Birth Pangs or Death Throes?

Birth Pangs or Death Throes?

David Ketchum
December 18, 2022

Watch the video HERE


Today, I’m offering the final of three reflections on the appeal made at the “7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions” (PDF), which met in Kazakhstan earlier this year. Roger began by taking us through the realities of our “tumbling world,” and I followed last week by reflecting on the role, or the possibility, of hope in such a world.  Those are familiar topics, but the appeal then turns to a topic that is both more complicated and more personally challenging: the role of religion and religious communities in all these things. The appeal holds in tension both the conviction that “Religions are often part of the problem, not the solution” and that religions have something to offer to help us navigate through and transform the challenges that surround us.

  As I’ve shared many times, religion and spirituality have been sources both of great pain and trauma in my life, and great joy and wisdom. Looking back, I don’t know if I would have survived my teen years without the spiritual practices I began at that time, and those practices have continued to nourish and sustain me through my entire life. On the other hand, harmful religious teachings also inflicted or set me up for abuse in the first place. If I identified with either of those experiences, I could easily conclude that religion was an overwhelming force for good, or an overwhelming force for bad. The truth is more complicated. In many ways, religions are a long-running, uncontrolled social experiment on the human condition and social change, and we’ve proved time and again that we can use religious beliefs, practices, and institutions to help or to harm.

This reality is also reflected in our collective perceptions, too; a 2017 survey by Ipsos asked more than 17,000 people from 23 countries the simple question: does religion do more harm than good? 49% said yes.  

But both the framing of the question and the division we have over its answer invite us to look more deeply. If all cultural, including religious, systems, have been used to justify everything from the terrifying to the sublime, who gets to define what is a problem and what is a solution? Who gets to decide what is good, both individually and collectively?

Dorothee Solle called this the “double function” of religion: “as apology and legitimation of the status quo and its culture of injustice on the one hand, and as a means of protest, change, and liberation on the other hand.” (“The Christian-Marxist Debate of the 1960s,” Monthly Review, 36 (July-August): 20-26)
James Cone expressed this same teaching as the choice between two alternatives: “(1) to accept the oppressor's value system and thus be contented with the place set for them by others, or (2) to find a completely new way of looking at reality that enables them to fight against oppression.” (God of the Oppressed, New York: Seabury Press, 1975; page 33) 

This sounds easy enough, and it feels like it should be easy. Yet we still manage to become divided over what is right and wrong. I have watched with a mixture of amazement and horror as my own friends and relatives and I have taken very different roads over the last twenty years. I would have never predicted people I used to respect defending cruelty, violence, and bigotry. Others have gradually accommodated injustice, a kind of creeping oppression that is accepted as just “the way things are.” I have felt my own energy lag. It can be easy to describe legitimation of injustice and liberation towards change in their ideal forms, but most of us live in a more messy, in-between place. Discerning which is which, and acting accordingly, is essential if we want our present troubles to be birth pangs of a new world, rather than the death throes of humanity.

I’ve been thinking about these things in my own life recently from a different point of view. Last year, a good friend wrote to me after many years of being out of touch. As we caught up with each other and swapped stories, we started noticing several similarities. When we last knew each other in the mid 1990s, we were both very earnest in our faith, and I at least was very naïve. We both took the vision of a just and peaceful world, proclaimed by Jesus and the Prophets, as possible and joyful. Neither of us were planning on doing anything like preaching. Instead, both of us were initially involved with music and then community programming. Our paths weaved through similar social issues, from food insecurity to Missouri’s methamphetamine crisis. And both of us experienced criticism and rejection for creating or joining those programs well before either of us ever taught something controversial.

        A few stories have been more vivid in my mind as I sort through these memories. I was the pastor of a small, rural church. Even on that small scale, liberation was experienced as a threat to settled way of doing things, a way that had conveniently excluded all the people pushed to the margins. As you might guess, money often had a lot to do with it. On more than one occasion, the church treasurer would confront me while I was printing bulletins. This was a pretty brilliant tactic. The photocopier was in a very small room with one door. There was no where to go, no way to escape her scathing words. She would stand in the doorway and let me have it. Her criticisms often amounted to what became a refrain: “the people you bring to church cost more money than they give.” I was making the church’s finances unsustainable.

