“Belief and Faith, Myth and Sacred Narrative”

“Belief and Faith, Myth and Sacred Narrative”    June 27, 2021 

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor         click here to see the video

Karen Armstrong:  In the Western world, a strong belief in the objective truths of reli­gion, which are viewed as incontrovertible, demonstrable facts, is regarded as essential to the life of faith. When asking if somebody is religious, people often inquire: “Does he or she believe?” as though accepting certain creedal propositions was the prime religious activ­ity. Indeed, faith is equated with belief, but this equation is of recent provenance. Originally the meaning of the word “faith” was akin to trust, as when we say that we have faith in a friend or an ideal. Faith was not an intellectual position but a virtue: it was the careful culti­vation, by means of the rituals and myths of religion, of the convic­tion that, despite all the dispiriting evidence to the contrary, life had some ultimate meaning and value. The Latin word credo (trans­lated now as “I believe”) seems to have derived from the phrase cor dare: to give one’s heart. 

I don’t always allow myself to be sucked into social media debates but when I do, it is usually in a conversation about guns. A young woman that I have tried to help through some really ugly family issues that have left her and her young child vulnerable to the erratic whims of a series of bad boyfriends, has tried to convince me that her current flame is the “one.” And no one would be happier about it if I could convince myself that it was true, but their most recent posts have been about “prince charming” taking her to the gun range to help her learn how to handle the new hand gun he has given her to keep in her apartment with her severely ADD elementary school aged son who has never spent more than five minutes in my house without slipping off to find a TV remote where he can download inappropriate pay-per-view movies. Given his penchant for following the rules, I felt the need to point out to her that whenever a woman has a gun in her home, that she increases her chances of being shot and killed by 1700%. 

 

There is a reason why America has more than 40,000 gun deaths every year and Japan averages about 7. The proliferation of guns always increases gun deaths. 

Every gun owner in the world imagines themselves to be John Wick, able to kill 80 or more bad guys in a 90 minute film, while never sustaining a wound that slows him down for more than a moment. But the majority of gun deaths, as you see on this chart, are self- inflicted because there is a lot of depression among gun owners and not a small amount of drug and alcohol abuse. Suicide is the most common lethal use of a gun in America, murder is the second, accidents are third, and legitimate self defense is just a fraction of the total. And, it is well documented that there are more accidental deaths from guns than legitimate use in self-defense and last year, 220 of those were young children shooting a parent…. Usually with a very cleverly hidden gun with multiple safety features thrown in. And still, someone in the family will often insist “that gun wasn’t loaded!”

 

This is not a sermon about gun safety, but I want to talk about faith and belief, and it seems like this is a good example. Gun owners are a perfect example of people who passionately believe in things that are demonstrably not true. They believe what they believe about their guns because they want to believe what they believe. They believe what they believe because of how owning a gun makes them feel. An insecure man can compensate for what he doesn’t have in his underwear with what he can sling over his shoulder or put in a holster. A frightened woman can believe that she has suddenly become the Black Widow because she has a cheap handgun and 90 minutes of practice on a gun range. 

 

Any sincere look at the facts for even five minutes will clearly demonstrate that they dramatically reduce their safety by owning a gun, but this is a matter of faith, around here, a matter of religion, and not a matter that can be affected by reason, information, or facts. They believe what they believe because they want to believe it, and they believe it because of how their faith makes them feel. Their faith doesn’t make them bulletproof but it does make them immune to facts. 

As the magician, James Randi opined, “Those who believe without reason cannot be convinced by reason.” If you reach firm beliefs based on whims and preferences, hard data is not likely to change your mind.

 

Consider the fact that there are more than 70 million people in America who voted for Donald Trump, twice! They voted for him a second time after seeing what he did for 4 years in the White House. Now consider the fact that most of these people also own several guns. Do you feel safer?  

 

Here in the Ozarks, where we have been in the national news a lot lately because only 30% of the people in the area have been vaccinated against Covid and we 

have the highest transmission rate in the country of the deadly Delta variant of Covid, but many of our locals believe firmly that they know more than the virologists and scientists who developed the vaccine, and they would rather take their chances with the virus than with the vaccine because “they don’t know what is in it.” These same people will also line up at Sonic to buy hotdogs, but they don’t want to have something put in their body when they don’t know what is in it. 

 

Even with our hospital Covid wards filled to capacity and ambulances speeding patients to hospitals in St Louis and Kansas City, they have faith that God will protect them and, I suppose, if God is busy, they can use their guns to shoot the virus if it tries to get into their lungs. And this, I will submit, is why the MENSA club never holds their national conventions in Springfield. 

 

I don’t typically walk around with my views printed on my shirts, but I have made an exception during the pandemic. I have this one that says, “Science doesn’t care what you believe” as a t-shirt and as a hoodie, so that I can make this statement in public regardless of the weather. 

But this is not a contest between science, facts, objective thinking in opposition to religion because, it isn’t just religion that falls prey to believing things without reason or, worse, against reason. People believe a lot of things that are false because they want to believe them, they like to believe them. But how those beliefs make them feel has nothing to do with the beliefs being true or false. 

Please allow me once more to cite the Great Dane, Soren Kierkegaard, who said that 
“there are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”

Right now, all of our hospital covid wards are full. None of those patients were vaccinated, and yet, any one of them could have gone to any Walgreens or CVS drugstore in town and received a vaccine at no charge without an appointment. It couldn’t be easier and yet 2 out of 3 of our neighbors are unprotected because they have allowed themselves to believe things that are truly stupid. 

 

In the world of religion, we talk a lot about belief and faith and all too often those words are associated with a choice to believe in things for which there is no evidence, or even to have faith in things for which there is a great deal of evidence that what they believe is not true. 

 

Some of our favorite religious scholars, including Karen Armstrong and the late Marcus Borg, have spent a great deal of time documenting the fact that the words “belief” and “faith” should not be taken as a matter of assassinating your brains so that you can believe in things that are clearly not true.

 

Karen Armstrong describes early Christian baptisms in which the newly baptized was lowered into the water and when they were pulled back up, they shouted, in Greek, “pistus” which is the word we translate as “faith” in the Bible but in this context, it obviously means something like “courage” or “conviction.”

 

The ancient church wrote creeds to describe the Christian faith, in fact, the Apostles’ Creed in Latin begins with the word, “credo” which we translate as saying “I believe,” . . . “I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth”….

