June
19, 2016 Community Christian Church of
Springfield, MO
Roger
Ray, pastor “The Failed
Reformation”
H.
L. Mencken in Treatise on the Gods 1930
“What the faithful
Christian professes to believe, if put into the form of an affidavit, would be
such shocking nonsense that even bishops and archbishops would laugh at it. . .
Protestantism itself, in its earliest phases, was plainly a movement toward
mysticism: its purpose, at least in theory, was to remove the priestly
veil separating man (sic) from the revealed Word of God. But that veil was
restored almost instantly, and by the year 1522, five years after Wittenberg,
Luther was damning the Anabaptists with all of the ferocious certainty of a
medieval Pope, and his followers were docilely accepting his teaching.”
One
of our YouTube listeners in Florida wrote to me a couple of years ago and very
apologetically told me that he had decided to return to the traditional
Catholic Church. Of course, I never tell anyone that they should leave their
church but he was one of those people, like many of us here, who had been a
very faithful believer in the formal theological teachings of the church and
once he had done enough reading and thinking for himself, he simply couldn’t go
back. As you have heard me say before, we cherish the teachings of Jesus but
the teachings about him seem to be mired in Iron Age mythology.
This listener didn’t really stop believing in the truth of
his late in life discoveries of a more honest and fact-based faith, but rather,
he willingly elected to return to a kind of self-deception. That is, feeling
his advancing years leading up to a sudden end, he couldn’t face the thought of
just ceasing to exist and felt the need to return to the assurance of an eternal
life in a more Catholic vision.
I don’t know how you do that. I wouldn’t have any idea about
how to put the genie back in the bottle. If a traditional church tried to make
me one of those “offers you can’t refuse” I just couldn’t go back into the
world of doing midnight Christmas vigils and Easter sunrise services and trying
to offer people certain hope in an afterlife that is anything but certain. But folks, a lot of people do it.
It has become sort of a hobby for me to look for examples in
historical literature of signs of progressive faith breaking out in poetry,
philosophy, and theology prior to this current wave of historical Jesus,
biblical critical, scholars. It is no longer surprising to encounter someone
who writes as if they managed to just stumble out of a dark cave into the
sunlight of reason.
I was delighted to discover a book by H. L. Mencken,
published in 1930, entitled Treatise on
the Gods. Mencken didn’t stumble out of the dark. He was an old school
scholar who didn’t have much formal education but he was an amazing reader and
researcher. He was a journalist so that might lower your expectations a bit
and, in all honesty, he was a racist at a time and place where it didn’t seem
that many people could challenge his narrow views but his political commentary
was wonderfully controversial and incisive. When he turned his sights on
religion, he produced a scathing review of the silly things that religious
people believe.
I was delighted to find a self-taught myth buster from the
early 20th century but this passage I am using as our wisdom lesson
today startled me in what he pointed out about Luther’s reformation.
Like every seminary student, I had a cursory introduction
into the history and writing of the great German reformer but I had never given
a moment’s thought to how Luther, on the one hand became famous for being able
to see through the absurdity of the papal authority and the clear abuses of the
church, but he very quickly engaged in battles with Protestant rivals and he
came to think of himself as having the virtual authority of a pope.
The Protestant reformation changed the western world. The
incestuous relationship between government and the Catholic Church that had
ruled Europe for a thousand years came to an end in a single lifetime in the 16th
century. There were very influential anti-reformation movements within the
Catholic Church but it would be difficult to over estimate the way in which
Luther’s reformation preaching and writing transformed the nature of modern
Christianity and politics.
However, after smashing statues and breaking out stained
glass windows, and insisting upon a transfer of authority from the church to
the printed text of scripture itself, it wasn’t very long before the
reformation church was starting to look a lot like the Catholic Church with
only nuanced differences….
The Lutheran Church reinvented itself as a kind of “Catholic
light” in a way that reminds you of the final pages of Animal Farm when the pigs who had lead the rebellion against the
farmers, are seen with the human farmers having dinner and playing cards in the
farm house.
I don’t think that Martin Luther was necessarily trying to
usher in a new age of reason but, given the context of when he lived and the
oppressive control of the Medieval Catholic Church, he was a 16th
century super hero, but as Mencken points out, the reformation substantially
failed.
Are people afraid to think for themselves? Do they want an
authoritarian government to protect them from imaginary boogiemen and an authoritarian
religion to help them deny the reality of the world around them and their own
mortality? Do they prefer the ease of magical thinking over the challenge of
critically examining evidence?