        As I mentioned, I was very naïve and thought I had a solution. I got the board to approve a restructuring of my salary. I would reduce what I got paid every week in order to create a community fund. This way, when people came to us needing assistance, or there was a special ministry opportunity, we would have a small budget to meet those needs. I knew enough that I shouldn’t be in charge of that fund, so at least two deacons needed to approve of any request. But this still was not enough; I faced a new criticism. The gossip became that I wanted to reduce my salary so I wouldn’t have to tithe as much to the church. That one never made any sense to me, but it didn’t stop the rumor from going around.

        On one occasion, I was providing pastoral care for a terminally ill man. Years before, he had been an active member of the church, but a messy conflict had driven him away. We worked through a lot of those issues as he made peace with his imminent death. Before he died, he told me and his wife that he wanted to have his funeral and be buried at the church. It was very moving, a sacred moment of healing and hope. So I’m glad he didn’t live to see the fallout. My misstep this time was that I didn’t realize that, because he reconciled himself to the church, his family was then entitled to a ham dinner after the funeral. This was a significant, but not huge, expense, and some church members resented having to foot the bill. Instead of celebrating the sacred work of dying with peace, we argued over who would buy the hams. I can confess to some passive-aggression here, as I volunteered to pay, but I reduced my offering to the church by that same amount. I was so angry that this kind of petty, selfish bickering could spoil something holy.

        These kind of memories have helped me rethink how liberation and legitimation work. It is often through small, seemingly unimportant habits. Any one of the habits might seem inconsequential, something we just need to overlook. This is just the way things are. We don’t notice that, taken together, the cumulative effect is to create a powerful culture and system. This is how oppression often establishes and sustains itself, not just through the gross and obvious injustices, but through the little, small habits of accommodating harmful behavior, leaving conflict unresolved, avoiding uncomfortable conversations, and being reluctant to take meaningful action. 

       Moving to the large scale, we can call to mind the experience of the Angelina and Sarah Grimke, sisters who were raised in a wealthy slaveholding household in South Carolina and became prominent abolitionists. It should not surprise you to know that their journey included a religious transformation, converting from Episcopalianism to Presbyterianism and finally to Quakerism. That journey was quite literally one of moving from legitimation of oppression (using religion to excuse and defend racism and the abhorrent practice of slavery) to liberation (using religion to undermine that evil institution and promote freedom). It would be easy to let the reference end there, because Quakers have been firmly established in the popular mind as being on the right side of history. And that is well-earned in many respects. But humans are not that simple, and the history of the Religious Society of Friends is a wonderful opportunity to see this struggle between legitimation and liberation in action.

        In the case of opposing slavery, Quakers did adopt a broadly abolitionist stance much earlier than most civil or religious groups in either Europe or the colonies. But by the time that Quakers in Pennsylvania formerly condemned participation in the slave trade in 1758, that was already built on nearly a century of activism and labor. The conversation began in the 1670s in Barbados, where Quaker colonists raised the question. Then, in 1688, three Quakers and a Lutheran in Pennsylvania openly opposed slavery. The movement would ripen in the 1700s, through the work of people whose names are more familiar, such as Benjamin Lay, John Woolman, and Anthony Benezet. Even early adoption, the best-case scenario, was slow work, and many of those who began it did not live long enough to see the fruit. 

Even then, the success of condemning slavery as a practice did not mean all Quakers were suddenly in the right about everything. The liberation commitments existed alongside legitimation commitments, and conflict bubbled up and sometimes overflowed. Again, it is vital that we know these fuller stories, and this is why historical accounts like Fit for Freedom, Not for Friendship: Quakers, African Americans, and the Myth of Racial Justice by Donna McDaniel and Vanessa Julye are so important. This more complete history is, as Cathy Wald described it, “a roller-coaster ride from the heights of admiration for my religious community to the depths of embarrassing chagrin.” Far from being discouraging, these more realistic accounts of human limitations and human transformation can be vital to encouraging one another today. When we understand that our spiritual ancestors had an equally messy set of conditions, and yet persevered in doing what was right, that can affirm our own perseverance. And there is much to learn about the practical side of working for change and what sustains us, as individuals, communities, and movements.

        In the case of the Grimke sisters, their convictions eventually made them outcasts in their Orthodox Quaker community in Philadelphia, and they eventually left that meeting. Despite the Quakers’ and the city’s reputation for abolitionist sentiments, Sarah and Angelina’s views were considered to go too far, too fast. Mark Perry, author of Lift Up Thy Voice, described their situation.