 

But, again, this was not a claim in the literal facts of virgin birth or bodily resurrection. Marcus Borg insists that we should understand this creed as meaning “I belove” rather than “I believe.” Because you can love the Catholic Church for what it has meant in your life without believing that the Pope is infallible or that you have to be opposed to women’s reproductive rights. You can love your Jewish faith community without believing that God divided the Red Sea for the Israelites to escape Egypt, or that Moses caused water to flow from a rock and bread to fall down from heaven. You can love your Muslim faith community without believing that Muhammad flew on a winged horse up to heaven. 

 

In our time, people will find the basic tenets of the Christian religion to be impossible to believe and they will say, “I have lost my faith,” but I don’t think that is a good use of that word. I don’t believe in a supernatural theistic god, or in angels, demons, souls, heaven, or hell but I believe that I am a person of faith. I don’t believe in things that I know don’t exist, but I have courage and commitment to what my religious life represents . . . justice, mercy, liberty, equality, freedom, love, unity, respect, compassion, and a cherishing of the earth itself and of all life. I have a lot of faith, but that doesn’t mean that I believe in silly things. 

 

Christian communion, the Jewish Passover, the Muslim hajj, all symbolically reenact the sacred stories of their faith tradition, and while many Christians may take the account of the passion as being literal history, or Jews believe that the destroying angel killed the first born of the Egyptians, or Muslims may think that Muhammad made the Devil run away by throwing rocks at him, I trust that most people are engaging in a ritual to connect themselves to a faith community they want to be committed to. . . rather than believing in a powerful, evil, demon that you can throw rocks at. 

A community of faith almost always has shared sacred stories, but the power of those stories does not rely on their historical accuracy. Frankly, to do so would be to embrace a denial of reality and to embrace embarrassing stupidity. 

 

Honestly, I look forward to some Christmas in the future when I will attend a Christmas Eve service and just experience the light and darkness, the carols and lessons, the choirs and candles, but I can’t now and have not for many years because those fables were taught to me as history and they, along with a huge truck load of myths and lies, twisted my perception of reality and retarded my intellectual growth. So, I can’t hear those carols or see those decorations without some anger just yet, but I am confident that it will not always be that way. 

 

You can love the community, the tradition, literally the bells and smells of your faith, without trying to turn beautiful stories into factual historical accounts. The progressive church can be resolved never again to pass along unbelievable myths as facts to another generation, but we can celebrate the rituals and seasons that are associated with our roots, our tribe, our tradition. 

My old friend, Charles Hedrick, and my newer friend, Bishop John Shelby Spong, are both founding members of the Jesus Seminar. They are both historical and biblical scholars who have often spoken at our church because they are the kind of credible thinkers who have helped us to become who we are.

 

But in a private dinner one night, Bishop Spong asked me why Charlie still goes to a Baptist Church. 

Because I had asked Charlie myself, many times in many different ways, I was able to tell him: Charlie long ago divorced himself from the beliefs and practices but his friends are there, and he wants to stay connected to them. He also envisions the Baptist church someday being better than what it is today, and he doesn’t want to give up on it. 

 

Before Charlie retired to Kansas City to be near his daughters, I regularly had lunch with him at the University and he asked me once, “Why does John Spong still go to an Episcopal Church, he can’t possibly share many beliefs with them?”

Because I had this very conversation with Bishop Spong, I was able to tell Charlie, “His friends are there and he has a long history with the church that, though it has largely rejected him the way the Baptists have rejected you, but he still hopes to see it become a better church than it is today.”

 

Though I will never return to my mother denomination, I respect the decision that Charlie and John have made because they have chosen connection to community and I think we should all make that choice, I just needed a better community to be connected to. While we exist as a resource to thousands of listeners scattered across the globe, I encourage you not to let this YouTube or iTunes channel be your only connection to a community of faith. Find your tribe, love your tribe, try to tolerate their faults and fables, but don’t every stop hoping for them to also become better. The church needs to abandon its history of dishonesty and embrace an honest approach to life. 

 

That’s what I am hoping for, and that is why I want to keep kicking at the darkness until it bleeds daylight.

 

Living Beyond Religious Guilt, Fear, and Manipulation

Living Beyond Religious Guilt, Fear, and Manipulation      June 20, 2021   

Dr. Roger Ray, pastor   Click here to see the video

We will hold a zoom meeting on Tuesday, June 22, at 7 pm central to discuss overcoming religious trauma. Please join us at:  https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88913510589?pwd=R21CRmdmM2MraDczL2dVVTFZODl5UT09

Paul-Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach (1723-1789):

If [God] is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future? If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? If grace does everything for them, what reason would he have for recompensing them? If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable? If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?

When the early 20^th century theologian, Paul Tillich, wrote in his systematic theology that “God does not exist,” he created a fire storm in the media and among modern churches. But Tillich was not declaring himself to be an atheist. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in God but he specifically did not believe in a supernatural theistic god who existed in time and space. God is not somewhere, in fact, God is not someone. I found it to be helpful to focus on his insistence that in order to understand the bigger God, you have to be willing to kill off the little god who gets in your way. 

 

God, as conceived in antiquity, was a person, an individual who had human like qualities, like emotions, but also had super powers and non-human qualities like immortality and invisibility. 

The primitive concepts of god, along with all of the complimentary angels and demons, heaven and hell, occupy so much space in culture that it is difficult to get a word in edgewise. If you are religious, you are expected to be religious in the terms of the prevailing culture. If you are religious in India, you are probably a Hindu. If you are religious in Iran, you are probably a Muslim, and if you are religious in Northern Ireland, you are probably a Catholic. 

 

These rigid constructs, I would argue, tend to extinguish sincere thought and most of sincere spirituality. If I am to be a person of faith here in the Midwest, I almost certainly have to be some flavor of Christian and I have to be that with fairly irrational beliefs in the primacy of the Bible, the eternal presence of Jesus, and to live in a certain anticipation of a very hazardous final judgement. 

 

But through the centuries we have examples of people who just refused to be fit into that narrow box but it has often been quite dangerous to be public about it. Even in ancient Greece, the birthplace of western civilization, philosophy and literature, many politicians, and probably most philosophers did not buy into the myths about the gods but they had to be careful because the charge of being “godless” or an atheist could turn the public against you.

 

In the fifth century before the common era, 2600 years ago, the Greek philosopher, Euripides, wrote these lines for a character in a play:

“Doth some one say that there be gods above?
There are not; no, there are not. Let no fool,
Led by the old false fable, thus deceive you.”

