Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, Pastor
Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge." Isaac Asimov
The death of democracy is not likely to be an assassination from ambush. It will be a slow extinction from apathy, indifference, and undernourishment. Robert Maynard Hutchins
Like a lot of people, I still love my home state and even though I have lived here in Missouri for 24 years, I still feel that Kentucky is my home. I love my home state, but I have to admit, it is often hard to be proud of it. I thank God for the images of Kentucky broadcast every first Saturday in May when the Kentucky Derby is run because almost every other time that Kentucky is mentioned in the national news, it undermines my claim that I am from the MENSA Club capital of the world.
Once the media is locked onto a story they seem to have difficulty in letting it go, hence we have been treated to so many stories about the ignorant shenanigans of Kim Davis, the court clerk in Rowan County, Kentucky that I have found myself longing for another story about the last horrifying thing that Donald Trump has said.
Davis not only makes my beloved Kentucky look like a grossly exaggerated version of Hee Haw, but she is simultaneously giving the Christian religion a black eye it really doesn't need right now. Claiming her loyalty to God over the laws of mere mortals, she has resolutely refused to follow the decision of the Supreme Court in making same-sex marriages legal.
You have all seen her, by this time, I'm sure. Evidently she has made the gay community in Rowan County so angry with her that she can't even find anyone to do her hair. Her current husband, Joe Davis, has also enjoyed the media attention, showing up on camera wearing a dirty t-shirt and coveralls and making such profound statements as: Just because five people on the Supreme Court say so doesn't make it a law.
Clearly, neither Joe nor Kim are either legal or Biblical scholars but what has been alarming to me is that people who actually are national figures are saying things that are just as factually in error as the constitutional interpretations of Joe and Kim Davis. Two presidential candidates, Gov. Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz, actually showed up for her release from jail and others, including Rick Santorum and Marco Rubio, have defended her right to refuse to issue marriage licenses for same sex couples. They keep using the phrase, "Five unelected justices," to reference the majority vote of the Supreme Court, as if to say that the Supreme Court is not, what the name clearly implies, the Supreme Court, i.e., you can't appeal their decision because there is no higher court.
There have been decisions made by the court that have seemed to me to be wrong, and sometimes even immoral, and I would be the last person to say that you don't have a right to refuse to obey a law that your conscience tells you is morally wrong, but to say that the Supreme Court, because the justices are constitutionally appointed rather than elected, does not have judicial authority, is just a denial of facts, a denial of reality, it raises stupid to the level of a sacrament.
Because we are progressives, we are disinclined to believe in things for which there is no evidence. We talk about "evidence based faith" and I often quote philosophers who urge us to simply ignore truth claims that have no testable veracity.
I would also like to add that our perspective is not something new or unique to us. Even though the Kim Davis' and Mike Huckabees of the world may use the word "faith" to mean asserting things to be true that clearly are not true, that is not what religious thinkers have meant by faith through the centuries.
I don't often mention the fact that my doctoral research was in monastic spirituality. Over the years I have realized that no group of adults can remain awake for more than 90 seconds of me talking about this topic that has been fascinating to me. So I will be brief.
My dissertation looked at the great spiritual classics produced between the 4th and 18th centuries in Christian monasteries. I found in this literature the assumption that the spiritual journey followed three essential steps. In Latin they called these steps: the purgative, the illuminative, and the unitive. I will give a copy of my 1999 book, Christian Wisdom for Today, to any of you who have the courage to try to read about this. I have several copies here today and I will mail a copy to any of our internet audience who are willing to send me the $4 for postage.
But, here is my less than 90 second spiel: For centuries the assumed path of spiritual growth started with a time of purgation... of self-denial, self-examination, of getting your appetites under control and getting out of your life those things that might prevent you from progress in the spiritual life. The last of the three steps, the unitive, had to do with uniting with God, the contemplative, prayerful, devoted life in which the self is united with the Divine.
The middle step, the illuminative or the gaining of illumination, was about study. No matter how many religious people try to insist that faith is a matter of just believing, or more likely, just denial of reality, even the ancient monks of the Alexandrian desert, expected monks to read books, meditate, and study. An uninformed religious opinion has the same value as an uninformed medical or mechanical opinion.
