important truth.  Origen and others taught that the Bible also contains a level of truth that they called "allegorical."  The allegorical meaning was a non-literal meaning.  It was what we would call metaphorical or mythic meaning.   It was meaning, or truth, that resides in the text beyond the literal, factual meaning of the text.  The allegorical was the level of meaning, of inspiration, and of spiritual rather than factual truth.  Origen and the others considered the allegorical truth of scripture to be much more important, much more profound, than the mere factual truth that scripture also contained.  The allegorical truth off a Bible passage did not, for them, depend on the factual truth of the passage.  It was truth that came from a spiritual openness to the text, a willingness to see beyond the mere facts of a passage and to open oneself to deeper spiritual truth.

Let me give one quick example.  Origen had no interest in the factual meaning of the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden in chapters two and three of Genesis.  In fact, in that instance he denied the factual truth of the story.  Yet the story has profound mythic meaning.  It is a story of God as Creator.  It is a story about the human striving to be like God and the dangers of that striving.  It is a myth that seeks to explain the pain and difficulty of human life.  It is a story that attempts to explain how the typical relationship in the ancient world between men and women came to be.  It is, in other words, a story with multiple allegorical or mythic meanings that do not depend upon the factual truth of the story.

Western culture tended to lose its openness to the allegorical, its openness to mythic and symbolic meaning, in the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution that was a part of it.  As science and reason expanded the human understanding of and ability to control the human environment, truth got reduced to fact, specifically to scientific, logical fact.  The power of scientific fact, a power that we do not deny and that has produced both great good and great destructive force,  led people to see all truth as factual truth.  Christian thinkers wanted the truth of faith to be the same order of truth as the powerful truth of science.  People began to read the Bible only as fact.  This development reached its highest point in Protestant Christian Fundamentalism, a development of the early twentieth century that radically reduced the Bible to factual truth.  Christian Fundamentalism and all of the literal approaches to scripture that have been influenced by it cling desperately to the factual truth of the Bible because, like the scientific atheists who so viciously attack religion, they know of no truth other than mere factual truth.  The so-called new atheists say religion is false because the Bible is not factually true.  Christian literalists, who should perhaps more accurately be called factualists, agree with the assumption that the atheists make that all truth is factual, that if the Bible is true at all it must be factually true and that if it is not factually true it is not true at all.

Yet of course the Bible is, in many of its particulars, not factually true.  The creation myths of the first three chapters of Genesis, for example, do not describe how creation took place as a matter of fact.  They are not scientific or historic descriptions of events.  Science establishes that truth beyond reasonable doubt.  If the only truth is factual truth, as both the Fundamentalists and the scientific atheists insist, then the atheists are right.  The Bible is simply not true in significant aspects.  Because of the central role the Bible plays in Christianity, if the only truth is factual truth, Christianity is not true.  Neither is any other religious tradition, because their foundational scriptures aren’t factually true either.  In that respect the scientific atheists are right.  So the issue for people of faith necessarily becomes:  Is there more than one kind of truth.  Is there truth other than factual truth?  The answer is:  Of course there is.  To an explanation of that answer we will turn in Part 2.

The Myths of American Imperialism

The United States of America is a world empire.  A century ago Teddy Roosevelt expressly campaigned for the expansion of American empire, and today we have all the hallmarks of empire.  We have units of our military stationed all over the world.  We use our military to enforce what our leaders say are our national interests anywhere in the world with little concern for international law, as when we violated international law by launching a war of aggression against Iraq.  Our politicians clamor for the restoration and preservation of "American leadership" in the world, by which they clearly mean American domination over other countries in our own interests, particularly our short-term economic interests.  Our military budget is nearly as big as the military budgets of very other nation in the world combined.  We act as the world's policeman, and we are able to and do interject ourselves into remote conflicts that affect us only indirectly.  The way in which it is simply assumed that the United States plays a major role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, for example, demonstrates our status as the dominant world empire.

As there is for every empire there is a complex of myths that supports American imperialism.  All empires have their myths.  Rome had the myth of the divinity of the emperor.  England had the myth of the "white man's burden" to bring civilization to the heathen, using such absurd slogans as "she stoops to conquer."  Spain had the myth of the divine mission to convert indigenous American peoples to Christianity, even if they had to kill huge numbers of them to do it.   We have our myths too, but most Americans have never even considered the truth that we are an empire, much less that there are myths that support the ideology of the American empire.  We are an empire nonetheless, and our empire  has its myths.  These things are myths in the technical sense of the word.  They are by and large not true, but what makes them myths is not their falsity but the way in which they are stories that function to connect people with a god, the god of the American nation.  In theology a myth is not something that people believe is true but that is not true as it is in common parlance.  Rather, a myth is a story that connects people to a god, be that god an idol or the one true God.  The god of American imperialism is the American nation.  That god is an idol. The myths of American imperialism are idolatrous and factually false, but the important point is that they truly function as myths, that is, as stories told to connect people with their idolatrous national god.