 

Early Greek philosophers often wrote in the form of dialogues or plays because, that way, they could put ideas into the mouths of their fictional characters without having to say these things themselves and suffer the consequences. 

 

Still, history and literature are littered with examples of people who just refused to be religious in a formal way because the claims of those rigid religious systems were based on very primitive and anthropomorphic views of the divine. And, when you are given a choice of either believing in this certain way or being a godless heathen, then, for many, being an atheist seems like the best option. 

 

In another play, Euripides suggests that someone very clever invented belief in god in order to frighten the people into living moral lives. That observation has echoed through the centuries because fear of divine judgement has been useful to both governments and to religions. I would like to think that most of us would like to be peaceful, considerate, compassionate, good people because it is better to be good than to be violent, dishonest, self-serving, and criminal but, you have to admit, religion has been needed as an incentive to be good people when you couldn’t rely on the inherent good instincts of people in general. 

The 18^th century French philosopher, Voltaire, famously observed that if God did not exist it would be necessary to invent him. Voltaire was obviously an atheist but he very wryly noted the social usefulness of a watchful and harshly judgmental god who would serve to keep society from falling into anarchy. 

Where fear of the police is not enough to control people’s more base instincts, we insert a fear of god. 

 

Tuesday evening, David and I are hosting an online conference on Zoom entitled, “Overcoming religious guilt and fear.” You will find the link to that at the top of our Emerging Church Face Book page if you cannot copy it from this text. 

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/88913510589?pwd=R21CRmdmM2MraDczL2dVVTFZODl5UT09

 

We discovered in the course of offering another online conference that very many people seemed to have an almost desperate need to talk about the way in which they had been traumatized by either religious leaders or the institution of religion itself. While, as Voltaire and Euripides noted that religion is used to frighten or manipulate people into behaving better, there are very many ways in which the plunge into that irrational way of thinking as also led people to into doing even worse things than they were trying to stop.

 

Obviously, especially for those of us who have grown up in predominantly Christian culture, there has been a lot of judgement about being homosexual or trans. Women have almost always been relegated to second class citizenship through religious insistence, and we have all heard nauseating accounts of the sexual exploitation of children under the auspices of religious authority. 

 

The media has talked about this primarily as a matter of pedophilia among Catholic priests but I assure you that it was not limited to Roman Catholics. In my own practice of pastoral counseling, I have talked to many people who were sexually exploited by ministers and church leaders in the Baptist Church, the Jehovah’s Witnesses, the Methodists, the Assemblies of God, and in my own mother church, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). Among the Disciples, the controversy went right to the top, hiding a 40 year long career of child abuse by a man who ended his career as the General Minister and President of the denomination, C. William Nichols, who went to his grave in 2012, still avoiding any legal consequences for a monstrous lifetime of sexual abuse of vulnerable victims. 

 

But, while all of these examples are horrible and they make for great movie plots and newspaper headlines, what I want to focus on in our conference on Tuesday evening is not these specific crimes and these particular criminals but more, I would like to talk about the big lie. Because, isn’t it obvious that telling children that if they think dirty thoughts or touch their private parts that they might spend eternity in a burning hell, that telling them that, century after century, telling literally billions of children about the tortures of hell, that’s child abuse. 

 

I don’t want to spend a lot of time defining venial sins verses mortal sins but, if you will allow me to say it, what is putting an immigrant child in a cage at the border for two months, compared to a trusted Sunday School teacher telling hundreds of little children that they are very likely to go to hell forever if they behave in ways that human beings cannot help to behave?

I don’t know who started the internet memes that suggest that we always should have been more afraid of the righteous who burned witches alive than we were afraid of witchcraft. 

To me, that is the big lie that has survived for centuries.

I took our wisdom lesson today from the writings of one of the founders of the 18^th century French enlightenment, a movement that in many ways gave birth to desires for liberty, equality, and freedom that found physical expression in the founding of the United States, Baron d'Holbach.

 

In those days before television, movies and the internet, people like Baron d’Holback would keep what was called a “salon.” A meeting room where people would come to entertain one another with intelligent conversation. A lot of publications arose from these public sharing of ideas, much as had been done in the open air meetings of philosophers in ancient Greece. They also got a lot of people in trouble for allowing them to think aloud about the claims of the Catholic Church and the absurdities of religious guilt and fear.

 

The Catholic Church fought hard to close these salons and to suppress the publications that came out of them. There was a time when simply owning one of Voltaire’s books could get you executed in France. But I found this quote because it had such an impact on the thinking of the British poet, Percy Shelly, who quoted Baron d'Holbach in an anonymous pamphlet he published as a young student at Oxford that got him expelled. Still, even without an Oxford degree, Shelly’s willingness to ask hard questions of obvious social lies made him a major influence on the later works of Karl Marx and Gandhi. 

 

My point today is that there are very many good reasons to strive to be a spiritual person, a good person, a compassionate person, but, I am afraid, institutional religion gets in the way of that goal, both through filling our minds with magic and superstition, and giving us very good reasons to find a therapist to try to overcome the poisoned reasoning religion leaves behind, even years after a victim has stopped going to church.

 

d’Holbach, line by line, knocks the foundations out from under traditional Protestant, Catholic and Orthodox Christianity just by saying the obvious:

If [God] is infinitely good, what reason should we have to fear him? 

If he is infinitely wise, why should we have doubts concerning our future?

 If he knows all, why warn him of our needs and fatigue him with our prayers? 

If he is everywhere, why erect temples to him? 

If he is just, why fear that he will punish the creatures that he has filled with weaknesses? 

If he is all-powerful, how offend him, how resist him? 

If he is reasonable, how can he be angry at the blind, to whom he has given the liberty of being unreasonable?

 If he is immovable, by what right do we pretend to make him change his decrees? If he is inconceivable, why occupy ourselves with him? 

IF HE HAS SPOKEN, WHY IS THE UNIVERSE NOT CONVINCED?

The revolutionaries of the French Enlightenment and the American movement that followed, were not satisfied with individual enlightenment and rejection of the mental prison that religion imposed, they wanted society to be free. 

I left grad school in the mid 1980’s with a skull full of theology and not enough smarts to really put it all together. I credit the insightful works of the famous M. Scott Peck, with making my formal education finally make real sense to me.

