Progressive Faith and Practice

Progressive Faith and Practice     June 21, 2020    Dr. Roger Ray, pastor

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To move forward in our practice, we seek to move from the intellect to faith. We grow from blind faith towards wisdom faith.    The Venerable Lama Migmar, speaking in Dr. Diana Eck’s course on World Religions at Harvard in October 2004

The body of 19 year old Black Lives Matter activist and aspiring artist and model, "Toyin" Salau was found earlier this month in Florida. She had been living in a church shelter and accepted a ride from a man to get back to the church to collect her belongings. She later tweeted that she had been sexually assaulted by the man. Before she lost connection with the outside world, she explained to friends that she had trusted the Holy Spirit to protect her. 

So, there is an evil rapist to blame for this assault and murder. You can mention her own carelessness, and maybe we could dig up some culpability on the part of a family of origin but may I ask you this, “was the church that encouraged her to put her faith in the protection of the Holy Spirit, was a church that assured her that an all-powerful and all-seeing God was watching over her, does that church share some responsibility for setting this young woman up to be murdered?” Is there such a thing as theological malpractice? Is bad religion an accessory to a crime like this?

We have about 50,000 suicides in America every year. Disproportionately, by a factor of 4, gay teens and young adults commit suicide and you have to ask why that would be true? It will come as no surprise to you to know that multiple studies have shown that religious condemnation of homosexuality is a major factor because the religious convictions of people like our current vice-president fuel a prejudice that not only makes mothers and fathers reject and exile their own sons and daughters, but it causes young gay people to despise themselves, and in hopelessness, take their own lives. 

Is it too much to say that evangelical, Orthodox, and Catholic churches literally cause the deaths of tens of thousands of young, talented, intelligent people who just happen to be gay? If you tell a gay person that if they ever actually have sex that they will go to hell forever, isn’t that about the same as putting a loaded gun in their hands and telling them that death is preferable to falling in love? Can the church be held harmless in this tidal wave of annual suicides?

I was a grad student doing my clinicals in counseling right here in Bowling Green when a former nun limped into my office with a bruised face, broken ribs, and injuries all over her body which she told her employer were the result of having fallen down the stairs . . . again. She told me that her priest had told her that this abuse she suffered at the hands of her alcoholic husband was her cross to bear, the consequences of having broken her vows in the convent to live a celibate life of prayer. 

It is a story I have heard repeated many times through the years as a pastoral counselor and a volunteer in spouse abuse shelters. Pentecostals, evangelicals, Catholics, and sometimes even main-stream pastors will counsel women to forgive their husbands. To try to change the husband’s abusive behaviors by being more obedient, less argumentative, and, of course, more sexually compliant. 

We liberals want to be accepting, unjudging, tolerant, freedom loving people. Everyone is free to choose their own spiritual path, their own religious beliefs and practices. But, I have to ask you, is there a point at which tolerance becomes tacit approval? Can we, by being unjudging, telegraph the kind of acceptance that says that misogyny and homophobia are personal choices to such a degree that we, who are trying to be open minded liberals, are also accomplices to domestic violence, suicide, and murder? 

I believe that it is inescapable to conclude that bad religion is at least a contributing factor and, in some cases, directly responsible for these and many other grave social ills. You may not agree with me but as one of my professors liked to say, “This is just my opinion, it just so happens that I am also right.”

I don’t have any tattoos but if I did it would surely be this quote from Voltaire, “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Traditional religious teachings limber people up to deny science, research, and even their own experiences. 

There have been times in history when it seemed that we were about to emerge from the darkness of magical religious thinking, the French Revolution, the emergence of modern science, even movements which have sought to preserve the community building and values education of religion without all of the magic and superstition.  In 1822, Thomas Jefferson said that, "there is not a young man now living in the US who will not die a Unitarian."

You could point to the writings of Thomas Paine and many others from the early days of the United States who seemed to be ready to dismiss all supernatural theism and to embrace a religious perspective that was rooted entirely in ethics, a study in morality. But the institutional church always managed to drag the majority back into creedal and ritualized religious practices through three different massive phases of revivals which have kept progressives in the minority, cementing, as it were, a literal wall between academic theological thinking and the actual practices of the people in church pews. 

That wonderful group of scholars who started the Jesus Seminar in the 1980’s, gave a concerted effort to breaking down that wall. They made Marcus Borg, John 

Shelby Spong, Karen Armstrong, and Jon Dominic Crossan famous but their amazing books failed to put much of a dent in the wall of ignorance and magical thinking that defends the traditional expressions of the faith. The numbers of people who are still engaged in the traditional churches have been in rapid decline, other than in the mega churches which seem to defy the social trend, but it remains to be seen to what degree the current pandemic might affect how many and how large the churches will be in this decade. 

Our congregation in Springfield, MO started in 2008 to serve those who were of sufficiently liberal and progressive faith to be a bad fit in any existing mainstream church in our area. We grew for a while and almost made it to the point of being a church with Sunday School and youth groups and mission trips along with social events but about five years into our experiment, our attendance at our bricks and mortar church started to decline while interest in our content online grew. By the time the pandemic hit, we were having about 40 people in our Sunday service, but our sermons were being downloaded at an average rate of 15,000 per month. 

For the past several years, I have been predicting the demise of seated congregations and the growth of online faith groups. When the pandemic hit, we simply took another step in the direction of becoming an on-line church. Some churches in our area are making what I believe to be a very dangerous decision and they are reopening to the public but I don’t think many people are finding their way back into the pews. 