In his recent speech on the supposed end of the American combat mission in Iraq President Obama expressly or tacitly endorsed many of the myths of American empire.  The idolatrous myths that were stated or assumed in President Obama's speech include at least these: 

First is the myth of American exceptionalism.  This is the foundational myth of American empire.  It is the American equivalent of the British myth of the white man's burden.  This myth connects people with American actions around the world and secures their support of those actions by asserting that the United States is a different kind of nation from every other nation, and a better one, and that we can do what others cannot simply because we are who we are.  The myth of American exceptionalism posits that whatever America does is good simply because it is America that does it.  This myth too is false, but Americans have so bought into it that most of them are simply puzzled when people in other nations object to something we are doing.  No American politician can deny the myth of American exceptionalism and survive politically.  Any politician who raises the slightest doubt about the myth of American exceptionalism is savaged as un-American.  The myth of American exceptionalism posits that it would be better for them (and of course for us) for every other nation in the world to be more like us.  Again, President Bush's invasion of Iraq is the prime example, as one of the lies told to support that invasion was that we were doing it to create a stable, western style democracy in Iraq that would somehow miraculously lead to the creation of other stable, western style democracies in the Middle East.

Closely related to the myth of American exceptionalism are several myths about the American military and the way we use it.  One such myth is the myth that America uses military force only in the cause of justice and peace, never simply in naked self interest.  This myth causes our leaders to invent just and peaceful reasons for the use of force, even when, as was the case in Iraq, there is nothing just or peaceful about our actions.  Part of the myth that America uses military force only in the cause of justice and peace is the myth that America uses its military only defensively, a claim that simply is not true as a matter of fact.  There was absolutely nothing defensive about our invasion of Iraq.  Decades ago we changed the name of the War Department to the Defense Department.  In other words, we created a myth, a story that we engage in defense not in war, a story that functions to garner the commitment of the American people to the wars the leaders choose to fight.  Another part of the American military myth is the contention that service in the American military is always honorable and heroic.  It may be that at times.  We need not and do not deny that American military men and women often engage in acts of courage and heroism, in acts of self-sacrifice on behalf of their comrades in arms.  But it is false to say that service in the American military is always noble and heroic, as the various atrocities committed by American soldiers (not only by American soldiers of course, but also by American soldiers) in every war--My Lai, Abu Ghraib, and so on--demonstrate.  Beyond that, the myths about the American military cannot deny the truth that I once heard an American soldier express in a television interview.  He said:  “My job is to kill people and blow up their stuff.”  Killing people and blowing up their stuff is neither honorable nor heroic.  Nations, the United States included, must convince their people that military service is honorable and heroic because otherwise people would never accept the horror of war.  Actions that in any other context would be considered heinous crimes are declared to be honorable and heroic when done by an organized military on orders from a national government.  One of the verses in a great song by the Georgian Soviet protest poet/singer Bulat Okudzhava, a song he says is about an American soldier (although he would apply it to other soldiers as well, as would I) translates from the Russian:  “And if something isn’t right, that’s not our problem.  As they say, the motherland has ordered it.  How glorious to be a simple soldier, not guilty of anything.”  The myth of the honor and heroism of military service is absolutely necessary for the ruling powers, which are always willing to spend other people's lives and to order other people to kill in pursuit of their power goals.

Finally (for this essay at least) there is the myth of redemptive violence.  This myth, articulated with great power by the theologian Walter Wink, asserts that violence can have redeeming value, that it can and does accomplish good, that violence used in some just, redemptive cause is not sinful, is not wrong, because of the good of the cause in which it is employed.   American culture is riddled with the myth of redemptive violence.  If you doubt that just look at our superhero cartoons, in which a hero figure saves the day through the use of violence against someone depicted as evil.  We condition our children from a very early age with the myth of redemptive violence.  It is therefore not surprising that so many Americans support violent actions by our government.  The one thing that any American President can do that will  drive his approval numbers up more than anything else is to go to war.  That truth may in fact be the actual reason why President George W. Bush invaded Iraq.  A Christian can never accept the myth of redemptive violence.  Jesus Christ, the one we claim to follow, rejected the myth of redemptive violence.  In its place he taught creative, assertive, nonviolent resistance to evil.  That way, which Wink calls a third way between pacifism and violence, must be the way of the Christian.