 

In his book, The Different Drum, Peck describes four stages of spiritual transformation, beginning with the chaos of early childhood, full of selfishness and fear, greed and an apparent unwillingness or, Peck suggests, an inability to care for others. Sadly, this is not just an affliction of childhood since many people persist in this state for their entire lives. Without being at all tongue in cheek about it, this is the kind of person we saw in our former president, Donald Trump, and in the kind of people who tried to overthrow the government on January 6^th when they stormed the Capitol Building. All fear and greed, without governing morals.

 

Most people are trained out of this stage with what Peck calls an institutional faith, something that has been found to be necessary, even in adamantly atheist countries like China and Russia, where veneration of the state itself forms the governing, controlling, force that religion is in most of the rest of the world. 

 

Again, I understand why this is done. We are literally using either religion or nationalism to tame the wild emotions of a chaotic child. Sadly, manipulation by fear is the biggest part of that. 

 

But, as Peck describes, the claims of institutional religion and nationalism fall apart when they are closely examined. The third stage of development, Peck calls “Skepticism” which can be horrifying to most people. If you have been trained to believe that things happen for a reason, that there is a god who is in control of the outcomes of life, and that in some afterlife, the deserving will be punished and the well behaved believers will be rewarded, and then you get to a place where you just don’t know anymore, you can’t be sure, and probably all of it is hogwash.

 

That, quite frankly, is what revivals are for. To bring skeptics back into the fold. That is why religious leaders can be so inflexible, to unbending in orthodox beliefs. They force people to stop questioning, to stop doubting, to stop being skeptical, and they try to fit them back into choir robes, and handbell choirs, and Sunday School lessons followed by really bad hymns and tedious rituals.

 

Again, most people don’t go back and those that do are never again fully convinced. Most church goers are nominal Christians at best because no one really likes fanatics. The goal is to be just religious enough to avoid the potential of hell while not really putting much stock in the gamble.

 

Most people either find themselves uncomfortably and largely unconvinced and yet tethered to traditional religion, or they give up on the project entirely, assuming that it is all just a bunch of hogwash. 

 

What Scott Peck was encouraging, what has kept me in the church and kept me preaching, writing, and teaching, is the hope of a fourth stage, a stage of spirituality on the other side of skepticism and doubt, a stage that is more defined by mystery, a holy wonder at the connectedness of the universe and of people. 

 

Peck argues that there are fourth stage spiritual leaders in all of the world’s religions: Christianity, Buddhism, Taoism, Islam, Judaism, and Hinduism, when people can come to accept doubt and uncertainty in doctrine in favor of a more experiential form of community, of loving other people, of striving to be a force for good without fear of judgment, and without a narcissistic need for eternal life.

 

Aldous Huxley called mysticism “the perennial philosophy” because it emerges in all cultures in all centuries among enlightened and liberated thinkers. Sadly, there is a whole spiritual industry that has grown up around using the word “mystery” to mean something that is simply devoid of facts and reason. That is the opposite of what I mean, what Peck, and Tillich, and Euripides meant. 

 

People reject institutional religion and embrace a set of beliefs that are even more toxic and stupid than the mental prison they just escaped. I am shocked by just how gullible most people turn out to be. 

 

What I am talking about is probably better described as being a sense of awe, of wonder, what Leander Keck called, allowing our souls to be astonished by both the sight of an unobscured night sky, or peering into either a microscope or a telescope. To bath in wonder that transcends understanding, and frees us from fear, guilt, and all forms of self-condemnation, and liberates us to forgive others, to believe in the potential in every person to become a good person, a person of sincere compassion and love. 

We don’t use religion the way an addict uses drugs, to escape reality and remove ourselves from others. We become spiritual in order to have a more firm grip on reality. To find spirituality in a deep dive into science and mathematics, into music and art, and in loving connections to others. 

 

We want to help people to overcome the trauma they have suffered at the hands of toxic religion and that requires some fairly aggressive confrontation of priests, bishops, popes, and pastors before we can break open the bars that keep people locked in irrational fear. And we don’t want to lose people in the darkness of hopelessness and skepticism. 

 

Like Plato’s allegory of the cave, it is our hope to be dismissive of lies, and to endure the initial blinding light of reality, to become a joyful and loving part of a profoundly connected universe in which happiness is not only possible, but it should be seen as a birthright for everyone.

 

You will not live forever, but you should live in joy in the life that you are given. That may be only my opinion, but you will not find it easy to prove me wrong.

Seeing the World Through the Lens of Racial Awareness

Seeing the World Through the Lens of Racial Awareness     June 13, 2021   

Roger Ray, pastor

click here to see the video

 

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

David Foster Wallace

https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/this-is-water

I was too young to fully appreciate my first introduction to the philosopher, Ludwig Von Wittgenstein. What I remember from this Austrian/British philosopher of mind was his insistence on perspective being determinative of reality. That is, a person who looks at a table from above the table is not seeing the same table as a person who is looking at the table from underneath. It was a hard sell on a 17-year-old college student, and it prompted my father to ask, “I’m paying for this?” But the older I get, the more that I realize that Wittgenstein was right. 

 

I am a white, American, male, heterosexual and though I have traveled over much of the world and have enjoyed a lot of educational and diverse social experiences, I cannot see the police through the eyes of a black mother whose sons are regularly pulled over and questioned for no apparent reason. I can’t speak to violence against trans folk the way that people within the trans community feel it. I grew up around people who claimed that white privilege didn’t exist because our lives were also very hard in lots of ways, and, as people would say, “I never owned a slaved, I never killed and Indian, and I’m not prejudiced.” 

 

And, it is true enough, that I am my white sys friends have never owned a slave, nor have will killed a Native American. And, in my case, it is also true that I didn’t inherit economic gain from my white family. To the contrary, I had to help them. But that doesn’t mean that I have not enjoyed white privilege and even that doesn’t mean that reverse discrimination does not exist. In specific cases there have been times when being a white male may have excluded me from some opportunities but that is because the white male quota has been filled up for a few centuries now.

 

Just like the fish in David Foster Wallace’s famous parable who have lived their entire lives in water but do not know that water exists or what water is, we live in a universe where absolutely everything that we know, we know from our own perspective. I have been an pastor for 43 years and I can tell you a lot about the abuses of church politics, the presumptions of sociopaths and con artists on church boards, but what I will never be able to feel is what it would be like to be a woman who never even got a chance to be hired to be the pastor of a church, no matter how smart, insightful, or well educated she was, because, in most of the world, churches hire men. I have complained loudly about a lot of toxic aspects of working for the church and have rarely paused to consider that there were tens of thousands of seminary educated women who would have loved to have had a chance to be in my shoes. . . even with a lot of toxic sociopath board meetings along the way.