As most congregations are typically older, until there is a vaccine, the majority of those who used to go to church are not likely to do so again and even when there is a vaccine, if it is anything less than 100% effective, most churches will end up closing and a few online services will survive. But, realistically, how many options will that online audience really need? A hundred, two hundred? There are currently about 400,000 churches in America. They will not all successfully make the transition to being online churches. In fact, I suspect that half of those will close in the next year. 

But as devastating as the pandemic will be on churches, it is really only accelerating an evolution that was already well underway. 

While the demise of superstition based religious beliefs has been mistakenly announced many times in the past 300 years, I’m willing to go out on a limb and place my bets one more time. I think that all forms of pie-in-the-sky religion will be going the way of the flat earth society. People who go to traditional churches will be in the same group as the people who still set up cameras around Scotland’s Loch Ness in hopes of photographing a long extinct dinosaur rising from the water. 

Civilizations don’t change quickly but I believe that the churches that are rooted in a belief in heaven and hell and an imaginary friend who lives in the clouds and who authored very questionable books in the distant past, I think that church is going away. I am not certain that any churches will survive but the ones that do, the ones that will be more than an online presence, will be ones that foster community, provide meaningful service opportunities, and which address the real world issues that confront us in a rapidly changing world. 

As I always do when I am invited to speak to a church for the first time, I want to try to sum up what it is that I am trying to say to the world though my books, videos, classes, lecture tours, and to my newspaper readers. In sum, it is this:

Our premodern ancestors tended to interpret natural events by personifying nature, assuming that invisible spirits with human emotions caused events of nature and physics. Depending upon geography and language, these beliefs sometimes coalesced into a formal religion. 

In 2020, it should be clear that while these ancient beliefs often convey helpful insights that can help us to understand our lives and to be better people, we really must stop acting like angels and demons are real, that there is a heaven or hell, that anyone has an imaginary friend who lives in the clouds or that you have a soul because you are a person but apes, chickens, lichen, and daisies do not. The great mystery of the universe that some call "God" did not write the Bible, the Quran, or the Upanishads. No matter how special Jesus or Zoroaster may have been in history, they were no more divine than you and I are. 

So, please, get your heads out of the clouds and look around you. We are in the middle of a pandemic and still don't have universal healthcare. We are a century and a half past slavery and still have a racial apartheid that is just as cruel as slavery ever was. We get distracted by momentary news cycles while thousands of children are still living in unsanitary and cruel circumstances on the boarders . . . just because the pandemic and police brutality are now in the news does not mean that those children have been reunited with their parents, we’ve just stopped talking about it. 

We have labor saving technology and the ability to generate all of the power we need. There is enough wind in Wyoming and enough sunlight in Arizona that, with the right infrastructure, we would never need to burn another gallon of gas or lump of coal. We have the natural resources to build all of the housing we need, and we have the available labor and space to grow all of the food that we need and to do so sustainably but we don't do it because, as I mentioned earlier, it is as Voltaire said, "Those who can convince you to believe in absurdities can convince you to commit atrocities." So we continue to poison our only planet for temporary financial gain while keeping the majority of people in the world locked into the violence of racism and poverty. Hunger only exists in the world because we have not organized a civilized way to distribute food without always focusing on profit.

A 3% reallocation of our military budget could wipe out hunger around the world and why is that not a sermon topic in every church, synagogue, and mosque in the world? I’m getting old and I have to tell you, I am exhausted with liberals switching from serving communion to burning sage and acting like they have done something of significance. Many of my peers know a lot about essential oils but they do not know that we have 2 million people in jails and prisons and 7 million on parole who are forever locked out of getting a decent job. 

We can have a spiritual life that is rooted in ethics and which builds human connection and fosters peace and love. But what I see among most of institutional religion is creedal paranoia that passes racism and classism from one generation to the next. Could we all just grow up and stop that crap? If churches are to survive into the 21^st century, they have to have a useful reason to survive. You can’t say that we are not desperately needed, but we are not needed as havens for racism and sexual prejudice, and we are not needed to foster superstitious and magical thinking.

We are needed to face the real moral challenges of creating a just and fair world that is home to 4 billion people. Journalists have become an endangered species. 

The print media is nearly dead, and the 24-hour TV news channels don’t know the difference between news and commentary and have more propaganda than information. Social networks are falling apart and being replaced with social media which is ten miles wide but only a quarter of an inch deep. 

If churches are to survive, they need to seize their potential of becoming places where people can be informed, inspired, motivated, and dare I say it, organized for action. Churches can be places where your 500 FaceBook friends could become ten or twelve real friendships . . . you know, the people who will mow your lawn when you have a broken leg, made soup for you when you are on chemo therapy, and give a damn when a member of your family dies. I have over 5000 members of my Emerging Church page, 15,000 listeners to my sermons, nearly a 1000 friends on my FaceBook page, and none of them would walk my dog for me if I had to be out of town over night . . . which is infuriating and I don’t even have a dog. 

I look forward to meeting your congregation in person next summer but here is my hope for you:  I hope that your church is personally significant to all of your members individually, and collectively, I hope that your church is morally relevant globally. Loneliness is the single largest form of suffering in America today and your congregation should be the cure for that isolation for one another. But globally, I hope that your church will be a part of the solution to racism, the cure for poverty, the transformation to sustainable energy, construction, and agriculture. I hope you are a voice for #BlackLivesMatter and for brown children in dog cages on our southern border. Advocate for prison reform, reform of militarized policing, and fight against an economic system that keeps shifting resources to the 1% while impoverishing the majority. Don’t ever tell anyone who to vote for but make sure that everyone understands that voting for a racist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a classist, an islamophobe, or a misogynist, is unacceptable. And don’t make me add  spray-on orange tanner to this list because that might cost me my tax-exempt status.

The future needs us, if we are willing to be relevant. I look forward to seeing you next summer but between now and then, let’s keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.