That is not to say that study makes you always right but it means that you are capable of rational critical-thinking and that you are a great deal more likely to be right. The untutored are sometimes just inherently insightful but most of the time it amounts to what my father used to say about how even a blind hog sometimes finds and acorn.
It has to be said that there has always been a difference between a healthy religious faith and an unhealthy faith. Our most famous Missouri born theologian, H. Richard Niebuhr said, "Religion makes good people better and bad people worse."
I don't think that it was her conversion to an evangelical flavor of Christianity that made Kim Davis into such a horrifying and prejudiced human being but I do think that she has used the Christian religion in the way that a drunk uses a lamp post, for support but not for illumination. She has used irrational, anti-intellectual, anti-factual religious claims to give her the courage to hold onto an outdated prejudice and by using religious language she has bought into a community of similarly affected supporters.
Before Davis brought a herd of reporters to rural Kentucky, I had selected this quote from Isaac Asimov as our wisdom lesson for today, because when he said that we are suffering from: ...the false notion that democracy means that "my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge" I felt like he was specifically describing one of the crucial problems with religion in our time.
There is lots of noise and spectacle, but not much illumination. There is an abiding insistence that an ignorant assertion of belief is to be shown the same serious consideration as a conviction that is the product of actual study and critical thinking.
Lots of people will sometimes buy a lottery ticket if for no other reason than that it is fun to sit around and speculate about what you would do if you won...like how much of it you would give to your church and how you would keep your grown kids from finding out how much money you suddenly have.
But if you buy a lottery ticket and tell yourself that you are going to win millions of dollars in a couple of days and on the strength of that belief you go ahead and quit your job and draw out your life's savings and put a down payment on a mansion, then you are not being a person of faith, you are being irresponsible....like Sarah Palin kind of stupid.
We are people of faith who live in a world where the science of military power has grown beyond the moral reflection of the people who run our government. We are a spiritual community in the midst of a culture that is willing to continue to bolster prejudices based on misinformation, person fears, and pseudo-science that threatens our planet's environment, that places human lives at constant risk, and prevents progress towards such things as equal rights, rational gun laws, and an educational system that works.
Because we want to have a healthy spirituality then we are in favor of supporting education... higher education should be provided without charge to every person in this country because information is the ladder by which the poor can climb out of misery and into an equal place in our economy. There is nothing we can do to keep the poor in a permanent peasant class that is more effective than what we are doing now in making higher education more and more unattainable by the poor.
This is not about conservative and liberal. Science and math don't care about politics. Politicians can argue about whether human activity is causing climate change and many news agencies still insist upon giving us statistics about how many Americans don't believe that climate change is real.
What I'm saying here is that science is not concerned with opinion polls and real religion shouldn't be either. Truth is our scripture. Scripture was considered to be sacred because it was believed to be true. What we must now, in turn, be able to say, is that where we find that it is not true, in the face of new information, our religion changes. Holy books, doctrines, creeds, may not change but by not changing in light of reality, they simply become irrelevant. We are so over that stuff.
Because we want to have a healthy religious life, we want to create for ourselves and encourage and support the creation in other places of churches that throw their arms around real science, an academic approach to theology, psychology, economics, sociology and, frankly, compassion.
When politicians trumpet a fake, obviously doctored bit of video to remove funding from Planned Parenthood, where most of the poor women in this country get needed reproductive care, critical thinkers don't fall for their manipulation of the truth.... Not if they are thinking.
Conservatives can claim that raising the minimum wage will cause unemployment and making the rich richer will create jobs but the math is not on their side. Math is not conservative or liberal. Math doesn't care about politics. Math shows that incremental raises in the minimum wage creates jobs and reduces suffering while easing the burden of state funded welfare. They can call it liberal, or socialist, or whatever they want to call it.... We just need to be sure that we are on the side of the math.
While intellect may not be the key to the Kingdom of God, I don't think that ignorance has much to offer. Reality is our creed. The truth is our Bible. Critical thinking must be our contemplative prayers for the world. Ignorance and lies are the real demons that possess our world and we are here for the exorcism.
