Creating Spiritual Community in a Post-Pandemic World

Creating Spiritual Community in a Post-Pandemic World   September 24, 2023

Dr. Roger L. Ray     

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It has been my good fortune, for the past 30 years, to have enjoyed a close friendship with Dr. Charles Hedrick, the now retired religion professor at our local state university. And, for the last decade of his life, I enjoyed the friendship of the late Bishop John Shelby Spong. They were both founding members of the Jesus Seminar. They were both highly published in their own lanes…. Charlie is an academic and therefore he wrote a lot of books that not very many people have ever read, and John was a man of the church, not as deeply immerse in the weeds of the ivory tower as our mutual friend, Dr. Hedrick, but his books were very popular and made him famous.

 

Charlie had grown up in the Southern Baptist Church, and in spite of his path in academics that led him to doubt the beliefs he had grown up with and then, finally, to entirely repudiate them. A lot of traditional religious people tend to call progressives “atheists with rituals,” and that moniker may actually fit Charlie. He was certainly not a theist but to this day, he rarely misses a Sunday morning in his Southern Baptist Church. For many years, I and several of his other academic friends, just couldn’t understand why he kept subjecting himself to that backwards, anti-academic, superstitious religious balloon juice. Charlie’s patient reply was consistent, he just said, “I go because my people are there.”

 

It frustrated me, because they didn’t treat him well. After he had said some rather shocking things about the Bible and the historical Jesus, they would no longer allow him to teach his Sunday School Class. 

A few years later, they actually added the restriction that he could no longer ask questions in the class. They allowed him to attend but during the class, he had to sit there quietly. I think that I may have cursed a bit when he told me about that. But somehow, those people were his tribe. They didn’t read his books. They didn’t honor his many academic accomplishments, and they didn’t show him the respect that he richly deserved, but, he had grown up Southern Baptist. He had, at one time, shared in their beliefs, and the mere fact that he had grown far past that simple childish faith did not mean that he did not still love them, even when they didn’t appear to love him back. Charlie is now quite elderly, his wife has died, and his own health is fragile, but he still goes, almost every week, to his Baptist Church.

 

A few years ago, Bishop Spong was having dinner with me in my home, and Charlie’s name came up, and John asked me, “Does Charlie still go to a Baptist Church?”  And when I replied in the affirmative, Bishop Spong just shook his head and said, “I just don’t get it.”

 

But, of course, Bishop Spong continued to attend an Episcopal Church all of his life. And it isn’t like they were carrying him around on their shoulders either! We had John here to give us a series of lectures in three different years and even though he is the most famous Episcopal Bishop in the United States and we have more than a dozen local Episcopal Churches here in town, not a single Episcopal priest ever attended or acknowledged his presence. 

 

I screwed up the courage to ask John why he still attended the Episcopal Church and his reply was almost identical to Charlie’s. These were his people, this was his tradition, the hymns and the liturgy was his native tongue. 

And I pressed him, “when you participate in a baptism in the Episcopal Church, do you ask the parents if they renounce the wiles of Satan?” And he replied, a bit defensively, that even though he does not believe in Satan, nor did he believe that baptism actually carried the salvific weight he once believed that it did, these were the rituals and the language of his tradition and he was committed to it. They remained committed to the faith community of their roots . . . I certainly didn’t and, in fact, I don’t think that I even could have. 

 

The Episcopal Church is certainly less offensive to me than the homophobic, misogynistic Baptist Church, but, still, why lend credence to that mythology by sitting there in a pew, appearing to endorse what is being said. But they did, Charlie still does, and I don’t, and I am not at all certain that I am right about this because we need community. 

 

I don’t agree with going along with bad theology, just reinterpreting it inside of your own head. But there have been generations of female religious scholars who have continued to attend, volunteer in, and donate to Catholic Churches, Assemblies of God Churches, Mormon and Churches of Christ. And, of course, the Catholic Church still does not affirm homosexuality so tens of thousands of gay priests have to feign loyalty to a church that does not even fully acknowledge who they really are. 

 

In spite of how many mega-churches have appeared and how big church buildings are in most of our cities, actual church attendance has been going down for 50 years. But then, there was the pandemic of 2020. Churches were asked not to hold services and when we did, we were not supposed to sing anymore and I and many others preached from behind plexiglass for a while. 