 

You all know how much I love and adore my daughter, and, you locals have seen  the mutual admiration society the two of us enjoy. What we never saw was what that whole international adoption would have looked like from the prospective of the young woman in Korea who gave birth to her and likely had little choice in the matter of leaving the hospital without her on the day when she gave birth. My greatest life joy was the greatest source of pain to a woman whose name I have never even known. You see, Wittgenstein is right, both perspectives are true, even though they are entirely different. And the mere fact that thinking about Valerie’s birth mother makes me sad, uncomfortable, and has made me feel very guilty about my own good fortune, doesn’t change any of the facts.

 

I think that I am a fairly clever boy most of the time. But when David and I have our weekly meetings and we talk about the issues we feel compelled to write about, to talk about to you and to the world, sometimes, when we talk about matters of sexual orientation, of gay and trans rights, I can see a look on David’s face that let’s me know that there are some things that I just can’t see, and maybe never will.

 

I was fighting for gay rights before David was even aware of their own orientation but, even with longer tenure in the fight, there are things that I will never understand because, while I can be an advocate, I can’t see the table from the top side.

 

And we have both been members of the NAACP and have demonstrated with Black Lives Matter but there are times when we feel like we need to address a subject that is just so far outside of our experience that we have called upon persons of color to deliver that message. It is a part of our regular conversations, do we have the right to speak to certain issues, even to use certain music in our services? Are we wrong not to speak to these issues, but are we the right people to do it?

 

The Black Lives Matter movement, especially during the Trump administration’s overtly racist policies, has helped a lot of us to become awakened to how much racism has been a part the cultural water we have been swimming in all of our lives. 

But just look at the backlash we’re seeing from white folks who do not want Critical Race Theory taught in schools. You cannot rationally dispute the historical facts, but people will dismiss the facts because the facts make them feel uncomfortable. I am certain that many German kids are made to feel uncomfortable talking about the holocaust and Germany’s fascist history, however, their discomfort doesn’t keep Germany from teaching their students about a history they must understand to avoid repeating. Still, the resistance of right wing America to facts is something that certainly doesn’t surprise me. 

 

I have written nearly a thousand newspaper articles over the past many years but 

only one for the little paper in my hometown of Glasgow, KY. 

I have told about when I learned that the bronze statue to “Our Confederate Dead” still stood on the courthouse lawn in my hometown, I wrote an essay suggesting that it be moved to the Civil War era cemetery a couple of miles away from the courthouse so that it could be an appropriate tribute to those who died in the war and not a symbol of white supremacy at the seat of justice in the country where race should not be a factor. 

 

I had no idea that so many people in Glasgow read the newspaper, especially online, but within an hour of my article being posted, there were more than 75 angry responses, many of which told me that I was not welcome to ever visit my hometown again and a few assuring me that they would kill me on sight if I ever did come back. But there was one entry from a thoughtful black man who talked about having to walk by that monument daily when he was young and how sick it made him feel. 

 

Many who threatened me also took the time to assure me that they were not racist in the least but, what was clear, was that they were not able to see such monuments through the eyes of a black man living in the American south. Everyone else who penned an angry response was just certain that a Civil War memorial wasn’t racist, it is just that they had never been aware of the racism they swim in every day. We should understand that a fish that doesn’t know what water is, is not necessarily an evil fish, just an unaware fish. Our neighbors and family members who have refused to acknowledge that Civil War monuments are almost always a statement of white supremacy also doesn’t mean that they are inherently evil. Being wrong doesn’t make you evil. However, refusing to understand, refusing to grow, refusing to think critically, that is the gateway to being evil. 

 

All of us who have lost contact with family members and old friends during the Trump era, have expressed both moral shock and outrage at the racist sentiments either tacitly or directly supported by people we used to think had more sense, but the really breathtaking aspect of it all is that they sincerely do not see how racist Trump’s policies and tweets really were.

 

For most of us, white privilege is exactly like a fish swimming in water. It is so much a part of us, of our cultural assumptions, our ways of speaking that become our decisions about who to hire, to whom you will rent an apartment, and, now, what we will allow to be taught in our schools. 

 

It may be an indisputable historical fact that white European settlers stole the wealth of natural resources and land of North America through a genocide of tens of millions of Native Americans, developed the wealth of the nation through African slavery, and expanded our boarders through pathological land theft from Latin Americans, but the truth of these things does not mean that this generation of white people want their children to learn honest history because it implies that somehow we did not earn our place in society fairly. The mere fact that we did not earn it fairly is immaterial. It makes the “Karens” of the world uncomfortable and so we are not supposed to say it.

 

I don’t know what all of the necessary elements of ending racism in America are, but this one thing I am certain of, not being willing to tolerate the teaching of historical facts is going to prevent progress in one generation after another. I think that we are at a unique time in history when a number of things have worked together to heighten our awareness of how race has been a factor in every aspect of the building of our modern society. 

 

The advent of cameras in cell phones has alone made it possible for the public to see the real events behind the police’s polished propaganda about police killings. 

The whole of the Black Lives Matter movement has brought articulate leaders to the front of a movement to educate America. Still, very sadly, it is entirely possible that we could let this opportunity slip through our fingers. 

A decade ago, the Occupy Wall Street movement came into being as a response to the way that the government bailed out banks in the 2008 financial crisis rather than bailing out homeowners and wage earners. They were sounding the right notes, they were occupying the moral high ground, but somehow, it all fell apart. Maybe because they didn’t have visible leadership but more likely, it was just because the winter came early that fall and the protestors lost the will to continue to fight for their public camps.

 

As my British friend, John Churcher, observed: Great Britain will never have another revolution because it rains too often. With all of the media coverage of police killings and the progress made in electing people of color, and the naked power grab behind voter suppression moves being made in Republican legislatures, we really must not let this moment pass.

 

This is no time for weak liberalism. It is not enough to simply “not be a racist.” 

We have to figure out how to meaningfully be anti-racist. That does not mean that white liberals need to posture themselves as saviors of down-trodden American blacks, but folks, it isn’t like racism was the brainchild of black and brown people. Racism is, primarily, a white disease. We are not called to cheer from the sidelines, we are in control of the ball on the field. 