I will tell you very honestly that I am sincerely worried that
the progressive reformation of our generation may also fail. I have been
astonished for years that as popular as the books of John Spong, Marcus Borg,
Karen Armstrong, and Jon Crossan have been, millions of people read their
books, attended their lectures and then go back to Methodist, Presbyterian,
Disciple, UCC, and Episcopal churches and repeat creeds and rituals that they
know are not true and, as H. L. Mencken says, literally put on a magic show
when they know better.
Is it the comfort of the familiar? Is it, literally,
whistling in the graveyard?
And many people tell me, “It does matter.” “People believe
what they want to believe and it doesn’t change anything anyway.” But is it
okay if I just object a bit?
Because, as Voltaire said, if you can get people to believe
in absurdities it isn’t hard to get them to commit atrocities.
Look at just the blatant lies told by the NRA and their
gun-manufacturing minions:
They tell us that the second amendment protects the rights of
all citizens to own any gun that they want.
Clearly this is not true. You cannot own a machine gun. You can’t own a
bazooka. You can’t own tactical nuclear weapons. And the second amendment
protects the existence of a well-regulated militia, which has nothing to do
with privately amassing an arsenal of lethal weapons.
The interpretation of the 2nd amendment to give
individuals the right to own guns under any and all circumstances was a hoax
cooked up in 2008 by a Republican dominated supreme court in the Heller case in
one of the most absurd stretches of logic seen in jurisprudence.
The NRA tells us that guns don’t kill people, which makes it
seem odd that we feel the need to keep giving soldiers guns …. Clearly, people
with guns kill more than 30,000 Americans every year where gun deaths in Japan
are always less than 10 a year and in most western democracies the number
rarely rises above a dozen.
They tell us that these guns used in mass shootings are not
automatic weapons or even semi-automatic, that they are just like other guns.
Sure, if you want to parse words, the AR-15 still requires you to pull the
trigger repeatedly to fire the weapon but you can put a 100 round drum on it
and kill 100 people in less than 2 minutes…. In which case, they are a military
style weapon whose only purpose is to kill people.
We keep talking about these shootings being a mental health
problem. Well, in a sense, I agree. If a person walks up to the gun counter at
the Bass Pro Shop or at Walmart and wants to buy a weapon designed to kill
dozens of people at a time, that is all of the diagnostic criteria needed in a
sane society to diagnose a dangerous and serious mental illness.
What more do we need to give them a mental health screening?
Do we have to watch and see if they serve red wine with fish? The people who
went to gun stores after Sandy Hook, and San Bernardino, and Colorado Springs,
and Orlando to buy the exact weapon used by the murderers in these nightmare
scenarios have self identified as dangerously mentally unstable people but rather
than put them on a “you can never own a lethal weapon” list we just sell them
the tools necessary for the next mass murder.
Yes, it is a mental illness problem but it appears that it is
our Congress that is mentally ill.
The false narratives sold to Americans, I’m convinced, is
rooted in the magical thinking of most of religion. When the former president
of the United States told us that terrorists hate us for our freedoms, did
anyone believe that to be a factual statement?
They don’t hate us for occupying their country? They don’t hate us for
installing violently oppressive puppet governments? They don’t hate us for the
drone strikes that kill their children and families? They hate us because we
eat hot dogs and wear bathing suits at the beach…. Who could believe such
non-sense? And yet, we play along, in part because we have been trained to be
silenced by the absurd.
We are told that our soldiers are serving abroad to defend
our freedom. Who threatened our freedom? There is hardly a two-story building
in Afghanistan. They have no navy, no air force, are they going to invade on
camel back? The United States operates
737 foreign military bases on every continent of the world. That’s not
protecting our freedom, that is defending our Empire! When the government talks
about defending American interests, what they mean is defending the interests
of Mobil, Exxon, Halliburton, and GE…. Not your interests, not my interests.
Those of us who oppose these wars for oil are the ones
defending our interests and supporting our soldiers.
This is plainly and undeniably true. We all know it is true
so how did we become puppets to an empire?
I do not know if the world is ready to wake up from the
slumber of not being able to tell the difference between a dream and reality
but I hope so. The goal of progressive faith is not to deny reality and believe
in an imaginary world, it is to wake up and comes to terms with the world we
are living in and to work to make it more peaceful, fair, just, and, dare I say
it, happy.
We have wasted enough time having the wool pulled over our
eyes. Let’s come to terms with reality and have the courage to change the
world.