Early in 2020, the numbers of our online viewers actually grew but something started happening to us and to most other churches. 

A Pew study conducted in March of this year showed that actual attendance is down only about 10% but older evangelicals have not slowed their attendance at all. More progressive churches, especially those of us on the far left in Unitarian and Humanist congregations have fallen off the cliff and young adults report no longer seeing the point in it. 

 

For centuries, the largest part of society has, at least to some degree, accepted that they would one day be judged by a supernatural theistic God, and that they would continue to exist for eternity, either in torment or in reward for their piety. While that kind of belief system still exists, it is losing its grip on people and so, what is the point of still having a church? 

 

If church attendance was predicated on believing that I had an imaginary friend in the clouds who was in charge of what happens in the world, I would have left the church in 1980 when Ronald Regan was elected. I have a brother who says that he quit going after 9-11 when it seemed to him that religion was just more toxic than it was helpful. 

 

But church for me has always been about community. It was in church that I was met with moral challenge and opportunities to join together with like minded people to serve the poor and victims of disasters, refugees from wars, and the victims of discrimination. 

I have always had tons of reasons for wanting to be in church that had nothing to do with either fear of hell or lust for heaven but what I could get in church that I couldn’t get anywhere else, was connection to other people.

 

I grew up in a fairly progressive church, absolutely left-wing liberals for my “old Kentucky home.” But my home life was not exactly warm and nurturing. It wasn’t abusive either, especially not by 1950’s standards. We had plenty of food, a warm bed, and clean clothes, there just wasn’t much joy and affection was as rare as hen’s teeth. The church was where I had more of a family connection. If my parents were literate you couldn’t tell it by watching them read books! 

 

But in church I met educated people. Our pastor was a Vanderbilt grad, we had doctors and lawyers in the church who had gone to Harvard and Princeton. And when I went to college, I fell into a campus ministry that was exciting, loving and amazing. It was the first time in my life that I really felt like I was accepted, cared for, and included. It was intoxicating and addicting.

 

Sadly, I thought that if I became a minister that I would experience that kind of love and acceptance every day for the rest of my life. That didn’t turn out to be true. But there were moments, and I was determined to create more and more moments like that. But the priority of attending religious services was declining before the pandemic and after the pandemic, many people just don’t feel the need for church, not specifically for a church, and yet, loneliness is often said to be the most common form of suffering in the world. Suicides have increased dramatically. 

We still need the community that churches once provided but we have become suspicious of church as being the place to go get it. 

 

My daughter, who is very much like me in so many ways, gave up on church as soon as she could. She doesn’t hate it and she has respected my work, she just doesn’t want what church involves. But she has an enviable tribe of close friends and they travel the globe to spend time together. Now that they are in their 30’s, they are getting married and having children, and I wonder if the bonds that have kept them together since middle school with continue to hold, but there is love there, and the things that the church claimed to offer . . . forgiveness, second chances, support in hard times, friendship, and sincere love. If we could bottle her life and market it to the world, we wouldn’t be able to meet the demand.

 

But we don’t all have that and most of us can’t even get pieces of it when we try. In a few months I, and this recording studio, will be moving to a little town in south-east Florida, and I just posted in a neighborhood chat, asking if there were other scuba divers in my new community, and I was bombarded by invitations to go diving, to get together for lunch or for coffee. The welcome has been so warm that I have been coaching myself to give up writing letters to the editor because I doubt that my welcome would be so enthusiastic if they knew what I thought of their governor and most of their legislature, but scuba diving…. We can agree on spending time under water with pretty fish. 

 

Most of the churches that used to invite me to come and preach have been hit hard by the decline in attendance and donations. There was one in Florida where I used to go once or twice a year and they no longer meet as a church, but the members continue to get together for a shared meal and conversation. One of those church members said, and we find that we are still getting what we really loved about church. I wish that I could be a part of that group to see just how deep their conversations go. 

In my new setting, as much a I love scuba diving, I know that talking about diving won’t feed my spirit. I will have to find or create a peer group of people who can have serious conversations about what is actually meaningful in life and not just entertaining. 

 

I understand that the world is changing, just like in the death of printed newspapers, people have turned to twitter and Face Book to get their news and, forgive me, but, that is a poor replacement. I will enjoy meeting new people to go scuba diving with, and I am sure that I will meet people at the health club, and I may join a book club or two. 