“After Angelina’s letter to William Lloyd Garrison appeared in The Liberator, the sisters met with a chilly reception at the Fourth and Arch Street [Friends] Meeting. They were also unwelcome, now, in Catherine Morris’s home, especially since Angelina had questioned her about the society’s policy of making its black congregants sit on separate benches during Quaker services. … Catherine was shocked and dismayed by Angelina’s query. She said that she agreed with the seating practice, that there were firm reasons for the existence of the ‘colored bench,’ and that such questions should not even be asked. She believed in the efficacy of ‘silent witness,’ the practice of leaving change to conscience and good works. Sarah and Angelina accepted Catherine’s reasoning, but they found the Fourth and Arch Street Meeting’s services increasingly stifling, and they resented the disdainful looks and verbal reproaches they received during their own public shows of devotion. Angelina was angry; Sarah felt rejected. Both felt they were being treated as outsiders.” 

        The sisters understandably felt “Embittered by and alienated from their own meeting”. But they did not settle for that feeling. Instead, they held firm in their convictions, eventually embraced their status as “lapsed Quakers,” and transformed their rejection into a deeper commitment and courage to act. In Perry’s words,

“Sarah and Angelina’s years of struggle with their religion, and their conversions from Episcopalians to Presbyterians to orthodox Quakers and finally to lapsed Quakers, served them well. No longer fearful of such changes, they now welcomed them. Nor were they intimidated, as they had once been, by the judgments of others; they were now willing to disagree openly with those whom they most admired.” (Lift Up Thy Voice)

This is a good example of James Cone’s insight that we are constantly navigating choices between accepting “the oppressor’s value system” and finding “a completely new way of looking at reality that enables them to fight against oppression.” So how do we work with all of our human limitations and access our human possibilities for social change in the direction of social justice? In 2017, I tried to make the case for four approaches that religious and spiritual communities could use to support us in being part of the solution, instead of part of the problem:

1) providing opportunities to expose, understand, and subvert oppressive systems and cultures, including our own roles in them as those who suffer injustice and those who inflict or benefit from injustice (the prophetic role, supported by critical theory);

2) teaching and modeling tools that integrate such critical reflection with mindful action in a cycle of emergent strategy (the contemplative role, supported by reflective practice); 

 3) transforming how we relate to one another so that we nurture wholeness, instead of oppression, in our relationships with each other and the earth (the role of community, supported by community development and transformative justice practices); and

4) connecting folks with resources, organizations, and actions from around the world that empower them to act in meaningful and effective ways (the role of movement building, supported by community organizing and networking).

I find those four approaches still compelling and relevant. Your list may be different, and that is also part of our work of building communities and movements for change. Because the heart of the question of whether religion and spirituality can be of any help in our present times comes down to the decisions we make. Becoming aware of and resisting all the ways we are complicit in legitimizing injustice is spiritual growth. Actively participating in movements liberating us toward peace and justice is spiritual growth. Rather than dividing us up between good and bad, categorizing ourselves as supporting liberation or legitimation, transformation or oppression, we can become aware of how we are each making these choices all the time. As I shared some years ago in a reflection on prayer,

“This world is both beautiful and terrible. Humanity is both beautiful and terrible. The line between the two [can be] very fine, between the sublime and the brutal, and the burden is sometimes overwhelming. Joy that cannot be contained, sorrow that cannot be contained. There is only room in my small heart if I make the room. So I make it my practice to make the room, to take the bounds of this small life of mine and make them boundless, my heart and mind wide open both to the suffering and to the exuberant joy of living. I read and sing and walk and plant wildflowers. Paying attention, I learn how to love. … we do not have to resign ourselves to the injustice of oppression, or humanity to the vacuous pursuit of accumulating money, power, and pleasure; … we do not have to lose ourselves in the resistance to this injustice, but … we can preserve our own humanity in the face of it, by finding ways to care for the earth, for each other, and for our shared future. And that is the best prayer I can think of, or know.”

