“Personal Faith and Public Policy”

“Personal Faith and Public Policy”        February 2, 2020   Dr. Roger Ray, pastor       

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Archibald McLeish:  “Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else."

            

A few years ago, my daughter moved to Denver and she tells me that she will never leave. And, though I am much more of a tropical island kind of a guy, honestly, I get it. You cannot go to Denver at any time of the year and not be able to look up and see the Rocky Mountains in the distance without wanting to go up there and be among the mountains.

Which is, frankly, the only way to enjoy them, you have to go stand on one of them to look at all of the others. Our members, Dick and Marty Lundh, own and are presently visiting the home where Dick grew up in Manitou Springs, which is where you catch the train to go up to Pikes Peak. High up in that thin, dry air, you can look around at all of the surrounding mountains.

I use that image with my students when I teach a course on world religions, because, I believe, it is nearly impossible to view the various mountains of any mountain range, or any religion of the world’s major religions, unless you are standing on one of them. I consider myself to be more Unitarian than I am anything else, but there is no way around the fact that I grew up in a Protestant Christian faith. I went to college and seminary as a Protestant. 

Though I did my doctoral studies in Catholic monasticism, even then, I was a Protestant Christian. And in the 1990’s I published what I now see was a very Protestant book about Catholic monasticism. Now, when I talk about Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, or Judaism, I recognize that I am doing so, respectfully, sometimes adoringly, but always from the perspective from which I first viewed them, standing on the mountain of my own experience and tradition, the Protestant faith. 

This is the most clear to me when I hear Jewish or Muslim scholars talking about Christianity because, it is obvious to me, that they are talking about my faith tradition from their mountain, through their lens of Judaism or Islam, which never sounds to my ears like they are describing my mountain. They are not wrong; they just don’t have exactly the same perspective as I do. It behooves us all to be gracious about this.

Every religion of the world is like a language, a language of an ancient culture that was trying to articulate its most closely held beliefs. You can trace the evolution of those languages as they change to suit different centuries and cultural needs. I think it is fair to describe Judaism as having been at least three distinctly different religions, the earliest being a Semitic religion based on animal sacrifice in an ancient temple and the latest being a religion centered on a religious text in scattered synagogue services, evolving into many expressions of various practices and observances. There are many ways of being Buddhist, just as there are many ways of being Christian.

It would be absurd to say that one is right and the others are wrong, just like it would be crazy to say that among the languages of Chinese, English, German, and Quichua, that one is right and the others are wrong. Each is wedded to a place and a culture, and each one changes as the needs of its adherents and practitioners change. 

The denominational church that fired me many years ago, largely for advocating for gay rights, now has an openly gay pastor. No religion is static. They all evolve.

A lot of my attraction to identify with Unitarian Universalists is that they are striving to be an umbrella under which people of various faiths can stand together. I recognize that 90% of my education and the majority of my experience is in liberal Protestant Christianity, but I can no longer abide the exclusivity of Christianity nor can I intellectually bear the supernatural theistic aspects of most expressions of Christianity. I am still a primary content provider for ProgressiveChristianity.org because I want to be a part of helping Progressive Christianity to change and grow, but I’m not sure that I am still a member of the club. 

Still, while I advocate for a respectful interfaith perspective that does not insist that one mountain is better than another, or one language is right while the others are wrong, and no one religion is superior to the others . . . I would not have you mistakenly understand that I am embracing any kind of theological relativism. I am not. 

Faiths are not divided simply between Christians, Jews, Pagans, Buddhists, Muslims, and Hindus . . . every faith, every denomination, every congregation, is also divided between good aspects and bad ones. 

Let me give you some examples:

When I was a pastor on the east side of Louisville, our ministerial alliance hosted a Thanksgiving service every year and we moved the event from one church to another and rotated speakers so that no pastor was ever speaking in his or her own pulpit. One year, it was the turn of the local African-American Baptist Church to host the event, but it was the turn of the local female Methodist pastor to be the speaker, and the Baptist pastor apologetically said that they did not allow women to speak in their church. I had a lot of things to say in response to that but let me sum it up by saying that I told my Baptist pastor colleague that it was time for him and his church to stop enshrining prejudice and invite this woman to speak. After all, a generation earlier, it would not have been uncommon to have white congregations that would not allow a black pastor to speak in their pulpit, and if the Civil Rights movement addressed racial prejudice but not gender prejudice, then the movement was guilty of hypocrisy. 

They refused to let her preach, and I refused to participate in the service because, men and women, tolerance doesn’t mean that you tolerate prejudice, tolerance means that you don’t tolerate intolerance. And yes, I am painfully aware that Paul wrote in I Corinthians 14:34 that women should not be allowed to speak in church but, folks, that’s just one of the things that I don’t like about Paul and that’s not even the worst of it. Paul was writing from the mountain of his cultural experience in the first century and he was wrong. Say it with me, “he was wrong.” 

