Community Christian Church of Springfield, MO
Roger Ray, pastor
My hope is that a religious consciousness will begin to rise, one based on enhancing humanity, grasping life in all of its complex wonder, having the courage to live fully, to love wastefully and to be all that each of us can be and that it will express itself in our national life in more earth centered, justice enhancing and humane ways. Bishop John Shelby SpongTo give our musicians fair warning, I outline my sermons several weeks or months in advance. So, we know that three weeks from today I will be talking about the fluid and often deceptive and fact-challenged nature of political speech and I don't want to get into that topic too deeply before that day rolls around.... But Ben Carson is testing me.
There will be a lot of grist for the mill for that sermon at the end of the month but today I wanted to explore something of Bishop Spong's articulated vision for the future of the church... that is the hope that there might be a religious consciousness that would arise from the myths, superstitions, and spiritual instincts of more primitive times that would preserve a religious consciousness that is relevant to modern life, that simultaneously is concerned about social justice and the environment, while also finding deep and passionate wonder and awe in the complexity and beauty of existence that might find substantive expression in deepening and loving ties to one another.
Our friends, Bishop Spong, Dr. Charles Hedrick, Dr. David Trobisch, Dr. Teresa Hornsby, and I, ... as well as many of our favorite authors: Marcus Borg and Karen Armstrong, and others, all grew up in religious environments in which we were expected to take Biblical narratives as being historically and morally correct, normative, and even necessary to both happiness and survival.... Especially in the eternal sense!
All of us went to graduate school, not to debunk that ancient faith and confidence, but to build upon a foundation that would allow us to become teachers of the faith and leaders within the structures of the church. None of us were happy to discover that the intellectual and factual integrity of that whole body of church teachings and assumptions about ancient scriptures was not only unreliable but were, in very complex ways, sometimes factually mistaken and psychologically dangerous.
There is a very high drop out rate in the more academically credible seminaries all over the world. People who do not want to have their bubble burst, people who want to hold onto magical thinking, some of whom burst into either angry shouting or who dissolve into miserable tears in class, find reality threatening and undesirable.
What stood at the doorstep of our decision to start this church was the awareness that there is and has been for far too long, a huge gulf between what is good scholarship in our religious institutions of higher learning and the pews where people are literally victimized by a body of teachings that ask them to assassinate their brains and invest themselves in misinformation, bad moral guidance, and long outdated views of gender, race, class, and, my friends, even of God and eternity.
I will credit my friend, Michael Dowd, with coining the phrase of "evidence based" or "fact based" faith.
The religious consciousness that Bishop Spong has talked about hoping to see arise within churches cannot come into existence in the thick fog of sloppy thinking, magic or superstition of past generations. The people who ran screaming from the classes I attended at Vanderbilt 35 years ago were confronted with realities that they didn't want to think about, didn't want to know, and didn't want to allow to change their magical thinking.... But, I would argue, they would always have to know that they had chosen unreality over reality. They could never escape the fact that they were dismissing the real world in favor of an imaginary world.
But, if I may now pick up the thread of my earlier comment, what we have seen this week in Ben Carson's dogged insistence that a comment he made years ago at a church related college, his personal belief that the pyramids in Egypt had been built by the Joseph of Genesis to store during a famine in Egypt five thousand years ago, is historically and factually true. He has gone so far as to say that only progressives who are atheists would find his statement to be absurd.
My friend, Bill Ringo, who is a rocket scientist, has been gloating this week that now rocket scientists stand alone as the proverbial reference for intelligence since Ben Carson has single handedly made saying, "Well, it doesn't take a brain surgeon..." no longer a high water mark for being smart. You cannot argue that someone is a scientist who insists that the world is no more than 6000 years old, that evolution is a deception of Satan, and that the patriarch, Joseph, built the pyramids to serve as grain storage barns.
Carson may have had technical success in the operating room but his orientation to reality and his ability to do critical thinking do not show up on the radar.
Yet even in the face of what must be thought of as public humiliation, a significant percentage of our friends and neighbors still want this man to become our president. And, again, I don't want to focus on this today as political speech but I do want for us to think about it as a litmus test for religious thinking.