“Give Up All the Other Worlds”: Learning to Hope

“Give Up All the Other Worlds”: Learning to Hope

David Ketchum
December 11, 2022

Watch the video HERE

Last week, Roger began this short series of reflections inspired by an appeal made at the “7th Congress of Leaders of World and Traditional Religions,” which met in Kazakhstan earlier this year. As the appeal unfolds, the focus moves from our tumbling world to an enduring hope: 

“In this world situation, we … are looking for forces to help face fear and the challenges with courage. This cannot be achieved by promising security. Trust alone encourages finding hope and taking action. The more pressing the world situation is, the more hope the world needs. It is only because of this that those responsible and the people do not lose confidence that the great challenges can be mastered.” (PDF)

       How you feel about hope likely depends on your own experiences and circumstances. It’s been portrayed as both salvation and delusion, and many things in between. An important criticism is that passive hope may give us the excuse to just stand idly by, waiting for others to do something. Meanwhile, we can get lost in an imaginary future, postponing our personal and collective wellbeing to some other time. We can even use hope as an excuse to avoid confronting difficulties, from places in ourselves that need healing to unhealthy situations that need to be addressed. This “pie in the sky” kind of hope can too easily just become a practice of accommodating injustice and oppression. As Joe Hill observed, it also makes you an easy mark for religious hucksters looking to get your money and your labor. 

On the other hand, we can hold so tightly to a specific version of hope, that our expectations become a cage. Attachment to outcomes can stifle our flexibility and creativity, so that we miss out on real opportunities to work for change. As some psychologists have put it, expectations are just “premeditated resentments.” Or we might find ourselves in the trap called “False Hope Syndrome,” with unrealistic goals. When this is the case, it doesn’t matter how much confidence and energy we put into our efforts. Distorted beliefs doom the effort to failures, no matter how many times we try. We end up devoting time and resources into what is essentially a lost cause. That makes it easy to get stuck and discouraged. 

And then there is the difficult reality that sometimes we don’t need to hope so much as we need to grieve. We need to come to terms with the state of our lives, families, communities, and world. Sometimes, what we call hopelessness is just honesty. And this is what makes navigating hope and hopelessness, grief and despair, rest and apathy, action and futility, something of a craft or an art. It is also why the words don’t always fit, because we are often at different places on this messy spectrum of grieving, healing, acting, or giving up. But behind our differences of experience and perspectives, there are questions that can be useful to most of us. What is it that keeps us from giving up, giving in, or standing idly by while honestly facing the devastating challenges of the day? What are some principles and practices that help us transform our anger, grief, and despair in meaningful action? 

To revisit a psychological perspective, and as part of preparing for these reflections, I took the Snyder Adult Hope Scale. The scale conceives of hope in terms of two qualities, agency (how we direct energy toward a goal) and pathway (how we plan to meet a goal). And this can be a practical approach that may help us avoid getting caught in those ways that hope can go wrong and make things worse. These are skills we can work on, and habits we can form. Sometimes, hope is just the resolution to keep taking small steps, even when the outcome is unclear. Sometimes, it is finding a resource or support that keeps a possibility of change alive. As it turns out, this scale ranks me as a person with “high hope.” This was interesting to me, because it touches all those tender places of despair, rage, and grief inside of me. I would not describe myself as a hopeful person so much as a persistent person. 

        Seeing the connection between those two in this context has helped me be more intentional about exploring what nurtures that energy and persistence. It is something like a vow to not give up, nor to give in to actions that undermine the long-term health of myself, others, or our communities and movements. I’ve known for most of my life that I depend on my spiritual and reflective practices to keep me steady, to help me consistently engage with people and processes in the midst of difficult and painful circumstances. This is why I’ve felt most at home in Quaker and Buddhist contexts, and why I’ve spent so much of my time teaching and practicing skills like meditation and mediation. 

        I would also include staying in touch with creativity and beauty as vital reflective practices. I have always relied on singing, poetry, and humor to carry me through. Here we can gather words, sounds, and images together in ways that allow us to recognize and heal one another. This is obviously not inevitable or automatic; this is something we do on purpose. As David Whyte has beautifully written in “Sweet Darkness,” 

 “You must learn one thing.
The world was made to be free in.
Give up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to learn
anything or anyone
that does not bring you alive
is too small for you.”