 

White people invented racism, defended it, sustained it, and passed it along to generation after generation. So, reading books by prominent black authors, listening to historians and sociologists as they expose the role that race has played in wealth disparity, inequitable prison sentences, police violence, hiring discrimination and roadblocks to higher education, that is part of being anti-racist. So, yes, Critical Race Theory needs to be taught in schools, but I am not sure that it needs such an unusual title because all we are talking about is offering honest history classes. Less fiction, and more facts . . . which wouldn’t hurt religion and politics either. 

 

And I need to say this to you, my closest friends and allies, we must never underestimate the power in changing the way that we and our peers think. American democracy, liberty, freedom, equality, does not exist as an external fact. Christopher Columbus didn’t land in the New World and report to his European backers that he had discovered democracy, liberty, freedom, and equality. These things to not exist in physical form, they are ideas, perfected in critical thought.

 

Irrational prejudice against gay, lesbian, and trans folk has been a part of Western civilization for centuries but it only began to change when the majority of people started to change the way they think. The reality for minority people in the world improves through better education and awareness, not on the part of the minority people but on the part of the majority who are the ones doing the oppressing.

 

Consider the matter of the XL pipeline through the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. Huge international investment was behind it . . . Obama was nervous about it but didn’t make definitive decisions. Trump gave it the green light and pushed for its completion. Years of protests, in which most of us have played a part, has finally ended this stupid, ecologically and morally corrupt project. We have won. It took years and a lot of sacrifice, and some real leaders are still in prison for what they did, but, as Martin Luther King, Jr. said, the arc of history is long but it bends towards justice. 

 

You need only consider our current predicament with the pandemic. Safe, effective vaccines are available to everyone now but more than half of our neighbors have refused to be vaccinated. The city recently withdrew all covid restrictions about masks and distance and almost immediately the hospitalizations of covid patients has tripled. I have only been back in the USA for a day but my trips into public have looked like it was 2019, no masks to be seen anywhere. This is a perfect example of how refusing to believe the truth, insisting upon believing untruths, will result in death and permanent disability for many. How we think shapes how we live. It is that simple. 

 

Compassion leads us to take care of those who are sick, as well as those who are victims of racism and other kinds of prejudice. But our faith, our spirituality, inspires us to help people to stay healthy, to avoid the stinking thinking that leads to wealth disparity, racism, prejudice, and ignorance. We are to be, first and foremost, a prophetic community . . . a real danger to ignorance . . . and a source for the kind of thinking that can make the world a better place. Have courage. Believe what is true. Reject what is false. Question everything. . . especially authority. 

Overcoming Religious Trauma

click here to see the video

David “Katya” Ketchum

June 6, 2021

 

My Own Path 

 

         Several years ago, I was in a small group at an ecumenical Franciscan retreat. We were sharing about our personal journeys, grieving the difficult and celebrating the beautiful ways our lives had unfolded.  It happened that I was the only person in the group that grew up in a conservative church, and so, when my turn came around, they had questions. It is not a conversation I have often, but it wasn’t uncomfortable, and I shared freely. It was only about halfway through their questions that I realized that the group had become increasingly quiet, and that some of their jaws had almost reached the floor. I was confused, because I was not sharing anything unusual for people who grew up in my religious community. I knew I was not sharing happy stories, but I didn’t expect them to be shocking. My friends had expected the gender and sexuality antagonism, the casual hate for anyone who is not straight; they had expected the sexual repression, complete with purity rings and accompanying guilt; they had even expected the anti-evolution tirades and dismissal of basic science. But they were not prepared for how thoroughly we were taught to hate ourselves as young children, or how we were trained to go through life making decisions based on fear of eternal torment. 

 

         I first noticed the shocked looks on their faces about halfway through a story about how my childhood pastor would gather the little children from time to time to teach a special lesson. He had big, square cut nails that he would pass around, asking us to push those nails into the palms of our hands and feel how sharp they were. Then he passed around a crown woven from young branches of a locust tree, with its two inch thorns. Again, we were asked to touch them and feel the pain. We were specifically told to imagine how much Jesus suffered when he was nailed to the cross, bleeding and suffocating to death. But this was all just building up to the real point, when we were reminded that Jesus had to suffer all this because of how sinful I was. In fact, even if everyone else on earth had been perfect, Jesus would have still had to die on the cross to pay for my sins. There was not much of a line between “Jesus died for your sins” and “you killed Jesus.” Admittedly, some kids just thought it was cool to play with replicas of devices of torture at church. But for some of us, these memories were seared onto our minds. 

 

         I was a little child, and I had not had much chance to do anything sinful. But this message was pounded into our brains from the earliest ages and then recalled at every opportunity. Primed in this way, it was not difficult to convince me, for example, that being a genderqueer and bisexual person was evil. I had been trained to believe I was evil for as long as I could remember; growing up just meant they could begin to fill in the blanks from their list of sins. And when I say “they,” I mean anyone who could present themselves as a religious authority, and who usually wanted to influence or control my behavior. That was a toxic combination. Since their authority was blessed by an omnipotent god, it was difficult to doubt, let alone resist, an adult who towered over you, especially when a wrathful god backed them up. We are usually reassured that the people who did this did not have any ill intent. Yet even if true, it does not change the reality of the harm.

 

         Perhaps they really believed that convincing us we were evil was a small price to pay if it brought about a conversion experience. After all, it worked. I was baptized when I was six years old, grateful to wash all the evil out of my tiny little heart. But that was only the beginning, and the control extended well beyond getting me to be baptized or to volunteer at Vacation Bible School. For example, during middle school I became interested in studying medicine, which developed into a curiosity about biochemistry by my sophomore year. About this same time, our church youth group attended a summer camp that was literally called “Spiritual Boot Camp.” Not only did people put cornflakes and toothpaste in the toes of my tennis shoes, but also the random adult assigned as my small group leader went to great lengths to explain to me that god had given me great gifts, that studying medicine or biochemistry would waste those gifts, and that I would be worshiping Satan if I pursued scientific studies. Instead, I should become a minister. 