We keep our ancient religious texts because they are a part of our history but they cannot be used to justify that which is unjustifiable. One of the biggest mistakes I made as a pastor in a denominational church was that I kept asking permission to do the right thing. For 15 years I kept asking the board of my last church if I could have same sex marriage ceremonies in our church and they just kept saying “no.” So I did same sex weddings in BnB’s down in Eureka Springs, in local Chinese restaurants, and in back yards. 

After 15 years of being told “no,” I asked again and when they voted against the couple asking to be married in the church where they were active supporters and volunteers, one of the board members raised his hand and asked, “Now, just for clarification, when a gay person puts a check in our collection plate, do we cash that check or do we give that back to them?” No one had the courage to answer him and in that moment, I resolved to stop being a part of the oppression and so I just did the wedding. That was in the spring of 2007 and that helped to pave the way for us starting this church in 2008 . . . sorry, not sorry. 

And, yes, in spite of the homiletical gymnastics that many more liberal churches go through to insist that the Bible doesn’t really condemn homosexuality, and sure, the English word, “homosexual,” didn’t even exist until the early 20^th century, the truth is that there are some passages of the Bible that condemn sex between two men . . . lesbians appear to have been flying under the radar. 

Much the same can be said of Islamic teaching and though there are open and affirming Hindus, Muslims, and Buddhists, there are also those who remain very prejudiced and closed minded. Again, tolerance of differences in religious belief should not include tolerance of intolerance. Prejudice is wrong, no matter what it says in the Torah, the Quran, or even in some of the early Buddhist texts. 

Folks, the mere fact that many religious traditions are quite ancient, does not mean that they are superior to modern thought or that they should carry more authority. 

Would you go to a dentist who only used 17^th century dentistry? I realize that many people love the security they feel in insisting that the Bible is the word of God or the Quran was given to the Prophet by God, but why try to find security in believing something that is very clearly not true?

One of the more troubling aspects of religious hypocrisy is when it comes to trying to legislate our religious beliefs so that we impose our beliefs on the whole of society rather than simply in our own lives.  As Archibald McLeish wrote:  “Religion is at its best when it makes us ask hard questions of ourselves. It is at its worst when it deludes us into thinking we have all the answers for everybody else."

If you don’t believe in abortion, don’t have one. If you don’t believe in divorce, don’t get one. If you don’t believe in same sex marriage, don’t marry someone of the same gender. Problem solved. 

If you don’t believe in birth control, well, buy a mini-van and a big house with bunk beds. 

The problem with this simple mantra is that it falls apart upon application. I think women should govern their own reproductive lives, and that everyone should be able to marry the person they love . . . and I want that in legislation . . . so I also want to legislate my religious values. Now, I can say that I am ipso facto favoring greater freedom, greater rights, greater democracy but even that is not always true.

I have asked you to join me in protests in front of fast food restaurants seeking to raise the minimum wage . . . we have marched in front of payday loan businesses demanding that interest rates be humanely capped. We have gone to our senator’s offices to demand prison reform. We have marched on our congressman’s office protesting child separation policies. And we have demonstrated against wars and for universal healthcare. 

Frankly, we have been more active in passing relevant legislation than the United States Senate! Our religion, our spirituality, demands that we not stand idly by and be passive witnesses to injustice. 

While a part of me is very sympathetic with Archibald McLeish in saying that the better part of religion motivates me to question myself and my own morals but that my religion should not be public policy, there is another part of me that demands that my spiritual values find a hearing in the marketplace. 

I would be angry if local Jews and Muslims tried to outlaw bacon, or if local Buddhists and Hindus tried to outlaw all meat, but I could get behind a movement to outlaw corn syrup as a food additive and, really, shouldn’t we legalize marijuana?

Our spiritual communities exist within society and while there are still Mormon spin off cults that practice polygamy, I still believe that in almost every case, polygamous relationships wind up being abusive to the women involved. There are many Muslim women who choose to wear head scarves to cover their hair and sometimes their faces, but I cannot accept that any community should impose such choices on anyone. 

You already know this but let me say it now very plainly. It doesn’t matter if you are religious or an atheist. You can be Buddhist, Hindu, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian but know this: there is a healthy way to be any one of those things and there are unhealthy ways to be any one of those things. 

Healthy spirituality teaches radical compassion, it advocates for equal human rights for all. It promotes peace among individuals and nations. It affirms the search for greater knowledge and insight through science. And it defends the health of the planet and the wellbeing of all of its inhabitants. 

But we know too much about unhealthy religion that divides people through harsh judgement and perpetuates discrimination of all sorts. We know about Christians and Jews and Muslims who advocate for military violence and harsh punishment within and among their own people. And we are exhaustingly familiar with religion that denies science and is either indifferent or even exploitative of the environment and the earth’s inhabitants.

In my experience, the unhealthy expressions of religious faith tend to outnumber the good examples of healthy spirituality and so, I believe, it is time for a reformation within Islam, within Christianity, within Judaism, and within a great deal of Hindu and Buddhist practice. I don’t say that as a threat. I’m just saying that it is time for all of us to work on getting healthy.

Maybe that’s just my opinion, but, it just so happens that I’m right.