The difficult news that we know all too well is that this is not usually simple to do. The good news is that we know that it is possible. In studying the history of people and movements, it is easy to miss this lesson. But if we are willing to stay with the story, we find not only the oppressors, but those who resist oppression. We find not only those who hurt, but those who heal. We find not only those who go along with the cruelty of the world, maybe even profiting from it, but those who do not. And all along the way, we find the artists and creatives who give voice, not only to the pain, but to the great insistence that things will not be this way forever – because we will always work to make those changes. 

        In 1993, Carolyn Forche edited what became and remains one of my favorite collections of poetry, Against Forgetting: Twentieth-Century Poetry of Witness. It beautifully and achingly bears “witness to extremity,” to all the horrors of the last century’s wars, torture, exploitation, exile, and oppression, in the voices of over 140 poets from all over the world, “from the Armenian genocide to Tiananmen Square.” 

        One of those poets was Otto Rene Castillo. He was a celebrated poet in Central America, but that didn’t save him from exile from his home in Guatemala for his work as a student organizer. (His first exile was in 1954 and the result of the CIA-backed coup that overthrew President Arbenz. Arbenz’ great crime was to advocate for agrarian reform policies that provided compensation and redistribution of land to exploited and impoverished laborers, many of them indigenous. The United Fruit Company had much to lose, and they lobbied for the US-backed coup.) When Castillo secretly returned to Guatemala in 1964 with an insurgent group, he was arrested, brutally tortured, and killed.
        
        His witness is not an idle one, nor one that stood idly by. He wrote about the “Apolitical Intellectuals” who refused to act when they were most needed: 

“No one will ask them
about their dress
or their long
siestas
after lunch,
or about their futile struggles
against ‘nothingness,’
or about their ontological
way
to make money.  …
They will be asked nothing
about their absurd
justifications
nurtured in the shadow
of a huge lie.
On that day,
the humble people will come,  …
and they will ask:
‘What did you do when the poor
suffered, when tenderness and life
were dangerously burning out in them?’”

And he also knew the uselessness of that ‘pie-in-the-sky’ hope, that substitutes platitudes for grief and rage, as he wrote in “Distances” – 

“Under the bitter December air
a friend says
'I’m disillusioned. Everything goes
so slowly. The dictatorship is strong.
I’m desperate and pained
by the calvary of my people.’
And I, sensing his anguish, the gray
and noble sadness of my friend,
knowing his fight
to keep on fighting,
do not say: coward or go to the mountains
or lazy or pessimist,
rigid, poor devil.
I only put my arm around his shoulder,
so the tearing cruelty of his cold
be less.” 

Yet his voice is most clear in his simple poem, “Before the Scales, Tomorrow” (tr. by Barbara Paschke and David Volpendesta): 

And when the enthusiastic

story of our time
is told,
for those
who are yet to be born
but announce themselves
with more generous face,
we will come out ahead
—those who have suffered most from it.

And that
being ahead of your time
means suffering much from it.

But it’s beautiful to love the world
with eyes
that have not yet
been born.

And splendid
to know yourself victorious
when all around you
it’s all still so cold,
so dark.

This is my favorite description that I have encountered of what feels like hope: “being ahead of your time / means suffering much from it. / But it’s beautiful to love the world / with eyes / that have not yet / been born.” Cruelly and tragically, Castillo never got to see that world with any other eyes. But his work and his art helped make change possible, and can help keep the possibility of change alive in us, as well.

While I was re-reading this poem, I remembered a guided meditation I offered at a local 2021 Transgender Day of Remembrance. I envisioned it as a way to “get in touch with our bodies and feelings; reconnect with our community and aspirations; and recommit to working together to create a world where justice, equity, and joy are the norms.” It was a concrete expression of loving the world “with eyes / that have not yet / been born.” We began with our deep sense of loss, making space for bearing witness to our collective and personal suffering: “Each time we gather like this, we can’t help but remember the world we live in. It is a world that makes it very clear that we are misunderstood and unwelcome.” That loss is in stark contrast to the possibilities we feel within ourselves and witness in others: “We live beautiful, vibrant, and even joyful lives. We exist in the face of all this violence, hatred, and grief, and insist on living, loving, and thriving. We create new worlds.” 