 

But I will tell you this: it was in church that I learned to give up both my racial prejudice and my judgement of homosexuals that I had been spoon fed in my family of origin. It was in church that my values around illegal wars, immigration, poverty, labor unions, and fair housing were formed. Church is where I met the people that I could go with to recover the homes of innocent people that were destroyed in a hurricane or a tornado. And it was in church where I first felt that my birth wasn’t just an unfortunate accident and that I was worthy of love and acceptance. And I don’t want any version of twitter style replacement for that.

 

My friends, John Spong and Charles Hedrick, may have been right to stay in close contact with their spiritual roots, even when they no longer shared any beliefs with that community. I still couldn’t do it. But I know that we were too quick to give up on newspapers, and local retail stores, and family owned restaurants, and those examples are nothing compared to living in a world where we cannot find a spiritual community. 

 

So, I encourage you to suspend judgement where you can. Lower the ego driven expectations that everyone will immediately see things as you do. Be patient with those who will still talk to you and try to do what nurtures community and avoid doing what tears it apart. 

 

There have been lots of problems with the way that churches have gone about being churches but before we give up on them, let’s see if we can put more love, and friendship, and forgiveness, and moral challenge into them, and see if we can save some of them.

 

“We Can’t All Be Above Average”

“We Can’t All Be Above Average”       Sept. 10, 2023    Dr. Roger Ray

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I suspect that I
am not alone among our listeners when I say that during the 1980’s I was a huge fan of Garrison Keillor’s radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. It featured a segment each week called, “The News from Lake Wobegon,” a fictional Minnesota town he always described as being “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”

 

The tongue in cheek description of this fictional town spawned a label in psychological circles called “The Lake Wobegon Effect” to describe how often people overestimate their intelligence, or their looks, or their importance. Obviously, no one wants to be below average, right? You might prefer to say that you are not good at spelling, or math, or foreign languages, but you would never want to explain a subpar school performance by just saying, “I’m below average.” 

 

However, just going by the definition of the word, half of all people are below average. If there are 100 students in a class, 49 of them are below average… that’s what the word means. Still, every time I have had a student who tried to tell me, “Dr. Ray, I’m just not smart enough to understand this assignment,” I will do verbal gymnastics assuring them that they are just as smart as anyone else in the class, all the while fighting with the voice in my head that was saying, “You know, some people just are not college material.” 

 

Still, the people who are willing to just honestly say, “I’m just not that smart,” are in the smallest group of people. Most people who really just are not that smart will more often think that they are uniquely gifted and significantly more intelligent than almost everyone else. They are the ones who talk the most about having “common sense.” When they say it, they mean that highly educated experts are somehow deceived, mislead, by their education and that what they know is of less value than this exulted “common sense.” 

 

The term for this is now called the Dunning-Kruger effect. People of low competence often believe themselves to be much more competent than they are because they don’t know enough to be aware of just how incompetent that they are. In fact, the most incompetent people often have more confidence in their knowledge and skill in an area than an actual expert has because the expert knows enough about a topic to know how much more there is to know. 

 

This really doesn’t have anything to do with innate ability. I have a degree in philosophy, a masters and a doctorate in pastoral counseling, and a post doc focused on ethics and public policy. However, when my transmission went out on my car recently, I didn’t even know how to check the transmission fluid. I am a total novice when it comes to how a car works and so I turned it over to a guy at a transmission shop… not to say that he is more above average than I am, but to just acknowledge that rebuilding a transmission is not something I know how to do, and I am not going to pretend that I do. 

 

However, when it comes to something like the Covid-19 virus, we saw the Dunning Kruger effect everywhere we turned. By April of 2020, everyone you met in the grocery store aisle was a virologist. Hardly any of them would even begin to rebuild their own transmission, which would be much easier to do than to earn a PhD in virology, but with just a few news reports and maybe looking at a couple of social media posts, a whole lot of people thought they knew more than Anthony Fauci.

As I was waiting to board an international flight during the height of the pandemic, I got to overhear a heated argument with between an airline employee and a self-appointed virologist. The irritated man was refusing to wear a mask because, he insisted, they made no difference. He explained, a virus is so small that it can pass through the fabric of a mask like a gnat flying through a chicken wire fence. 