 

         It wasn’t the first, or the last, time I would be pressured in that way. I resisted as best as I could, but I was groomed for the manipulation. Like for so many others, I was also experiencing abuse in other ways. It felt complicated, because religion exacerbated those harms while also giving me a few tools to cope with the wounds. Giving in seemed like a small price to pay to avoid eternal damnation. So instead of learning what should have been basic life skills as a child - to recognize harm, set boundaries, heal where healing was needed, and act on behalf of my own well-being, I learned to repress my feelings, doubts, gender and sexuality, and grief and rage at injustice and oppression. I learned to perform and conform to expectations, while generally hiding the hurts. After all, drawing attention to the unhealed psychological wounds would just bring more judgment; it wasn’t safe to need help. As a result, unlearning those bad habits, and learning healthy habits, took up a bigger part of my life, culminating in finally being able to leave my childhood denomination back in 2007, when I was over thirty years old. 

 

         I’m a private person, and I am only sharing these glimpses into my life because so many people are still suffering from the pain of religious abuse and trauma. I am not trying to say anything new today, because the concept of religious and spiritual abuse is not new. But many people trapped inside abusive institutions still do not have access to information, resources, and healing that could make a tremendous difference in their lives. And it is not an exaggeration to say that helping one another better understand these issues saves lives. From the wife who is convinced to stay with a violent husband in order to witness to him and “save his soul,” to the gay teen who dies by suicide because he was taught that he was evil, religious and spiritual abuse is deadly. To keep moving forward, we need to keep pursuing ways that prevent abuse, heal it whenever it tragically occurs, and create communities that are instead oriented around reason, curiosity, compassion, and wisdom. 

 

Religious Trauma Syndrome

 

         While the need may be obvious, the tools are still in development. The research has been more limited than you might expect, but both researchers and practitioners have made progress. In 2012, Dr. Marlene Winell first described “religious trauma syndrome (RTS),” which grew out of several existing psychological models, such as Post-traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), Complex PTSD, Shattered Assumptions Theory, and Betrayal Trauma Theory. A key concept in the model is “toxic religious experiences.” The first component of these experiences is toxic teachings, especially “inherent depravity and violent punishment” - 

 

“In fundamentalist Christianity, these would be doctrines of original sin and hellfire.  I call these the horror and the terror.  Basically, toxic religions and toxic Christianity in particular teach people two core messages: “You are not okay” and “You are not safe.” … These are the core assumptions that former believers can potentially carry for decades beyond giving up their religion.  They are ideas that are deep and unconscious out of sheer repetition and childhood indoctrination.” (https://journeyfree.org/rts-an-historical-overview-cort-talk/ )

 

         The second component is toxic practices, how the teachings are both taught and enforced in religious institutions, churches, schools, and relationships, including “isolating children from the larger world,” “limiting their information,” and using corporal punishment. (ibid) In my experience, one of the main practices was that we were rewarded with acceptance for professing certain beliefs and threatened with rejection if we did not. We were trained to believe that we did not deserve to be loved, that we were utterly evil, and that we deserved to go to hell. With that horror and terror fresh in our minds, we were then told that we could experience god’s love if we only acknowledged how evil we were and promised to conform to some very particular commandments. Both the church’s and god’s approval were at stake. If we failed, we could be forgiven, because forgiveness in this mode didn’t disrupt the system. In the practice of confessing our sins, we were also confirming the teachings that “You are not okay” and “You are not safe.”  

 

         This was a clever and powerful trap, and fertile ground for religious trauma. Dr. Minwell described the causes of RTS in four ways: 

 

“• Suppression of normal child development – cognitive, social, emotional, moral stages are arrested

• Damage to normal thinking and feeling abilities -information is limited and controlled; dysfunctional beliefs taught; independent thinking condemned; feelings condemned

• External locus of control – knowledge is revealed, not discovered; hierarchy of authority enforced; self not a reliable or good source

• Physical and sexual abuse – patriarchal power; unhealthy sexual views; punishment used as for discipline” (https://journeyfree.org/rts/ )

 

         If you are an outsider, it’s easy to believe these causes are unusual, and that people like me must have grown up in some obscure Christian cult. In fact, it was the opposite. I grew up in a church that belonged to the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention. I don’t believe that the Southern Baptist tradition is particularly unique in the harm it caused – and causes - in my and so many other lives. And I’m not trying to single out this one tradition; I’m sharing about it because it is the tradition I experienced firsthand. But since I am going to be critical, I’m also going to stick close to the public record, using two examples of how abuse of authority, coercion, and deceit can become part of a religious institutions’ culture and practice: namely, racism and sexual abuse. 

 

A Horrifying Beginning

 

         Though other issues were involved, the Southern Baptist Convention began in 1845 as an institutional response to justify slavery and protect those who profited from enslaving and exploiting human beings. Many Baptist leaders in the South were already prolific apologists for slavery and White supremacy, a trend that only deepened after the split with northern Baptists. (http://civilwarbaptists.com/featured/slavery/ ) Richard Furman, who was instrumental in consolidating southern Baptists and served as president of the South Carolina State Baptist Convention, is one example. On Christmas Eve of 1822, Furman earnestly wrote to the governor of South Carolina: 

 

“the advocates for emancipation blend the ideas of injustice and cruelty with those, which respect the existence of slavery, and consider them as inseparable. But, surely, they may be separated. A bond-servant may be treated with justice and humanity as a servant; and a master may, in an important sense, be the guardian and even father of his slaves.” (http://history.furman.edu/~benson/docs/rcd-fmn1.htm )

 

         The Southern Baptist Convention was born from this horrifying delusion, believing that one could justifiably and even morally engage in a blatantly immoral, cruel, violent, and dehumanizing system of oppression for economic gain. Moreover, the denomination did not officially apologize for its support of slavery until 1995, when they finally acknowledged: 

 

“Our relationship to African-Americans has been hindered from the beginning by the role that slavery played in the formation of the Southern Baptist Convention … Many of our … forbears defended the right to own slaves, and either participated in, supported, or acquiesced in the particularly inhumane nature of American slavery … In later years Southern Baptists failed, in many cases, to support, and in some cases opposed, legitimate initiatives to secure the civil rights of African-Americans … .” (https://www.sbc.net/resource-library/resolutions/resolution-on-racial-reconciliation-on-the-150th-anniversary-of-the-southern-baptist-convention/ )

 

         Despite the overture, a convention resolution could not magically erase 150 years of injustice, heal lives and broken relationships, and transform attitudes, habits, and institutions. In fact, the SBC and its member churches continue to struggle with racism and its harm. Paul Harvey, professor of history at the University of Colorado, pointed this out in response to a 2018 report on slavery and racism (https://www.sbts.edu/southern-project/ ):  

 