Holding that pain while also making space for what is possible is the task of each moment. The practice I suggested then was to reconnect with three intentions: 

“We affirm and love ourselves. Take a deep breath and remember a time when you or another person affirmed who are you, who welcomed you without reservation and didn’t make you hide your self. Knowing that gift, offer this same affirmation and love to yourself and to everyone gathered here. … 

“We care for each other: elders, youth, and everyone in between. … We cherish our history. We honor our elders. We celebrate our youth. We care for each other. Call to mind our … ancestors who walked this path before us, who also dared to be themselves. 

“We take our space in the world. We know the world we need is possible, a world … [where we] feel and are safe. We dream of a world where we easily access the medical care, housing, food, employment, and enjoyment we need. We know it is not unreasonable to demand a world where [we] get to decide what supports our well-being, and where all people are free and equal. 

“We affirm and love ourselves. We care for each other. We take our space in the world. We hear and honor our grief, anger, and fear. We also hear our community’s passionate insistence for all the good things that support our well-being. We hold both with fierce determination. This energy can carry and sustain us, as we continue to work together to create a world where everyone, without exception, can live with freedom, safety, and joy.”

This is what I take David Whyte to mean when he wrote “Give up all the other worlds / except the one to which you belong,” and “to learn / anything or anyone / that does not bring you alive / is too small for you.” This is what it means to me when Otto Rene Castillo powerfully teaches us “that / being ahead of your time / means suffering much from it. / But it’s beautiful to love the world / with eyes / that have not yet / been born.”

        After all these explorations, I still do not think I understand or can define hope. But I can commit to cultivate compassion and wisdom, without giving up. Without getting lost in “premediated resentments” or false hope, I can practice affirming and loving myself, offering and receiving care, and taking space in the world so that others can glimpse the possibility that everyone, without exception, can live with freedom, safety, and joy. Maybe this is what hope is, or maybe this is as close to hope as someone like me can get. 

        We know how exhausting it is to keep trying, and I don't know how realistic it is to insist on this kind of world. But we also know that if we give up completely, there is no possibility that humanity will ever heal, change, and grow. So let’s put our arms around each other’s shoulders in the time of disillusionment and despair, give up all the worlds that fail us, and keep loving ourselves and each other, until the world is able to love us back. 

“What Does Religion Have to Offer to a World in Crisis?”

“What Does Religion Have to Offer to a World in Crisis?”   December 4, 2022

Dr. Roger Ray       Click here to see the video

This is a portion of a resolution from the 2022 "Seventh Congress of Leaders of World Religions and Traditional Religions" in Kazakhstan 

1. A tumbling world 

We are living in a tumbling world. The challenges for humanity are enormous: 

·       Barbaric wars are waged in many parts of the world; (there is a growing)  threat of nuclear disasters in war zones. 

·       The sensitive climate system has reached many tipping points; if these are exceeded, the living space on earth is threatened. 

·       Wars, hopelessness due to poverty and climate catastrophes have already driven more than 100 million people to flee; the political tensions in the receiving countries are increasing. 

·       In rich countries, computerization is changing the social structure in a similar way to industrialization. 

·       The pandemic has overshadowed these challenges and pushed them into the background. In the meantime, they have reached politics. 

2. Many people are unsettled, fear is spreading 

Many people are increasingly feeling these threatening developments in their everyday lives. Forests are burning in Europe. Rivers have unprecedented low water levels. Elsewhere there is flooding. Because corn and wheat cannot be shipped freely from Ukraine, hunger is being exacerbated in many parts of the world. Energy prices are rising worldwide. Even in rich countries, the cost of living is becoming prohibitive for the more vulnerable. Such experiences unsettle people. They make fear. But fear de-solidarizes and creates a “non-culture” of growing rivalry. 

Some political populists and religious fundamentalists use fear, lies and greed to widen the gaps between nations, cultures and religions, fuel hatred and violence, spread nationalism (national egoism) and xenophobia. 

I have to confess that one of the best parts of having been the founding pastor on an entirely independent little liberal church is that we don’t have many meetings. During my 30 years as a denominational pastor, I had so many local, state, national and international meetings, conferences, assemblies, many of which were very time consuming at the end of them I usually felt that I had wasted time and money listening to what amounted to balloon juice. 

But the mere fact that I don’t attend them anymore doesn’t mean that such meetings do not go on without me. David and I came upon a report from this fall’s congress of world religions in Kazakhstan to be of sufficient interest that we are devoting our next few sermons to addressing one of their resolutions. The conference was addressing the very basic question of what faiths of all sorts have to offer to a world that is clearly suffering from many different crises at once? 