 

I’m sure that most of you heard such things many times in the first couple of years of the pandemic. When everyone had calmed down and the gentleman was wearing a mask so that he could board the plane, airline regulations, I gently tried to engage him in conversation, explaining that even though the virus is so small that it could easily pass through any kind of mask, the good news is that viruses don’t have legs or wings. A respiratory virus travels in droplets of water that we exhale. The droplets might be carrying thousands of viruses but, thankfully, the mask would stop most of the vapor droplets that carry them. 

 

It's obvious, isn’t it? Viruses don’t have legs and they don’t have wings and so they have to be spread through some vehicle, right? Now, here is the hard part, after hearing my amateur virus lesson, he looked at me and said, “Masks don’t help.” 

And that gets us to the larger problem of the Dunning Krueger effect. He could acknowledge that viruses don’t have legs or wings, what he could not acknowledge that what he wanted to believe was wrong. 

 

That gets at the larger problem that we have in our society today. People will believe what they know is not true because they prefer to believe the lie rather than to face the truth. 

 

Now, if this low-information virologist and I found ourselves aloft in the commercial airplane when, God forbid, both the pilot and co-pilot became deathly ill with the Coronavirus that flew right through their masks, would he prefer that I, a licensed private pilot, take over the controls, or would he insist that he be allowed to fly the plane, assuming that he knew as much about flying as he did about Covid-19?

Now, as a private pilot, I have a few weeks of training. I have owned a single engine Cessna and, when my friend recently gave me this t-shirt that identifies me as being the “world’s okayest pilot” I said to him that I had walked away from every one of my landings and that was ok enough for all of the passengers who have flown with me to date. And, I have even successfully landed a commercial jet in a simulator at UPS because I have a basic knowledge of the control surfaces of an airplane. Now, I think that he would give me the pilot seat in a nano second, he might start praying like a Catholic nun until we were on the ground, but he would know that even my 80 hours of pilot training was a lot more than he had. Most of the time, when our own lives are at stake in a very clear way, we can get real congruent with the truth, but in the absence of immediate consequences, we can still elevate what we want to be true to a point of being absolutely true.

I feel that this is one of those times when we absolutely must quote 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.” 

In a recent CBS New/YouGov poll, Trump voters responded, in a large majority, that they believed that Trump told the truth more reliably than their own family members and even the minister or priest of their church. That’s hard to imagine since Trump is broadly known to lie constantly, objectively more than any other politician…. Literally more than 3000 times while he was in office.

After his recent booking in Georgia, along with his mug shot, Trump reported that they recorded him as being 6’3” and 215 lbs. A friend of mine, one of our local church members, actually is 6’3” and 215 lbs. and he posted these photos for comparison. Trump might weigh 215 lbs. on the moon, but in Georgia, he’s got to be closer to 300.

 

But this is obvious isn’t it? Just like it is obvious that Trump did not get his big, beautiful wall built along our southern border. In fact, he only got about 400 miles of wall built, half of which was replacing already existing barriers and in spite of his often-repeated claim that Mexico would pay for the wall, they didn’t pay for any of it. 

 

Even in venial matters, like his criticism of how much Barak Obama played golf. Trump vowed that he would not play golf while president because he would be working all of the time but, as most of us know, he actually played golf twice as often as Obama did. 

 

In matters small and large, whether it was stealing classified documents, sexually assaulting women, paying off a porn star, or using his office to get business with wealthy foreign governments, at least one of which is a sponsor of international terror, it should be obvious that our former president is one of the most corrupt and dishonest men in history. The question looms larger with every passing week, why do people still support him and say that they think that he was a great president and that they do not believe that he lies or ever did anything wrong? 

 

As of this moment, even with several pending trials for crimes that might see Trump in prison before he could ever get back to the White House, polls indicate that Biden and Trump are virtually tied in their prospects of winning the 2024 election. 

 

There is increasing talk in the media about Trump’s base of voters having become a cult. That’s strong language and I have resisted using it. I went to seminary in 1980 when taking a course on cults was a part of the curriculum. That was less than two years after the famous Jonestown mass suicide. Younger people may not know much more about than that it happened but there was actually an audio recording made of more than 900 people dying from drinking poisoned Kool-Aid, a third of whom were children. We had to listen to that recording in class and even though that was more than 40 years ago, I still get nauseous when I think about it. 