“The Southern Baptist Seminary, and by extension the denomination leaders, they did a very good job reckoning with the past, and a not-so-good job reckoning with the present.” (https://www.nbcnews.com/news/nbcblk/southern-baptist-report-slavery-ties-includes-no-reflection-racial-equality-n948396 )

 

         As if to prove Harvey’s point, the SBC Council of Seminary Presidents made a statement in November 2020 that, while they oppose racism, “Critical Race Theory, Intersectionality, and any version of Critical Theory is incompatible with the Baptist Faith & Message.” (https://www.baptistpress.com/resource-library/news/seminary-presidents-reaffirm-bfm-declare-crt-incompatible/ ) In other words, you shouldn’t teach critical theory at any Southern Baptist seminary, and the strong implication is that no Southern Baptist should study, be influenced by, or use these critical tools. This is simply terrible. Critical race theory has been around since at least the 1970s, but has only recently attracted the attention of – and resistance from - many White people, which tells us a lot about how poorly most of us White people are at listening to anyone who doesn’t prop up our White privilege. At least two Black pastors, Charlie Dates of Chicago’s Progressive Baptist Church and Ralph D. West of Houston’s The Church Without Walls, got the message, though, and withdrew their large churches from the SBC. As Dr. Dates asked, “How did they, who in 2020 still don’t have a single Black denominational entity head, reject once and for all a theory that helps to frame the real race problems we face?” (https://www.christianitytoday.com/news/2020/december/charlie-dates-ralph-west-southern-baptist-sbc-crt.html )

 

“The Abusers Haven’t Stopped”

 

         It’s no secret that cultural and institutional injustice supports an atmosphere where other kinds of abuse can thrive. This is most easily seen in the ongoing struggle in Southern Baptist churches and institutions to overlook, hide, and sometimes even protect sexual abusers. The Houston Chronicle published a six part series in 2019 on just this situation. The first installment, by Robert Downen, Lise Olsen, and John Tedesco, ran the following headline: “Abuse of Faith: 20 years, 700 victims: Southern Baptist sexual abuse spreads as leaders resist reforms.” (https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/investigations/article/Southern-Baptist-sexual-abuse-spreads-as-leaders-13588038.php ) Together with investigators from the San Antonio Express-News, they found that:

 

·      since 1998, “roughly 380 Southern Baptist church leaders and volunteers have faced allegations of sexual misconduct”.  

·      Of the more than 700 victims, many were further abused by the response of their churches and communities, including being shunned, “urged to forgive their abusers,” and “get abortions.” Many of the victims were children, mostly adolescents but some as young as three. 

·      Although cases are still pending, more than 200 offenders were convicted or took a plea deal. These were church leaders and volunteers, from pastors to youth ministers to Sunday school teachers.  

·      “At least 35 church pastors, employees and volunteers who exhibited predatory behavior were still able to find jobs at churches during the past two decades.” Incredibly, one registered sex offender went on to become “the principal officer of a Houston nonprofit that works with student organizations … [called] Touching the Future Today Inc.” 

·      The failure to protect victims was widespread and institutional. Criticisms by victims “for concealing or mishandling abuse complaints” included “Several past presidents and prominent leaders of the Southern Baptist Convention”. (ibid) 

         

         All of this is part of the Southern Baptist Convention’s patriarchal culture. As Susan Shaw observed in her article on how “Southern Baptist Beliefs about Gender and Power Contributed to the Sexual Abuse Scandal”- 

 

“… Baptist beliefs about repentance and forgiveness make restitution for sexual abuse unnecessary. If a perpetrator claims he has repented, that confession is adequate for forgiveness by God, the church, and the male leadership of the denomination. No consequences are necessary, and, certainly, no recompense to the survivor is required. / To take abuse seriously and to take action would challenge Southern Baptist male power.” (https://berkleycenter.georgetown.edu/responses/southern-baptist-beliefs-about-gender-and-power-contributed-to-the-sexual-abuse-scandal )

 

         This patriarchalism connects with many expressions of abuse, including the abuse that gender and sexual minorities typically experience in religious contexts (https://www.welcomingpath.com/2018/10/faith-communities-trans-demands.html ). With so much work to be done on so many different levels, it is easy to be overwhelmed. This is yet another way that abusive systems insulate themselves against change: it takes intentional, hard work to root it all out. 

 

Your Healing Is Sacred 

 

         But I have also found another common obstacle, and that is the appearance of goodness. The Southern Baptist Convention and its member churches and institutions are made up of what would generally be called good, upstanding people. This makes it possible for religious and spiritual abuse, like so many other types of abuse, to be easily hidden in plain sight. The SBC proved that an organization can find ways to justify and even celebrate abuse as egregious as slavery. The SBC proved that an organization can preach a purity culture that props up patriarchalism while simultaneously hiding a horrendous pattern of sexual abuse. These widespread systems of harm are enmeshed in doctrines that teach people that they are inherently evil and worthy of eternal torment in hell. The only escape is to accept and act in conformity with beliefs that are immune to scientific inquiry and ethical accountability. Otherwise, they are not okay and that they are not safe. 

 

         As I mentioned earlier, I don’t think the Southern Baptist tradition is particularly unique in the harm it caused – and causes - in my and so many other lives. And I could throw out the usual caveats that there are a lot of Very Good People™ who belong to Southern Baptist churches. But it is easy to use this kind of thinking to tolerate and ignore religious abuse. Instead, we need to ask, and keep asking, the Very Good People in our lives what they are doing to change the communities, churches, institutions, and cultures that harm so many people. And, if they are not working for change, we need to ask them why they are still associated with abusive institutions. Because, when a good person learns that someone is using a position of authority to harm others, they don’t look the other way. They stop the harm. 

 

   We all, but especially those of us who still belong to faith communities, have a responsibility to bring religious and spiritual abuse to an end, to do everything we can to provide resources for healing, and to demand accountability and change for our institutions and leaders. It is easy to want to shy away from this work, especially when religious institutions are already in decline. That can never be an excuse. If an institution can’t survive without tolerating or protecting abuse, then it should not survive. Instead, we will continue to reclaim our dignity: your voice is important, your needs are valid, and your healing is sacred. You deserve to live free from the gnawing fear of condemnation and eternal torture. You deserve to be able to love yourself and your body. You deserve to know and express love in community without being coerced. You deserve to feel and be safe, and to belong to a community that is not built around delusions and threats, but around reason, curiosity, wisdom, compassion, and love. And I’m grateful to each of you who are committed to this vision, and who work together to make it real.