Of those who have been willing to discuss their decision to continue to support Ben Carson's candidacy in light of these anti-scientific, anti-historical, and even anti-Biblical scholarship statements, about half of them agree with him for reasons that simply cannot be explained but even more sad to me are the half of his supporters who simply do not care. They are willing to say that facts, good thinking skills, information, just don't matter to them.
I lead a fairly homogenized life. In spite of living in one of the most conservative communities in America, I am surrounded by largely like-minded church members. I am sufficiently outspoken and published that any residual family members or friends who take radically different views stopped talking to me years ago.
But with my morning coffee most mornings, while I passively take in the morning news, I play several local people in a form of on-line scrabble and sometimes that turns into a conversation.
One of my regular opponents is a local teacher, a conservative Christian with several children and a baby-daddy in prison. Our sidebar conversations are as close as I get to heated debate with conservatives these days. She is devoted to the form of Christian faith that you have often heard me call "magic and superstation" and, she is also a Ben Carson supporter.
Though there are multiple video clips of Ben Carson saying in public that he believed that Joseph built the pyramids, that Satan is the author of the theory of evolution, and that the earth is 6000 years old, she believes that all of those things are just media deceptions. And, she adds, paradoxically, he might be right.
Why is it taking us so long to switch from burning coal creating nuclear waste to more renewable and safer forms of energy? Because a large part of our population has been taught not to believe in facts and reality! Why is it so difficult to curb our military budget that feeds the transfer of wealth from the poor and middle class to the 1% at the top of the economy? Because people have been trained to react out of fear and false patriotism rather than facts and reality.
And, you have to admit, religious training is often the foundation for the magical thinking that is a part of every other social problem we seem to be unable to rationally address. As the French philosopher, Voltaire, said, "Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
You have heard me quoting Todd Schaible in the past. Todd says that in any research project you need to be able to answer the three "so's"....What is so? So what? And, So what should we do? You can never get to a reasonable plan of action if you refuse to take the first step, if you resist acknowledging what is so, or if we are willing to willie-nilly mix fact with imagination, wishful thinking and a bit of magic and superstition.
Several of our church members joined me on Thursday evening at MSU for a lecture by Dr. Gerardo Marti, a sociologist of religion. He was talking about the Emerging Church movement, an obvious topic of interest to our church. He didn't make any predictions of the future direction of the church, which is what I really went to hear. In many ways, he described the path by which we began and some of our past evolution into the more inter-faith church that we are now.
But there were a couple of points where I disagreed with him, at least to the degree that we are an emerging church and he was not accurately describing us. He talked about a very generous tolerance of differences in belief. He implied that beliefs don't really matter. And I have said that behavior is much more important that belief, that orthopraxy is what religion is really about, not orthodoxy.
But I don't that that we are very tolerant of imaginary religious beliefs... we are not very welcoming to anti-science, anti-medicine, unreal or untrue statements of belief.
A great deal of religious history has been deeply invested in deception and manipulation and for that the church writ large, church with a capital "C" owes the world and apology and we need to work hard to clean up our mess.
Bishop Spong has articulated a vision for the future of the church that is an emerging spirituality that honors the earth, works for justice, and fosters real love, forgiveness, compassion, and meaningful connection between all people. I don't know if the church has a future but if I am going to be found in any kind of church in the future, it will have to be that kind of church.
Both the government and the traditional church have tried to keep you afraid of Muslims and Arabs to keep you impoverished by military spending. You have been manipulated by the banks and corporations to be afraid of the Chinese so that we will go along with the TPP (trans Pacific trade pact), locking in low wages and unemployment in our own nation, to prevent the economic growth of an impoverished people on the other side of the globe.
You have been seduced by TV ads and government misinformation into believing that only way that we can get around is in private gas burning cars and the only way you can heat and light your home is by burning coal.
"Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities."
If the church of the future has anything of value to offer to you, let it be this: the courage to stop being manipulated by fear and the wisdom to be devoted to what it true rather than what is imaginary. Because, you are not going to go to heaven, you are either going to make this life heaven or we will be doomed to hell of ignorance and injustice.... And I'm not going to go there quietly.