 

This is something David and I have discussed on a nearly weekly basis for a few years now. A generation ago, it seemed to me that the world’s devotion to religions that expressed themselves in forms of magical thinking, superstition, and rituals were giving way to a new and more rational view of faith, primarily focused on ethics. However, whether due to the pandemic or the rise of fascism around the world, it seems like that process has gone into reverse. Rational, philosophical approaches to faith are now in rapid decline, and embarrassingly irrational and superstitious religion is stronger than ever. I hardly know how to express my personal disappointment in this development but the fact of our decline is reinforced every Sunday morning when I drive to our little gathering here in Springfield.

 

I drive past mega churches with full parking lots where thousands of our neighbors gather to sing highly repetitive and fairly vacuous songs, while waving their hands in the air and engaging in glossolalia, what they call “speaking in tongues,” an almost certain sign of an abandonment of all critical thinking and facts in favor of an other-worldly emphasis on a supernatural theistic world which, if you are honest about it, obviously does not exist. 

I have consoled myself for years with the awareness of that we have thousands of listeners around the globe even though our local congregation has always been small but since the pandemic began, we have become very small, and the flat-earth society, meeting under various denominational monikers, seems to be growing stronger. 

 

I have woefully concluded that the world does not much seem to want progressive theology or moral philosophy but that does not mean that the world does not need it. This fall’s congress of the leaders of world religions bluntly called our current state of affairs, “a tumbling world.”

 

This current European war looks so much like the beginnings of the world wars from early in the last century, only now Russia’s pathological land theft from Ukraine not only threatens to pull Europe, the United States, and China into the conflict, but there is the added threat of either nuclear war or a nuclear accident resulting from sloppy deployment of conventional weapons. This is creating a refugee crisis, adding millions of people to the already huge displacement from other regional conflicts and from the growing ravages of climate change. There is also a huge increase in malnutrition because the huge grain harvests in Ukraine are being prevented from being distributed to the nations that depend on these shipments. 

Things have been so bad in Europe and the Middle East for the past nine months that the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong-un has had to resort to firing off lots of intercontinental missiles just to get some media attention, and remind us all that Vladimir Putin isn’t the only dangerously reckless world leader. 

We were already in the midst of rapid economic changes in the west with the growing advent of automation lowering the market value of labor when the pandemic began, accelerating the pace of change and making unskilled labor in an ever more vulnerable situation, made palpably worse by the onset of global inflation. . . inflation is an inconvenience to the economically well situated and a crisis creating homelessness and food insecurity for millions more. 

 

It is precisely this sort of crisis that historically fuels the public’s appetite for other-worldly religious beliefs. We have literally seen this happen for centuries. Philosophers, especially in the east, began predicting the end of supernatural theistic religions as early as the fifth century before the common era but something always happens to increase despair about the future of this world that makes a fearful public double down on religions that promise deliverance in an invisible, non-existent, after life.

Shortly after our own Revolutionary War in which Americans sought independence, the French had a revolution to establish reason as the new religion for the modern age. They destroyed religious art and symbols and turned churches into Temples of Reason. They portrayed reason as a goddess, in part to thumb their noses at the traditionally male monarchy. There was also a certain subtle slap at the moralism of the church by depicting her with bare breasts because it was popular among French prostitutes of the time to give themselves the names of Greek goddesses . . . the French have a none too obscure love of iconoclasm.

 

But this shift in beliefs among thought leaders in France was not unfamiliar to the founders of the United States. None other than George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and James Monroe were all Deists, believing that the only divinity in the world was our collective human wisdom. 

 

It seemed, at the end of the eighteenth century, that abusive power of organized religion was being rejected, along with all of the neurotic guilt and prejudices it created. The French and American Revolutions were signs of hope in the future, a more free and scientific age. However, both revolutions failed to deliver on their promises. Liberation from the monarchy and the church did not equate to liberation from the ravages of poverty caused by capitalism. 

 

Supernatural religion continually enjoys rebirth in the desperation of people who have lost all hope in this world. Thomas Jefferson famously predicted that by the end of his lifetime, traditional forms of religion would have become extinct and maybe it would have if he had not been such a slave owning and raping, classist, narcissist but I will not take your time to delve into that topic.