There are a great many other American myths as well, including those that are domestic rather than aimed at our place and actions in the world, but we need not go into them here.  As long as our political leaders, even the ones who promised us change, keep proclaiming these myths either expressly or by implication we will continue to bully our way into disasters like the wars in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.  We will continue to act not truly as the champion of peace and justice that we claim to be (that claim being itself a myth of course, but one worth trying to live into) but as just another militaristic empire, the latest in a long line of such empires, each having its time of power, then declining and disappearing from history.  And we will remain horribly un-self-aware.  Self-awareness is the necessary first step in transformation.  The transformation that we need if we are ever truly to be a just nation dedicated to peace, a transformation so much deeper than mere change, will never even begin until the American myths are laid open precisely as myths, as stories we tell to connect us to the idolatrous god of the nation, and not as the factual truths that Americans take them to be.

Into the Darkness

Several experiences I have had lately have reminded me anew of how difficult, uncertain, and short life can be.  A dear woman from my congregation suffering from Parkinson's related dementia and physical deterioration.  A young man dealing with issues of addiction, his own and those of his family.  Reminders of the death at way too young an age of my first wife, the mother of my children.  The first anniversary of my father's death.  We Americans don't like to think much about such things, but we simply cannot deny that darkness is part of life, suffering and loss are part of what it is to be human.

Some Christians today seem to want faith to be fun.  They seem to want it to be only fun.  "Praise praise joy joy" is the mantra of so much of contemporary Christianity.  Praise and joy are indeed part of the life of faith, but what does faith that never progresses beyond them have to say to us when the darkness comes?  Not much.  Moreover, faith like that seems to me to be an odd interpretation of the foundational Christian story.  That story is one of darkness, not only of joy.  Yes, there is resurrection at the end; but you don't get to resurrection without first going through crucifixion.  The foundational Christian story is a story of God in human form entering into the deepest darkness of human life.  It is a story of God in human form experiencing in God's own person injustice, suffering, and death.

God entering into and experiencing injustice, suffering, and death is central to Christian mythology in a way that it is not for any other major faith tradition.  Moses and Mohammad died natural deaths after a full life. Jesus did not.  The Gospels tell the story of Jesus against the backdrop of the crucifixion that the evangelists know is coming.  Except for John, the last of the four Gospels to be written, they don't try to mitigate its horror.  They don't try to make it pretty.  They do try to give it meaning, but they don't deny it.  They don't deny the suffering.  Mark especially, the oldest of them, does not deny the suffering.  Many Christians want to jump straight from Palm Sunday to Easter, skipping Good Friday altogether; but our foundational story won't really let us do that.  The suffering and death of the story's central figure are too central to the story, and too shocking, to be ignored.  Darkness indeed lies at the heart of Christian faith.

Or rather, God's presence in the darkness lies at the heart of Christian faith.  The one who suffers and dies in the foundational Christian story is not a mere human, secular humanist understandings of him (which are present even in his church) to the contrary notwithstanding.  He is human, but he is also God.  He is Immanuel, God with us.  In him God enters into the human experience of suffering and death.  In him God even enters paradoxically into the human experience of the absence of God, of Godforsakenness:  "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"  Darkness does indeed lie at the heart of Christian faith.

Darkness does indeed lie at the heart of Christian faith, and that truth is very good news indeed.  It is very good news indeed because darkness is an unavoidable fact of human life, and in the darkness at the heart of Christian faith we see that God is always present in whatever darkness we encounter.  We see that God is present with us not only in the good times, not only in times of joy and praise, not only in times of resurrection, but also--and more importantly--in the bad times, the times of pain and loss, the times of death.  In our times of darkness we can look to that symbol of the darkness at the heart of Christian faith, Jesus on the cross, and know that God has not abandoned us.  God does not reject us.  God does not blame us.  Rather, God enters the darkness with us; and in that darkness God offers us the greatest gifts we can ever receive.  In that darkness God offers us comfort, strength, patience, courage, and hope.  God comes into the darkness with us and gives us what we need to endure it, to live through it, and in the end to die out of it.  Yes, the darkness that lies at the heart of Christian faith is very good news indeed.  Thanks be to God.