 

Jim Jones turned a Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) into a cult. He fed them on paranoid lies about threats of nuclear war, of government intervention in their lives, all while he was cleaning out their bank accounts and having countless affairs with women and men in the congregation. Now that was a cult. And just like I hesitate to compare anyone to Hitler unless they are pushing a program of mass genocide, I think that we need to be very careful about using that term in any flippant way. 

 

However, it must be said that Hitler didn’t start with a Holocaust and Jim Jones didn’t start with mass suicide. When I took my cult class at Vanderbilt under the famous cult researcher, Herman Norton, he identified the Jehovah’s Witnesses and the Mormon church as being cults, but he didn’t mention the Catholic Church or the Assemblies of God. Jonestown, Waco, and Heaven’s Gate, as well as some of the cults that were in the news for years like the Moonies, are easier to spot because they were crazy in new and dangerous ways. But if a cult is an organization that says that they or their leader is virtually infallible and that you must suspend critical thinking and believe what your cult teaches in spite of the obvious fact that a lot of what it teaches is false, then, well, the Trump base may very well be a cult in much the same way that certain religious groups are cults. 

 

But if a cult is known by its insistence that people believe what is obviously not true, without question, and that they allow themselves to be controlled, even to the point of being sexually and financially exploited, then it gets easy to see that Trump voters are, in that way, a cult, but then, you would have to say that the Catholic Church is as well, and many people who have left the Mormon church describe themselves as having been a victim of a cult. Leaving a Church of Christ or an Assemblies of God Church can require counseling which is, basically, deprogramming therapy akin to having left a cult. 

 

I don’t want to be anti-Catholic. I did my doctoral work in monastic spirituality. I am deeply read into classical Catholic spiritual material and some of my closest friendships have been with the Trappist monks who lived in their various monasteries where I did my research. But the mere fact that there is a healthy way to be a Catholic or a Mormon does not erase the fact that there is a large portion of both, maybe the majority of both, that are taught to overlook sexual abuse and financial exploitation. I own and cherish my collection of books by Thomas Merton, the famous Trappist monk and activist, but that does not mean that our local bishop is not a dangerously dishonest man. 

 

Just as there are people who may actually have a rational argument to make in favor of Donald Trump as a presidential candidate, but the people who have actual, fact-based motivations are in such a minority that it is not unfair to say in a more general way that there is something seriously wrong with most Trump voters. They are not oriented to reality. They have given up on critical thinking, and they are unwilling to be either self-critical or to be honestly critical of their “orange Caligula.” 

 

I bring this up today because I am afraid that we may be no more than 14 months away from permanently losing our democracy, with all of the hard fought for civil rights, and personal freedoms that once made America a beacon of hope to the world. We are living through a period of history in which fascism is on the rise in many countries as people are stoked with fear of immigrants, transexuals, and even books, just as people in religious cults are manipulated by fear of hell and an angry sky father. 

 

I have always felt that it was my job to be critical of my government in order to advocate for greater justice, equality, and freedom but now I realize, for the first time in my life, that our imperfect government may be the only thing that protects us from the violence and insanity of fascism. And, you can certainly tell that I am still plenty angry about the degree to which my own religious tradition asked me to avoid critical thinking and to believe what was clearly not true, though, I will say that in most cases, the people who were trying to indoctrinate me had been lied to and indoctrinated themselves, but still, isn’t it time that we all reject any politician, religious leader, or even corporation, that demands our uncritical loyalty? 

 

This has been a primary difference between religion and science: religion generally encourages you to believe a creedal statement as being facts that are beyond question while science, when it works as intended, encourages you to question everything and to be willing to change your beliefs in light of new evidence. I believe that religion and politics should operate more like science. People of faith should be willing to question their beliefs and to emphasize only those beliefs for which there is substantial evidence. Our faith should be closer to physics than it is to fiction. . . and so should our political dialogue. 

 

You should be especially suspicious of any religion or any politician who tries to manipulate you based on either fear or greed. 

I would like to close with one more reference to the Great Dane . . . I always loved Kierkegaard because he was a man of passionate faith, but he was equally passionate about his criticisms of the church and of religion in general. His insights sometimes burn like a hot poker but it is difficult to find many instances in which he was not right. He said of his peers, “People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for freedom of thought, which they seldom use.”  Thinking is good, folks, just as believing lies is bad. The only real reason to be seduced into a cult is to be relieved of thinking for yourself and that, while possibly tempting, is always a bad idea.