 

I am personally a part of the tail-end of the baby boom. My generation came into being following WWII, a time of economic expansion and a time when fascism had been defeated and seemingly permanent national boundaries had been drawn, hopefully bringing an end to traditional warfare. 

 

The defeat of the Nazis and fascists and the relative detent with communism was sealed by my generation being forced to say a newly revised pledge of allegiance to the flag that was both religious and patriotic. We sang the national anthem at baseball games, we prayed at football games. Every meeting of the Kiwanis Club, Lions’ Club, Optimists, and even the Sunday assembly before Sunday School every week featured the national anthem and a pledge of allegiance. We were raised to be unthinkingly devoted to America, its constitution, its values of democracy, freedom, and equality. 

 

Personally, I didn’t like it. I believe that I was just 14 years old when I put 2 and 2 together and realized that the pledge of allegiance was supposed to be a solemn promise to unquestioningly participate in whatever crazy war our American corporations tried to get us into and even as a young teen, I could see the moral weakness of our military involvement in Vietnam. 

 

I recognized early, and my awareness of my nation’s moral failings were sealed the summer I spent watching the Watergate hearings, that America had great but unrealized goals. I think that I was patriotic so far as democracy and freedom went, but I wasn’t crazy about the institution that claimed control of the ship of state. 

 

But nothing prepared me for the re-emergence of fascism in America. I watched in stunned disbelief when an American president organized a coup to overthrow the government of which he was the head! Thousands of violent fascists stormed and defiled the Capitol building in an attempt to overthrow democracy and liberty and freedom. And now, nearly two years later, our nation seems to be paralyzed in a moral quandary, unable to criminally charge and put on trial the people who nearly destroyed the oldest democracy in the world and who now, quite publicly, plan to organize better and try again. My casual search for a quiet tropical retirement haven has taken on a certain urgency now as I am no longer certain that our constitutional democracy will survive the challenges it now faces. 

 

Of course, assuming that I might live for another 20 or 25 years, I have to find a  tropical island paradise that won’t be swallowed by the rising sea levels before I meet mortality in person. But, if I am honest about it, escaping America’s problems by retiring to the tropics is terribly similar to the people who escape from the challenges of life by embracing magical religious beliefs. The tropics offer a better climate, a beach, scuba diving, and an assortment of rum fruit drinks, but it is still escapism, isn’t it?

 

Rather than accepting the defeat of rational religion and either running away or falling into the arms of a mind-numbing superstitious religion, can we try, once again, to enthrone reason as our religion? As David will be touching on in sermons over the next couple of weeks, traditional religion is often one of the things that divides us and is at the root of a lot of what is wrong with modern society, as seen again this past week in the violent attack in a gay bar in Colorado Springs. A lot of fear, prejudice, hatred, and suspicion have religious origins and at the very least progressives need to reform our own camp to eradicate such religious prejudices from the world. 

 

But there is also a fundamental connectedness to progressive spirituality, a connectedness that is not fearful of immigrants, or refugees, that is not nationalistic, seeking always to expand the boundaries of empire, either by political control or economic domination. 

 

In the early part of the 20^th century, the British philosopher, Bertrand Russell, realized that with the advance of communication technology and the advent of easier and more affordable global travel would bring people who had been kept isolated through sheer distance and geography into closer and closer contact. Even before the internet, FaceBook, TicTok, and Twitter, Russell realized that closer contact would result in more fear, anger, territorialism, and disgusting levels of ideological purity.

A century ago, he advised us: 

“Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don’t like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.”

 

Bertrand Russell would certainly have not suggested that we need formal religion to teach that kind of charity and tolerance. If you can’t tell the difference between right and wrong, you are not necessarily in need of religion, you are in need of a conscience. 

 

I am proposing that spirituality, spiritual communities, are one answer, a part of an answer, to helping a world that is tumbling, literally falling apart, to undergo a revolution that is about freedom, democracy, equality, and justice. We don’t need heaven or hell, souls, demons, or angels, and forgive me for saying it this bluntly, the last thing the world needs is more belief in an imaginary friend in the clouds . . . but we do need more tolerance, more understanding, more compassion, and maybe we can even work our way up to having more love. I hope that spiritual communities will survive to promote this kind of rational religion. The shelf life of traditional religions have surely gone past their “best if used by” date.